I now ask all my patients, at the end of our visits, “Did I get it? Did I successfully answer your questions and address your fears?”
Dr. Marc Katz is a cardiac surgeon in Richmond Virginia. His op-ed, ‘Participatory Medicine’ encourages partnership between patient and provider, appears in today’s Richmond Times Dispatch.
This is an important article on the participatory medicine movement. Dr. Katz highlights not only the players, including our own Society for Participatory Medicine, but also his practice of participatory medicine.
Katz’s piece continues:
Today, there is a movement afoot — one that is welcomed by me and many of my colleagues. It’s a change that I hope will become the norm when it comes to the physician-patient relationship. It’s all about partnerships between patient and provider.
Participatory medicine, as noted by the Society for Participatory Medicine (S4PM), is “a movement in which networked patients shift from being mere passengers to responsible drivers of their health and in which providers encourage and value them as full partners.”
You can read Dr. Marc Katz’s article in full here.
Physician – patient partnerships are a step in the right direction, but to fully respect a patient’s (human being’s) autonomy and humanity, we need to recognize that this is not a partnership, but rather a customer – service-provider relationship. Patients hire physicians to solve a problem or do a job for them. Patients are not partners; they are the boss.
Nick, thank you so much for spotting this in your home turf yesterday and posting it here! I have a sense that things are cracking open, and this feels like a signal moment.