Medicine has become a commercial profession

Medicine has become a commercial profession

Medicine has become a commercial profession. Comment.

I completely agree that Medicine has become a commercial profession just like any other profession. Gone are the days when, Medicine was more humanitarian in nature than professional.
Medicine has become such a business that personhood has been forgotten to a great deal. Even in big and very popular hospitals, it is seen that if a patient is suffering from a unique disease, what attracts the doctors is the intricacies of the disease for further research ,while the patient and his human side becomes irrelevant.
In this era of immense competition and difficult survival, human values are available only in paucity and medical professionals in their race of survival and growth have started placing the monetary aspect of this noble profession higher than the humanistic aspect.

How does one judge whether it is the wrong people who get selected in a medical school or is it the training they receive during their residency that is causing this drastic change in the way this profession operates? It is important that before they get certified as doctors, they should be trained about the fact that the sole objective of this principled and honourable profession is to relieve the suffering of a fellow human being, be it physical, social, spiritual, or emotional.

I strongly believe that the entire selection process needs to undergo a change. As a present norm, the medical students are selected only for grades, nothing else. But more than the grade, what is more important in this field is a human corner, social skills, comradeship and a perfectly balanced personality. All these traits can be accessed through various techniques of psychometric testing. In fact, some form of testing should be done for these soft skills as well and should have a considerable weight age in the selection process. If right kinds of people are selected for awarding the degree, half of the problem stands resolved.

Another notable fact is that the cost of medical education is so steep that the young physician must make enough money to repay the loans. Hence, when they actually start their practice, their human corner is subsided somewhere and the cold and professional corner like that of a businessman takes over. They charge the same consultation fees irrespective of the paying capacity or the condition of the patient. They start advising additional and irrelevant medical tests to fetch their pockets additional pennies they will be receiving as commission from the various laboratories they have a tie up with.

It is sad but a truth that today hospitalists work for the hospital, not for the patient.