Practice guidelines that may kill

Excerpt

The mission of our Journal and our movement is to privilege the patient over the disease. We hold that the patient represents the ever changing reality facing the provider. The disease is a theoretical construction that allows the provider to categorize and approach different illnesses [1]^.in the ever changing patient landscape. To pursue our mission, we face an uphill battle as we defy the trend of a time enamored with technology. This “high tech, low touch” society aims to bypass the pain of the human interactions, to ignore the discomfort of confronting a mystery in every human encounter. We do hold that life is a mystery in its original sense. The Latin Mysterium indicated a rite that allowed humankind to achieve an immediate (without mediators) experience of the deity, that is of the reality in its entirety. By saying that human life is a mystery we state that it is a living reality, self-evident, that cannot be circumscribed by words, cannot be conceptualized but only can be lived. The hallmark of this living experience is a kaleidoscope of sentiments moving and interacting on a background of intertwined joy and suffering. That includes the pain of growing, of delivering a continuously renewed human being and the joy that follows a parturition and any other difficult accomplishment. …