The Death Of The Clinic

Atul Gawande in his article “When the Doctor Makes Mistakes” exposes the mystery, uncertainty and fallibility of medicine in true stories that involve real patients. In a society where attorneys protect hospitals and physicians from zealous trials from clients following medical errors, doctors make mistakes is a testimony that Gawande a representative of other doctors speak openly about failures within the medical fields. In this article, Gawande exposes those errors with an intention of showing the entire society and specifically those within the medicine field that when errors are hidden, learning is squelched and those within the system are provided with an opportunity to continue committing the same errors. What you find when you critically analyse Gawande, “When Doctors Make Mistakes essay is how messy and uncertain medicine turns out to be. Throughout the entire article you experience the havoc within the medicine field as the inexperienced doctor misapplies a central line in a patient.

A physician, just like the healers of the past, are concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring human health through the treatment of disease, injury, and other physical and mental impairments. Similarities still exist in that the medical practice properly requires both a detailed knowledge of the academic science based disciplines underlying diseases and their treatment – the science of medicine – and also a decent competence in its applied practice – the art or craft of medicine.

"Johns Hopkins patient safety experts have calculated that more than 250,000 deaths per year are due to medical error…" (John Hopkins Medicine). This soaring number has caused medical errors to become the third leading cause of death in the United States. For many people, medicine seems foreign and unknown. People who have lost loved ones due to medical error desperately look for a reason, and many times that blame falls upon doctors. Media has put a negative connotation on doctors as well, causing their reputation to plummet whenever a hospital procedure turns badly. A renown surgeon and author, Atul Gawande, uses his knowledge and experience to give people a new perspective on medicine. In the article "When Doctors Make Mistakes," Gawande uses rhetorical appeals: ethos, pathos, and logos to prove the need for a change in the medical systems and procedures. He analyzes how the public looks at doctors, giving a new perspective to enlighten the reader that even the best doctors can make mistakes.

For physicians practicing in the 19th century, there was a deep connection between mind and body. In the eyes

According to the Institute of Medicine, “At least 44,000 people, and perhaps as many as 98,000 people, die in hospitals each year as a result of medical errors” (Kohn et al.). Despite the unfortunate consequences, medical errors provide an important foundation for medicine. An immense uncertainty envelopes the medical field, and frequent leaps must be made. Some of these ventures are prosperous; however, many render unsuccessful. In Complications, Atul Gawande crafts an alluring view of the medical unknown using tales of his personal medical mistakes. Through the use of ethos, logos, and pathos, Atul Gawande argues that medicine’s vast uncertainty has beneficial influence upon society.

An ever growing problem in today's society are “medical advances” that end up not making things better for the user. For example there is an application for a smartphone that lets one take a photo of an injury. However people have to wait a long time for an anonymous person to give back results of a possible life threatening injury. People are shifting from a personal visit with a doctor, that can examine a wound better in person, to behind computer screen projecting inaccurate results. Another repercussion of these apps are that people are not seeing a doctor that they can be personal with and know about their medical past. *****Ray Bradbury had a part in his story where the character Montag faces this, "Neither of

But instead, it seems that what they are doing is feeding on each other hope. For example, patients remain hopeful that doctors can cure their diseases and doctors are hopeful that technology can deliver these changes to their patients. However, by feeding on their unrealistic hope, physicians enter without knowing into this vicious cycle for pushing for harsher and unrealistic means or treatments that endanger in the process the patient’s sense of dignity. That said, Susan ‘s physicians and his son, at one point, were victims of this cycle because they allowed, instead of alleviate the pain in Susan’s

In the time period between 1500 and 1800 there were changes in medical theory and philosophy, and while the ideas firmly established at the beginning and end of this period seem quite different on the surface, there are similarities. This is due to new theories incorporating pillars from previously accepted ideas and practices. Major points to take note of in this period are: the extent of improvement in quantity and the quality of medical care, the shifting relationship between theology and medical practice, and how the credibility of ancient medical theory changed.

