By Dhruv Khullar
NY Times Journal of Medicine, March 25, 2016
"Too often in medicine, you feel like part of a machine, a cog in a massive bureaucracy. We cover each other’s shifts, we maintain a hospital’s patient flow — and at the end of many days, you feel nothing would have been different if another doctor had stepped in.
But standardized care, by definition, is not personalized care: it fails to acknowledge patients’ individuality. [In this age of the electronic medical record, there are still things] only doctors — as humans — can offer: critical thinking, clinical intuition, empathic care, exploring what’s important to patients so they can make the decisions that are right for them."
Dhruv Khullar’s moving Op-Ed piece articulates this with clarity and eloquence.