Peace in Health Care
Clinicians are carefully trained to incorporate and routinize what they do together every day, over and over again: health care professionalism has always been and is a practice. While so-called “medical shows” glamorize high-stakes, emotional health care situations, skilled clinicians generally strive to mitigate crises and control any variables they can, restore homeostasis, and promote stability and wellness in the lives of ill, injured patients. As a culture, we probably do not benefit much when health care organizations are misappropriated and misrepresented as sites of dramatic entertainment. In reality, patients, their loved ones, and their clinicians need health care organizations to be places of peace. This theme issue investigates what it means to establish and maintain health care as an enterprise known less for stress and more for healing.