In the waiting room of his Manhattan office, Belsky every other week leads seven or eight of his patients in a "feedback session," a free-wheeling dialogue unusual in the closed society that the medical profession has often been. After a little banter to relax the patients, some of them new to feedback, Belsky springs his crucial question: "How do you know I'm a good enough doctor for you to trust me?"
After a couple of mumbles—"Someone told me you were good" and "I heard about you from a friend"—Belsky tells them what they should have demanded to know. "How many of you asked where I had gone to medical school, or where I served my internship or what my fees were? You should have asked those questions."
Thus encouraged, the wife of a man who has recently had a kidney removed speaks up. "You know, Doctor, when my husband was released from the hospital I didn't have any idea what kind of diet he should be on, and you never said anything about it until I called your office." Belsky reflected, then said, "You're right and I apologize. I only wish you had mentioned it right away."
The son of a Bronx businessman, Belsky had wanted to be a psychiatrist from the time he was 13. But early into his studies at NYU medical school he decided he had "a greater love for medicine's wedding of art and science" and abandoned psychiatry. Though he is critical of his medical education—"we spent hours on lupus vulgaris, an obscure skin disease, but no time at all on the art of communicating with patients"—he went on to specialize in internal medicine, starting his own practice in 1960.
After several successful years, Belsky found his professional enthusiasm was suffering from galloping anemia, that his work was "seeping into a kind of drudgery." He diagnosed the problem of patients not following through with prescribed treatments as symptomatic of a physician who needed to heal himself: "I had been trying to get rid of patients as quickly as possible."
So in 1973 when he encountered the term "feedback" in a communications class at the New School for Social Research, Belsky decided to adapt it to his practice. Since then he also has become something of a medical community fifth columnist. He urges his patients to challenge the "medical mystique," the aura of doctor omniscience that can turn the most aggressive skeptics into unquestioning milquetoast patients. He has just published a book, How to Choose & Use Your Doctor, a call for a patient activism.
Belsky—who himself has adopted a jogging regimen and a health food-oriented diet (no candy or caffeine, few dairy products or red meats)—also is receptive to patients' suggestions on new methods of treatment they may have read about ("even in Reader's Digest"). He refuses to dismiss acupuncturists or chiropractors out of hand.
His own renewed enthusiasm for medicine is reflected in his son, Paul, 18, who has started in pre-med at Brown University. Daughter Ann, 19, is an art design student there and his wife of 21 years, Miriam, is working on a doctorate at Columbia Teachers College. Belsky acknowledges that putting on that white coat in the morning has become an adventure again. "There is nothing so satisfying as a diagnosis well made," he says. "There is a real beauty to it."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
