“There was a time when the public had an unquestionable faith in biomedicine and the practitioners who translated it into everyday patient care—and physicians believed that the public's trust was justified based on their educational qualifications and training. But today, many patients believe that individual clinicians must earn their trust, just as a close relative has earned it through shared experience.

...Gallop polling over the last several decades that demonstrates how much the public's confidence in most US institutions has deteriorated. Confidence in the medical system in particular fell from 80% in 1975 to 37% in 2015. Statistics from the General Social Survey confirm this troubling trend. Baron and Berinsky explain the historical reasons for this shift in attitudes, but the more pressing question is: How can individual clinicians, and the profession as a whole, regain the patients' trust? ”