Tag: Danielle Ofri

They want to politicize everything! Now, in the name of promoting “health,” doctors are urged to engage their patients about politics. A Prescription for Politics From “Doctors Should Tell Their Patients to Vote” (my emphasis): Suddenly, like Dr. Virchow [a 19th-century German doctor who wrote a report castigating public policies he believed responsible for a typhus epidemic], we are recognizing that our purview extends to the entire structure of our society and that politics is, as he put it, “nothing else but medicine on a large scale.” Political decisions that affect insurance coverage, access to medical care, housing, minimum wage, immigration law, water sources — just to name a few examples — exert medical effects that are comparable with those of major diseases. Dr. Virchow’s words from 170 years ago about the creep of religion into state affairs, the outsize power of the wealthy and the autocratic impulses of government feel unsettlingly contemporary. But should that extend to their interactions with individual patients in the clinical setting? Apparently so: So is it time for doctors to pull out our prescription pads and, like Dr. Virchow, start prescribing democracy? Considering the repeated examples she gives of the political issues doctors should address with patients — and the apparent approach she believes they should promote — does anyone believe her disclaimer that “viewpoints” would not be advocated in the exam room? Just as hospitals and clinics help the uninsured obtain coverage, they should also help eligible voters register. The last thing sick people need while being admitted to a hospital is a nurse or clerk trying to get out the vote. I don’t want to hear my doctor pontificating about the Affordable Care Act or what our public policy should be about the opioid epidemic.