In his review of Carrying the Heart and The Deadly Dinner Party and Other Medical Detective Stories(NY Review of Books November 5, 2009) Jerome Groopman catches the desperation of modern medicine, a proud profession that has evolved into a money generating soulless machine.
- “But only recently has medical care been recast in our society as if it took place in a factory, with doctors and nurses as shift workers, laboring on an assembly line of the ill. The new people in charge, many with degrees in management economics, believe that care should be configured as a commodity, its contents reduced to equations, all of its dimensions measured and priced, all patient choices formulated as retail purchases. The experience of illness is being stripped of its symbolism and meaning, emptied of feeling and conflict. The new era rightly embraces science but wrongly relinquishes the soul.”
Medicynical Note: Doctors do piecework for insurers. Whether that changes in a modified health care system is doubtful.
For the most part our non-system of care has lost whatever relationship there was between doctors and patients and replaced it with a hucksterish carnival sideshow atmosphere–step right up here young man we have a medicine, procedure, rejuvenant that will change your life and only run the risk of a 4 hour erection.
Medicynic 