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A revelation is taking hold in medical schools across the country that deprving medical students may not be good for their cognitive skills required to care for patients! Talk about great customer focus....
In an industry that actually takes an oath to do the right thing for the people they serve, there are a lot of things done that would tell their patients otherwise.
The latest revelation: Patients are people, not cases.
Amazing. There was a piece on the Today Show recently about physicians understanding how to take care of patients with chronic illnesses. In it, Harvard Medical School asked Richard Cohen, Meredith Vierea's husband, to visit with a group of patients so that they could understand what they were living with and how they could help them. That was great and very interesting, because these folks are living with life-long journeys and know more about dignity than most of us.
The thing that was amazing to me, is that a big takeaway for these big minds and medical students was to treat the patient like a "human, not a case."
And that really does indicate alot of how we are treated in medicine. The interest is in curing the ailment, the case. And the patient is frequently not even referred to by name.
Anyone who's spent any time in a hospital cafeteria or walked through the halls can hear it in the exchange between physicians: "Apendectomy at noon, Tonsils at three." Not WHO, it's the WHAT that the work is all about.
Humanizing medicine as the new big aha? What irony is there in that?
But what a big benefit we would all reap as their "customer" if doctors as a population would take this to heart and start treating and thinking of us as people.
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Comments
Jeanne,
You are too young to recall earlier headlines touting the same thing: treat the who not the what. This is at least the third time in my lifetime that medical schools announced that is their approach. Perhaps this time it will stick.
However, it is a tough sell for any profession because it is easier to focus on the what than it is to show concern for the who.
Posted by: Lewis Green | 02.08.07
Jeanne,
Taking a holistic approach in medicine is nothing new. Alternative practioners make this the hallmark of their practice: homeopathy, naturopathy, Ayurveda, Chinese medicine have all worked this way for hundreds and even thousands of years. These modalities treat the person. The whole person.
I expostulate that with an educated population trying alternative modalities more and more, and spending billions doing it, the mainstream medical community is wising up to the fact that its approach needs to change from the "what" to the "who". Somehow, in spite of all the time doctors spend diverted by HMOs, paperwork, drug company salespeople and myriad other distractions, they need to get back to the "who" of their practices. That's not easy today. It's not like it was when I was a kid. The family doctor either made house calls or we went to his office where we had his undivided attention and he knew everything there was to know about us.
As institutionalized medicine became a bigger and bigger business, much was lost in that level of holistic patient care. I'm not certain how much of that we're going to regain--even with the med schools adding this to their curricula. Let's hope for the best.
Posted by: Claire Ratushny | 02.08.07