Doctors and health reform: maybe they do stand for health!

The new GOP health plan, the American Health Care Act (AHCA), aka “Trumpcare”, has crashed to defeat. The President, who pushed hard for it, looks like his greatest nightmare, a “loser”. It is worth thinking, however, about who opposed it. In Congress it was Democrats and (the few) moderate Republicans and very right-wing Republicans are against it, for different reasons. From outside government the response was pretty negative, with a 17% approval rating (amazing they could still think they could pass it!). Far-right “conservatives” thought that AHCA was too much like Obamacare in that it actually provides some federal support for some people, and  they don’t believe in the government ever helping anyone, except maybe themselves and their friends. (Oh, yes, and fabulously rich people. They deserve a lot of help.) The criticism from most of the rest of the universe (to say “the left” would be inaccurate, since it includes many quite a bit right of center, since, in fact, “Obamacare” started life as a Republican plan) was mostly because it would be a disaster for health coverage for Americans. Projections by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) were that 24 million people would lose their health insurance, that access to care would be more and more limited, especially for the middle class and poor, and that costs would rise for patients exponentially. Also that the public health and preventive health infrastructure would be gutted and many of our advances in those areas lost.

The main “positive” in the CBO’s projection was that it would reduce the federal deficit by $337 billion over 10 years. This was only because it shifted costs to others, to states and employers and individuals. Those who could not pay with money would pay with their health and sometimes their lives. While, as I have pointed out (‘We have a bill! The GOP's plan to cut taxes on the rich and health care for the rest of us, March 16, 2017) many would have lost their insurance because of cuts in subsidies through the exchanges, the biggest impact would have been through the loss of Medicaid. This is clearly explained by Dr. Daniel Derksen, a family physician and director of the University of Arizona’s Office of Rural Health in a video on MedPage Today.

Among the many groups criticizing the draconian cuts in health care (as well as taxes on the rich) are almost all of the major hospital associations (including the American Hospital Association, the Catholic Hospital Association, and others), and physicians’ groups, most notably the American Medical Association (AMA) as well as most specialty societies including the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), the American College of Physicians (ACP), as well as many others. They have been joined by the major nursing organizations and by patient advocacy groups. It should not be surprising, I suppose, that most of these groups would be critical of such a devastating attack on health care for Americans, but if it isn’t, it is at least a relief. The AMA is important in part because of its major role in opposing most historical expansions of health care access by the government, including President Truman’s attempt to get a national health insurance program (where they were successful) and President Johnson’s creation of Medicare and Medicaid (where they were not).

Of course, not all health providers and certainly not all physicians opposed the AHCA’s changes. MedPage Today published quotes from a number of physicians, and some were quite supportive; Darrell S. Rigel, a dermatologist at NYU, for example, said “It looks like it is a significant improvement over the ACA [the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare].” The most noteworthy physician advocate for the AHCA and Trumpcare was naturally Tom Price, MD, the Secretary of Health and Human services. As I discussed before his appointment (“Trump, Price, and Verma: Bad news for the health of Americans, including Trump voters, December 3, 2016), Secretary Price, as a congressman from Georgia was a leader in the Tea Party caucus and an opponent of ACA or any other program to expand health coverage to Americans. Another recent voice to both support AHCA and channel the administration and GOP’s contempt for regular people is Rep. Roger Marshall, an obstetrician from Great Bend, KS who is the Representative from Kansas’ “Big First” district. Dr. Marshall told the Washington Post that “the poor just don’t want health care”. He kind of walked back those remarks later, but his analysis is telling:

“Just like Jesus said, ‘The poor will always be with us,’ ” Marshall said in response to a question about Medicaid, which expanded under Obamacare to more than 30 states. “There is a group of people that just don’t want health care and aren’t going to take care of themselves.” He added that “morally, spiritually, socially,” the poor, including the homeless, “just don’t want health care….The Medicaid population, which is [on] a free credit card as a group, do probably the least preventive medicine and taking care of themselves and eating healthy and exercising. And I’m not judging; I’m just saying socially that’s where they are,” he told STAT, a website focused on health-care coverage. “So there’s a group of people that even with unlimited access to health care are only going to use the emergency room when their arm is chopped off or when their pneumonia is so bad they get brought [to] the ER.”

