Medicine has become a service industry, and it's making doctors unable to confront death | Seamus O'Mahony | Pulse | LinkedIn

"[Doctors] increasingly see themselves as service-providers, a role that does not encourage Difficult Conversations, or a willingness to be brave. Consumerism, fear of litigation and overregulation have conspired to create the customer-friendly doctor, who emerged when the doctor–patient relationship became recast in a quasi-commercial mould. This type of doctor, well trained in communication skills, eminently biddable, is not what Kieran Sweeney or Atul Gawande had in mind. Doctors, by the nature of their selection and training, are conformist, and the now dominant ethos of customer-friendliness has all but silenced other, dissenting, voices. There is now an insatiable appetite for medicine: for scans, for drugs, for tests, for screening. This appetite benefits many professional groups, industries and institutions. It is difficult to call ‘enough’, but a good doctor sometimes has to tell patients things they do not want to hear. Regrettably, it is much easier, in the middle of a busy clinic, to order another scan than to have the Difficult Conversation."


Medicine has become a service industry, and it's making doctors unable to confront death | Seamus O'Mahony | Pulse | LinkedIn: