Forum Post: Doctors speak out: healthcare has been reduced to a money-making factory

Sunday, October 16, 2011 by: S. L. Baker, features writer

(NaturalNews) Two doctors from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard's teaching hospital, have taken an unusual step for the medical profession. These courageous physicians are speaking out about today's healthcare system which emphasizes money over individualized patient care.

In an article just published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Pamela Hartzband, MD, and Jerome Groopman,MD, are blunt about their frustration with a system that has "reduced medicine to economics." In fact, they go so far as to say hospitals have been turned into "factories" that reduce clinical encounters between a patient and doctor into simply "economic transactions."

"Patients are no longer patients, but rather customers or consumers. Doctors and nurses have transmuted into providers," Pamela Hartzband, MD, and Jerome Groopman MD, wrote. "We are in the midst of an economic crisis and efforts to reform the health care system have centered on controlling spiraling costs. To that end, many economists and policy makers have proposed that patient care should be industrialized and standardized. Hospitals and clinics should be run like modern factories and archaic terms like doctor, nurse and patient must therefore be replaced with terminology that fits this new order."

One of the problems, according to Dr. Hartzband and Dr. Groopman, is that the knowledge physicians and nurses have and should be able to use to help patients individually is getting lost. Instead, the current "factory" system of medicine values prepackaged, off-the-shelf solutions that substitute "evidence-based practice" for "clinical judgment."

Simply put, healthcare providers are no longer expected to spend time carefully considering patients as individuals and using their experience to make the best decisions for specific people and their health problems. Instead, doctors and nurses are supposed to offer a cookie cutter approach that moves patients through the system quickly as though they were things to be processed on a conveyor belt, not complex human beings to be treated as individuals.

"Reducing medicine to economics makes a mockery of the bond between the healer and the sick," the doctors wrote in their article. "For centuries doctors who were mercenary were publicly castigated. Such doctors betrayed their calling. Should we now be celebrating the doctor whose practice, like a successful business, maximizes profits from customers?"

Read the second part of this article here:

http://www.naturalnews.com/033881_health_care_profits.html