http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-10-buzzwords-medicine-economics.html "We are in the midst of an economic crisis and efforts to reform the health care system have centered on controlling spiraling costs. To that end, many economists and policy makers have proposed that patient care should be industrialized and standardized. Hospitals and clinics should be run like modern factories and archaic terms like doctor, nurse and patient must therefore be replaced with terminology that fits this new order."
The problem, Hartzband and Groopman, note, is that the special knowledge that doctors and nurses possess and use to help patients understand the reason for and remedies to their illness get lost in a system that values prepackaged, off-the-shelf solutions that substitute "evidence-based practice" for "clinical judgment."
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Hartzband and Groopman say the new emphasis on "evidence-based practice" is not really a new phenomenon at all. "Evidence" was routinely presented on daily rounds or clinical conferences where doctors debated numerous research studies.
"But the exercise of clinical judgment, which permitted the assessment of those data and the application of study results to an individual patient, was seen as the acme of professional practice. Now some prominent health policy planners and even physicians contend that clinical care should essentially be a matter of following operating manuals containing preset guidelines, like factory blueprints, written by experts."