What a great read! It seems a lot of doctors today are jaded and overworked. Some seem to be indoctrinated by what they learned in medical school as opposed to thinking outside the box so to speak. It seems like that's something you do. When you retire some day you can always write! Sabrinalabow.substack.com
EMS uses "doorway impressions" as the 1st assessment. What you can see, hear, observe about environment as you enter a patients home cannot be understated. After asking "what made you call today" can reveal another nugget of info as you observe their speech, focus, breathing, posture, skin, attitude/mood...and that's before you begin any hands on assessment. More information gained from this brief period than any monitor/equipment would reveal in the same amount of time. This skill improves with experience. Why did I enter healthcare? So i would not feel helpless in an emergency and my natural curiosity about people...its never been boring and always in need.
There's a small part of me that doesn't want to know because exactly what you said...boat load of tests. They try every which way to milk you. If nothing comes up instead of saying "let's get to the bottom of this" you get a "I don't know...good luck...come back if it gets worse!" Or a "Oh these drugs didn't work...sorry boutcha! Thanks for the BOATLOADS of money you wasted on me!" Mine started out I was waking up swollen head to toe, but hands were worse! I started taking off my rings at night and loosening my watch! I started with OTC water pills which helped some. I started drinking ALOT of water. Started iodine drops, liver detox, magnesium, Tumeric and Krill Oil supplements. I also put Native Path collagen in my coffee every morning! Things are ALOT better (I feel more thanks to Krill Oil) and just my first joint on my middle finger is swollen, hot, and pops funny. I get the Krill Oil and Tumeric from Native Path and I HIGHLY recommend them!!! I hope your situation gets better! I'm like you in my 50's and don't plan on slowing down if I don't have to! Off to mow! It's only 96 today as opposed to 106 yesterday! 🤪
Sensible medicine to me is a healthcare provider’s powers of knowledge, intuition and observation that is held in check with a non-judgmental (ideally non-dual) awareness that acknowledges the potential for intrinsic, extrinsic and systemic bias.
Marie, while potentially correct, was projecting her own struggles with autoimmunity and chronic steroid use onto the patient. Her greatest strength is also a weakness. And has the potential to widen the aperture of misdiagnosis.
Thank you for sharing your story. I got into nursing late in life. I took all my pre-reqs, one class at a time, as my boys were growing up. I went to nursing school with the sole goal of becoming a NICU nurse. My firstborn was a preemie and watching the nurses who cared for him and me lit a fire in me to pay it forward to other terrified parents of premature babies. I have been following my passion for 14 years now and I still celebrate every tiny milestone with families as they walk thru the life of a NICU Parent.
Yep, I remember when my grand daughter made it to three pounds. I remember when she went from slowly sucking and getting too tired to take in enough nourishment to suddenly sucking down the whole 5 ounces and looking for more.
This reminds me of something that happened to me over 30 years ago.
I was in my early 20s, sick, and went to my family doctor, who was teaching a group of family practice medical residents at that time. They trooped into the exam room, my doctor put my chart (it was all still paper back then) on the table, then asked me what brought me there that day. I reeled off my symptoms: headache, ringing in my ears, stuffy nose, sore throat with post-nasal drip, upset stomach, no fever, losing my voice, all of which had persisted for over 3 weeks.
My doctor turned to the residents and asked them, "Okay, now what do you do?" Every single one of them started recommending a dizzying array of diagnostic tests and specialists, ranging from a CBC & head CT scan to consults with a neurologist and an otolaryngologist (ENT doctor).
My family doctor turned to me and asked "What do you think is wrong with you?"
I told him "I think I have my annual fall sinus infection."
Not one of them tried to examine me first, something my doctor was quick to point out. My family doctor then led them through the exam, and had all of them take turns looking in my ears and nose, feeling the glands in my throat, applying pressure to my facial sinuses (less than pleasant, but they needed to learn and I'd agreed to be their lab work). My doctor then says to them, "Okay, that's a sinus infection. What do we do about it?"
After being called on not examining me before recommending lab work, they were all looking at each other with that "uh... do you want to go first?" expression, and I had to take pity on them. I volunteered "I think you're going to prescribe 500 mg of amoxicillin 3x/day for 14 days because I've been getting these every year since I was 3, but for any other patient you'd probably only do 10 days of antibiotics because you don't want to overprescribe them."
My doctor then picked up the chart - -which had been totally ignored until that point - and explained that it was all in there, including the years I'd spent as a pediatric patient at the ENT specialist and the tests the allergist had run - and that aside from my physicals, this was the only thing I'd needed to see him for since my pediatric days.
