Public Forum
Default group for all members. Biological family sometimes get you down? Come join your logical family!
Organizers:
- Organized by
-
-
The Physicians We Are Slowly Losing
-
The Physicians We Are Slowly Losing
Dr. Varon has written another beautiful piece in Brownstone, this time about Dr. Charles Augustus Leale, the young doctor who cared for Abraham Lincoln after he was shot.
He points out that we still need doctors like Dr. Augustus
Not box-tickers
Not prescription machines.
Not the ones who look at the screen more than you, the patient.
The doctors who:
The ones who have judgment, courage, and enough backbone to do what is right, even when it would be easier to just follow the system.
Because that cannot be replaced with AI
I mean we know that AI may be able to scan records, suggest drugs, write notes, and follow protocols. But it cannot sit with a frightened patient and make them feel less alone.
If doctors let themselves become protocol-following pill pushers, the system will replace them with something cheaper!
What makes a doctor irreplaceable to you?
I’ll put Dr. Varon’s article in the comments.
-
2 Replies
-
Helen, you’ve landed on the right question, and I think the answer is harder than Dr. Varon’s piece lets on. What made Dr. Leale irreplaceable wasn’t compassion alone — plenty of protocol-followers are compassionate. It was that nothing in his training, his licensure, or his career advancement depended on producing the answer somebody else was looking for. He could exercise judgment because no one had a leash on his credential.
That’s the part of the picture that’s hard to restore now. The selection runs from elementary school through residency, and at every gate the question is the same: will this candidate keep producing the expected answer? The ones who will, advance. The ones who won’t, leave. By the time they reach the bedside, the box-tickers aren’t a failure of character — they’re the product.
Two pieces I wrote on the mechanism, if useful:
The four-layer system: https://rkoch.substack.com/p/the-four-layer-lock-read-this-first
How the credential gets controlled: https://rkoch.substack.com/p/government-controlled-credentials
Log in to reply.