The telephone is now a significant component of medical care: 25% of encounters between primary care physicians and patients involve its use. Successful telephone medicine improves the rapport between doctor and patient, increases access to care, enhances patient satisfaction, and lowers patient and physician costs. Telephone medicine is no longer just renewing prescriptions. A telephone call can clarify issues raised during the office visit, help patients with decisions about their health care at home, prevent unnecessary emergency department visits, and communicate test results quickly and personally.
The book - which includes essays by physicians, philosophers, and a nurse - is divided into three parts: one deals with how empathy is weakened or lost during the course of medical education and suggests how to remedy this; another describes the historical and philosophical origins of empathy and provides arguments for and against it; and a third section offers compelling accounts of how physicians' empathy for their patients has affected their own lives and the lives of those in their care. We hear, for example, from a physician working in a hospice who relates the ways that the staff try to listen and respond to the needs of the dying; a scientist who interviews candidates for medical school and tells how qualities of empathy are undervalued by selection committees; a nurse who considers what nursing can teach physicians about empathy; another physician who ponders whether the desire to be empathic can hinder the detachment necessary for objective care; and several contributors who show how literature and art can help physicians to develop empathy.
"The Fenway Guide to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Health is the first truly comprehensive clinical reference to enhancing the health care and wellness of LGBT patients. Written by leading experts in the field and created in conjunction with Fenway Community Health of Boston, one of America's most respected community-based research and treatment centers, this one-of-a kind resource examines the unique issues faced by sexual minority patients and provides readers with clear and authoritative guidance." -- Book Jacket.
The definitive guide to the knowledge and skills necessary to practice Hospital Medicine Presented in full color and enhanced by more than 700 illustrations, this authoritative text provides a background in all the important clinical, organizational, and administrative areas now required for the practice of hospital medicine. The goal of the book is provide trainees, junior and senior clinicians, and other professionals with a comprehensive resource that they can use to improve care processes and performance in the hospitals that serve their communities. Each chapter opens with boxed Key Clinical Questions that are addressed in the text and hundreds of tables encapsulate important information. Case studies demonstrate how to apply the concepts covered in the text directly to the hospitalized patient. Principles and Practice of Hospital Medicine is divided into six parts: Systems of Care: Introduces key issues in Hospital Medicine, patient safety, quality improvement, leadership and practice management, professionalism and medical ethics, medical legal issues and risk management, teaching and development. Medical Consultation and Co-Management: Reviews core tenets of medical consultation, preoperative assessment and management of post-operative medical problems. Clinical Problem-Solving in Hospital Medicine: Introduces principles of evidence-based medicine, quality of evidence, interpretation of diagnostic tests, systemic reviews and meta-analysis, and knowledge translations to clinical practice. Approach to the Patient at the Bedside: Details the diagnosis, testing, and initial management of common complaints that may either precipitate admission or arise during hospitalization. Hospitalist Skills: Covers the interpretation of common “low tech” tests that are routinely accessible on admission, how to optimize the use of radiology services, and the standardization of the execution of procedures routinely performed by some hospitalists. Clinical Conditions: Reflects the expanding scope of Hospital Medicine by including sections of Emergency Medicine, Critical Care, Geriatrics, Neurology, Palliative Care, Pregnancy, Psychiatry and Addiction, and Wartime Medicine.
“A fascinating journey into the heart and mind of a physician” that explores the doctor-patient relationship, the flaws in our health care system, and how doctors’ emotions impact medical care (Boston Globe) While much has been written about the minds and methods of the medical professionals who save our lives, precious little has been said about their emotions. Physicians are assumed to be objective, rational beings, easily able to detach as they guide patients and families through some of life’s most challenging moments. But understanding doctors’ emotional responses to the life-and-death dramas of everyday practice can make all the difference on giving and getting the best medical care. Digging deep into the lives of doctors, Dr. Danielle Ofri examines the daunting range of emotions—shame, anger, empathy, frustration, hope, pride, occasionally despair, and sometimes even love—that permeate the contemporary doctor-patient connection. Drawing on scientific studies, including some surprising research, Dr. Ofri offers up an unflinching look at the impact of emotions on health care. Dr. Ofri takes us into the swirling heart of patient care, telling stories of caregivers caught up and occasionally torn down by the whirlwind life of doctoring. She admits to the humiliation of an error that nearly killed one of her patients. She mourns when a beloved patient is denied a heart transplant. She tells the riveting stories of an intern traumatized when she is forced to let a newborn die in her arms, and of a doctor whose daily glass of wine to handle the frustrations of the ER escalates into a destructive addiction. Ofri also reveals that doctors cope through gallows humor, find hope in impossible situations, and surrender to ecstatic happiness when they triumph over illness.
