An Academic Clinician’s Perspective on the Care of the Geriatric Patient

This paper discusses the role that the personal history plays in a patient’s perception of his or her own illness in the light of the patient’s own personal history. It demonstrates the regrettable modern tendency to regards the patient as the “bearer of a disease” rather than as a human being with personal values and experiences into which their current illness needs to be integrated. I illustrate my point by an exchange between a student and an “attending” and the “attending” and the patient. It represents only one out of unfortunately many such instances in which the pressures of “managed care” and “efficiency” have made truly knowing the patient as an individual with life experiences and personal values much more difficult.