You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The Commission on Critical Choices for Americans, established by Nelson Rockefeller, has produced a series of essays by prominent authorities, intended to elucidate the major problems confronting the nation today in its medical enterprise. The volume is directed to the laity but is written in so informed and sophisticated a manner that all health personnel can surely benefit from it.
One of the striking features of American medicine today is that it is said to attempt too much, and exorbitant demands have been made upon it. As a nation we have been medicalized and require to be demedicalized. All forms of social ills, delinquency, criminality, learning disabilities, unhappiness, and many forms of troubled and troublesome behavior are brought to the physician. Formerly the theologist had to confront many of these problems, but increasingly they have become the domain of the physician. If the nation is to provide some form of national health insurance, such extensive services would certainly be far too expensive to initiate and maintain.
The ethical issues confronting medicine today are daily becoming more prominent and are thoroughly discussed in this volume. Health care as a “right” of every citizen is generally thought of as too large an order for the nation to fulfill, but equal access to such care can be readily agreed on, although not so easy to provide. What has not always been emphasized so emphatically of late is the necessity for each individual to lead his life in a manner in which he assumes more responsibility for his own health.
The technology of medicine has seen dazzling advances in recent years, but according to Lewis Thomas
“Nothing has changed so much in the health-care system over the past twenty-five years as the public's perception of its own health. … The general belief these days seems to be that the body is fundamentally flawed, subject to disintegration at any moment, … always in need of continual monitoring and support by health-care professiona