A revelation is taking hold in medical schools across the country that deprving medical students may not be good for their cognitive skills required to care for patients! Talk about great customer focus....


In an industry that actually takes an oath to do the right thing for the people they serve, there are a lot of things done that would tell their patients otherwise.
The latest revelation: Patients are people, not cases.
Amazing. There was a piece on the Today Show recently about physicians understanding how to take care of patients with chronic illnesses. In it, Harvard Medical School asked Richard Cohen, Meredith Vierea's husband, to visit with a group of patients so that they could understand what they were living with and how they could help them. That was great and very interesting, because these folks are living with life-long journeys and know more about dignity than most of us.
The thing that was amazing to me, is that a big takeaway for these big minds and medical students was to treat the patient like a "human, not a case."
And that really does indicate alot of how we are treated in medicine. The interest is in curing the ailment, the case. And the patient is frequently not even referred to by name.
Anyone who's spent any time in a hospital cafeteria or walked through the halls can hear it in the exchange between physicians: "Apendectomy at noon, Tonsils at three." Not WHO, it's the WHAT that the work is all about.
Humanizing medicine as the new big aha? What irony is there in that?
But what a big benefit we would all reap as their "customer" if doctors as a population would take this to heart and start treating and thinking of us as people.