THE POSITION DEFINED

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 55, Issue 3928, 19 July 1937, Page 8

THE POSITION DEFINED

BETWEEN DOCTOR AND PATIENT “There is a curiously illogical outlook which almost everyone adopts in fact, if not in theory, with respect to medical practices. The doctor lives by sickness, not by health. The more people who are ill, the more the doctor earns, and most people take this state of affairs for granted. This is not to suggest that the private practitioners are not for the most part wholly upright, ethical and competent; but there ought to be more doctors who are paid to keep us healthy, and then we should need fewer to try to put us right when we have fallen ill. The average patient expects toe much. Too often he wants to be cured in ten minutes, with a bottle of physic, of all the accumulated ills of forty years of offence against the principles of healthy living. It is not the fault of the doctor that he lives on other people's troubles. Ignorance of elementary biology is largely to blame. Everyone should be taught to go to the doctor to find out how to keep well and not to wait until sickness has struck him down. Unfortunately, it is improbable that many people will he persuaded that it is to their advantage to pay a fee to a doctor when they are feeling perfectly well. This is a kind of thrift which will hardly appeal to the masses.”—Dr Wynham E. B. Lloyd, M.A., M.R.C.S., D.H.P., in “A Hundred Years of Medicine.”