Medical grind hurts healing art

Somewhere along the line too many doctors stopped being healers and became prescribers and technicians, says Benjamin Brewer, MD, in this opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal. "We became business people and started thinking in terms of relative value units—the coin of the medical finance realm—as much as how to make patients better," Brewer says. "We took seminars in medical coding, so we could talk the same lingo as the government and the insurance companies. The changes in medicine are at odds with many of the values that defined the profession I joined."