I may not be the best person to comment on his bizarre interpretation of the Gospel, but I can say that for many of us the challenges that poor people face in just getting through their lives are reasons why we need to make health care accessible, not reasons to just write them off. I also wish that I could say that, in my experience, physicians with attitudes like those of Price and Marshall are rare, but sadly they are not. To some degree, there are differences by specialty, with primary care physicians and psychiatrists more likely to support government-involved health care and even single payer plans than surgeons (including orthopedists). I am sure that at least in part this difference is driven by income; while all physicians have relatively high incomes compared to most Americans (top 10%), some specialties, including orthopedics (at the top), radiology, cardiology, surgery, and dermatology make much more; the mean reported income for orthopedists, about $467K (which seems low to me based on those I know) is about the cutoff for the top 1%. When a friend of mine (who later became a surgeon) was on his surgical rotation in medical school, he was impressed by all the talk in the surgeon’s lounge about the “Big Board” – until he found out they meant the stock market, not the board listing upcoming surgeries! And primary care doctors are not immune; when I lived in Texas one family physician regularly railed against the liberal government spending our money. One day, however, his attacks were on delays in payments to doctors from Medicare. Umm…

Doctors are, of course, like other people. Their perspectives vary widely, with most being caring and some caring mostly for themselves. My family physician colleague’s self-centered view is not so different from that of those Trump voters who are now against the AHCA because they see that their benefits are being cut; see “Trump budget cuts put struggling Americans on edge”, NY Times March 18, 2017. The authors cite a retired nurse with lung cancer whose heat was cut off in the middle of the winter; she was rescued by a heating subsidy funded by the federal government and likely to be cut. “I understand what he’s trying to do, but I think he’s just not stopping to think that there are people caught in the middle he is really going to hurt,” she said. Somehow, I suppose, she thought that the cuts would only be to other people…

So, while it is true that doctors, like others, often share the perspectives of their class, and callously disregard or rationalize opposition to ensuring health care for everyone, they often do understand the situations their patients are in and serve as advocates for them. In 2001, the AMA passed its “Declaration of Professional Responsibility: Medicine’s Contract with Humanity”.  It includes the following “Advocate for social, economic, educational, and political changes that ameliorate suffering and contribute to human well-being.”  The AMA was on the right side of the AHCA fight. I hope that most doctors agree with, and even practice, that principle.

I hope Tom Price and Roger Marshall are aberrant exceptions.

Physician advocacy: for patients and for social change

A recurring question for physicians and others in the health profession is what degree of health advocacy is expected or appropriate. For those of us in medical education, the question becomes how much of the training (and evaluation) of medical students and residents should be based on advocacy for their patients or populations. Sarah Dobson and colleagues provide a useful formulation of this question in a “Perspective” in the recent Academic Medicine, “Agency and activism: rethinking health advocacy in the medical profession”.[1] They note that “Health advocacy appears in various forms in professional charters and standards”; however, as Canadians they focus on the CanMEDS document. This is “…a competency-based framework developed by the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada that describes the core knowledge, skills, and abilities of specialist physicians,” that has 7 core roles including “health advocate”.

In the United States, the clearest expression of the role of advocate is in the American Medical Association’s (AMA) Declaration of Professional Responsibility: Medicine’s Contract with Humanity, which contains, as item #8, “Advocate for social, economic, educational, and political changes that ameliorate suffering and contribute to human well-being.” Overall, the Declaration is quite an impressive document, the contents of which would surprise many in both the medical and lay communities who think of the AMA as professional advocacy group with no social conscience; sadly, there might be as many unpleasantly as pleasantly surprised by the discovery. Advocacy for patients is generally considered an appropriate role for physicians by physicians, but advocacy for social, economic, educational and political change is far less widely accepted.

Dobson and colleagues propose a parsing of the concept of advocacy into two components. They call these “agency”, working on behalf of the interests of a specific patient, and “activism”, which is more directed toward changing social conditions that impact health, and whose effect is seen on populations more than individuals. This is helpful in clarifying different perspectives on the term “advocacy”. While the CanMEDS framework, for example, calls for physicians to “…responsibly use their expertise and influence to advance the health and well-being of individual  patients, communities, and populations,” the authors observe that trainees “…have variously described it as charity or as going above and beyond regular duties.” They note that “...several studies have concluded that although physicians generally endorse the idea of advocacy, they rarely engage in it.” They summarize the difference between agency and activism by saying “…whereas agency is about working the system, engaging in activism is about changing the system.”

The article concludes that there is a distinction to be made between the role and responsibilities of the individual physician and that of the medical profession as a whole. “Physicians and other health professionals witness the effects of the socioeconomic determinants of health every day, made

visible to various degrees in every patient encounter, “ but they question “whether this authority translates into an obligation.”

There are, however, many physicians who do act as social activists, and we need more of them. The source will be medical students who then become residents. Luckily, there seem to be no shortage of entering medical students with this commitment. They demonstrate it by community volunteer work, creating and working in free clinics, volunteering their time to work in schools, and pursuing training in public health, public policy, and community involvement. Sadly, however, along with empathy, which has been shown to dramatically drop as medical students enter their clinical training (Hojat, et al.[2], and this blog, “Are we training physicians to be empathic? Apparently not.”, September 12, 2009), so does volunteerism and commitment to social change.

