For a book titled Hippocrates' Shadow, I expected David Newman's work to be about the influence of Hippocrates on modern medicine. Instead I found just the opposite--HS is a scathing analysis of the multifaceted problems plaguing the current US health care system. Using a myriad of well-explained medical studies and personal anecdotes, Newman poignantly illustrates the key areas where the House of Medicine has drifted away from Hippocrates' ideals. Anyone who has ever spent time at a doctor's office or a hospital can personally attest to many of these issues. What makes Newman's telling so penetrating is that unlike personal experiences, the evidence he uses definitively proves how widespread and common these problems are.
While some of the issues discussed are familiar and easily identifiable (such as doctor's notoriously bad bedside manner), other are much harder to reconcile. Despite the clear evidence Newman gives about the futility of mammograms, in lieu of another screening technique, it is hard to completely abandon that ship. Regardless of how easily we accept each postulate he presents, the overall message conveyed is one that cannot be ignored: our health care system is broken and it is up to everyone (doctors and patients alike) to work together to bring about change.
Like many other Canadians, I could fill a book with my personal experiences with the problems Newman presents. However, unlike most who have faced these same roadblocks, I not only thought about real ways to fix the problems (no, throwing more money is never the right answer), I found out where these solutions were already being used. Despite what conservative medical doctors may like you to think, there is another group of health practitioners out there that still embody the ideals of the Hippocratic Oath, and who had already reconciled their practice with the problems Newman based his book around: naturopaths.
It only took one visit to a naturopath for me to see the impact their different approach makes. A standard first visit is one hour. I don't think I had ever seen a medical doctor for more than 10 minutes at a time. Already Newman's problem of not enough face time is solved. Naturopaths have two other core beliefs that separate their practice from MDs and demonstrate how a new perspective could breath new life into the House of Medicine: focus on prevention and treat the patient as a whole. While these ideal seem simple enough, as Newman's book demonstrates they are frequently neglected by the traditional medical establishment. While neither of these solutions will cost exorbitant amounts of money (unlike investing it in technology to make doctors more "effective"), they do have the potential to rectify the errors that have made our medical system so full of flaws.
In his conclusion, Newman speaks to the need to return to "Hipporates' belief in the bond, his respect for the mind/body, and his patient primacy." To reach this goal, Newman suggests that we look to history, and step back to a time when these three tenets still formed the core of medicine. However, the means he suggests are not required to reach these ends. What Newman fails to realize is that instead of looking to the past, we only needs to look right under our noses and follow the example of naturopathic medicine to heal the wounds currently crippling our public health system.
