Class News

Nortin Hadler '64 on the doctor-patient relationship

Saving The Doctor-Patient Relationship

On Point, an interview by Tom Ashbrook, broadcast on WBUR, Boston’s National Public Radio station

March 29, 2016

"Dr. Nortin Hadler joins us to look at what’s happened to the doctor-patient relationship, and how to save it.

"Nortin Hadler, MD, has been doctoring for a long time. He’s old school. Loves a rich doctor-patient relationship, where the whole person — patient — is seen and comprehended. Treated in full. But these days, he says, doctors who care are burning out, retiring early, pulling their hair out. 'Today,' he writes, 'health is a commodity, disease is a product line, and physicians are a sales force in the employ of a predatory enterprise.' Ok! This hour On Point, Dr. Nortin Hadler on how to heal American health care."

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Dr. Nortin Hadler is a retired professor of medicine, microbiology, and immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His books include:

• By the Bedside of the Patient: Lessons for the Twenty-First-Century Physician
• The Citizen Patient: Reforming Health Care for the Sake of the Patient, Not the System
• The Last Well Person: How to Stay Well Despite the Health-Care System
• Rethinking Aging: Growing Old and Living Well in an Overtreated Society
• Stabbed in the Back: Confronting Back Pain in an Overtreated Society
• Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America

All are available for purchase on the Publications page of this website.