Dr. Dana Atchley interviewing a patient, 1958. Photo by Elizabeth Wilcox, courtesy Archives & Special Collections, Columbia University Health Sciences Library.
The History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series presents Nuisance or Necessity? Historical Perspectives on the ‘Informed’ Patient, by Nancy Tomes, PhD, SUNY Distinguished Professor of History, Stony Brook University, New York.
This lecture will be held on Thursday, March 9 with Refreshments, 5:30pm and the lecture at 6 in Conference Room 103-A, Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library, Hammer Building, 701 West 168th St. at Fort Washington Ave.
Today it is an article of faith in American health care that patients need to be more actively engaged in their own treatment. That engagement begins with information: as a nation, we place great emphasis on people’s responsibility to find and act on the best available data about many complex issues, from the choice of insurance plans to the selection of doctors, hospitals, and treatments. Yet beneath the surface, there remains considerable tension over the role that “informed” patients should and do play in medical decision making. That tension is often associated with the arrival of the Internet, which has made it far easier for patients to get information about health care options. ealth care that patients need to be more actively engaged in their own treatment. That engagement begins with information: as a nation, we place great emphasis on people’s responsibility to find and act on the best available data about many complex issues, from the choice of insurance plans to the selection of doctors, hospitals, and treatments. Yet beneath the surface, there remains considerable tension over the role that “informed” patients should and do play in medical decision making. That tension is often associated with the arrival of the Internet, which has made it far easier for patients to get information about health care options.
But as this talk by historian Nancy Tomes will show, the fundamental issues involved in today’s debates over how patients use the Internet are by no means new. Drawing on her latest book,Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients into Consumers (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), Tomes will put the current debates over the value of “medical Googlers” in historical perspective. She will explore the long term factors that have generated those debates and conclude with some reflections on what history can teach us about the present and future prospects for patient engagement.