Being a patient reminded one world-renowned physician, Dr. Bernard Lown, of the importance of a book he’d published twenty years earlier, The Lost Art of Healing. In this interesting opinion piece in The New York Times, Dr. Rich Joseph writes of what he learned from treating Dr. Lown — and their later conversations. Whether we are providing direct medical treatment or non-treating, independent second opinions on the patients we serve, the ideas are important to consider. As Dr. Joseph notes:
This (approach to medicine) begins with our own training. Certainly doctors must understand disease, but medical education is overly skewed toward the biomedical sciences and minutiae about esoteric and rare disease processes. Doctors also need time to engage with the humanities, because they are the gateway to the human experience.
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