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Earning Patient Trust Through The Power Of Touch

Abraham Verghese, MD, Standford University

My wife has two world-class oncologists who help her manage her Stage 4 Lung Cancer.  Both are excellent clinicians.  Yet their skills differ in one very important way.  Her radiation oncologist physically touches her a lot (in a good way of course!).  There are the touches on her arm, a hand on the shoulder, hugs, and of course a thorough hands-on physician exam.  Her medical oncologist not so much.

We all recognize the therapeutic value of touch.  Dr. Abraham Verghese, a Stanford Physician and Professor, at the 2011 Med2.0 Conference, described the power of touch associated with the physical exam.  In the following scenario he describes an interaction with a chronic fatigue patient who came to him after being seen by many other physicians: Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Mind The Gap*

Dr. Abraham Verghese: The “Top Gun” Of American Medicine

The first-year medical students I precept were too young to see Tom Cruise’s alter ego Lieutenant Pete “Maverick” Mitchell grace the big screen in the 1986 blockbuster film “Top Gun.” Yet, the story has a relevant analogy to medicine. 

According to the film, during the Vietnam war American pilots were relying too much on technology to bring enemy fighters down. They weren’t as skilled in taking out the opposition. They fired their technologically advanced missiles to try and get the job done. They didn’t think. It didn’t work. They forgot the art of dogfighting.

The military discovered that technology alone wasn’t going to get the job done. The best fighter pilots needed the skills, insight, and wisdom on when to use technology and when not to. As a result, the Navy Fighter Weapons School, known simply as Top Gun, was created to retrain the military pilots on this vital lost skill. The goal of the program was specifically to make the best of the best even better.

Like the military, the country is discovering that the healthcare system enabled with dazzling technology isn’t getting the job done either. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Saving Money and Surviving the Healthcare Crisis*

Primary Care Doctors Rewarded For Time With Patients?

Abraham Verghese is a professor of medicine at Stanford University and one of the most articulate physician-writers today. He recently wrote an op-ed highlighting primary care’s plight, and focuses on the scarcity of time:

The science of medicine has never been more potent – incredible advances and great benefits realized in the treatment of individual diseases – yet the public perception of us physicians is often one of a harried individual more interested in the virtual construct of the patient in the computer than in the living, breathing patient seated on the exam table.Time is the scarcest commodity of all. Patients, particularly when it comes to their routine, day-to-day care, want a physician who has time to understand them as people first, and then as patients.

It’s been frequently discussed on this blog, with solutions ranging from paying physicians per hour to cash-only practices.

There’s no easy answer, and worse, money isn’t even the root of the problem. Often left unaddressed is the burnout that primary care doctors face, practicing in unpalatable environments where the doctor-patient relationship is obstructed by bureaucracy and paperwork. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at KevinMD.com*

Too Much Testing And Treatment? Try Superb Primary Care

The Associated Press has been running a fantastic series of must reads with the latest article highlighting the consequence of too many imaging studies, like X-rays and CT scans, which are the biggest contributor to an individual’s total radiation exposure in a lifetime. Americans get more imaging radiation exposure and testing than people from other industrialized countries.

Reasons for doing too many tests include malpractice fear, patient demands for imaging, the difficulty in obtaining imaging results from other doctors or hospitals, as well as advanced technologies, like coronary angioplasty, which have increased radiation but avoid a far more invasive surgery like heart bypass. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Saving Money and Surviving the Healthcare Crisis*

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