His bottom line is this: It is up to friends and relatives to rescue the elderly from standard medical care. And slow medicine, like slow food, involves a lot of hard work.

In its place, doctors like Dennis McCullough, a family physician and geriatrician at Dartmouth Medical School, suggest “slow medicine” — as he puts it, “a family-centered, less expensive way.”

Dr Grove acknowledges that health care is much more complex than chip manufacturing, but argues that the learning process in medicine is needlessly slow.