In the US, despite the AMA Declaration, there are no requirements for teaching advocacy included for teaching medical students by the Liaison Committee for Medical Education (LCME), which accredits medical schools, or in training residents by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), which accredits residency programs. In the absence of such requirements, it is less likely that advocacy programs will be developed for students and residents, and more likely that, when they are, it will be the students who are already interested in doing such activities who participate. That is great, and programs which allow students to be involved and helps “inoculate” them against from losing their interest and commitment will continue to exist (such as several that we have here at the University of Kansas School of Medicine, including our free clinic and longitudinal elective Community Leadership track). However, if these are not expectations of all students, of all physicians, then only a minority will be involved.

Indeed, when we look at the American political landscape, we see a fair number of physicians involved in politics. It could be argued that, in these roles, they are advocating for social, economic, educational, and political changes. What is disconcerting is that the majority of these physician politicians seem to ignore the second half of that sentence, “…that ameliorate suffering and contribute to human well-being”. They are often found among, and sometimes as leaders, in advocating policies that slash the social safety net, decrease funding for public education, and oppose universal health insurance. Too frequently, they act as agents of their own social class than as advocates for those most in need.

That doctors will most often adopt the “agency” role when it comes to issues that most directly affect the health of their patients, that can be arguably seen as “medical”, is very reassuring. I was once at a physician meeting in which a “conservative” state legislator was speaking against a statewide smoking ban. Reassuringly, the vibe in the room was very hostile to the content of her remarks. Sensing that, she turned to a physician from her district who was also very conservative and a political supporter of hers and said “You? Do you agree with this?” To which he shrugged his shoulders and replied, “I’m a doctor!”

The advocacy role is more complex. Not only are many physicians socially conservative and not, perhaps, in support of policies “…that ameliorate suffering and contribute to human well-being,” physicians are busy people who mostly see themselves in the role of providing direct patient care, not advocating for systemic societal change. Even physicians with public health roles may see their advocacy in a much more limited way (for immunizations, smoking cessation, cancer screening, seat belt use, etc.) rather than structural societal change.

I would like to think that all physicians manifest advocacy in the “agency” sense for their patients. It may be wishful thinking to hope that all physicians will manifest advocacy in the “activist” sense, that they will fulfill the AMA’s Declaration by actually advocating “…for social, economic, educational, and political changes that ameliorate suffering and contribute to human well-being.” But if we do not make this a core value for physicians that is ubiquitously taught in medical school and residency, if we do not select students because of their commitment to advocacy, we will have much less of it.

And we need it badly.

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[1 Dobson S, Voyer S, Regehr G, “Agency and activism: rethinking health advocacy in the medical profession”. Acad Med. 2012;87:1161–1164.First published online July 25, 2012. doi:10.1097/ACM.0b013e3182621c25

[2] Hojat M, Vergare MJ, Maxwell K, et al, “The Devil is in the Third Year: A Longitudinal Study of Erosion of Empathy in Medical School”, Academic Medicine, Sept 2009;84(2):1182-91

Physician Oaths and Social Responsibility

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Most people are familiar with the existence, if not the content, of Hippocratic Oath taken by physicians on graduation from medical school. Whether this was originally written by that Greek “founder of Medicine” or not, it is very old, and has been updated often to be relevant to modern practice. Most medical schools do recite some modification of this oath at graduation, although some use the Oath of Maimonides, written by Moshe ben Maimon, a 12^th century Jewish physician from Spain and North Africa. All are focused on the role of the physician and his or her commitment and implicit pact with his/her patients, including using healing and confidentiality. There is also a fair amount of veneration of teachers. The Declaration of Geneva adopted by the World Medical Association in 1948 after the horrific acts of Nazi doctors were revealed in the Nuremberg trials, and revised many times since then, adds some acknowledgment that the physician also has responsibility to society; it now includes the phrase “will not use my medical knowledge to violate human rights and civil liberties, even under threat”.  

