My grandmother Demetra was a pediatrician. She delivered me. And she probably delivered most of the babies in the Greek mountain village I grew up. She never asked for money. In fact, she assisted poor mothers as much as she could. She was not wealthy. Her husband was a shepherd.
I remember her like a dream. She would visit us with pockets full of oranges, walnuts, almonds, other seasonal fruits or, sometimes, chocolate. She died when I was five years old.
My mother never ceased talking about Demetra. So my dream was becoming a doctor like my grandmother.
I started in that premedical path at the University of Illinois but, after getting my bachelor’s degree in zoology, I gave up and earned a doctorate in history from the University of Wisconsin.
I realized rather quickly medicine in America was no longer attached to its Greek roots. Not that I expected doctors emulating my grandmother, but business medicine turned me off as much as its mechanization.
My health has been relatively good, so my contact with doctors and hospitals has been minimal. But my diagnosis that medicine in America suffers from the deleterious illness of profits is probably accurate.
You can see medicine’s business obsession in the dishonest game president Trump and the Republicans in Congress have been playing with “Obama care.” Political discussion hides the doctors and the money they and the insurance companies extort from Americans.
A personal example: Not long ago, a large dog attacked me. I went to the urgent care of a family physicians clinic. I had wrapped my bleeding hand with tissue paper. I asked the receptionist for seeing a doctor immediately and she said, “Do you have insurance?”
This callous response shows the deception behind “urgent care” and “medicine” in the United States. Patients are cash cows, not persons in pain and possible disease.
No wonder medical doctors take their responsibility so lightly. A neurosurgeon left his patient half paralyzed because he mixed surgery with making phone calls. Other doctors text messages during surgery. And still others focus on the patient data in their gadgets but ignore the patient. Their hospitals keep telling them that taking care of patients must be “data driven.” This delusion fuels distraction equivalent to playing games with the lives of patients.
Computers and smartphones are seducing doctors as much as they do car drivers – with the same fatal results.
Thus “distracted doctoring” came into being. But could gadgets at doctors’ hands be more than a means of distraction? Is it possible that doctors’ playing with smartphones is symptomatic of caring more for money than health and healing?
However, seeing nurses and doctors fiddling with gadgets is not “funny,” according to Dr. Peter Papadakos, anesthesiologist and manager of critical care at the University of Rochester Medical Center in northern New York. “My gut feeling is lives are in danger.”
Indeed, doctors addicted to smartphones and computers increase iatrogenic disease and death by hundreds of thousands per year. Doctors describe these deaths as “preventable adverse events.”
These deadly “events” made Papadakos angry with his unethical colleagues. He decided to blow the whistle. He invited Stephen Bertman, a distinguished classics scholar and professor at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada, to join him in editing a book about this new medical nemesis.
“Distracted Doctoring: Returning to Patient-Centered Care in the Digital Age” (Springer, 2017) is what Dr. Papadakos ordered. The book is timely, pioneering, even riveting sometimes -- and fearless. Most of its readers will probably be doctors and nurses, but its message transcends medicine.
It reveals the obscene grab smartphones and computers have on doctors and other medical stuff. The addiction to machines nicely covers up and intensifies the separation of doctors from ill people, the consequence of which is the divorce of medicine from society and the natural world.
Industries are making people sick by the millions but doctors fail to understand or treat environmental diseases. The environment is an alien world. Species are becoming extinct at catastrophic rates and doctors remain silent. Farmers are dosing America’s crops with neurotoxins and other deleterious substances and medical schools barely teach nutrition and toxicology. Doctors ignore these environmental plagues. Countless numbers of children suffer from neurotoxic diseases.
The ambition of “Distracted Doctoring” is to shock doctors with the reality of their unacceptable behavior. Dr. David Loxterkamp, Seaport Community Health Center, Belfast, Maine, admits that distraction and “disengagement have reached epic proportions” among his colleagues.
Papadakos speaks of “distracted health care” enmeshed in fear, the fear of patients seeing doctors and nurses everywhere in the hospital “constantly focused on their screens.” Doctors also “don’t look” patients “in the eyes.” This fear breaks down the “sacred bond” between doctors and patients.
Like Papadakos, Bertman tackles head on the implications of having advanced technology in one’s pockets. The digital age is problematic. The speed of the gadgets is phenomenal. Their “electrons [are] racing around a nonstop track at the speed of light.” This speed, this “electronic culture,” he says, has something to do with “our absence from the lives of others, including the lives of those who love and need us.” This reality is probably “the consequence of the multiple wired and wireless devices we have eagerly allowed ourselves to become addicted to.”
Smartphones and computers are “radiant” devices bathing everything in their own light. “If the values of the computer more and more become the values of medicine,” Bertman asks, “how humane will the practice of that medicine be when a patient is viewed chiefly as a storehouse of data to be summarily and impersonally accessed?”
Burke Cunha, doctor of infectious diseases at Winthrop-University Hospital, Mineola, New York, sees positive and deleterious effects of technology.
“Omnipresent technology has profound positive benefits, but also underappreciated are its human price and negative ramifications, and the dangers of a speedy descent into the abyss for the unwary distracted doctor,” he writes.
Read this extremely important book.