Sign Up For More InfoOften in medicine, the issues of science and technology are more valued than human interaction, than communicating one on one, at least according to David H. Newman, MD, featured speaker at the NYAM Fellow Author Night Series who read from Hippocrates Shadow, his critically acclaimed book about why medicine today is not practiced the way Hippocrates intended.
In the book, Dr Newman discusses the diagnostic methods Hippocrates used (sometimes going as far as tasting his patient’s bodily secretions as a way of getting to know the individual) as holistic, sometimes to an extreme, and always patient-centric. The relationship with his patient was fundamental in determining treatment. Today the focus is on getting all the right tests in order to determine treatment. Physicians specialize, narrowly, on parts and sections of the body which is not in keeping with the Hippocratic approach.
“When you are indoctrinated into medicine the focus is on testing and how we interpret tests, what it means, and to figure out what happens with the science compared to the human part and put them together. This is where we go wrong,” said Dr. Newman.
The book is filled with patient’s stories depicting the many ways doctors “get it wrong” with this dependency on technology and testing as the sole means of treatment. As Dr Newman says, physicians have become victims of technology, victims of responding with a fix without explanation, without dialogue.
“We are led to believe that mammograms save lives, but they don’t,” he said “and that is hard to say because mammograms are fascinating and important, they are emblematic of the other things in the way we focus on tests and technology and the way we love ideas. We really believe that catching cancer early should save lives. It makes sense to us. And a lot of what happens is that an idea makes sense based on the science we know.”
NYAM Fellow, David Newman, MD, added pre-med courses to his first major, philosophy, worked as a paramedic in upstate New York, and went on to Albany Medical College where he received his medical degree. Following medical school he completed an emergency medicine residency at the University of Pittsburgh, and went on to a fellowship in biomedical research. As a Major in the Army Reserves he was deployed to Iraq in 2005 where he received an Army Commendation Medal for his work with the 344th Combat Support Hospital on the outskirts of Baghdad. He now runs a clinical research program, publishes regularly in the biomedical fields, and teaches graduates, undergraduates, medical students and residents with Columbia University and in the Department of Emergency Medicine at St. Luke’s/Roosevelt Hospital Center in NYC.
Please join us for the next NYAM Author Night Series event on April 23 featuring the work of Steven Jonas, MD, MDH, MS. Click here for more information.
Posted on 02/27/2009
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