My doctor's "moral of the examination" was twofold: examine the patient and read the patient's chart before ordering or prescribing anything. It is amazing to me that those two simple starting points seem to be missing from medical school.
Yes...HELLO!! thank you. I hope you have found better remedies now than antibiotics and sought to uncover the root cause of your annual sinus infection so as to prevent the condition that caused them in the first place!
Homeopathy and Functional Holistic Medicine could be helpful in this regard.
Things don't come out of the blue; they come out of the oblivious. Every effect has a cause. If you can tap into and uncover the root cause and address that, your symptoms will cease.
Thanks for sharing this very illustrative experience. Always more to the story that Western medicine is missing because they're not asking "WHY?"
YEARS ago at a sick visit to our PCP, I had agreed to see "the other doctor" on staff because ours was booked solid. When Dr. Ricci walked into the exam room, he talked to me for over 20 minutes before ever laying a hand on me. It was obvious from his questions that he had read every page of my medical history (a very long and complicated one at that). He also appreciated that I didn't just want a prescription but a solution/cure. That chance visit changed my families' course and he became our new PCP. We followed him every time he switched practices. In our years of seeing him, he was always running late but I never complained because I knew he was spending whatever time was required with the patients before me and would do the same with me. Two years ago, he began doing concierge medicine and unfortunately, that priced him out for us. It was a difficult process to find another doctor like him (he set the bar really high), one who would LISTEN, one who would ask questions, one who wouldn't immediately reach for the prescription pad. That kind of practice/medicine is a lost art.
Yes it is a lost art but it needs to be found again! Because unless it is, doctors today are simply not practicing true medicine. You were so blessed to have Dr. Ricci as your doctor and I'm sorry that this had to stop because of money. That's another problem but that's a whole other conversation!! Thanks for sharing.
My wife and I can't seem to avoid the remote diagnosis syndrome. She, a retired CNM, and me, a long-term scientist, have seen enough patients in our time to be pretty good at it, too. I didn't have the opportunity to go to medical school but that didn't stop me from years of medical research, and even some significant clinical exposure. While medicine should have been my lifelong career, science, in a variety of fields where I've been pretty successful, had to substitute. And a poor substitute it was. Retired now, I'll continue keeping up with CME, my reading, and acting as an epidemiologist for a rather large not-for-profit. My work's helped keep the volunteers in that organization a little safer by providing them evidence-based data on COVID, and providing answers to their questions.
Thank you for the essay. I found it touching in all the right ways.
Very interesting. I think observation and diagnosis lacks in so many doctors today. My dad was a great diagnostician he is long gone but was a urologist and surgeon. I remember talk at the fing table about patients of his. As an adult I’ve been subjected to as wide range of doctors in general practice or internist I’ve had two good ones. My current doctor however just dumped me or I chose not to pay her concierge $$ as I’m very healthy and have limited retirement income. Now I’m on the search for one like you with acute observation skills and can diagnose properly! Good for grandmother teaching u these skills. Oh that more had grandmother’s like yours.
Thank you for mentioning the word diagnostician. Two of my favorite shows are HOUSE and Doc Martin!
we should all be so lucky to have brilliant diagnosticians like them although the bedside manner could stand a little improvement lol
I have been chronically ill for a long long time; decades, and now much worse. No doctor I ever go to in the Western medical system has ever been able to touch it and they seem annoyed because I do have a long list of symptoms and they won't even listen to all of them in my " physical" in which they nevwr examine me. They just stare at the computer screen and cut me off saying, "it's too much.. you'll have to talk about that when you're on your next visit" when it's all part of the same condition.
I just wish that a doctor (and this wasn't even a doctor; it was a nurse practitioner. Good luck even getting access to a doctor nowadays at least in the health system I'm a part of). but I sing the praises of a good nurse practitioner or a physician's assistant! In my experience they have been far superior to the doctors I have seen over the last 10 years.
But still, I never feel heard. I never feel that anyone is really interested in how I feel when I go to these PCP offices.
They're not listening and they're not LOOKING.
I might as well be talking to robots!
All they know how to do is order blood tests and x-rays etc but you practically have to be dying to get a referral to a specialist and then they make you jump through all kinds of hoops before they let you. it's all about insurance insurance insurance.
