"We Can Run but We Can't Hide": Applying the Perspectives Model to What Ails Medicine

Contemporary analyses of modern medicine's challenges often oversimplify what medicine has become and the stories physicians tell about themselves and their work. This paper seeks a more fulsome vision of medicine and the lives of medical practitioners by using the "Perspectives" model of psychiatry as a form of imaginative inquiry into the state of the profession and physician self-understanding. In The Perspectives of Psychiatry (1998), psychiatrists Paul McHugh and Phillip Slavney described four "perspectives" through which clinicians might more fully see and understand those they serve: disease, dimensional, behavior, and life story. While this model was designed for clinical psychiatry, we here apply the model to the practice of medicine itself, looking at medicine and the lives of physicians through the lens of these four perspectives. We pay special attention to the "life story" perspective, concluding with a set of conversation starters for students, educators, and clinicians who long to see medicine anew.