Saving The Doctor-Patient Relationship

This program was originally broadcast on March 29, 2016.

Lifetime M.D. Dr. Nortin Hadler joins us to look at what’s happened to the doctor-patient relationship, and how to save it.

Nortin Hadler, MD, has been doctoring for a long time. He’s old school. Loves a rich doctor-patient relationship, where the whole person – patient - is seen and comprehended.  Treated in full.  But these days, he says, doctors who care are burning out, retiring early, pulling their hair out.  “Today,” he writes, “health is a commodity, disease is a product line and physicians are a sales force in the employ of a predatory enterprise.” Ok! This hour On Point, Dr. Nortin Hadler on how to heal American health care. -- Tom Ashbrook

Dr. Nortin Hadler, retired professor of medicine and microbiology and immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Author of the new book, "By the Bedside of the Patient: Lessons for the Twenty-First Century Physician." (@nortinhadlermd)

The Health Care Blog: There Is Nothing Free About the Health Care Free Market — "The shame of this chapter in the history of American medicine is that unlike the Jefferson-Franklin debates and unlike the debates regarding the moral underpinnings of the bureaucracy, the ACA was born out of debates on form and function but not on substance and ethic. Economists, policy wonks, politicians and all the various stakeholders came together to devise an insurance scheme that would be sufficiently granular to define who is at risk, for what and at what price."

The Wall Street Journal: Is Your Doctor Getting Too Much Screen  Time? -- "Computers, laptops and tablets are increasingly occupying your physician’s attention as more medical practices record their patients’ data electronically rather than on paper. This has changed the dynamics between some doctors and patients and created new communication challenges, research shows."

New Yorker: Overkill — "Virtually every family in the country, the research indicates, has been subject to overtesting and overtreatment in one form or another. The costs appear to take thousands of dollars out of the paychecks of every household each year. Researchers have come to refer to financial as well as physical 'toxicities' of inappropriate care—including reduced spending on food, clothing, education, and shelter."