February 17, 2022
The Decline of American Medicine
By Anthony Matoria
The COVID pandemic has highlighted concerning trends in the way medicine is practiced in the United States. These trends have been present for long time, predating the appearance of COVID, but their pernicious nature has become more apparent under the stresses and anxieties associated with the virus.
The fundamental and most deleterious trend is the decline of the physician/patient relationship. There are many causes for this — some economic, some cultural, some ideological — but the cumulative effect is corrosive.
The importance of the physician-patient relationship has been recognized for millennia, and was alluded to by Plato in Book IV of his Laws:
D]id you ever observe that there are two classes of patients in states, slaves and freemen; and the slave doctors run about and cure the slaves, or wait for them in the dispensaries — practitioners of this sort never talk to their patients individually, or let them talk about their own individual complaints? The doctor who treats slaves prescribes what mere experience suggests, as if he had exact knowledge; and when he has given his orders, like a tyrant, he rushes off with equal assurance to some other servant who is ill; and so he relieves the master of the house of the care of his invalid slaves. But the other doctor, who is a freeman, attends and practices upon freemen; and he carries his enquiries far back, and goes into the nature of the disorder; he enters into discourse with the patient and with his friends, and is at once getting information from the sick man, and also instructing him as far as he is able, and he will not prescribe for him until he has first convinced him; at last, when he has brought the patient more and more under his persuasive influences and set him on the road to health, he attempts to effect a cure.
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https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/02/the_decline_of_american_medicine.html