I feel like I have to sell my PCP on the fact that I'm sick!. they put a lot of pressure on me and I feel very stressed. As a matter fact my blood pressure shoots through the roof the second I walk into a medical building because my anxiety kicks in automatically. I always tell them to take my blood pressure at the end of the visit and they do and it's always normal but at the beginning of the visit it tends to be high because of the anxiety i feel laying myself open to an inhumane, discompassionate system that really doesn't care about me.
I just started with a new one last week and she was definitely better. She spent a longer time with me (you know over the 10 minutes they allot you normally) lol but no physical exam.
I don't even know what she looks like because of the huge mask she was wearing. Sigh…
I'm obligated to point out that most difficult diagnostic challenges are not solved by a single, brilliant if troubled diagnostician, but by working with a competent team, and knowing when your knowledge isn't sufficient to answer all the questions. House isn't real life.
initially I felt I was demoting my self, or squandering my degreed knowledge just working for a couple of ortho surgeons in a busy practice, but! People are unique. Ortho surgery is complex for each patient. I did love that job very much, I worked directly with the patients and knew them. All of us have a struggle
Thank you Dr Cifu. That was very good to read; so genuine and refreshing to know there are still doctors in this country who are thinking about what it means to practice medicine. I find the current system abhorrent.
Dr. Lawrence Palevsky MD (one of my heroes) says that the doctors today have lost their curiosity. And that the most important word in a doctor's vocabulary should be WHY? What is the cause of these symptoms? Because without identifying the root cause the correct remedy that will affect a cure (which is what doctors are supposed to be doing) cannot be arrived at.
Doctors today don't even use the word cure. It's not a part of their vocabulary. Doctors today "treat" with the use of surgery and drugs only. Well I have a problem with this because this is not true medicine. True medicine identifies symptoms, identifies root cause of symptoms and affects remedy and the medicine (or if necessary a surgery) that will affect a cure. That's what medicine is supposed to be doing! Curing!
Still and all, I'm glad to know there are high-quality individuals like you practicing thoughtful medicine and I thank you.
The system needs to be transformed from the ground up. And I hope it will be because we need to return holism to the picture. Doctors today treat lab tests they don't treat people and they should be.
Dr Palevsky, who is a brilliant pediatrician on Long Island, says he would love to open a school that teaches doctors how to give a physical exam; the way it used to be done.
" The care of the patient means, CARING FOR the patient"
I recently visited a new physician looking for a primary care doc. To say his version of a physical exam was perfunctory would hardly do it justice. And when I started asking questions about proposed changes to my meds, his lack of knowledge of current literature was, well, "interesting". Now, we resort to CT and MRI as the Tube of Truth. We don't see that laying on of hands that calms the patient but also provides so much information to the appropriately trained clinician. We can order labs and sometimes even tie the pieces of the lab puzzle together into a diagnosis but, like the internist I saw, with no real knowledge of the patient, what they do, what they did, and what level of compliance you're likely to see, a lab-oriented diagnosis is likely just gonna fail.
Exactly. Thanks. I fault the system not the doctors who have every good, noble intention I'm sure when they decide to become doctors. It's the system that is failing us (and them) and this needs to change. Thanks for your share which highlights the point I was making. Instead of staring at a computer screen doctors need be looking kindly in their patients eyes, asking them how they are feeling and listening to what they say. Listening and looking. They're not just a body with symptoms; they are a whole person with a history and a family and all the factors of that persons life need to be taken into consideration because in medicine you are treating a whole person : emotional, physical, mental and spiritual. Doctors should remember they are entering into a sacred relationship. This relationship needs to be built on trust and it is one of care of the physician for the patient. Medicine goes far beyond just treating symptoms. It is a sacred bond. An art as much as a science.
This is a fantastic reflection.
From my own personal multicultural competencies: Bellissimo and Dziękuję
What a great read! It seems a lot of doctors today are jaded and overworked. Some seem to be indoctrinated by what they learned in medical school as opposed to thinking outside the box so to speak. It seems like that's something you do. When you retire some day you can always write! Sabrinalabow.substack.com
EMS uses "doorway impressions" as the 1st assessment. What you can see, hear, observe about environment as you enter a patients home cannot be understated. After asking "what made you call today" can reveal another nugget of info as you observe their speech, focus, breathing, posture, skin, attitude/mood...and that's before you begin any hands on assessment. More information gained from this brief period than any monitor/equipment would reveal in the same amount of time. This skill improves with experience. Why did I enter healthcare? So i would not feel helpless in an emergency and my natural curiosity about people...its never been boring and always in need.
Such an enjoyable read! Thank you for sharing this story of your journey.
Thanks so much. I am glad you enjoyed it.
