by Meghan O’Rourke, The Atlantic, November 2014
Meghan. O’Rourke is a writer and poet who has suffered with an obscure autoimmune disorder for over a decade. Her reflections on American medicine are important and iinstructive. This article is available as full free text.
O'Rourke writes:
This essay is about why it has become so difficult for so many doctors and patients to communicate with each other. Ours is a technologically proficient but emotionally deficient and inconsistent medical system that is best at treating acute, not chronic, problems: for every instance of expert treatment, skilled surgery, or innovative problem-solving, there are countless cases of substandard care, overlooked diagnoses, bureaucratic bungling, and even outright antagonism between doctor and patient. For a system that invokes "patient–centered care" as a mantra, modern medicine is startlingly inattentive – at times actively indifferent – to patients needs. To my surprise, I have now learned that patients aren't alone in feeling that doctors are failing them. Behind the scenes, many doctors feel the same way. A crop of recent books was a fascinating and disturbing ethnographic of the opaque land of medicine, told by participant-observers wearing white coats.
Here are our expanded notes from "Doctors Tell All. Download Doctors Tell All – And It’s Not Good