Making Sense of Medicine: Bridging the Gap Between Doctor Guidelines and Patient Preferences
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Patients: how do you understand guidelines?

12/22/2014

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Patients, families, caregivers - people of all styles, colors, and ages! In preparation for a coming workshop at the Society of General Internal Medicine, I am interested in how you understand DOCTORS' guidelines.

Doctors' guidelines are documents produced by committees, with some relation to the scientific evidence, meant to provide useful advice for practice. For the past decade (or more) we have known that these guidelines rarely include patient preferences.

These guidelines are frequently mentioned in the lay press. Do you know about these guidelines? Do you ever look at them or think about how you might be included? Or whether doctors follow them?


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The one not sick

12/7/2014

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Guishan asked Daowu, “Where are you coming from?”
Daowu said, “I’ve come from tending the sick.”
Shan said, “How many people were sick?”
Wu said, “There were the sick and the not sick.”
“Isn’t the one not sick you?” Guishan asked.
Daowu said, “Being sick and not being sick have nothing to do with the True
Person. Speak quickly! Speak quickly!”
Guishan said, “Even if I could say anything, it wouldn’t relate.”
Later Tiantong commented on this, saying, “Say something anyway!”
(Fischer, 2008, p. 66)


(From Arthur W. Frank, Reflective Healthcare Practice, in E.A. Kinsella, A. Pitman (eds.), Phronesis as Professional Knowledge:
Practical Wisdom in the Professions, 53–60.)

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A personal note: a Jewish voice in contemporary health care reform?

12/7/2014

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In seeing inequities in health care as a moral crisis (and acknowledging there are socioeconomic approaches, scientific understandings, and ethical claims that are made in the secular sphere, all of which are vital and to which I separately subscribe), I feel the acute lack of a Jewish voice in healthcare reform. Do we need one, specifically, or is it enough to have the occasional resolution from the various denominations? I so admire the rabbis who got arrested while demonstrating against racism and its bitter brutal fruits. What should the Jewish response be to our healthcare crisis?

I know Rabbi Jill Jacobs wrote about this in And There Shall Be No Needy, but that chapter was about a halachic charge for reform. I take that as a given. My question is institutional, programmatic, and -- agitational, I guess. Realms where I am not the one to lead, but I would love to advise and help propel.

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Health care inequalities: slower, and dressed up in scrubs and jargon, but no less deadly.

12/5/2014

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    The author of Talking To Your Doctor and Making Sense of Medicine blogs about the books, shared decision making, doctor-patient communication, and the redeemable imperfections of healthcare.

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