Integrated, Personalized Care for Older People

Abstract

Medical science has made magnificent advances by dividing complex problems into their component parts. The strength of clinical trials, and the resulting evidence-based clinical guidelines, is that they isolate a particular phenomenon or therapy from its context to assess its effect without the confounding of diverse contextual factors. However, the health and health care of whole people, and particularly older people who often live with multiple chronic conditions, is context-dependent. Older people are not well served

Time for Family Medicine to Stop Enabling a Dysfunctional Health Care System

“…Our hallowed role as the front door for people seeking health, healing, and connection 11 has been relegated to the position of weathered doormats for a system bent on optimizing its ability to deliver and be paid for commodities. 12,13 But as was pointed out by a recent National Academies report, primary care is a common good that benefits and is deserved by everyone. 14 The health it seeks to foster fundamentally emerges from relationships.…”