What a patient and doctor owe each other; the ethics of hope and trust in a fallibilist model of the doctor-patient relationship.

As a clinician I struggle when patients defer effective care and fail to acknowledge that, as a consequence, not only can they be harmed but also that others who depend upon them may suffer. In part due to our fallibility, we all ought to at least attend to the views of others to whom we owe respect. I provide an ethical defence of Evidence based medicine that rests on an attitude of fallibilism, and I link this to how respectful co-deliberation which ought to occur in E.B.M. is also what two people owe each other in an ideal model of the patient doctor relationship.