Jeff Kane. Healing Healthcare: How Doctors and Patients Can Heal Our Sick System. New York: Helios Press, 2015. pp. 156. Paperback. ISBN‐13: 978‐1‐62153‐461‐7.

• Author: Bonnie Stabile
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/wmh3.163
• Published date: 01 December 2015
• Date: 01 December 2015

Book Review

Jeff Kane. Healing Healthcare: How Doctors and Patients Can Heal Our Sick System.

New York: Helios Press, 2015. pp. 156. Paperback. ISBN-13: 978-1-62153-461-7.

Seeing the words “Healing Healthcare” in red on the cover of the book I was

reading on a recent f‌light, the passenger next to me asked testily, “How’s that

going?” A hand surgeon, he expressed bitter frustration with current practice.

Like the book’s author, he f‌inds the United States in the midst of a health-care

crisis. Physician and author Jeff Kane’s thoughtful book focuses on the profound

pain experienced by both patients and physicians as a result of our dysfunctional

health-care system. While conceding that “medical technology can be truly

wondrous,” he nonetheless bemoans that “as healthcare morphed into retail

trade” in recent decades “the patient and physician had to make space in the safe

haven of their examining room for insurance clerks, government bureaucrats,

drug company reps, technology marketers, and attorneys, not to mention the

ever-proliferating hardware” (p. 26). As a result, both expenditures and suffering

have skyrocketed, leaving us with health-care costs “surreally out of line” with

the sorry status of “thirty-seventh place for quality, between Costa Rica and

Slovenia” as ranked by the World Health Organization (p. 4).

Kane joins a growing chorus of physicians calling for restraint and ref‌lection in

medical practice. This assemblage advocates changes that would both control costs

and lead to better outcomes by reinfusing medical care with vital elements that

have receded with the rise of technological advance: talk and human touch. The

laying on of hands practiced by “physician-author Abraham Verghese... through

physical exam can diagnose accurately and more rapidly than thousands of dollars

worth of high-tech tests ... and be a profound healing ritual” (p. 41). Like surgeon

Atul Gawande, whose answer to the question “What should medicine do when it

can’t save your life?” includes listening more and acknowledging our collective

mortality, Kane suggests strategies for would-be healers, caregivers, and patients to

engage in productive dialogue. In so doing, physicians would practice real

compassion,by“suffering with” (p. 81) their patients, and see them, as physician/

philosopher Jeffrey Bishop urges in his book The Anticipatory Corpseem (2011), as

more than mere mechanistic systems in need of repair.

World Medical & Health Policy, Vol. 7, No. 4, 2015

420

1948-4682 #2015 Policy Studies Organization

Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ.