Physicians were once trained and encouraged to use critical thinking skills coupled with scientific knowledge to make diagnoses for their patients. Increasingly however, doctors are pressured by the government and insurance company bureaucrats writing their checks into substituting rigid practice guidelines for the physician’s own judgement.

In this podcast interview with Michael Ostrolenk, Richard Amerling, MD summarizes how these top-down, one-size-fits-all, “cookbook” protocols hurt patients. Dr. Amerling is Associate Professor of clinical medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and the Director of Outpatient Dialysis at the Beth Israel Medical Center.

Practice guidelines are too often both financed and written by the pharmaceutical industry and thus become biased towards favoring treatments benefitting these companies. In addition to discussing the scientific flaws in such guidelines, Dr. Amerling also explains why Obamacare will further entrench them and punish doctors who treat patients on an individualized basis.

Read Dr. Amerling‘s latest article “Practice Guidelines – Fail Again,” and watch a presentation by him from the 2011 AAPS meeting, below.