Group items tagged

by Paul Moses - Newsday - 6/29/2001 DR. FREDERICK SMITH has the usual textbooks on ambulatory care, surgery and prescription drugs in his office. But the shelves also hold D.T.Suzuki's "Essays in Zen Buddhism," a volume of Cardinal John Henry Newman's writings, books on Confucianism and Judaism, the Quran and alarge-type, 69-year-old Bible a patient gave him, so worn that its cover has fallen off. These, too, are tools of Smith's trade. As associate chief of internal medicine at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, the gray-bearded, 56-year-old physician has found that religious faith can help his patients,and he's trying to teach that to a generation of up-and-coming doctors. His 2-year-old course, Religion and Medicine, is part of a growing move to sensitize doctors to the role faith plays in their patients' lives. It gives residents at North Shore who've completed medical school but are still receiving some training a chance to learn about their patients' religious traditions....

Interview by John C. Reed, MD, PhD - CEO, Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, La Jolla, California.

... not quality of pt care

Doctors' inertia in changing practice to fit new evidence - especially in cancer screening

Bob Doherty is the main Washington lobbyist of the ACP - after the AMA, the largest organization of US doctors (representing internal medicine physicians, whether primary care or subspecialist). He's had some very interesting posts since the Massachusetts Senate upset. His blog is a finalist in the sixth annual Medical Weblog Awards for the Best Health Policies/Ethics Weblog. Doherty articulates the ACP's case for supporting the current Senate&House Health Care Reform legislation (whose failure he & many others will end up leading eventually to more draconian limits on doctors & patients, in order to control the currently unsustainable growth in US health care costs (now approaching 20% of GDP).

Autonomy has limits - pts want docs to exercise expertise.