About this blog
Posted by npaadmin on Monday, May 14, 2007 at 3:29 am
We are pleased to present this temporary site for the official blog of the National Physicians Alliance (NPA). Our hope is that this blog will help to promote dynamic discussion on broad health care issues.
The National Physicians Alliance was founded to restore physicians’ primary emphasis on the core values of our profession: service, integrity, and advocacy. The NPA offers a professional home for physicians seeking creative collaboration and mutual support. As a diverse physician community, we work to improve health and well being, and to ensure equitable, affordable, high quality health care for all people.
The NPA blog serves to facilitate communication among physicians and the public on these broad issues. This blog is the first multi-author blog of a physicians professional organization. However, the views presented on this blog are those of the individual authors’ and are not necessarily representative of the views of the organization. More information on the organization’s mission and issues can be found at the official website of the National Physicians Alliance. Join a community of caring physicians — become an NPA member today.
And a letter from Lydia Vaias, NPA Founder and current President:
Welcome to NPA Blog. Here you will find a community of physicians who have chosen to look back and look forward. Doctors who long for the return of the values of our profession of service, itegrity and advocacy with the modern spin of an organization that utilizes the tools and ideas of modern times. At the National Physicians Alliance we are striving to create an organization that is nimble,transparent and democratic. To do this we need all of you. There are over 800,000 physicians in this country. Even the largest of our organizations represents a small fraction of those docs. We need a voice. The country needs us to step up as advocates and defenders of what is best, not for doctors, but for the health of our people.
At the NPA we are all here for a dream, a wish, a vision carried over from our days as students.
We need a home.
A place were we can reach across specialties and interests and find each other.
A place we can find support, friendship and the synergy that comes when people of good hearts and altruistic motives come together and make magic.
We need it to fight the cynicism and despair of our times and our world that taints our work.
We need it to nurture young physicians in their ideals and activism.
We need a place to celebrate each other and the miracles large and small you accomplish every day.
We need a place we can go where we can be reminded what an amazing honor and privilege it is to have another put their life in your hands, share their vulnerabilities and nakedness and witness the beginning and end of their time on earth.
Then there is the other reason for the NPA.
Somehow our profession has lost its way.
The obsession with the business of medicine has, like Harry Potters Dementors, sucked the joy out of our jobs.
I believe this is at the core of the void so many of us feel about our work.
For decades now, the focus on financial issues, in particular by the AMA, to the near exclusion of all others, at least in the political and press worlds, has contributed mightily to the loss of trust the public has with our profession.
Our patients question our motives when it comes to decisions about their care and rightly so.
Did we choose that drug because we just had a free lunch or because it is the cheapest and best medicine for that person?
We all swear we are NOT influenced by these things, but there are rafts of research showing it is, in fact, so and ask yourself, if a pharmaceutical company would really spend the equivalent of $12,000 a year per physician on these things if it wasn?t effective.
Today we are no longer this country?s most trusted profession. We now trail nurses and pharmacists.
Now,I’m not so naive as to believe issues of money and financing medical care can be ignored.
Not at least in this country.
Medicine is a business and a big one.
Billions of dollars are being spent and made in this industry annually.
Lest you think I?m a total socialist, I’ll tell you I feel entitled to a piece of that action.
I have sacrificed a good part of my life; probably health and for sure, well being on this alter of medicine.
I want a good life.
I?m grateful we have strong trade associations working on these issues on my behalf, for my compensation and my autonomy to practice without being micromanaged by non-medical entities.
The question I often ask myself however is, how much is enough and at what cost does it come?
The problem is that something is missing. We are missing a different voice in the public discourse.
One that focuses not on issues of physician self interest but one that speaks for physicians as advocates for health.
Many of our professional organizations have become so distracted or politically beholden they have become silent on issues that so clearly scream for a physician voice.
Perhaps no issue illustrated this as clearly as the Terry Schiavo case.
The medical condition of a patient was discussed on the floor of Congress, in the halls of justice and the in court of public opinion, yet organized medicine did nothing to bring medical, scientific sanity to a country craving answers on this issue.
It is time for this voice.
A physician voice that is not so compromised by conflicts of interest that it cannot advocate for the lowest cost medications for seniors.
A voice who will call for the radical overhaul of the malpractice system that fairly compensates all patients injured by poor care, promotes the safest medical practices and stops the waste of frivolous lawsuits.
A voice who advocates for a system of care that first and foremost, ensures that every person in this country can receive affordable, quality healthcare that allows them to reach their full potential.
This after all is supposed to be the promise of a democratic society.
This, then is the mission of the NPA:
“The National Physicians Alliance is founded to restore physicians’ primary emphasis on the core values of our profession: service, integrity, and advocacy. The NPA offers a professional home for physicians seeking creative collaboration and mutual support. As a
diverse physician community, we work to improve health and well being, and to ensure equitable, affordable, high quality health care for all people.”I encourage you all to join us. Explore this blog, our website, join a committee, make a donation. Help us build a strong community of physicians whose primary mission is to first and foremost to safeguard and improve the health or our people.
Thank you,
Lydia
President and Founder, NPA
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