Drawbacks of virtual care

Re: Keep the virtual healthcare revolution going, R. Sacha Bhatia and William Falk, Dec. 22

I graduated from medical school in 1964, and one of the lasting axioms instilled in us was: “when all else fails, examine the patient.”

I agree that there is a place for virtual health care. In fact, after more than five decades in practice, ( five years in family practice and the rest as a specialist general surgeon), I long ago concluded that the overall health of the population would not suffer a bit omitting perhaps half of all physician visits and eliminating a significant percentage of family doctors ( nurse practitioners and/or physician assistants could fill the gap). In other words, a lot of “medical care” is not really all that necessary or of much value.

That said, there is no substitute for actually examining the patient, and neither virtual visits on Zoom, FaceTime or all the technological wizardry will definitively distinguish an infected ear from a simple cold, asthma from pneumonia or from lung congestion due to heart failure, appendicitis from food poisoning or too much candy, plus an infinite list of ailments presenting with similar overlapping symptoms, but requiring markedly different treatments.

Virtual health care may be more convenient, cheaper and more efficient, but in my experience, it has the serious drawback of being potentially very dangerous.

Morton Doran MD, MSC, FRCS( C), Fairmont B. C.