Today’s medicine is spiritually deflated and morally adrift; this book explains why and offers an ethical framework to renew and guide practitioners in fulfilling their profession to heal. What is medicine and what is it for? What does it mean to be a good doctor? Answers to these questions are essential both to the practice of medicine and to understanding the moral norms that shape that practice. The Way of Medicine articulates and defends an account of medicine and medical ethics meant to challenge the reigning provider of services model, in which clinicians eschew any claim to know what is good for a patient and instead offer an array of “health care services” for the sake of the patient’s subjective well-being. Against this trend, Farr Curlin and Christopher Tollefsen call for practitioners to recover what they call the Way of Medicine, which offers physicians both a path out of the provider of services model and also the moral resources necessary to resist the various political, institutional, and cultural forces that constantly push practitioners and patients into thinking of their relationship in terms of economic exchange. Curlin and Tollefsen offer an accessible account of the ancient ethical tradition from which contemporary medicine and bioethics has departed. Their investigation, drawing on the scholarship of Leon Kass, Alasdair MacIntyre, and John Finnis, leads them to explore the nature of medicine as a practice, health as the end of medicine, the doctor-patient relationship, the rule of double effect in medical practice, and a number of clinical ethical issues from the beginning of life to its end. In the final chapter, the authors take up debates about conscience in medicine, arguing that rather than pretending to not know what is good for patients, physicians should contend conscientiously for the patient’s health and, in so doing, contend conscientiously for good medicine. The Way of Medicine is an intellectually serious yet accessible exploration of medical practice written for medical students, health care professionals, and students and scholars of bioethics and medical ethics.
How do we understand and respond to the pressing health problems of modern society? Conventional practice focuses on the assessment and clinical treatment of immediate health issues presented by individual patients. In contrast, social medicine advocates an equal focus on the assessment and social treatment of underlying social conditions, such as environmental factors, structural violence, and social injustice. Social Justice and Medical Practice examines the practice of social medicine through extensive life history interviews with a physician practicing the approach in marginalized communities. It presents a case example of social medicine in action, demonstrating how such a practice can be successfully pursued within the context of the existing structure of twenty-first-century medicine. In examining the experience of a physician on the frontlines of reforming health care, the book critiques the restrictive nature of the dominant clinical model of medicine and argues for a radically expanded focus for modern-day medical practice. Social Justice and Medical Practice is a timely intervention at a time when even advanced health care systems are facing multiple crises. Lucidly written, it presents a striking alternative and is important reading for students and practitioners of medicine and anthropology, as well as policy makers.
To what extent should spiritual information be part of a patient’s medical assessment? How should physicians respond when patients refuse life-saving care on religious grounds? Should doctors pray with their patients? Questions such as these raise deeper ones about the goals of medicine and the nature of healing. In a set of engaging and candid essays, The Soul of Medicine explores the role and influence of spirituality in clinical practice, professionalism, and medical education. The contributors to this volume approach this topic from their own spiritual perspectives—Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, New Age / Eclectic, secular, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Christian Scientist. Their thought-provoking essays provide rich insights not only into the needs of patients with various world views but also into how spirituality influences the practice of medicine. When their own spiritual issues arise in medical practice, physicians rely on their professionalism, ethics, and education. To better understand how various world views are incorporated into clinical work, doctors must ask themselves—as these contributors have—a series of important questions: What insights about life and healing does your faith provide? How does your faith challenge or reinforce contemporary medicine? How do you assess and address spirituality in clinical practice? How do your own beliefs influence your interactions with patients? The Soul of Medicine encourages medical students and practitioners to recognize the spiritual dimensions of medicine, to consider how these dimensions inform their own education and practice, and to be compassionate about their patients’—and their own—religious beliefs.
Michael Stolberg offers the first comprehensive presentation of medical training and day-to-day medical practice during the Renaissance. Drawing on previously unknown manuscript sources, he describes the prevailing notions of illness in the era, diagnostic and therapeutic procedures, the doctor–patient relationship, and home and lay medicine.