This film offers the public an important piece of medical history through the telling of Thomas’ achievements in a way that is thought-provoking. Also, the social issues it raises, for example the relationship

Burnham, John C. 1985， "American Medicine's Golden Age: What Happened to It?" in J.W. Leavitt and R.L. Numbers' Sickness & H ealth in Am erica: Readings in the H istory o fM edicine and P ublic H ealth, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. 1977 * O rganized M edicine in the Progressive Era: The M ove Toward M onopoly, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Illich, a non-conformist social critic of the institutionalization and bureaucratization of various areas of life previously regarded as personal, believed that the medical institution was intended to produce good but has instead damaged our humanness with several negative consequences. In his argument against the increasingly prominent heteronomous mode of production in the medical realm, he speaks of counterproductivity to criticize the heteronomous (the external aids) paralyzing the autonomous (us, the people) and our ability to do anything for ourselves. He argues that beyond a critical threshold, there are tipping points that produce the opposite of what they were intended to produce lead to terrible results.

The existing healthcare system is also responsible for these discriminations. Thusly, insurance companies and hospitals are also responsible for this disparity for instance: certain forms of treatment are encouraged and the others are discouraged. This paper focuses only on physicians in order to highlight their unique role in enacting inequality in the care of reproduction, because doctors influence both the individual level of care provided to patients as well as the societal debates regarding the role of medicine in reproductive care. I want to use Michel Foucault’s theory which indicates that power transacts in the relationship of people to the knowledge elite such as teachers, doctors, therapists, social workers, and psychiatrists to back my

ADHD, defiance disorder, pregnancy, these are just few of the things medicalized in the West (Davies 1995). With the rising prestige of Doctors in the 19th century, came a widening of the gap of knowledge between Doctors and the general population (Davies 1995). Doctors have kept a sort of lock on medical knowledge, enabling them to medicalize all sorts of “issues” aided by the idea of the medical mystique. But with the emergence of medicalization and cures that are being searched for by Doctors, a new problem has arisen. This fixation on curing illnesses has led to Doctors viewing patients as experiments and not as human beings, this is seen especially in technologically advanced societies as exemplified in the movie Wit. In addition to this new problem, there are clear establishments of hierarchy between medical professionals such as Doctors and nurses as well as the emotional detachments with the patients which can lead to patients feeling left out and alone.

Medical power or medicalisation is the underlying force by which disease and illnesses are identified and dealt with. It is a belief system in which individuals are profoundly experienced and understood through the discourse and practise of medicine (Lupton, 1997). The Australian Medical Association (AMA) is arguably the most powerful organisation in the country, it currently has more than 29 000 members and an annual revenue of $21.6 million (Australian Medical Association, 2016). This essay focuses on the Marxist and Foucauldian perspective as a vehicle to examine plays of hierarchy and power in health care.

The treatment of physical and mental problems has undergone a rapid change in the past few decades. An increasing number of bodily and behavioural symptoms now have a recognised medical diagnosis and corresponding treatment. Sociologists have attributed these changes to the process of medicalization, wherein “non-medical problems come to be defined and treated as if they were medical issues” (McLennan, McManus & Spoonley 2009: 271). Medicalization is an ongoing, gradual process which occurs through the social construction of new diseases by groups such as health professionals (Conrad 2007: 4). It can be argued that medicalization is an active and passive process by which diseases are constructed in an attempt to find treatments for patients; and that diseases can be ‘socially’ constructed as well as ‘corporately’ constructed by companies to create a profitable market of consumers. At the micro level of society, medicalization in the Western world has been influenced by liberal notions of individualization which has extended to some parts of the health sector. At the macro level, medicalization has been buoyed by the process of the professionalization, expansion of state monopoly over the health profession and religious and political social movements. Although some academics argue that the medicalization of society is less significant than the process of “de-medicalization”, there is clear evidence that the process of medicalization is intensifying and outstripping the rate