KevinMD posts of the week, August 28, 2011

Here are the top posts from this past week, based on the number of times they were viewed.

1. Our country fails to view physicians as humans. When we demoralize these physicians, we show no respect for their hard work, for their lives being given up to take care of sometimes fifty to sixty strangers a day, then we give up on the survival of humanity.

2. The entire approach to food based on nutrients is wrong. After years of “reductionist” thinking — where food has been viewed as the sum of its parts – a call to treat food as food has been sounded.

3. Why concierge and direct pay medicine is not unethical. Like the shots fired at Concord and Lexington in 1776, concierge medicine and direct pay practices are the initial shots fired by concerned primary care physicians in the revolution against health care systems which limit access to physicians and destroy the doctor / patient relationship.

4. The art of medicine and the power of human touch. I am prone to touch a sick patient on the forehead much as a mother would to check a child’s fever. I rest it there for a few seconds at the hairline, just enough to let them know I’m connected; you are not alone, I will care for you.

5. How not to treat yourself when chronic illness strikes. In 2001, I got sick with what the doctors initially thought was an acute viral infection. I have yet to recover. Diagnosis: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome—a little-understood illness that is as debilitating as its more justly named cousins that also compromise the immune and neurological systems.