A Country Doctor Writes:

This week I posted two brand new pieces on Substack and brought back several posts from the blog archives.

In THE WAY HEALTHCARE IS GOING, WE NEED MORE NURSES, NOT MORE DOCTORS, I make the argument that so much of what doctors have to do today could be done by nurses, and therefore the doctor shortage is just an illusion. Americans don’t understand that public health doesn’t necessarily have to be shouldered by physicians who are trained to diagnose and treat disease. Many other western countries have a robust public health system.

In THE HIGH COST OF SPECIFICITY, I audaciously claim that primary care doctors are used as free labor shoveling data into our EMR so that researchers and actuarians have the data they need, while we have less time to do OUR jobs and less time to address our patients’ priorities.

Republished from the archives were BRIEF IS GOOD; BRAND-NAME DRUGS AND GENERIC PRESCRIBERS; SEIZURES: LOW P, LOW D AND LOTS OF THC; WHEN A HOUSECALL IS WORTH A THOUSAND TESTS; PAIN AND SUFFERING and A SAMURAI PHYSICIANS TEACHINGS.

In the coming week, I will repost a few pieces about doctoring at Christmas, including words by Osler that speak to frontline physicians like myself. I am also planning some new material, looking backward and forward before anchoring firmly in the present moment with insights from Eckhart Tolle and others.