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Do we still need doctors?

by John D. Lantos

Do We Still Need Doctors? is a personal account from the front lines of the moral and political battles that are reshaping America's health care system. Using compelling firsthand experiences, clinical vignettes, and moral arguments, John D. Lantos, a pediatrician, asks whether, as we proceed with the redesign of our health care system, doctors will - or should - continue to fulfill the roles and responsibilities that they have in the past. Interspersing moving personal stories of his young patients suffering from AIDS, cancer, and other chronic or terminal illnesses with his own stirring dilemmas of truth telling, creative navigation of HMO bureaucracy, and reflections on the identity crisis of medical education, Dr. Lantos reveals how changes in our health care system and new technologies are fostering new ways of understanding and responding to illness. He taps into the public's sense of wanting doctors and hospitals to do something other than what they do now and the frustrating disagreement about what they should do in the future. Do We Still Need Doctors? neither demonizes nor idealizes managed care or for-profit medicine. Instead, Dr. Lantos argues that managed care continues a trend toward rationalizing disease and streamlining treatment that doctors themselves have initiated and sustained over the last fifty years. Illness and death will always resist rationalizing, and in order to respond to them, doctors and patients alike need to re-imagine what healing is or ought to be.