This, I think, is a step forward. In the time of Hippocrates and later Maimonides, there were great limits to what physicians could do as healers. Surgery only became something people regularly survived after the invention of ether as anesthesia and the recognition of the importance of antisepsis (even hand-washing) in the late 19^th century. In his graduation speech to the Harvard Medical School, Cowboys and Pit Crews (which I have cited earlier EMRs and Primary Care: The good, the bad, and the challenges, June 11, 2011), Dr. Atul Gawande refers to Dr. Lewis Thomas describing the work of an intern as recently as 1937 in his book “The Youngest Science” [1]. Those interns worked hard in order to make sure they didn’t miss one of the treatable conditions, because “There were only a few. Lobar pneumonia could be treated with antiserum, an injection of rabbit antibodies against the pneumococcus, if the intern identified the subtype correctly. Patients in diabetic coma responded dramatically to animal-extracted insulin and intravenous fluid. Acute heart failure patients could be saved by bleeding away a pint of blood from an arm vein, administering a leaf-preparation of digitalis, and delivering oxygen by tent. Early syphilitic paresis sometimes responded to a mix of mercury, bismuth, and arsenic. Surgery could treat certain tumors and infections. Beyond that, medical capabilities didn’t extend much further.”

The huge explosion of treatments, and often cures, both medical and surgical, that occurred during the 20^th century far exceeds all that came before. There is an extraordinary amount that we, as physicians, can do for all sorts of conditions as well as much more effective treatments for the conditions Gawande lists above. When I trained in the 1970s, we could do things scarcely dreamed of when Thomas was an intern in 1937, and what we can do today makes the 1970s look like ancient history. We continue to see in the 21^st century explosions of new therapies, some good, some not-so-good, and many unproven before they are released on the market. Our incredibly enhanced understanding of science, such as the human genome, and the amazing engineering capabilities of our technology, make it seem as if nothing is unachievable.

But because we can do things for certain diseases, because we can utilize certain technologies, doesn’t mean that we always should. Even the treatments Gawande describes above, limited as they were, often had devastating side effects that killed when they did not cure. Now we have more treatments that can be absolutely wonderful for some people in some circumstances, but not for everyone in every circumstance. [2] The complexities of these interventions make it even more important to have a physician’s ethic that understands context, understands public as well as individual health, and most important understands the contribution of food, housing, education and other social basics to health.

The “Declaration of Professional Responsibility: Medicine’s Social Contract With Humanity”, adopted by the American Medical Association (AMA)’s House of Delegates in 2001, is a more recent effort to summarize the obligations of the physician. Its title itself understands the role of the physician as more than a commitment to the individual patient but, in fact, a social contract with humanity, to the interconnectedness of all people. Its 9 points re-state many of the basic principles of the Hippocratic and Maimonides Oaths; it then adds several additional critical concepts. These include, in particular, commitments to:

“VI. Work freely with colleagues to discover, develop, and promote advances in medicine and public health that ameliorate suffering and contribute to human well-being.

VII. Educate the public and polity about present and future threats to the health of humanity.

VIII. Advocate for social, economic, educational, and political changes that ameliorate

suffering and contribute to human well-being.”

This is a very big and important step. It is even more important when not just the individual physicians, but the institutions of which they are a part, commit to core social values. Recently, WONCA, the World Council of Family Doctors, convened a conference, in East London, South Africa in October2010, to look at the Social Accountability of Medical Schools. Its final report, issued in December 2010, “Global consensus for social accountability of medical schools”, addresses 10 major areas:

&Area 1: Anticipating Society’s Health Needs

&lArea 2: Partnering With The Health System And Other Stakeholders

&Area 3: Adapting To The Evolving Roles Of Doctors And Other Health Professionals

&Area 4: Fostering Outcome-Based Education

&Area 5: Creating Responsive And Responsible Governance Of The Medical School

&Area 6: Refining The Scope Of Standards For Education, Research And Service Delivery

&Area 7: Supporting Continuous Quality Improvement In Education, Research And Service Delivery

&Area 8: Establishing Mandated Mechanisms For Accreditation

&Area 9: Balancing Global Principles with Context Specificity

&Area 10: Defining The Role Of Society

Each of these has several points listed under it, which are goals/directions for medical schools to achieve. People, and the societies that they comprise, invest heavily in medicine and medical education because they value health, and see this investment as a way to achieve health. But as the cost of medical care rises, absorbing more and more of our GDP and that of the world, it has the opposite effect. As it begins to squeeze out necessary spending on infrastructure, on education, on housing, on nutritious food, it degrades health.

While WONCA represents only family doctors/general practitioners, it is an important international organization and its recommendations will be taken seriously by medical schools around the world. To the extent that they are, it would be a good thing, because medical schools, like the physicians that they educate, need to be much clearer on how they fit into the society that produced and supports them.

Physicians and other health professionals cannot see themselves only as technicians with a bag of tools to use on the sick; they must be the custodians of health, the enablers of health, the advocates for the necessary components of healthy people and a healthy society. The Preamble to the “Declaration of Professional Responsibility” ends with this simple reminder:

“Humanity is our patient.”

[1] Thomas L, The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine Watcher, Viking, 1983.
[2] And this does not even touch on the issue of financial cost.