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WAY OF LIFE: OUR MAGAZINE
WoL, as it is affectionately called, is a 32 page, colour A5 quarterly, available for £8 a year. Below is an excerpt from an interview with a Christian GP Partner in practice in Kent. The full article appears in the April - June ‘10 issue. Help your self to more by subscribing! Click here to email
Jonathan believes there is no fault-line between Christian faith and medical practice; it is not a case of ‘effective Christian ministry’ or ‘good medical practice’; they are they are essentially bound together. With his GP Trainer ‘hat’ on, he maintained the days had long gone when the medical profession could ‘get away with’ looking at persons as merely bionic; that battle had been fought long ago, and it had to be reflected in training. As an accredited ‘training practice’, The Vine takes in ‘GP Registrars’ who are fully trained doctors coming from the hospital milieu and equips them for GP work.
Jonathan pointed out that medical decisions are ethically driven by professional, Christian and personal boundaries whether the issue be simply prescribing antibiotics or managing more complex conditions with psychosocial and moral elements. There must be Absence of Doing Harm, the intention to Do Good, a respect for Patient Autonomy, and Justice (ie assessing the wider implications of very high cost / low demand treatments.)
The place of placebo always intrigues me because it is commonly held that 30% of conditions will improve without medical intervention. Dr Jonathan described a medical model of intervention of two axes. One reaching from extreme ‘Patient Centred’ to ‘Practitioner Centred’; the other ranging from ‘Task Oriented’ to ‘Process Oriented’. The good clinician, he added, needed to be able to change approach.
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