Doctors, Revolt! -

Doctors, Revolt! -
In 1996, he published “The Lost Art of Healing,” an appeal to restore the “3,000-year tradition, which bonded doctor and patient in a special affinity of trust.” The biomedical sciences had begun to dominate our conception of health care, and he warned
that “healing is replaced with treating, caring is supplanted by managing, and the art of listening is taken over by technological procedures.”
He called for a return to the fundamentals of doctoring — listening to know the patient behind the symptoms; carefully touching the patient during the physical exam to communicate caring; using words
that affirm the patient’s vitality; and attending to the stresses and situations of his life circumstances.
“You should be doing something to help fix this system.”
The hospital, he lamented, is more like a factory — “it tests every ache and treats every laboratory abnormality,
but it does little to heal its patients.” Treating and healing are both necessary, but modern health care too often disregards the latter.
“Doctors no longer minister to a distinctive person
but concern themselves with fragmented, malfunctioning” body parts, Dr. Lown wrote in “The Lost Art of Healing.” Now, two decades later, he’d become a victim of exactly what he had warned against.
Checking things like temperature, blood pressure and respiratory rate every four hours on hospitalized
patients has been the standard of care since the 1890s, yet scant data indicates that it helps.
“I always was the last to know what exactly was going on, and my opinion hardly mattered.”
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“Each day, one person on the medical team would say one thing in the morning, and by the afternoon the plan had changed,” he later told me.