The Patient Is Not in the Medical Textbook

In medicine we try to fit all our patients in the academic textbook algorithm. This causes a loss of clinical judgment, and increases the potential for medical racism, medical gaslighting and healthcare biases.

Even in an office visit, Physicians have to get through their specialty algorithm in their heads. We should allow patients to speak without interrupting them for 2-3 minutes. Additionally, insert your algorithm around the patient’s input. Let them express their symptoms, and distress the way they are feeling them. Ultimately, we have to complete the medical Note, but not at the expense of quality person centered care.

Medicine is currently so commercialized, Physicians and patients have become commodities. We can never be rice, sugar, flour or chicken. Thus, the medical marketplace, which is it’s own living, breathing thing, rebels. The medical economic marketplace is a societal marketpalce, heavily influenced by biopsychosocial factors, the social determinants of health. The medical economic marketplace is not a capitalistic marketplace. So, the capitalistic hammer always misses the societal nail, that is the medical economic marketplace.

Hopefully, we can go back to the Hipprocratic way of dispensing medicine, and leave this capitalistic crucible of 21st medicine behind us in the distant past.

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