by Joan L. Cannon

A doctor being interviewed on Public Radio about his autobiography made a comment that should resonate with those of us who came to maturity in the last century. It called to mind a recent article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. Both say what most patients never hear articulated is the importance of skills beyond the scientific and technical ones that may be able to save lives.

It’s been in the news of late that family practice is becoming a rarity. The older we are, the more we understand the value of access to someone who knows us; someone who knows not only our cases and our history of diseases or injuries, but someone who knows our histories and our personalities.

For over ten years such respected general interest journals as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal as well a host of educational and medical publications have been printing essays about the values of "the Humanities." That’s the best and most descriptive word to embrace the relatively new notion that to heal the body a physician needs to know more about the person to whom it belongs than purely quantitative and anecdotal evidence of abnormality.

This slow-to-mature attitude has even been the means of adding students to medical schools who are not entering with undergraduate majors in any of the expected sciences. This may be the best thing to happen to patients as a class since the inventions of anti-sepsis and anesthesia.

Familiarity over years is better than over weeks, but even if one must learn to be managed by a new physician, the adjustment necessary can be vastly eased with some time. The necessity of averaging a set number of minutes with each patient is unfortunate and counterproductive. Imagine being treated as an elderly person by a young doctor who has no classical arts background when his or her patient is a university authority on Greek drama and the author of books on the subject that has consumed the major portion of his or her life.

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