My friend and colleague Nancy Bilello wrote a book for us a number of years ago that I have always liked. We titled it, perhaps inauspiciously, Understanding the Difficult Patient. It is all about problematic patient communication, dealing with all those moments where you don't know how to handle a patient: when they are angry, non-compliant, needy, overly-familiar, seductive, don't show up or don't pay, or all the other weird moments that we hate as practitioners but which do happen. It's a wonderful book but it never got the attention we thought it deserved. We are now making it available as an ebook for a very reasonable price and here is the first chapter for those of you who actually have experienced these problems and know that any advice we can get for these is hugely helpful!difficult patient-chapter1.pdf

Please enjoy.