Little empathy

I came across a recent article on the Archives of Internal Medicine which struck a chord to me. Actually, I'm not really surprised since I have had concerns of this since I was in medical school and the emphasis on training for the "science" of medicine and the lesser emphasis of the "art" of medicine. I came in naively to believe that there is a balance to both. I still believe in that balance but the training for new medical professionals as well as the emphasis of over-specialization has definitely tilted to the point where we now see doctors no longer having that empathetic skill to connect to their patients. Even more striking is with the recent tide of "market-forces" and "letting the market decide" for medicine is how people are just treated like commodities and widgets - it's pretty sobering...whatever happened to real interaction with real people? It's definitely lost in translation with all the hype of the cure-all pharmaceuticals and state-of-art technology. *Sigh*.