Via MostExerent.
(Source: mostexerent)
Mark Menjivar, a photographer, took portraits of people’s refrigerators instead of people. For each portrait, he wrote a short blurb. The one on the left:
Midwife/Middle School Science Teacher | San Antonio, TX | 3-Person Household (including dog) | First week after deciding to eat all local produce.
The right:
Bar Tender | San Antonio, TX | 1-Person Household | Goes to sleep at 8AM and wakes up at 4PM daily.
My first practice was strictly a house call practice. I had no office, so I had to visit your apartment. This is the kind of thing I could understand about you. As a doctor, I could see how you lived and what you ate. This is why traditional clinic visits are so limited. People all tend to look the same when you’re seeing 25 people a day in a sterile white office. But, in fact, people actually reflect what’s in their refrigerator. And then docs typically prescribe pills when the real solution is changing what’s in the refrigerator. Medical care, and the way doctors deliver it, is broken in America. Since pills and scalpels don’t fix bad lifestyle, we must get away from the belief that modern medicine will save us. Doctors, and their antiquated tools, are failing our country’s health.
"Health is not a commodity. Risk factors are not disease. Aging is not an illness. To fix a problem is easy, to sit with another suffering is hard. Doing all we can is not the same as doing what we should. Quality is more than metrics. Patients cannot see outside their pain, we cannot see in, relationship is the only bridge between. Time is precious; we spend it on what we value. The most common condition we treat is unhappiness. And the greatest obstacle to treating a patient’s unhappiness is our own. Nothing is more patient-centered than the process of change. Doctors expect too much from data and not enough from conversation. Community is a locus of healing, not the hospital or the clinic. The foundation of medicine is friendship, conversation and hope."
—
—David Loxtercamp, author of A Measure of Days: The Journal of a Country Doctor, as read in his interview with NPR’s Liane Hansen. (via beingblog)
For Jay.
Thanks Kevin! Kevin and I were born two weeks apart back in St. Louis and have remained best friends ever since…
(via kbaum)
(via jayparkinsonmd)
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
"But I wouldn’t say that we (at The Future Well) look at health from just a medical and emotional perspective. I’d say it’s much more than that. The word health has been hijacked by the medical/sickness industry. But it really means the way you live your everyday life through your relationships with friends, family, your neighborhood, your movement, your food, your experiences, your work, and your finances. Health isn’t a goal, it’s a tool to live your life the way you want. Sometimes being fit isn’t the tool you want to use, but having a lovely marriage is. Is the unfit person with a lovely marriage less healthy than a fit person with a horrible relationship with their spouse? Health is obviously complex but it’s more about sociology and anthropology than pills and scalpels."
—
Interview: Dr. Jay Parkinson | Made by Many
It’s a bit of a long one, but if you’d like to dive in…
(via jayparkinsonmd)
(via jayparkinsonmd)
