This Article  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Harold R. Brodman, MD; L. Elizabeth B. Brodman, MD
Albert Einstein College of Medicine Bronx, NY

JAMA. 1980;243(4):332.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

During our tour of duty for Care-Medico in Afghanistan in 1972, we were initially shocked that patients retained their own medical records and roentgenograms. Later we were charmed by the idea. It came to seem appropriate in this poor country of self-reliant people that responsibility for their medical records was each person's concern. Had we, as physicians in the United States, in a paternalistic and sometimes patronizing attitude to our patients, assumed too much responsibility? Were we in part helping to generate a dependent rather than self-reliant population? The concept of "A Portable Medical Record System for the Elderly" (242:57, 1979) could be expanded to the Afghanistani model.

People do hold their driver's license, social security cards, and duplicate tax forms; why not their medical records? What a saving in space and cost to be rid of the hospital record rooms and their army of clerks. What . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?