Do We Still Need Doctors?

by John D. Lantos

Written with poignancy and compassion, Do We Still Need Doctors? is a personal account from the front lines of the moral and political battles that are reshaping America's health care system.

Genres: Medical

226 pages, Paperback

First published April 10, 1997

About the author

John D. Lantos is Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Missouri at Kansas City and Director of the Children's Mercy Hospital Bioethics Center.

Reviews

[Elson Joy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Do we still need doctors?
Although this is the question that was posed as the title of the book and was one of the major reasons I showed initial interest in the book, it is not exactly the answer that the author dwells upon.
"...The key question is whether our societal understandings of the proper responses to disease and death, which these practitioners need to embody, have changed in such a way that we need to reevaluate our ideas about doctors..."

"...This book is an excellent cry from the heart of an M.D. who feels that our medical system is failing...". However at some points I did feel that it went to a sort of excessive whining and repetition of the same rhetoric.

I do feel the book could have been written less like a medical journal entry or textbook and more 'readable'. I did at some points find it hard to finish the book.

However this must not in any way undermine the questions he has raised and I definitely do believe that these are going to be significant challenges that the scientific and pragmatic 21st century is going to or is already facing.



Notes:

Specialization and Managed Care

Splintering of multi-specialty.

Is the medical enterprise a rational, scientific, and orderly endeavor? In one sense, doctors want it to be. The authority of medicine is the authority of science, not of morality.

When one has a problem, he chooses the best specialist, and when the problem is fixed, he never goes back. Perhaps that's how the informed patient of the future will behave.

In a sense, medicine has come to be perceived not as a solution to problems but as the problem that needs a solution.

Westerner in The Bridge in the Jungle, Abraham Verghese in My Own Country - The life-saving crisis moves to the background and the timeless rituals of caring and compassion move to the fore.
We begin to focus less on the future and more on the present, less on the outcomes and more on process.
In the end, there is something symbolic or ritualistic about all that we do in medicine.
As long as we do, efforts to rationalize health care, to make it efficient, to computerize it, to make it scientific, will miss the point.

[Nisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are a lot of things to be learned from this book. It posed several interesting questions about being a doctor - does the traditional model still hold? Or should we embrace the new technological advances as they come along? Like everything, there are pros and cons to these choices. Also, I found it eye-opening to know that science is a rather new and modern addition to the art of medicine. Another interesting thing discussed is the absurdity of the clinical double blind study -- are we generating relevant knowledge? Can we reduce people to their commonalities? And if a treatment is shown to be beneficial, is it ethical to continue the study, hence putting the placebo group without treatment that we now know is good for them? Definitely brought up a lot of questions. Being a doctor is really not just smooth sailing. If I really make it to Med School, I'm gonna reread this book.

[Ankit · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was very informative and a good to read
Displaying issues as the part of medical education,
the section of health care.
showing how changes in our health care system
are covering new ways of responding and overcoming to illness