For most of my life, my experiences with doctors, nurses, and medical administrators have been consistently first-rate and professional. I could always expect to enter an office that had an air of seriousness that revealed the motivations of everyone there—to provide state-of-the-art medical services with state-of-the-art tools, delivered with a caring focus on the tasks at hand.
I’m not sure that’s the case today. Physicians across the country have increasingly been driven to give up solo or small group practices and join massive corporate medical enterprises by forces they can’t control. Giant pharmaceutical companies sell directly to governments while limiting their liability and capturing vast market share. As a result, I think professionalism, personalization, and integrity have been sacrificed to some degree. Constant skepticism, the lifeblood of science, has given way to groupthink and conformity. Trust has been compromised.
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