Tag Lines for Authentic Medicine
One of my oldest and dearest patients congratulated me on my story in the AP. She is in her late eighties and is really a sweet old lady. We love her at the office. She didn’t understand what the story was about, however. “Are you fighting for doctors?”, she asked. Not exactly. What I told her convinced me that this website and movement needs a new tagline. Right now it is Finding the Balance Between Science and Art in Today’s Healthcare System but I think that may be too confusing.
Let me first explain what was behind this first tagline. I believe the pendulum has swung too far towards technology in our healthcare system. It has gotten to the point where the puppet masters actually believe that robots could do our jobs as physicians. The same business people and administrators believe that LELTs (less educated and less trained) “providers” are exactly equal in their delivery of healthcare . To them it is only a bonus that they are coincidentally cheaper. These same people believe that technology compensates for every move they have made (reducing staff, hiring more LELTs, overwhelming staff, etc.). My tag line tried to emphasize that the pendulum needs to swing back to the art of medicine to find a truer balance. By reconnecting with our roots we can become what we thought doctors were when we went to medical school. That balance is Authentic Medicine.
Did I tell my patient this? No. What came out of my mouth seemed to work a lot better. I said that my goal is “fight to remove those things that are getting in the way of doctors directly treating patients”. It worked. So now my questions to you:
- Should I switch this tagline?
- Do you like my new one?
- If you do, should it be condensed more?
As bad as it gets for doctors, we are priveleged. “fighting” for doctors loses me immediately. However much I agree with “Finding the Balance Between Science and Art in Today’s Healthcare System”, this fails to express the grief many physicians feel regarding our loss of autonomy and its impact on our ability to care for our patients.
improved tools to evaluate and assess what we do is essential to quality and understanding why some doctors soar and others lose compassion and focus. Keep up the humor and scepticism (kind of like art and science). Good luck with the tagline
I believe you are CORRECT! LELT’s happen in nursing as well and no one seems to care. Patients deserve to know who is caring for them!
KEEP AUTHENTIC MEDICINE coming!
I think perhaps part of the difficulty in finding a tag line is that there are really two notions here to be captured: medicine is an art, and the treating physician knows the patient well enough to be able to make medical decisions based upon that art.
There is a lot of talk about the art of medicine, but as Authentic Medicine has so well documented, the practice of medicine has become cookbook medicine because regulators have the illusion that the art of medicine can somehow be captured in a checklist of rules.
The whole notion of “expert systems” in the 80s ran up against some serious brick walls because there was this delusion that all computer programmers needed to do was talk to experts and write down the rules experts used to make their decisions. It soon became evident to those researchers trying to collect the “rules” of experts that experts didn’t make their decisions based upon rules, per se. An expert has the ability to make a comparison and hence an artful, expert decision based upon one incident which may have occurred 40 years ago.
So much for “evidence-based” medicine.
In a culture of sound bites, the ability to differentiate between art and artiface disappears.
well said!
I like Authentic Medicine.
“Doctors Actually Treating Patients” is a little wordy,but captures your point.
Keep up the good work.
GMM