It is sobering to consider how much our trust in people and institutions has shrunk in recent years. No longer do we put implicit trust in politicians, lawyers, businessmen, doctors, the police, house-builders and public bodies. We maintain a grudging trust in firemen and lifeboatmen, but that is all. I hesitate to assess how much trust the public places in pharmacists, although I suspect that there are wide divergences in esteem. Those of us who are fortunate enough to deal directly with individuals at the personal level are more favourably placed than the rest who must take unknown individuals on trust. We know who to trust and who to doubt, who to avoid. We often find ourselves having to rely upon people or institutions whose competence and ethical rectitude cannot be assumed. Many desirable procedures are today undertaken by incompetents whose excuse is often lack of funds.
Trust is defined as "confidence in or reliance on some quality or attribute of a person or thing, or the truth of a statement." We define confidence as the mental attitude of trust. Failure of trust may arise from a defect of intelligence as opposed to a wish to deceive. It is a lamentable fact that, with all our secondary and tertiary education programmes, individuals emerge who cannot earn our trust because they lack the brain-power needed to discriminate between logic and mislogic and between truth and untruth. Such incapacity seems to lead individuals into professional paths where we look most keenly for truth and sound judgment. And those are the individuals upon whose judgments we are forced to place most reliance, because they claim to know things which we do not. It is not a happy situation.