Today, the average time a doctor spends with a patient is twelve minutes or less. Dr. Stephen Schimpff, an internist and former CEO of University of Maryland Medical Center, told Newsmax that, “Doctors who are in a rush don’t have the time to listen,” and that patients today “often get referred to specialists when the problem can be solved in the office visit.” The same article reported that doctors are stressed out and 9 out of ten would “discourage others from choosing their profession.” Also, “data suggests that 300 physicians will commit suicide this year.”
Things weren’t always that way. In 1947, Norman Rockwell was on assignment for the Saturday Evening Post to record the lives of representative Americans in his artwork. In his painting Norman Rockwell Visits a Family Doctor, Rockwell painstakingly reproduced the office of his own family physician in Vermont. Underneath this painting, in a book of his illustrations (1) it reads: “The family doctor is a hometown’s man of miracles. The people want him, when they need him, and he is usually there. His office resembles a den more than an examining room. The doctor himself is a kindly, tolerant man with a reassuring manner and a good disposition, with friendly advice stemming beyond the field of medicine.”
(1), Faces of America, The Curtis Publishing Co., 1982
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