Bedside Manifesto: Healing the Heart of Healthcare

"e;When I was in the hospital I was poked and probed and ultraviolated, but never touched,"e; a patient told Dr. Jeff Kane. Over the past forty years he's heard thousands of such stories from patients and their families.

They appreciate medicine's awesome technology, but yearn for low-tech contact.

They want their suffering treated as well as their illness.

Dr. Kane shows that our current "e;healthcare crisis"e; isn't fundamentally economic, but social: where we'd benefit from skilled doctor-patient contact, we've been seduced into overusing expensive, invasive, and often hazardous technologies.

The venerable "e;bedside manner"e; isn't simply Marcus Welby congeniality; it's powerfully therapeutic medicine.

Dr. Kane describes it, shows how we lost it, and how we'll regain it.