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Looking Back (and Forth)
Reflections of an Old-Fashioned Doctor
Herbert L. Fred, M.D.
A doctor who favors "high-touch" medicine instead of "high-tech" solutions to health care
This collection of published essays covers a wide range of medical topics. Although designed primarily for a medical audience, these essays are also written for a general audience in an understandable, entertaining way.
The essays cover five general areas:
(1) caring for the patient, (2) schooling the physician
(3) looking back, (4) dizzy medical writing
(5) miscellany
In lucid, witty prose, Dr. Fred laments the demise of bedside medicine. He emphasizes that overreliance on modern technology has undermined physicians' use of the mind and five senses for diagnoses. Diagnosing illnesses is becoming a lost art in favor of tests, consultations, more tests, and more consultations. As such, the individuality of patient care is at risk.
Reflecting on forty-four years as a full-time medical educator, Dr. Fred sees enormous progress in the ability to detect and treat disease. But along with that progress, he believes that doctors have largely sacrificed the very core of doctoring—humanism.
Suggesting that doctors recapture the "Oslerian spirit," Dr. Fred states plainly that health care workers need to "strive diligently to promote and preserve the human element in medicine. Reaching that goal will require doctors with commitment, compassion, candor, and common sense: doctors who can look at, listen to, and talk with patients; doctors who understand that medicine is a calling, not a business; and doctors who always put the patient first. In short, doctors who practice medicine the old-fashioned way."
Herbert L. Fred, M.D., is Professor, Department of Internal Medicine, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. He is a graduate of Rice University and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is the author of Say Aah (Hah)! A Medical Educator Mouths Off and Elephant Medicine and More: Musings of a Medical Educator.
Titles of Related Interest
Everybody is Special:
An Autobiography of a Multihandicapped Person
Gary E. Mann
194 pp. Hardback. $19.95t. 0-86554-451-4. H358.
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