These issues addressed include doctors as heroes, and the legacy of
heroic medicine in an age of clinical teamwork, collaboration and a more feminine medicine.
Pharmaceuticals serve a purpose in health care, especially in
heroic medicine. At the moment in our current United States "health care" model it is an over-utilized tool.
Heroic medicine was almost never effective, but it put on a good show.
This year, I've had two pals burn slowly at the stake of
heroic medicine and then disappear.
It describes care that's appropriate for the last six months of a life -- care emphasizing quality and not quantity, pain control over
heroic medicine to prolong life.
(Tomkins's study, though blinkered, far outshines Gross's tabloid treatment.) Money was curative, the philanthropists believed--the practice had a kind of dramatic precedent in
heroic medicine, the theatrical clinical method, predominant in nineteenth-century America, dedicated to bloodletting, blistering, and induced vomiting--and the palatial museum, they said, would be an engine of social progress.
We have to presume that a stranger must have been the source, but Rieff doesn't ask who it was or what the pathways are that allow
heroic medicine only for a few--even when, for a 70-year-old, statistics suggest the transplant is unlikely to work, and might better go to someone else.
Unsurprisingly, the new so-called
heroic medicine was much more popular among practitioners than patients.
Kittredge and the novel's Congregationalist Minister, the Reverend Doctor Honeywood, in which Kittredge suggests an analogy between the Calvinism of conservative Congregationalism, and the interventionism of "
heroic medicine":
With its sometimes grotesque procedures, the new
heroic medicine may turn out to be yet another instance of reflex preference of modern medicine for the highest-tech fix for a problem" (585).
The sad truth is that prevention is in low prestige in an age of
heroic medicine, when the reward structure is heavily biased in favor of high-tech interventions.
Bearing steps out of bed, takes off the baseball cap she's been wearing to hide her baldness, loosens the ties that fasten her gown, and, liberated from futile
heroic medicine, stands "naked, and beautiful," reaching up toward a warm glowing light.