How do clients/patients bring Internet based information to the interaction in a respectful, time efficient manner?

I propose that we conceptualize health habitats (Jordan-Marsh, 2008) where all of the players recognize the complexity of sustaining or regaining health in a sometimes hostile world. Many physicians are building “medical home” arrangements to coordinate their services. This new and appealing concept is an important step forward, but it is only one niche and implies a central focus on medicine (rather than a team with patient at the center of a transdisciplinary network) and is a static place. If we reconceptualize health as occurring in a habitat, it will be more obvious that our environment, human interactions, social capital, health capital, spiritual resources and economic capital all matter–they can be symbiotic, sychophantic or downright harmful. An ecological perspective could turn around the ‘mess” we are in. Digital resources can be partnered with human resources for smart homes, medical homes, and full utilization of pre-Internet knowledge and tools.

Fascinating. I blog about compassionate health care at http://www.everydayhealth.com/blog/schwartz-center-bedside-manner/, so I found the TIME story/essay particularly intriguing. While we often blame managed care for the demise of the patient-doctor relationship, the roots of the problem are much older, as the piece shows. Although the essay seems almost quaint to readers today, so many of the issues it raises are still with us. I chuckled at the section about resentment towards doctors’ high salary. The average doctor in 1966, as the piece points out, earned $28,380!