This is incredibly anecdotal story. It’s one that highlights the experience of one elder doctor and how they don’t like the expansion of a technology they don’t understand and don’t wish to adapt to. There’s countless studies and even metastudies out there about how incredibly useful and important telehealth is. Hell, there’s even reviews of metastudies which highlight how useful this technology is and how abundant we have data to prove its efficacy. The article doesn’t spend any time touching on the other side of the argument. It’s hyperfocused on this one doctor’s opinion of healthcare, and their perception of it. The one patient he focuses on, is exactly the kind of patient for which the kind of telehealth he was practicing (zoom style narrative only telehealth) is not particularly well suited. There’s a reason that there’s telehealth devices which exist to allow the use of a sphygmomanometer, stethoscope, otoscope, and other important checkup tools or are a hybrid telehealth environment where a nurse can do these and report findings to a doctor who’s present virtually.

As an aside I’m not sure what to think of the publication openmind magazine. They’re relatively new and they claim to have a focus on unbiased reporting, but they also claim to be here to address and debunk conspiracies and deceptions and controversies. If this is meant to be a think piece, the lack of addressing the obvious scientific gap between this anecdotally based thinking about a very well established scientific field makes me think twice about whether this is truly out here to be based on fact or whether this actually just a conservative mouthpiece trying to pass itself off as focused on facts.

With all of that being said, I do think there’s an important consideration to be made in healthcare, and one that’s been discussed in extreme depth in the literature - what kinds of care are better for telehealth and which are best for in-person (or at least, what tech would we need for the two to be comparable). There are absolutely important considerations on what specialties and workflows do well in the telehealth field and which ones are not well suited. Emergency and trauma care, for example, are unlikely to have any telehealth components for a long time. Dermatology and mental health, on the other hand, are extremely successful in the telehealth space and were early adopters. There’s also a specific set of skills and a way of approaching diagnosis that are fundamentally different for those people you see in person and those you see via telehealth and if you are not adequately trained on these considerations it makes a lot of sense that you might not work well in between the two mediums.