Web-Based Psychiatry

I think that I have retired just in time. If “Web-based psychiatry” is an indicator of the future (Psychiatric News, June 15), medicine and psychiatry will have abandoned their professional standards.

I would recall for your readers Francis Peabody’s landmark article, “The Care of the Patient,” which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in the March 19, 1927, issue and republished in the August 10, 1984, issue. In it he said, “The practice of medicine in its broadest sense includes the whole relationship of the physician with his patient. It is an art, based to an increasing extent on the medical sciences, but comprising much that still remains outside the realm of any science.” And later, “And it is the essence of medicine that it is an intensely personal matter.”

I hope that the practice of psychiatry will not become enmeshed and eventually strangled in the Internet.