Doctors and patients have to survive from populism

 The doctor-patient relationship is, by its nature, a power dynamic: 

the doctor is the healthy, strong, calm savior, the holder of knowledge. 

The patient is the weak, suffering, frightened person seeking help from the former.

….the ignorant seeking aid from the “authority.” 

In primitive societies, the doctor was the tribe’s shaman, the keeper of great natural and metaphysical secrets, second in hierarchy only to the chief.

Today, things have changed. 

Since the 1970s, with the questioning of all authority and established power, doctors and medical authority were among the first institutions to be challenged. 

Pharmaceutical and insurance companies aided this shift, seeking to strip doctors of their power and claim it for themselves. (The power to influence and exploit patients is too lucrative a business to be left to “naive doctors.”) .

The flattery of a now pseudo-educated public led to the belief that anyone can judge what suits them diagnostically and therapeutically.

The internet finished the job. 

Anyone can tap a few buttons on their phone and access the world’s literature on a platter. 

Of course, alongside serious literature springs a sea (an ocean!) of garbage information. 

and Naturally, Babis and Toula [common Greek names, implying laypeople] don’t know how to distinguish what’s valuable in this chaos of information, nor do they understand the literature even if they find it. 

But Babis and Toula aren’t deterred by such things: they have unshakable opinions about science and doctors and can even rate them on Google.

In the end, after all this, the power dynamic has reversed: 

the power now lies with the masses, who hold sway over criticism, public opinion, and the media. 

The doctor is now on the defensive, trying to protect themselves from attacks coming from all sides, forced to guard against every possible trouble, even for the slightest misstep.

Power dynamics in general are a bad thing, and some say they’re even diabolical: 

for instance, they say Satan is nothing but a power-monger, a corrupter who turns people into power-mongers too—violent people who lord over others.

The problem now is that this shift in power has made things worse: we’ve gone from one bad authority to an even worse one. 

If the doctors’ authority was bad once, the authority of the ignorant public is three times worse. The doctors’ authority usually came with rationality and scientific knowledge, whereas today, the authority of the public and patients goes hand in hand with scientific ignorance and every paranoid conspiracy theory.

I see no light. 

Good luck sorting out the line between populism and democracy, or between hysterical nonsense and sobriety. 

A new Middle Ages is on the horizon.