God's Hotel By Sweet Summary

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Considering the health care system today, one can identify the many ways in which medical professionals address disease. The health care profession is focused on curative medicine, rather than taking preventative measures to address health in general. Imagine a medical setting that seeks to address the medical aliments while utilizing a holistic assessment approach to better understand the economic and political systems that placed a patient in this setting to begin with; a place otherwise known as Hôtel-Dieu (God’s Hotel). In God’s Hotel, Sweet illustrates the many conversions of Laguna Honda Hospital while preserving the necessary implementation of slow medicine in her doctor-patient relationships. Sweet describes slow medicine in many …show more content…

Steven Harp. Using Mr. Harp, the reader is again subjected to Sweet’s illustration of slow medicine as the implementation of time-oriented care while at Laguna Honda Hospital. Suffering from what doctors thought was two strokes, Mr. Harp needed physical, occupational, and speech therapy regularly. Mr. Harp became a memorable case for Sweet because it reminded her that in all the time she has with her patient there was still so much she would never know. Although Mr. Harp was never able to speak with Sweet, he was still able to teach her so …show more content…

Muller’s as well as Mr. Harp’s narrative to detail the impact time can have while working with patients. Time is an element of health care one rarely sees in this age; however, Sweet understands time as a crucial component to slow medicine. Taking five more minutes with a patient than a doctor would have otherwise allotted may mean a world of a difference. In Mrs. Muller’s case, “an accurate diagnosis and the leisurely reevaluation of the patient” became the most efficient means to saving money for Laguna Honda (Sweet 140). In Mr. Harp’s case, “quiet is the opposite of interruption. It’s where everything is connected. Once you key into it, there are no emergencies, and you have all the time you need” (Sweet 292). Arguably, the most difficult element of maintaining this slow medicine mentality came from the rapid transformations from almshouse to modern health care facility. Laguna Honda, a fulling functioning almshouse, did not meet the “twenty-first-century codes” (Sweet 123). They had to meet fire, ventilation, and earthquake regulations within a short amount of time to remain open. In addition, as argued by the Department of Justice (DOJ), Laguna Honda had to cut back by 140

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