Medicine’s Wrong Direction
We had a really nice brunch this morning for the Cardinal Free Clinics, which is an umbrella organization to support our two student-run free clinics. (We’re trying to recruit more physicians to get involved with our clinic and volunteer.) I’m a co-chair of CFC, so I gave a short little speech and we ended with our dean giving a talk, and one of his points really rang true.
He said that he felt like there had been something of a disconnect between medical advances and what people wanted from their doctors. That we’ve come incredibly far in the past 30 years in terms of medical progress–children with cancer used to mostly die, while now, they mostly live, for example. But seeing and communicating with the patient hasn’t advanced–if anything, it’s regressed. A patient wants a doctor that listens, one that cares, and one that sees the patient as the person, not the disease. But with all the financial and business changes that have come to medicine, we’re no longer really serving our patients the way they want to be served.
We can save and extend life in ways like never before, but our everyday interactions with patients have become dissatisfactory: rushed, pressured, and driven by the mighty dollar, not the needy patient.
dissatisfactory has actually gotten worse where patients have come to not seek consultations or become noncompliant.
dissatisfactory seems to have gotten worse where patients choose not to seek consultations and become noncompliant
I think that a great deal of blame can be solely placed on the shoulders of physicians. We have allowed this to happen and are now trying to fight HMO’s, managed care groups, and the like to win back some of what was once ours (our right to time). Unfortunately I think it will never again be the way it once was…but we can always try and live by example rather than be a victim.
Exactly. And it’ll be a long time before it changes, if ever.
During my residency, at the tail end of the summers of love, I volunteered at the Haight Ashbury Clinic, the mother of all free clinics. I thought it’d make me feel good; but it didn’t. By then, the people left in the Haight were those too wasted to have noticed everyone else had left. Still, that the clinic remained was a good thing.