Adam
There's a small part of me that doesn't want to know because exactly what you said...boat load of tests. They try every which way to milk you. If nothing comes up instead of saying "let's get to the bottom of this" you get a "I don't know...good luck...come back if it gets worse!" Or a "Oh these drugs didn't work...sorry boutcha! Thanks for the BOATLOADS of money you wasted on me!" Mine started out I was waking up swollen head to toe, but hands were worse! I started taking off my rings at night and loosening my watch! I started with OTC water pills which helped some. I started drinking ALOT of water. Started iodine drops, liver detox, magnesium, Tumeric and Krill Oil supplements. I also put Native Path collagen in my coffee every morning! Things are ALOT better (I feel more thanks to Krill Oil) and just my first joint on my middle finger is swollen, hot, and pops funny. I get the Krill Oil and Tumeric from Native Path and I HIGHLY recommend them!!! I hope your situation gets better! I'm like you in my 50's and don't plan on slowing down if I don't have to! Off to mow! It's only 96 today as opposed to 106 yesterday! 🤪
Sensible medicine to me is a healthcare provider’s powers of knowledge, intuition and observation that is held in check with a non-judgmental (ideally non-dual) awareness that acknowledges the potential for intrinsic, extrinsic and systemic bias.
Marie, while potentially correct, was projecting her own struggles with autoimmunity and chronic steroid use onto the patient. Her greatest strength is also a weakness. And has the potential to widen the aperture of misdiagnosis.
Looking forward to this series! Cheers
Thank you for sharing your story. I got into nursing late in life. I took all my pre-reqs, one class at a time, as my boys were growing up. I went to nursing school with the sole goal of becoming a NICU nurse. My firstborn was a preemie and watching the nurses who cared for him and me lit a fire in me to pay it forward to other terrified parents of premature babies. I have been following my passion for 14 years now and I still celebrate every tiny milestone with families as they walk thru the life of a NICU Parent.
Yep, I remember when my grand daughter made it to three pounds. I remember when she went from slowly sucking and getting too tired to take in enough nourishment to suddenly sucking down the whole 5 ounces and looking for more.
Beautiful...💗
RuthAnn, you are an angel
This reminds me of something that happened to me over 30 years ago.
I was in my early 20s, sick, and went to my family doctor, who was teaching a group of family practice medical residents at that time. They trooped into the exam room, my doctor put my chart (it was all still paper back then) on the table, then asked me what brought me there that day. I reeled off my symptoms: headache, ringing in my ears, stuffy nose, sore throat with post-nasal drip, upset stomach, no fever, losing my voice, all of which had persisted for over 3 weeks.
My doctor turned to the residents and asked them, "Okay, now what do you do?" Every single one of them started recommending a dizzying array of diagnostic tests and specialists, ranging from a CBC & head CT scan to consults with a neurologist and an otolaryngologist (ENT doctor).
My family doctor turned to me and asked "What do you think is wrong with you?"
I told him "I think I have my annual fall sinus infection."
Not one of them tried to examine me first, something my doctor was quick to point out. My family doctor then led them through the exam, and had all of them take turns looking in my ears and nose, feeling the glands in my throat, applying pressure to my facial sinuses (less than pleasant, but they needed to learn and I'd agreed to be their lab work). My doctor then says to them, "Okay, that's a sinus infection. What do we do about it?"
After being called on not examining me before recommending lab work, they were all looking at each other with that "uh... do you want to go first?" expression, and I had to take pity on them. I volunteered "I think you're going to prescribe 500 mg of amoxicillin 3x/day for 14 days because I've been getting these every year since I was 3, but for any other patient you'd probably only do 10 days of antibiotics because you don't want to overprescribe them."
My doctor then picked up the chart - -which had been totally ignored until that point - and explained that it was all in there, including the years I'd spent as a pediatric patient at the ENT specialist and the tests the allergist had run - and that aside from my physicals, this was the only thing I'd needed to see him for since my pediatric days.
My doctor's "moral of the examination" was twofold: examine the patient and read the patient's chart before ordering or prescribing anything. It is amazing to me that those two simple starting points seem to be missing from medical school.
Thanks for sharing your story. "What do you think is wrong?" is easily on of my favorite questions.
Yes...HELLO!! thank you. I hope you have found better remedies now than antibiotics and sought to uncover the root cause of your annual sinus infection so as to prevent the condition that caused them in the first place!
Homeopathy and Functional Holistic Medicine could be helpful in this regard.
