‘No medical student goes to…become a businessperson’
When Dr. Sandeep Jauhar was growing up, his mother held doctors in high esteem.
“She always told us she wanted us to become doctors because she wanted people to stand when we walked into a room,” says Jauhar, who went on to become a cardiologist.
Upon donning that hallowed white coat, however, Jauhar says he started to get uncomfortable. He felt like he was compromising some of the ideals of his youth to fit the business model of the American healthcare system. His new book, “Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician“, voices his frustrations with today’s changing medical landscape.
“What the system has done is forced physicians to behave in ways that they don’t want to behave,” he says. “No medical student goes to become a doctor to become a businessperson, but the system is so dysfunctional today that it has created this business mentality among doctors.”
Jauhar says the system needs to be fixed to accommodate the needs of more ordinary patients.
“The system is wonderful if you have a rare disease or if you require very high-tech care, but if you’re a run-of-the-mill patient who has a chronic disease that needs to be managed by multiple doctors, the level of coordination and communication in the American system is so weak, so lacking,” he says. “Today, if a politician says, ‘we have the best medical system in the world,’ he doesn’t sound patriotic, he just sounds clueless.”
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