Reconstructing Medical Practice examines how doctors see health care and their place in it, why they remain in medicine and why they are limited in their ability to lead change in the current system. Doctors are beset by doubts and feel rejected by systems where they should be leaders - some see their role as 'flog[ging] a derelict system to get the last breath of workability out ... for their patients'. Others simply turn away. Rigorous studies carried out at large public teaching hospitals in Australia found that doctors were reluctant to increase safety in the wider health system, despite making every effort for their 'own' patients. Doctors' self-esteem was found to be delicate due to the uncertain nature of their work; colleagues provide the support doctors need to deliver good care. However, these essential relationships and their cherished connections with patients have disadvantages: reducing doctors' ability to admit to error. On top of this, senior doctors predict a future bereft of professional values - one where medicine is 'just a job'. While the loss of professional identity introduces new risks for patients and doctors, the repercussions of the more self-serving attitudes of younger doctors are unknown. Reconstructing Medical Practice concludes that regulation, despite its recent proliferation, is a clumsy and limited approach to ensuring good care. It presents original and much-needed ideas for ways to rebuild the critical relationship between doctors and the system. By better valuing communicative interactions and workplace relationships, safe and satisfying medical practice can be reconstructed.

Reconstructing Medical Practice examines how doctors see health care and their place in it, why they remain in medicine and why they are limited in their ability to lead change in the current system. Doctors are beset by doubts and feel rejected by systems where they should be leaders - some see their role as 'flog[ging] a derelict system to get the last breath of workability out ... for their patients'. Others simply turn away. Rigorous studies carried out at large public teaching hospitals in Australia found that doctors were reluctant to increase safety in the wider health system, despite making every effort for their 'own' patients. Doctors' self-esteem was found to be delicate due to the uncertain nature of their work; colleagues provide the support doctors need to deliver good care. However, these essential relationships and their cherished connections with patients have disadvantages: reducing doctors' ability to admit to error. On top of this, senior doctors predict a future bereft of professional values - one where medicine is 'just a job'. While the loss of professional identity introduces new risks for patients and doctors, the repercussions of the more self-serving attitudes of younger doctors are unknown. Reconstructing Medical Practice concludes that regulation, despite its recent proliferation, is a clumsy and limited approach to ensuring good care. It presents original and much-needed ideas for ways to rebuild the critical relationship between doctors and the system. By better valuing communicative interactions and workplace relationships, safe and satisfying medical practice can be reconstructed.

In the crowded and busy arena of obesity and fat studies, there is a lack of attention to the lived experiences of people, how and why they eat what they do, and how people in cross-cultural settings understand risk, health, and bodies. This volume addresses the lacuna by drawing on ethnographic methods and analytical emic explorations in order to consider the impact of cultural difference, embodiment, and local knowledge on understanding obesity. It is through this reconstruction of how obesity and fatness are studied and understood that a new discussion will be introduced and a new set of analytical explorations about obesity research and the effectiveness of obesity interventions will be established.

The complex challenges facing healthcare are being met by the transitioning much patient care from hospitals, clinics, and offices to virtual settings. The digital reconstruction of medicine includes telemedicine, mobile apps, sensing devices, and other technologies. The book explores how these tools are meeting patient needs across the globe.

The complex challenges facing healthcare require innovative solutions that can make patient care more effective, easily available, and affordable. One such solution is the digital reconstruction of medicine that transitions much of patient care from hospitals, clinics, and offices to a variety of virtual settings. This reconstruction involves telemedicine, hospital-at-home services, mobile apps, remote sensing devices, clinical data analytics, and other cutting-edge technologies. The Digital Reconstruction of Healthcare: Transitioning from Brick and Mortar to Virtual Care takes a deep dive into these tools and how they can transform medicine to meet the unique needs of patients across the globe. This book enables readers to peer into the very near future and prepare them for the opportunities afforded by the digital shift in healthcare. It is also a wake-up call to readers who are less than enthusiastic about these digital tools and helps them to realize the cost of ignoring these tools. It is written for a wide range of medical professionals including: Physicians, nurses, and entrepreneurs who want to understand how to use or develop digital products and services IT managers who need to fold these tools into existing computer networks at hospitals, clinics, and medical offices Healthcare executives who decide how to invest in these platforms and products Insurers who need to stay current on the latest trends and the evidence to support their cost effectiveness Filled with insights from international experts, this book also features Dr. John Halamka’s lessons learned from years of international consulting with government officials on digital health. It also taps into senior research analyst Paul Cerrato’s expertise in AI, data analytics, and machine learning. Combining these lessons learned with an in-depth analysis of clinical informatics research, this book aims to separate hyped AI "solutions" from evidence-based digital tools. Together, these two pillars support the contention that these technologies can, in fact, help solve many of the seemingly intractable problems facing healthcare providers and patients.

Serious illness and mortality, those most universal, unavoidable, and frightening of human experiences, are the focus of this pioneering study which has been hailed as a telling and provocative commentary on our times. As modern medicine has become more scientific and dispassionate, a new literary genre has emerged: pathography, the personal narrative concerning illness, treatment, and sometimes death. Hawkins's sensitive reading of numerous pathographies highlights the assumptions, attitudes, and myths that people bring to the medical encounter. One factor emerges again and again in these case studies: the tendency in contemporary medical practice to focus primarily not on the needs of the individual who is sick but on the condition that we call disease. Pathography allows the individual person a voice-one that asserts the importance of the experiential side of illness, and thus restores the feeling, thinking, experiencing human being to the center of the medical enterprise. Recommended for medical practitioners, the clergy, caregivers, students of popular culture, and the general reader, Reconstructing Illness demonstrates that only when we hear both the doctor's and the patient's voice will we have a medicine that is truly human.