Modern medicine is losing its humanistic essence: 'Patients no more, but diseases' is the new motto now.

• Main Authors: Filiz Bulut, M. Murat Civaner
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Turkish Bioethics Association 2016-12-01
• Series: Türkiye Biyoetik Dergisi
• Subjects: Medical ethics; Bioethics; Professional ethics; Healthcare; Health policies
• Online Access: http://www.journalagent.com/z4/download_fulltext.asp?pdir=respircase&un=TJOB-58070

For medicine, which is as old as history of humanity, the virtue of helping has always been a priority. However, the way medicine see diseases and human being changed from time to time, and the treatment approaches were shaped accordingly. Ancient Greek's Knidos and Kos Schools of Medicine reflecting one of the earliest schools of systematic medical education show us two distinct perspectives. School of Kos carries the characteristics of Hippocratic medicine and reach a diagnosis not considering the disease symptoms but through the disease itself, and the prognosis of the patient is taken into consideration as well. The disease and the patient are handled with a holistic view without focusing on an organ and the treatment is planned accordingly, while the School of Knidos focuses mainly on the disease not to the patient and reach a clinical diagnosis based on the specifications presented from the symptoms. Today's modern medicine mentality has significant similarities with the School of Knidos approach. This model ignores the cases specific to the patient while diagnosing and applying treatment methods. The physicians who get more specialised every day are becoming implementers of an alienated medicine in contrast to Hippocrates's 'There is no disease, but the patient' aphorism. Nowadays, with the rapidly developing technology and ever-growing accumulation of knowledge, it is possible to say that we moved away from the 'humanistic' medicine concept. In addition, in today's medicine, embedding the business concepts into medicine and commercialization of medicine have significant effects on this phenomenon. The establishment and assessment of the relationship of patient-physician on the basis of ‘customer satisfaction' is changing physicians' opinions on their profession and patients, which leads to a worrisome transformation such as moving away from traditional medical virtues. In this process, respect and trust for the physician are shaken and patients tend to look for various alternative methods for their health problems. In view of this worrisome development, returning to the ‘humanistic medicine' seems vital for social existence of medicine, rights related health and professional values, instead of today's modern medicine which ignores the holistic approach to complicated nature of human being, and prioritizes business world concepts, such as cost-effectiveness, profit, productivity and competition.