Things don't come out of the blue; they come out of the oblivious. Every effect has a cause. If you can tap into and uncover the root cause and address that, your symptoms will cease.
Thanks for sharing this very illustrative experience. Always more to the story that Western medicine is missing because they're not asking "WHY?"
YEARS ago at a sick visit to our PCP, I had agreed to see "the other doctor" on staff because ours was booked solid. When Dr. Ricci walked into the exam room, he talked to me for over 20 minutes before ever laying a hand on me. It was obvious from his questions that he had read every page of my medical history (a very long and complicated one at that). He also appreciated that I didn't just want a prescription but a solution/cure. That chance visit changed my families' course and he became our new PCP. We followed him every time he switched practices. In our years of seeing him, he was always running late but I never complained because I knew he was spending whatever time was required with the patients before me and would do the same with me. Two years ago, he began doing concierge medicine and unfortunately, that priced him out for us. It was a difficult process to find another doctor like him (he set the bar really high), one who would LISTEN, one who would ask questions, one who wouldn't immediately reach for the prescription pad. That kind of practice/medicine is a lost art.
Yes it is a lost art but it needs to be found again! Because unless it is, doctors today are simply not practicing true medicine. You were so blessed to have Dr. Ricci as your doctor and I'm sorry that this had to stop because of money. That's another problem but that's a whole other conversation!! Thanks for sharing.
Wonderful way to start this Substack. Thank you for sharing your story!
Thanks so much Anne. I am glad you liked it.
Adam
My wife and I can't seem to avoid the remote diagnosis syndrome. She, a retired CNM, and me, a long-term scientist, have seen enough patients in our time to be pretty good at it, too. I didn't have the opportunity to go to medical school but that didn't stop me from years of medical research, and even some significant clinical exposure. While medicine should have been my lifelong career, science, in a variety of fields where I've been pretty successful, had to substitute. And a poor substitute it was. Retired now, I'll continue keeping up with CME, my reading, and acting as an epidemiologist for a rather large not-for-profit. My work's helped keep the volunteers in that organization a little safer by providing them evidence-based data on COVID, and providing answers to their questions.
Thank you for the essay. I found it touching in all the right ways.
Very interesting. I think observation and diagnosis lacks in so many doctors today. My dad was a great diagnostician he is long gone but was a urologist and surgeon. I remember talk at the fing table about patients of his. As an adult I’ve been subjected to as wide range of doctors in general practice or internist I’ve had two good ones. My current doctor however just dumped me or I chose not to pay her concierge $$ as I’m very healthy and have limited retirement income. Now I’m on the search for one like you with acute observation skills and can diagnose properly! Good for grandmother teaching u these skills. Oh that more had grandmother’s like yours.
Thank you for mentioning the word diagnostician. Two of my favorite shows are HOUSE and Doc Martin!
we should all be so lucky to have brilliant diagnosticians like them although the bedside manner could stand a little improvement lol
I have been chronically ill for a long long time; decades, and now much worse. No doctor I ever go to in the Western medical system has ever been able to touch it and they seem annoyed because I do have a long list of symptoms and they won't even listen to all of them in my " physical" in which they nevwr examine me. They just stare at the computer screen and cut me off saying, "it's too much.. you'll have to talk about that when you're on your next visit" when it's all part of the same condition.
I just wish that a doctor (and this wasn't even a doctor; it was a nurse practitioner. Good luck even getting access to a doctor nowadays at least in the health system I'm a part of). but I sing the praises of a good nurse practitioner or a physician's assistant! In my experience they have been far superior to the doctors I have seen over the last 10 years.
But still, I never feel heard. I never feel that anyone is really interested in how I feel when I go to these PCP offices.
They're not listening and they're not LOOKING.
I might as well be talking to robots!
All they know how to do is order blood tests and x-rays etc but you practically have to be dying to get a referral to a specialist and then they make you jump through all kinds of hoops before they let you. it's all about insurance insurance insurance.
I feel like I have to sell my PCP on the fact that I'm sick!. they put a lot of pressure on me and I feel very stressed. As a matter fact my blood pressure shoots through the roof the second I walk into a medical building because my anxiety kicks in automatically. I always tell them to take my blood pressure at the end of the visit and they do and it's always normal but at the beginning of the visit it tends to be high because of the anxiety i feel laying myself open to an inhumane, discompassionate system that really doesn't care about me.
I just started with a new one last week and she was definitely better. She spent a longer time with me (you know over the 10 minutes they allot you normally) lol but no physical exam.
