2009-The Physician of the Future English and Catalan

F UNDACIÓN E DUCACIÓN M ÉDICA (FEM) 58 2.3. A communicative and empathic physician Technological development will not only provide us with the means to live a more active and healthier life but will also change our perception of the world and ourselves. We must therefore prepare ourselves for the changes that technology will bring about outside the technological domain. Medicine will not escape those changes and the question will be how to lead them so that medicine remains at the service of people rather then machines or diseases. New physicians will not hide behind computer screens that block patients, they will use the time made available by new technology to increase and improve communication with patients. $e new physician, aware that technology also has drawbacks, will no longer be fascinated by it, but rather concerned in making suitable use of it to the bene"t of patients. $e new physician will continue to act on clinical criteria and not solely on technology. $e new physician will be better in adapting guidelines and protocols to the individual patients and to establish an empathic relationship with him, not only because he will have more and better and easier obtained information due to technology, but also because he will have more time and energies available to obtain and deal with the so% information obtained from the interaction with patients. Besides critical thinking physicians we want them to be good listeners. Aside from gatherers of information we want physicians to be capable of making sensible interpretations, so that we don’t have to regret with T.S. Elliot when he asked “ where is the wisdom lost to knowledge and the knowledge lost to information?”. We want physicians concerned as much with a'ectivity as with e'ectiveness; physicians who, beyond establishing relationships with patients, win their con"dence; physicians capable to reconcile what belongs to the rational world with what is relational, but also having very clear in their minds that if their professional approach is only rational their practice will not be good medicine, while if their practice approach is only relational it will not be medicine at all.