(NaturalNews) Two doctors from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard’s teaching hospital, have taken an unusual step for the medical profession. These courageous physicians are speaking out about today’s healthcare system which emphasizes money over individualized patient care.
In an article just published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Pamela Hartzband, MD, and Jerome Groopman,MD, are blunt about their frustration with a system that has “reduced medicine to economics.” In fact, they go so far as to say hospitals have been turned into “factories” that reduce clinical encounters between a patient and doctor into simply “economic transactions.”
“Patients are no longer patients, but rather customers or consumers. Doctors and nurses have transmuted into providers,” Pamela Hartzband, MD, and Jerome Groopman MD, wrote. “We are in the midst of an economic crisis and efforts to reform the health care system have centered on controlling spiraling costs. To that end, many economists and policy makers have proposed that patient care should be industrialized and standardized. Hospitals and clinics should be run like modern factories and archaic terms like doctor, nurse and patient must therefore be replaced with terminology that fits this new order.”