Favorite Quotes
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." - HL Mencken
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"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." - Confucius
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"The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease" - Sir William Osler
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" The best test of a person's character is how he or she treats those with less power." - Bob Sutton
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"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them - well, I have others." - Groucho Marx
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"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
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"It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them" - Friedrich Nietzsche
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"Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple." - Charles Mingus
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"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - Albert Einstein
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"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around." - Talking Heads, Life During Wartime
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"What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour. This is the whole Torah; all the rest is commentary. Go and learn it." - Hillel, Talmud, Shabbath 31a
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"You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing." - Thomas Sowell
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"An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup." - HL Mencken
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"If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." - Abraham Maslow
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"A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and whose goal is not to dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves." - Herbie Hancock
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"There are no facts, only interpretations." - Nietzsche
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"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't." - Anatole France
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"In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ====
Nov - 15
Dec - 19
Jan - 21
Feb - 8
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Who will pay for the art?
26 Jul2009
Physicians like those should speak up for medicine, and argue in favor of paying doctors to spend time with their patients. They should fight against a payment system that has created perverse incentives that encourage unnecessary treatments. Let’s make it as lucrative to talk to the patient as it is to do to the patient.
A physician who gets to know the patient can discuss difficult subjects such as end-of-life care while the patient is still relatively healthy — often sparing them the pain and huge expense of spending their last days of life in an intensive care unit. Physicians with good relationships with their patients can guide them away from futile therapies whose only proven efficacy is making money for drug companies, hospitals and doctors. How wonderful if all our lobbying societies would agree that our goal should be to fulfill Dr. Peabody’s old maxim, and not to simply restate it generation after generation: “The secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient.”
Dr. Verghese understands. Actually most internists understand. We know the difference between the art of medicine and our payment system.
Related posts:
- Graduate medical education and the Long Tail
- Work hours – medical student perspective
- Universal health care will require fair pay for primary care
- On difficult patients
- Primary care payment – is win-win possible?
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- In: Medical Rants
1 Response to Who will pay for the art?
Jared
July 26th, 2009 at 6:45 pm
I must support this idea. To get a feeling of how a physician who doesn’t know a patient feels, ask personal questions of your tangential acquaintances. Such as if they have ever used drugs, or practice risky sexual practices.
What physicians do is not easy, and not comfortable all of the time. Keeping physicians’ pain down while they practice is important in keeping physicians for the future.