Abstract
I read with interest the article by the HRH, The Prince of Wales 1 and find his concept of healthcare refreshingly warm. What he calls as ‘an integrated approach to medicine and health’ is nothing more than the real essence of medicine: caring. The principles he outlines are broad and will be useful for not only UK but the entire international medical community. What he advocates is essentially nothing more than putting up a humane side to medicine and healthcare. When medical students enter the profession everyone has just one aspiration – to treat patients, take care of the sick, relieve humanity of pain and suffering. However, in the course of their profession which currently relies on ‘mechanistic and technological aspects’ they do start having the ‘notion of the body as a machine’. We need doctors to feel like the way they felt the first day in medical college, restoring in them the reason they joined medicine for.
Medicine's glory does not lie in making diseases go kaput but in alleviating the pain and suffering of the sick and the afflicted.
Footnotes
Competing interests None declared