Treating diseases, not patients.

Abstract

Highly trained medical specialists now possess a vast array of sophisticated technical apparatus with which to fight diseases. These tools, coupled with a growing emphasis on cost accounting and a medical paradigm emphasizing facts and depicting the human body as a machine, depersonalize health care by militating against a holistic approach to treating patients. Medical training and patient education must combine to ensure a new humanistic approach to the practice of medicine built on technical skills, but buttressed by comparison, commitment, humility, and those other attributes that will encourage physicians to treat people and not just diseases.