Page 195 - Morgan Housel - The Psychology of Money_ Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness-Harriman House Limited (2020)
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Doctors felt that in order to accomplish that objective they were obligated
to attend to their patients’ physical and emotional needs and to do so on
COBACOBA
their own authority, without consulting with their patients about the
decisions that needed to be made. The idea that patients may also be
entitled to sharing the burdens of decisions with their doctors was never
part of the ethos of medicine.
This wasn’t ego or malice. It was a belief in two points:
Every patient wants to be cured.
There is a universal and right way to cure them.
Not requiring patient consent in treatment plans makes sense if you believe
in those two points.
But that’s not how medicine works.
In the last 50 years medical schools subtly shifted teaching away from
treating disease and toward treating patients. That meant laying out the
options of treatment plans, and then letting the patient decide the best path
forward.
This trend was partly driven by patient-protection laws, partly by Katz’s
influential book, which argued that patients have wildly different views
about what’s worth it in medicine, so their beliefs have to be taken into
consideration. Katz wrote:
