All of the columns published from May 1980 through April 2016 (totaling 1,438) were read, categorized and analyzed. Five broad themes emerged as follows: stories about patients, stories about medical practice, stories related to the medical humanities, personal stories, and stories about dying and death.

Stories about patient-physician relationships regularly appear in all five categories over the publication period. The thesis of this work is two-fold: first, that the columns are consistent examples of the humanities applied to medical practice, each column informed by the author's personal and professional perspective; and second, that the columns as a collection are a casual primer in the medical humanities, in stories with a wide range of physician interpretation about factors that enhance or detract from an understanding of patients. Columns cited include topics showing the breadth of physician writing on patient-physician relationships.

While medicine has changed greatly since the inception of APOMM, the columns remain consistent examples of physician investment in relationships with patients as the art of medicine, and a cornerstone of practice. Doctors discern relationships with patients through individual lenses, colored by life experience and professional experience including philosophy, ethics, faith, sociology and the arts as elements of the humanities. As such, their APOMM columns about giving and receiving care are both individual and collective works about the humanities in the practice of medicine, the importance of understanding patients and the delicate dynamic of the patient-physician relationship.