In their daily practices, can doctors be both patient advocates and society's agents in rationing costly care? Doctors disagree among themselves. Some argue that patients stand to benefit if doctors lead the movement for cost‐effective care in hospitals, nursing homes, and patients' homes. For others cost‐cutting at the bedside erodes the foundations of the doctor‐patient relationship and compromises the quality of care.

Post-modernism is receiving much attention, but it is often seen as merely an extrapolation of modernism. Michael Polanyi’s post-critical epistemology offers a useful way of understanding post-modernism. The modern objectivism of critical thought leads to a dead-end dehumanization. Polanyi offers a recovery of the human dimension by demonstrating the ways in which all knowing, especially scientific discovery, requires human participation. An analogy is drawn with post-modern art and architecture, which similarly attempt to recover the human form and traditional or classical (...) ornamentation in a way which goes beyond the sterile abstractness of modernism. (shrink)