Culture Shift for Medicine - From Disease to Health
There has been a growing amount of focus recently on how people can stay healthy - looking at what we eat; how we exercise; and, how we manage stress - asking us to take more personal responsibility for our own health. During my last annual medical check-up, I started to think more about the role of doctors in helping people to stay healthy. What expectations should my doctor have of me and what should I have from her?
My next thought was - are doctors trained to help people stay healthy to prevent sickness or is the profession’s focus on identifying and treating disease? It seems that the focus should be on prevention, but my sense is that the historical training for doctors is more reactive in nature. So if people are becoming more proactive in thinking about their health rather than waiting for disease to strike, then we need to have doctors trained and rewarded to help us stay healthy as well as treat disease. This would be a major culture shift for the profession from a focus on disease to health.
Now we can go back to the question of expectations between doctors and their patients, but wait a minute - first I need to think about language. A patient is defined as - one under medical treatment and when I go in for my annual check-up, I am really a client looking for a health service provider. Let me know if I am sick, but please give me the info I need to stay healthy!
Again, the first step of acting differently is to think differently.
