Word: doctorate
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...this means that it is simply harder to be a doctor now than it was a generation ago: harder to master the art and the craft, harder to practice, harder to savor the natural pleasures of healing. Patients loudly long for the days of chummy family doctors and personalized care, when Marcus Welby would make everyone well. But it turns out that the distress is mutual, the frustration shared. Many patients may be surprised to learn that the doctors are suffering too. Listen to them tell...
...think patients have become consumers," says Robert Rogers, an ophthalmologist in Pompano Beach, Fla. "They are no longer interested in their doctor, who has perhaps been their doctor for five, six, ten years. They are really interested in what it's going to cost them. It's just like they're going shopping at the local supermarket...
...across the U.S., among family doctors and brain surgeons, in large cities and small towns, the tensions are growing. Perhaps many doctors just miss their pedestals and the days when their patients were more respectful and their diagnoses unchallenged. But the soreness may also reflect the stresses and strains of a profession in transition. Nothing in medicine is stationary: the blinding speed of technological advances, the splintering effects of specialization, the onset of medical consumerism, the threat of malpractice suits have all bruised the doctor-patient relationship in recent years...
There are rich ironies here. Never have doctors been able to do so much for their patients, and rarely have patients seemed so ungrateful. Eighty years ago, a sick man who consulted his physician had roughly a fifty-fifty chance of benefiting from the encounter. The doctor's cheery manner and solicitous style were compensation for the uncertainty of a cure. "Medicine originally was mainly talk," says Sidney Wolfe, a physician who directs the Public Citizen Health Research Group in Washington, "and very little effective diagnosis and treatment...
...naturally, the public is far from content. In part the problem lies with the failure of the profession and the government to police medicine adequately, since the stakes could not be higher. If a stockbroker is incompetent, his client may lose his savings; if a doctor is negligent, his patient may lose his vision, his memory, his mobility or his life. Though the public, the government and the physicians themselves have become more vigilant, the persistent stories of medical mishaps continue to take their toll on patient confidence...