Time spent with the patient plays a big role. Too bad that no one else values that.
Related posts:
- How to drive a doctor out of primary care
- The Boston Globe continues to spotlight the primary care crisis
- A health care stimulus package that makes sense
- Why this doctor left primary care
- Today’s "death of primary care" article
- Web 2.0 vs health care values
- What Makes a Good Doctor?
KevinMD.com on Facebook
{ 5 comments }
Becaseu we all know that as long as “proceduralists” do their thing well, they don’t have to spend a lick of time talking to their patients.
So why don’t you guys make sure you get paid for spending more time with your patients? It reduces your likelihood of a malpractice claim as well.
Sure. Why don’t you make sure you get paid more for sitting at home unemployed.
What do you suggest – collective bargaining. Oops, can’t do that. Strike? oops, can;t do that. Opt out? Oops, can’t do that and still see patients. Or maybe we can, but then N14 will say that we are abandoning our patients, to whom we owe a duty of indentured servitude for all of our privilege.
Proceduralist don’t need to talk to their patients? Poppycock. They don’t, but they need to if they want to practice good medicine.
The surgeon who didn’t take a history put my Mama under general and did a wide excision to take off a suspicious lesion of. . psoriasis. He never even took a history to find out she had it and the trusting old soul went under the knife without questioning. . . but the procedure was skillfully done.
Before that, my father had a cardiac catheritization for symptoms due to hyperthyroidism . . .the cardiologist never bothered to take a history. “My son the doctor” heard about the cath being scheduled the day before and made sure that they were informed of the history so they got the thyroid studies that revealed the problem on the way to the cath lab. But at least the unnecessary procedure was well done.
Doctors who don’t talk to their patients are half-ass doctors no matter what kind of medicine they pretend to practice. They don’t call it history AND physical for nothing.
The BEGINNING of being a good doctor is having “open” nonverbal communication, actively LISTENING, and then talking to the patient at the proper time in the proper way. But, one of my mentors used to remind me that “quacks” are often the nicest “docs” around, but they either don’t know anything or are trying to sell the patient something they don’t need. So one still has to be sure that the doc has been properly trained and has a history of high integrity in his/her practice
Comments on this entry are closed.