The Not-My-Problem Problem

Part 3 of 3 Part Teamwork Series: Example of fragmented care for a patient that ended with MD cornering another MD to talk with patient and her family. Medicine gives lip service to culture, but we’ve never prioritized applying the methods of the social sciences toward the achievement of the cultural values to which we’ve laid claim. Though historically the imperative to develop a more traditional clinical science justified this neglect, maximizing the benefits of all we’ve learned will require a new kind of knowledge, one derived from the expertise of those who study how we interact with the world around us. In the highly demanding environments of modern medicine, it often feels like the only way to survive is to put your head down and keep going. To avoid becoming bystanders to our own culture’s unraveling, we must learn to shape our social environments as much as they have shaped us.