Why the disease-based model of medicine fails our patients.

Medicine faces several critical and conflicting challenges. The tremendous and changing cultural diversity of our population requires physicians to develop new skills in communication and negotiation with their patients. But managed care constraints, litigation, and growing regulatory pressures have compromised communication and trust between physicians and patients. This, along with the surge in technologic development, has driven the medical system even further toward a “disease-based” approach to health care that views individuals as “cases” and undervalues the sociocultural and humanistic aspects of patient care. The results are a diminishing faith in the medical establishment and the rise of alternative medical philosophies and practices. A medical system that allows physicians to refocus on the patient-centered, personal, and unique experience of “illness” is an imperative for our time.