Think about what happens to a society when its most educated and humanistic individuals function as frenetic technicians in creativity-killing systems. Think too about what future generations of physicians will be like if we do not return to the true way. I have practiced rural family medicine, urban interventional cardiology, and now academic medicine. The fact that this involves countless days and nights and months and years and decades of arduous effort may, to others, make such a thing seem earned. But no amount of effort brings entitlement to such richness.
Medical practice is a form of grace, and to diminish it is to desecrate it.
The true nature of the physician is not what we are living today, nor where we are heading. Whether or not our troubles were brought on by earlier inattention to society's socioeconomic needs, we have allowed our evolution and destiny to be limited. 3 Wisdom sources serve to illuminate a higher path. Once there we, wiser and perhaps slightly changed, will be essentially the same as other healers throughout time. For Tom and Della Stametz.