Imbalance of power between patients and doctors

The human capacity to understand the world is truly astonishing. What began with a taste of the fruit from the “tree of good and evil,” has developed into our unlimited capacity to separate, differentiate, define, and analyse. Consequently, the natural sciences have handed humanity previously unimaginable powers to control and shape the world. In the words of Susan Sontag, we have expanded the boundaries of the kingdom of the well and gained control of significant parts of the kingdom of the sick.1

To make this possible, society has provided vast resources to the medical sector and given physicians powers no other profession has: to open the human body, to prescribe potentially lethal substances, and to cut, pierce, and replace organs and body parts. With great powers come great responsibilities and fears. In the “Role of fear in overdiagnosis and overtreatment,” Iona Heath eloquently described the everyday inner conflicts of patients and doctors. …