How Can Doctors Restore the Heart of Medicine?

In recent years, the American public has clamored for a more integrative and holistic medical model, in which doctors are equipped not only to write prescriptions and perform procedures, but also to guide patients in a whole-being/whole-life approach to health. We actually need a medical culture that can support doctors, as well as patients, in this regard. Medicine is one of the most demanding environments in which to work. For starters, the hours can be brutal, especially early on. By way of example, it was only a decade ago that medical residency workload was decreased to 80 hours a week. Addressing this matter in our recent interview, Jeffrey Sloan MD - a researcher and professor at the Mayo Clinic, specializing in quality of life issues for medical patients and practitioners - noted that doctors all have residency stories along the lines of, "I was up for 72 hours, and I'm lucky I didn't kill somebody" or "I did something goofy, but fortunately someone caught me." These are "cute anecdotes," Sloan said, but they underscore a serious issue. Referring to a series of peer-reviewed studies on physician wellness, which Sloan and his colleagues conducted, Sloan emphasized that it was not surprising to get "hard data that says, yes, burnout leads directly to medical errors." The matter nonetheless remains controversial, and I can see both sides of the coin. On the one hand, it is true, grueling hours easily can lead to burnout and compromise a doctor's ability to perform. ...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news