As a FamiIy Physician, I'm encouraged every day by being a part of people's lives. Our relationship is a force that seeks a creative tension to help us grow-- and it often happens. It's about meaning. People want meaning. In Family Medicine, we want to help people find meaning. And we want meaning in our lives, too. It's like the historical physician who comforted patients, while learning from them.
We are still doing it. BUT. Sinister forces are driving the practice of medicine into mechanistic strategies to overemphasize guidelines and treat everyone as if we are 100% certain that they are all the same. The Electronic Medical Record is being used as a weapon to enforce the denial of biological variability and give bonuses to doctors who agree that everyone is the same. This generates a lot of moral distress in physicians, nurses and patients.
AND, it thwarts the quest for meaning. It's a de-humanizing approach to money management, not health or disease management. Physicians are being de-humanized, too. I see it in my colleagues frequently. I read about it in their writings on the internet. I hear it when I converse with them. They used to enjoy what they get to do. That enjoyment is disappearing. Yours might be disappearing, too when you are somewhere in the healthcare system.
You are getting to experience it when you see your physicians. What do you think?
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