Take back the patient

It’s time for physicians to take back their patients. It’s time for the national obsession with the “health care system” to stop focusing on “systems” and start putting the focus where it belongs — on the doctor-patient relationship. That relationship, as essential to the health of an individual as it is to the health of the nation, is on its death bed. The bureaucrats, consultants, theorizers, government gurus, fiscal fabricators, self-absorbed statistical snobs, know-it-all provincial pundits, scheming convention-going covens, and maniacal medical reformers have been spewing out self-serving venomous nonsense for a decade and half. And what do we have to show for it? Less than nothing. The lines grow longer, hospital beds grow fewer, facilities deteriorate, responsibility (read blame) is transferred from one level of government to the one below with never a penny of funding to go with it. Meanwhile doctors struggle to do their best by their patients who, surely, must be counted as among the most patient patients on the globe — too patient many would say. The “government” is taking care of us so we must not grumble. We must wait.

There was a time, not so many years ago, when they did not grumble and they did not wait; when the profession was respected for the life-affirming work it does; when patients received a bill for medical services and, at the very least, knew the cost of the services they received. Third party payers had as little say about how doctor’s offices were run as fire insurance companies have about how the hoses are rolled in fire stations. And it was better. Patients have been too numbed and dazed by the endless litany of woe out of Ottawa and the provincial capitals to do anything about it. It’s up to the profession to act and act now to restore human values to medical care. The task begins by clearing out all of those busy-bodies with their studies, computers, printouts and forms that stand shouting in what should be the quiet space between doctor and patient.

David Elkins