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Keep up the good work To the editor: Yale Medicine has certainly gone upscale. It is quite a magazine—and also I suspect a great marketing tool. Keep up the good work. Dwight
F. Miller, M.D. ’56, HS ’58
No compliments for alternative care To the Editor: I date way back from the class of 1942. In my class were members Michael Puzak and James Bunce, noted on the In Memoriam pages of the Yale Medicine that recently arrived in my mailbox. In the same issue, I read of the growing popularity of unregulated alternative or complementary treatments (“Use of alternative medicine widespread among mentally ill,” Et cetera, Fall 2000 | Winter 2001). I would prefer to call them unscientific or unproven. My particular interest in retirement has been the exposure of the alternative care known as chiropractic. There are some 70,000 practicing chiropractors, legally called doctors, with 4,000 new graduates every year, compared to 15,000 medical graduates. In a survey of medical college deans, 27 termed the subluxation and adjustment theory to be false. I witnessed a student perform an adjustment of the neck and back at one chiropractic college, and was appalled. I have written a book to challenge this treatment titled Chiropractic: The Greatest Hoax of the Century? Yet the practice flourishes. Things were not so, way back in my student days of ’42. Perhaps the time is appropriate for Yale and other colleges of science to speak out on this subject. Ludmil
A. Chotkowski, M.D. ’42
From the editor: Building relationships in the classroom and the clinic When we chose the lineup of feature stories for this issue of Yale Medicine, we didn’t make a conscious decision to focus on the doctor-patient relationship. True, performer and playwright Anna Deavere Smith had made this topic the focus of her one-woman show, Rounding It Out, for which she interviewed several dozen patients, physicians and staff (See Cathy Shufro’s story, “A Dramatic Turn,”). Good communication—between doctor and patient, mentor and medical student—is also an idea running through John Curtis’ portrait of the Wednesday Evening Clinic (“Learning for the Long Run,”). But the issue’s theme was completed when fourth-year medical student Sharon Chekijian filed her letter from Armenia (“Adrenaline and the Ordinary, in Varying Proportions,”), describing the state of health care in her family’s ancestral homeland. Her observations, gathered over the course of a decade and a half-dozen visits to Yerevan, reveal a different rhythm for medicine in this ex-Soviet state, where doctor and patient may toast the success of the operation together and where the surgeon’s fee may be paid in livestock or potatoes. Is the doctor-patient relationship alive and well where you practice medicine? What do medical students and young physicians learn from the profession about listening and communicating well? Drop us a line at ymm@yale.edu or the address below and tell us what you think. Michael Fitzsousa |
