Poverty medicine: how we are failing poorer and isolated patients | Zara Aziz

Empathy alone can’t solve life’s problems, but GPs don’t have the means to treat the root causes of patients’ malaise

Poverty medicine is a term coined by US physician Raymond Downing in 2001 on his travels through rural east Africa to mean “not just what our patients lack but also what we [the doctors] lack in trying to treat them.”

No one specialises in this area of medicine expanding here in the UK, but I am now practising it. Patients are turning up to the surgery with pain, headaches and depression. Many are isolated and feel a general sense of malaise.

Related: Loneliness is finally being recognised as a risk to health. But this is just the start | Laura Alcock-Ferguson

When treatments for life’s problems are hard to come by, sometimes only the relationship between patient and GP remains

Related: Homeless babies and starving parents: the poverty seen by doctors

Continue reading... March 06, 2018 at 05:30PM