Corrupting market forces have resulted in a crisis of care

Heath and Montori have expressed1 the inexpressible about what gives my own work as a general practitioner meaning in the face of the industrialisation of medicine and what keeps me going in the face of the mounting forces of this industrialisation. The crisis of care the authors so articulately and beautifully describe is not unique to healthcare in the UK and the US. The same forces are at work here in Canada and, I suspect, in most high income countries.Not all physicians feel this way about such forces and how they are transforming our work. Many see it as progress and some are profiting from this industrialisation.One touchstone essay throughout my career has been G Gayle Stephens’ Family Medicine as Counterculture, based on a lecture he gave in the late 1970s.2 The cultural forces that have been shaping medicine and larger society since Stephens gave that lecture are capitalist, market…
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