Dr. Michael J. O’Connell commented that the word “institute” is used quite a bit today in medicine. There is the Institute of Pain, Institute of Internal Medicine, Institute of Headache, Institute of Addiction Treatment, and on and on. In the New Hampshire Seacoast region alone, there are at least five “institutes” in the medical field. What they all comprise is simply standard medical practices – a collection of physicians, nurse practitioners, and other providers. They are hardly ‘institutes’ of anything.
According to Webster's Dictionary, the word ‘institute’ means “an entity for advanced study, research and instruction.” There is no research, no advanced study, no medical breakthroughs, no attempt at systematic instruction at any of these so called “institutes.” In fact, with evidence based medicine, providers of all specialties will be reduced to little more than reciters of what Obama feels are the ‘real’ harbingers of knowledge. Practitioners will no longer be encouraged, but in fact DIScouraged to learn from anecdotal experience, but rather relegated to blindly following and applying solely the knowledge gleaned from sterile peer reviewed double blinded scientific articles.
Clearly the word ‘institute’ is being misused, probably for purposes of marketing alone, as if by employing the word, prestige is bestowed. But sadly, all of medicine, real medicine where there is a meaningful interaction between patient and practitioner, is changing forever. The so called “science” of medicine has won out, practitioners reduced to automatons, and the patient has lost.
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