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Biomedical subjects

R B Gunderman

Publications and source records attributed to R B Gunderman.

25 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
PubMed1997

The outcome of medical outcomes assessment: it's not necessarily academic.

The outcomes assessment movement has the potential to significantly enhance the practice of medicine by enabling physicians to identify and implement what works. It represents a rich wellspring of material for investigation and is already proving to be an important source of research support. As such, it also represents a boon to academic medicine, whose activities in patient care, research, and education it may enrich. Yet outcomes research may also prove itself a threat to academic medicine insofar as the "outcomes" of the academic medical center are not adequately represented in its deliberations and recommendations. Ultimately, the results of the outcomes movement will be defined--both now and in the generation to come--by medicine's guiding vision. It behooves those who care about academic medicine to recall that this vision itself is a highly prized outcome.

Academic Medical Centers↗
PubMed1995

Rethinking our basic concepts of health and disease.

Medical students' concerns that their education is not preparing them to be the doctors they could be can be traced in part to inadequacies in the basic concepts of health and disease they are taught, which prevent them from learning how to most effectively meet the challenges and exigencies of patient care. The author proposes an alternative theoretical perspective on the biological foundations of medicine by describing two divergent models of health and disease. The first, reductive isolation, represents the dominant theoretical approach to health and disease in contemporary medical education and practice. It emphasizes quantification and measurement and aims to peer beneath variability, subjectivity, and the infinite variety of patients' experiences to something universally definable, measurable, and objective. The second model, ascendant interrelation, takes as its starting point a special and prototypical property of the living organism, metabolism, in which the organism has an identity that transcends the material of which it is made, and in which such characteristics as form, wholeness, self-generation, and integration dominate. Medicine and the teaching of medicine must use both these models; the tools of reductive isolation are necessary but must be applied with a view to the larger and more complex reality of the patient as addressed by ascendant interrelation. Alone, reductive isolation does not offer an adequate perspective on the health of the whole human being, just as the well-functioning of the eye cannot be adequately explained without reference to seeing. In short, patients are more than their diseases; complex factors in their lives must not be overlooked as contributors to their illnesses or keys to healing.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Curriculum↗
PubMed1990

Medicine and the question of suffering.

Doctors are not health care providers, and medicine is not a commodity. To practice medicine well, the doctor must attend to each patient as a whole person and be faithful in giving care when cure is not possible.

Adult↗