Descartes' Mistake

The expense for public health of the Czech Ministry of Health. Almost 30 per cent of that amount went to cover pharmaceuticals. In spite of that, more than 67 per cent of participants of one survey were diagnosed with a chronic disease by their general practitioner. “Mentally ill person is a sinner, who was punished by the God with a loss of free will. He is therefore responsible for his illness.“, said Johann Christian August Heinroth, who was he first to use the term of ‘psychosomatics‘. And what do students in various areas of medicine understand under the name of “psychosomatics“ today? Also Czech health education is starting to be influenced by the essentials of psychosomatics as inspired by German public system. But with a delay, because basic psychosomatic care was introduced into the public health care system by German insurance companies in 1984 and its inclusion proved to be economically advantageous. In our country psychosomatics still receives only marginal attention. Why? Professor Mares from the clinic of social medicine of Charles University compared official goals of the education and training with the real state experienced by the medical students? “The outcome was that the training of medical students takes rank with a training of professional special army soldiers regarding high demands on performance and memory, bullying, and hardly any space for releasing emotions accumulated after a brutal encounter with death. (Autopsy training takes place already in the first year of university medical course.) Can we then be surprised that doctors have so little understanding for the emotions of their patients?”