Today in the Wall Street Journal, Stanford physician and best-selling author Abraham Verghese, MD, discusses his writing career and the School of Medicine's bedside medicine initiative, Stanford 25.
In the Q&A (subscription required), Verghese explains the motivation for developing Stanford 25. He says:
Many of us recognized that there was a gap between what the medical record claimed was done on the patient, in a sense, and the actual execution of the task. It reflects an increasing dependence on technology and paying lip-service to the actual examination of the patient. My sense was that there's a lot of low-hanging fruit, easy diagnoses that one can make, that people have been making for a hundred years and it would be a shame for us, to have reached this place where the only way we can make certain diagnoses is by ordering expensive and fancy tests when the diagnosis was really there all along for us to see.
Previously: Stanford’s Abraham Verghese discusses the power of touch and observation in the exam room, Exploring the “fading art” of the physical exam and Abraham Verghese at Work: A New York Times profile
