The Day She Broke Medicine
Over the first 8 months of this year, I spent 50 hours observing doctors in hospitals. With no authority beyond my little blue badge, whose magic logo opened to me closed exam room doors and secured units, I pushed aside literal and metaphorical curtains to reveal moments of frailty and fear and peace and humor, moments at the threshold of life and the threshold of death. I was a silent observer of the wild jungle of medicine, in which strangers in white coats hold the keys to hope and life, and in which everyday people look up high at the looming white coats with glimmers of salvific expectation in their eyes. But the wild jungle of medicine is more than a controlled environment in which white coats administer pills of cure and tests of omniscience to fragile mortal beings. {It is more than a power differential} It is a technocracy, a machine, which is self-perpetuating and which can swallow us whole if we do not pay attention, or if we allow it to be for us the truest site of heali...