Doctors, Revolt! -<br />In 1996, he published “The Lost Art of Healing,” an appeal to restore the “3,000-year tradition, which bonded doctor and patient in a special affinity of trust.” The biomedical sciences had begun to dominate our conception of health care, and he warned<br />that “healing is replaced with treating, caring is supplanted by managing, and the art of listening is taken over by technological procedures.”<br />He called for a return to the fundamentals of doctoring — listening to know the patient behind the symptoms; carefully touching the patient during the physical exam to communicate caring; using words<br />that affirm the patient’s vitality; and attending to the stresses and situations of his life circumstances.<br />“You should be doing something to help fix this system.”<br />The hospital, he lamented, is more like a factory — “it tests every ache and treats every laboratory abnormality,<br />but it does little to heal its patients.” Treating and healing are both necessary, but modern health care too often disregards the latter.<br />“Doctors no longer minister to a distinctive person<br />but concern themselves with fragmented, malfunctioning” body parts, Dr. Lown wrote in “The Lost Art of Healing.” Now, two decades later, he’d become a victim of exactly what he had warned against.<br />Checking things like temperature, blood pressure and respiratory rate every four hours on hospitalized<br />patients has been the standard of care since the 1890s, yet scant data indicates that it helps.<br />“I always was the last to know what exactly was going on, and my opinion hardly mattered.”<br />Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, the Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world.<br />“Each day, one person on the medical team would say one thing in the morning, and by the afternoon the plan had changed,” he later told me.