I don't even know what she looks like because of the huge mask she was wearing. Sigh…
I'm obligated to point out that most difficult diagnostic challenges are not solved by a single, brilliant if troubled diagnostician, but by working with a competent team, and knowing when your knowledge isn't sufficient to answer all the questions. House isn't real life.
You are exactly right. And love how they tell too much next visit. Next patient pls!!! Oh brother. A sad state of our healthcare
It's not healthcare. It's sickness management.
“Come on, you can tell a lot if you really look at people.”
Probably one of life’s most important lessons and likely the most frequently missed.
Thank you for sharing a beautiful story. You were a very fortunate young man indeed.
I fully agree! reminds me of the quote "You can observe a lot by just watching" by Yogi Berra
Thanks so much for reading the piece. I am glad you enjoyed it.
I have developed RA like symptoms this past 18 months since I got that stupid second covid shot.
My mind knew better than to make such a grievous error, but I was forced to get it in order to care for my 98 year old daddy.
So I cant take prednisone foreverrrr?
How are the other treatments less wearing or damaging to a patient, especially these newer drugs?
I took lots and lots of pre med but topped it off with just an RN BA. I mainly worked in ortho surgery for most of my career
I enjoyed reading this
Not “just an RN”!
initially I felt I was demoting my self, or squandering my degreed knowledge just working for a couple of ortho surgeons in a busy practice, but! People are unique. Ortho surgery is complex for each patient. I did love that job very much, I worked directly with the patients and knew them. All of us have a struggle
Ah, the power of curiosity 😀
https://hekint.org/2017/02/01/francis-peabody-caring-for-the-patient/
Thank you Dr Cifu. That was very good to read; so genuine and refreshing to know there are still doctors in this country who are thinking about what it means to practice medicine. I find the current system abhorrent.
Dr. Lawrence Palevsky MD (one of my heroes) says that the doctors today have lost their curiosity. And that the most important word in a doctor's vocabulary should be WHY? What is the cause of these symptoms? Because without identifying the root cause the correct remedy that will affect a cure (which is what doctors are supposed to be doing) cannot be arrived at.
Doctors today don't even use the word cure. It's not a part of their vocabulary. Doctors today "treat" with the use of surgery and drugs only. Well I have a problem with this because this is not true medicine. True medicine identifies symptoms, identifies root cause of symptoms and affects remedy and the medicine (or if necessary a surgery) that will affect a cure. That's what medicine is supposed to be doing! Curing!
Still and all, I'm glad to know there are high-quality individuals like you practicing thoughtful medicine and I thank you.
The system needs to be transformed from the ground up. And I hope it will be because we need to return holism to the picture. Doctors today treat lab tests they don't treat people and they should be.
Dr Palevsky, who is a brilliant pediatrician on Long Island, says he would love to open a school that teaches doctors how to give a physical exam; the way it used to be done.
" The care of the patient means, CARING FOR the patient"
Francis Peabody, MD
Harvard Medical School
https://hekint.org/2017/02/01/francis-peabody-caring-for-the-patient/
Yours sincerely,
Rainbow
Thanks for your kind words. That Peabody essay is a classic!
I recently visited a new physician looking for a primary care doc. To say his version of a physical exam was perfunctory would hardly do it justice. And when I started asking questions about proposed changes to my meds, his lack of knowledge of current literature was, well, "interesting". Now, we resort to CT and MRI as the Tube of Truth. We don't see that laying on of hands that calms the patient but also provides so much information to the appropriately trained clinician. We can order labs and sometimes even tie the pieces of the lab puzzle together into a diagnosis but, like the internist I saw, with no real knowledge of the patient, what they do, what they did, and what level of compliance you're likely to see, a lab-oriented diagnosis is likely just gonna fail.
"We don't see the laying on of hands that calms the patient."
🙏🙏🙏
Exactly. Thanks. I fault the system not the doctors who have every good, noble intention I'm sure when they decide to become doctors. It's the system that is failing us (and them) and this needs to change. Thanks for your share which highlights the point I was making. Instead of staring at a computer screen doctors need be looking kindly in their patients eyes, asking them how they are feeling and listening to what they say. Listening and looking. They're not just a body with symptoms; they are a whole person with a history and a family and all the factors of that persons life need to be taken into consideration because in medicine you are treating a whole person : emotional, physical, mental and spiritual. Doctors should remember they are entering into a sacred relationship. This relationship needs to be built on trust and it is one of care of the physician for the patient. Medicine goes far beyond just treating symptoms. It is a sacred bond. An art as much as a science.