{"id":642729,"date":"2025-12-19T18:53:14","date_gmt":"2025-12-19T18:53:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/642729\/"},"modified":"2025-12-19T18:53:14","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T18:53:14","slug":"the-role-of-doctors-is-changing-forever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/642729\/","title":{"rendered":"The Role of Doctors Is Changing Forever"},"content":{"rendered":"

Historically, medicine\u2019s power rested on a specific kind of cultural authority\u2014the ability to determine not only what diseases exist, who has them, and what to do about it, but also what counts as evidence or truth. In \u201cThe Social Transformation of American Medicine<\/a>,\u201d first published in 1983, the Princeton sociologist Paul Starr describes two pillars of professional authority: legitimacy and dependency. Legitimacy provides a basis for why people accept influence over their lives; dependency refers to the harm they\u2019re likely to face if they don\u2019t accept it. Starr argues that authority is, paradoxically, characterized by the power to compel or persuade\u2014but it is undermined by the need to resort to either. If you have to talk people into believing that you\u2019re right, it\u2019s because they don\u2019t think that you are.<\/p>\n

Medicine is undergoing a kind of unbundling. Specialized services can now be accessed \u00e0 la carte from many sources other than doctors\u2014even if some are bad for our health. The upshot is that medicine can no longer take its cultural authority for granted. In today\u2019s fractured and fractious health-care system, doctors must convince patients of the value of their expertise, and at times they must outcompete other kinds of providers. We may need to accept that we are no longer the high priests of health care. Perhaps, instead, it\u2019s time to think of ourselves as what we have always been: healers.<\/p>\n

The medical profession wasn\u2019t always powerful. For decades after the nation\u2019s founding, doctors had competition from homeopaths, herbalists, apothecaries, midwives, and religious healers\u2014not to mention mothers. Some doctors worked second jobs. Benjamin Rush, a physician and a Founding Father, encouraged students at the country\u2019s first medical school, the University of Pennsylvania, to cultivate a farm, so that they could eat even when business was bad. Otherwise, he told them, you might harbor \u201can impious wish for the prevalence of sickness in your neighbourhood.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the nineteenth century, doctors started to consolidate their authority by standardizing, and encouraging, medical education. Most states passed medical-licensing laws, although they were unevenly enforced. But during the populist era that followed the election of Andrew Jackson\u2014one of Trump\u2019s favorite Presidents\u2014many states repealed licensing requirements altogether, amid a surge in suspicion of \u00e9lites and expertise. Not until the twentieth century did medical schools, medical societies, and medical boards\u2014three types of institutions that can buttress a profession\u2014coalesce to give doctors a new level of influence.<\/p>\n

Some of today\u2019s challenges to medical authority, including political shifts and technological changes, began outside the medical field. But others seem like reactions to long-standing shortcomings. Tens of millions of Americans don\u2019t have a primary-care doctor, and, in much of the country, wait times to see a physician reached new highs this year. More than half<\/a> of U.S. counties don\u2019t have a psychiatrist. Many people wish that their medical providers spent more time trying to understand them. Meanwhile, medical errors are estimated to harm hundreds of thousands of Americans each year.<\/p>\n

The multibillion-dollar field of menopause care, which has historically been understudied and underfunded, hints at what\u2019s happening to health care as a whole. There has been an explosion of investment: between 2019 and 2024, venture-capital funding for women\u2019s health more than tripled, and women now have access to care that they previously didn\u2019t have. But these funds are not necessarily flowing to medical professionals; in some cases, so-called menopause influencers are exploiting a \u201cmenopause Gold Rush.\u201d \u201cThe slowly dawning realisation that these women might be slightly underserved\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. has unfortunately coincided with the high-water mark of aggressive capitalism,\u201d the author Viv Groskop argued<\/a> in the Guardian. The BBC journalist Kirsty Wark has warned that many women are promised<\/a> relief from \u201cdebilitating symptoms if they buy specially branded supplements, teas, and even pyjamas.\u201d<\/p>\n

Worthwhile efforts to make medicine more convenient and accessible can sometimes lead to care that is diluted and extractive\u2014partly because businesses can be untethered from the ethics that guide the medical profession. For many health-care startups, selling pills and products is tidier than the comprehensive forms of care offered at traditional medical practices; writing prescriptions is more scalable than building relationships. Last year, Cerebral, which called itself the fastest-growing mental-health company in history, agreed to pay millions of dollars in fines for overprescribing addictive A.D.H.D. medications. Last month, following a Wall Street Journal investigation, executives at the mental-health startup Done Global were found guilty of aggressively pushing Adderall. At the trial, one clinician testified that she was \u201cjust stamping\u201d prescriptions without conducting follow-up patient visits. According to a former executive, the C.E.O. had encouraged employees to \u201cbend laws\u201d and told them, \u201cWhoever is the first person to get arrested, I\u2019ll buy you a Tesla.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Historically, medicine\u2019s power rested on a specific kind of cultural authority\u2014the ability to determine not only what diseases…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":642730,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4316],"tags":[5002,28039,5205,105,3941,20909,4348,3912,182,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-642729","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-alternative-medicine","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence-a-i","10":"tag-doctors","11":"tag-health","12":"tag-health-care","13":"tag-health-insurance","14":"tag-healthcare","15":"tag-medicine","16":"tag-social-media","17":"tag-uk","18":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115747750227510339","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=642729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642729\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/642730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=642729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=642729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=642729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}