Health Care at a Crossroads
In his 20 years as a physician, Dr. Jeffrey M. Thurston ’78 has treated a lot of patients and delivered more than 7,000 babies. He likes to remember the successes, but every day he faces one patient whose case, he believes, puts all others in jeopardy. That patient is America’s health care system, and Thurston argues that the prognosis isn’t good.
Thurston makes his case in “Disrobe Completely: Real Life Cases Reveal the State of American Medicine” (Brown Books Publishing Group, 2007). “I used to be a doctor,” he wrote in the introduction. “Someone to whom people came for help because they didn’t feel good, or they were scared or confused or injured. No longer. Now they tell me I’m a health care provider. I no longer have patients, because people like you, who used to be patients, have become customers.”
Thurston is in a good position to understand the issues. In addition to maintaining a private practice, he serves as an associate clinical professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School and is actively involved in teaching medical students and residents. He also has appeared on more than 400 radio shows and is a regular women’s health consultant on “Good Morning Texas” for the Dallas ABC affiliate, WFAA. “So-called managed care,” he wrote, “is severely altering the doctor–patient relationship, transforming what can be a very special personal interaction into a business transaction. It is usurping the doctor’s decision-making power, forcing diagnostic and treatment decisions to be made by a third party whose central concern is cost.”
“So-called managed care is severely altering the doctor–patient relationship, transforming what can be a very special personal interaction into a business transaction.”
— Jeffrey M. Thurston
In an attempt to cut through what he terms “the growing estrangement between physician and patient,” Thurston hopes to give readers a better understanding of what is involved in becoming a doctor and demonstrate that the doctor–patient relationship is key to better health. “While the patient comes to the doctor in need of his scientific expertise and guidance,” he wrote, “it is the patient who teaches the vital courses in humanity that supplement the doctor’s science.”
Along the way, Thurston offers solutions to the health care system’s problems that “neither destroy the physician’s effectiveness and desire nor restrict the patient’s ability to choose his or her own caregiver.” Throughout, he illustrates his arguments with the story of his personal development as a physician and narratives of encounters with patients and various members of the health care industry, including other health care providers and insurance industry representatives.
Thurston is the author of two previous books: “Death of Compassion: The Endangered Doctor–Patient Relationship” and “1,000 Questions About Your Pregnancy.”