Media must play its part in restoring trust between doctors and patients

CHEN ZHONGWEI, a dentist in Guangzhou, South China's Guangdong province, died on Saturday after being stabbed 38 times by a former patient. The case aroused nationwide attention and put violent conflicts between doctors and patients in the spotlight. Trust between the two has already been ruined and it will take a long process to rebuild it, said Beijing Youth Daily on Monday:

There have been too many similar cases in which patients attack, even kill, medical staff because they believe they have not received the proper treatment. The number of these cases is so many that we cannot say they are individual cases and they happen because there is widespread mistrust in the society.

Some media outlets repeatedly report on the conflicts between medical staff and patients by automatically pinning the blame on medical staff even though these media outlets lack even the most basic knowledge of medicine.