Laborists: who really benefits?(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)

Doctor Louis Weinstein's promotion of the laborist movement is a sign of the times ("Laborist Movement Poised to Take Off," June 15, 2005, p. 1).

In our specialty, we were taught to be hands-on, eyes-on, nose-on, ears-on, and tongue-on doctors. (I was made to tongue-tip taste every medication ever ordered for a pediatric patient). Now, Dr. Weinstein urges us to have a team approach to labor and delivery: one who cares for the patient during the prenatal course and a relatively total stranger, if not a virtual one, to guide the woman through what may be the most anxious few hours of her life. His comments seem more fiscal than medical. I guess this is the influence of our HMO masters who look to this kind of fee splitting to help their bottom line, which is their priority. But should it be Dr Weinstein's?

In 1959, Cuba's revolutionary government created a polyclinic, ubiquitous system that took prerevolution women who had lost babies to newborn diarrhea while delivering in the sugar fields into hospitals with exactly the system Weinstein described.

The neighborhood doctors would follow their ...