Do We Still Need Doctors?: Reflective Bioethics

"For anyone who wishes a relatively brief, easy-to-read, thoughtful, and deeply penetrating examination of the issues facing medicine today, this is the book to read...John Lantos, a pediatrician, teacher, and bioethicist, opens and closes the book with unanswered questions. In doing so his purpose is 'to think about the roles and responsibilities within the ever-metastazing enterprise that we will call the health system.' Particularly, he wants to 'think about what doctors do within that system, what doctors once did, and what doctors out to do.'...In short, the author, whose religious background is Judaism, provides much food for thought for the Christian and for the medical profession." -- Ethics and Medicine
"With intelligence and balance, Lantos guides the reader through the ethical morass of what has become a public debate." -- Library Journal
"This thoughtful book is a literate and troubled search for the lost soul of doctoring. It feels as though the author could not restrain himself from spilling onto paper what he had observed as the paradoxes and contradictinos, the triumphs and tragedies, of the practice of healing. It is worth anyone's time to read this succinct and erudite contribution to the issues of the goals of medicine and doctoring." -- Journal of the American Medical Association
"Lantos has written an engaging book that provides a fascinating guided tour through current ethical and medical dilemmas." -- The Houston Chronicle
"With intelligence and balance, Lantos guides the reader the through the ethical morass of what has become a public debate." -- Library Journal
"John Lantos's anecdotes and analyses reveal a thinking and compassionate physician whose heart and mind are constantly in conflict... a highly personal and pained account of the angst-ridden role of U.S. physicians in financially driven managed care systems... Lantos tackles head on such subjects as euthanasia, withdrawal of treatment, the worthiness of human life and the cost of care for patients with incurable diseases." -- The Toronto Globe and Mail
"A disturbing, often painful examination of a profession in transition." -- Kirkus Review
"A book that is strinkingly personal, part essay and part memoir." -- Medical Humanities Review
"Insightful and challenging. This book is an excellent cry from the heart of an MD who feels our medical system is failing--failing all of us, patients and physicians alike. For we all know it. What he says is absolutely accurate--why are we so poorly trained for what we need as a physician today? We are not trained to make and value relationships with our patients, nor to value them as our co-workers to handle their own illness and health. This is an important read for all young physicians and caregivers." -- T. Berry Brazelton, M.D., author of What Every Baby Knows and To Listen to a Child
"A personal look at the most personal profession. In describing its moral conflicts, Lantos does for the practice of pediatrics what Verghese did for AIDS in My Own Country." -- Steven A. Schroeder, M.D., President, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
"John Lantos shares both professional and personal insights into the multiple crises of confidence facing physicians. He not only shows why society needs doctors; he also shows doctors how to be the kinds of people society needs. His book will refresh those who believe that professional orthodoxies need sympathetic challenge." -- Arthur W. Frank, University of Calgary, author of At the Will of the Body and The Wounded Storyteller
"John Lantos is a physician who sees, far more clearly than most, the critical state of medicine as a profession. Buffeted by social forces, economic pressures, and new conceptions of health care, the physician is often bewildered, angry, and unsure of his or her role. Dr. Lantos very cogently, and incisively, looks at the new possibilities, and the new problems, and suggests important directions for the future vitality of the physician as a professional." -- Daniel Callahan, Director of International Programs, The Hastings Center
"A provocative, somewhat sacreligious questioning of the role doctors play in providing compassionate medical care. John Lantos questions the fundamentals: doctors' authority, doctors' values, doctors' motives, and the ethics of medical technology. What makes this book most refreshing is Dr. Lantos's willingness to examine his own feelings, values, and motives with frank honesty. The book includes family experiences and patient experiences from Lantos's own life and medical career, and Lantos reflects on these stories with candor." -- Wendy Levinson, M.D., President, Society for General Internal Medicine
"... extraordinary ... Lantos's sometimes anguished, always clear-eyed view of medicine is bracing and salutary ... Every medical educator, ethicist, and practitioner should read this book and meditate seriously on what Lantos is teaching us so lyrically and so wisely." -- Religious Studies Review
"...doctors are becoming purveyors of brilliant cures, pilots of the new super jumbos of medicine. Yet we also want them to be humane and caring, like they used to be. Lantos, a pediatrician and bioethicist, explores the ambiguity of these two roles." -- Linda Hollick, The Australian Financial Review

1. Introduction 2. Postwar Optimism 3. Priscilla’s Story 4. Why Should We Care about Other People’s Children? 5. Medical Education and Medical Morality 6. Truths, Stories, Fictions, and Lies 7. On Mistakes and Truth Telling 8. The Perils of Progress 9. Do We Still Need Doctors?