I graduated from medical school in 1959 during the authoritarian era. At that time, every young physician had a “doctor’s bag” with all sorts of medical paraphernalia in it such as a stethoscope, an ophthalmoscope, tongue depressors, etc. because, in those days, it was common for doctors to make house calls. Sixty years later, in today’s anti-authoritarian society, it is almost impossible for someone to get an appointment with a physician let alone receive a return phone call from him.
How did this change come about? Early on in their medical education medical students today are taught to view the patient as a machine composed of individual organ systems, organs, etc. By focusing exclusively on the broken part of the “machine” (the “disease”) they lose contact with the human being that has the affliction. Their mechanistic training makes them fall prey for the entrance of large corporations into the practice of medicine by hiring doctors and expecting them to practice medicine according to the time-saving, quantitative rules used in the business world. This fits in, hand and glove, with the mechanistic training of the physician. Private medical practice became transformed into corporate medical practice, another casualty of the anti-authoritarian transformation of our society.
The takeover of medical practice by large corporations is an example of the intrusion of socialism, corporate socialism into the practice of medicine. What is lost is the authority of the doctor in the way he wants to practice medicine and the quality of the doctor-patient relationship. What is gained is a layer of social armor that dictates how medicine must be practiced.
Neither Left Nor Right
The Emotional Plague
Charles Konia, M.D. 