Confronting the Medical Leviathan: Reading a Report from the Front Lines

This essay discusses how two physicians in Britain's National Health Service describe and analyze the conditions of their work: how algorithms and protocols structure the care they can provide and create the dilemmas they and their patients face. In these issues, the NHS is a canary in the mine...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inPerspectives in biology and medicine Vol. 67; no. 3; p. 470
Main Author Frank, Arthur W
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States 2024
Subjects
Algorithms
Delivery of Health Care - organization & administration
Humans
Physician-Patient Relations
Physicians
State Medicine - organization & administration
United Kingdom
United Kingdom
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Summary:This essay discusses how two physicians in Britain's National Health Service describe and analyze the conditions of their work: how algorithms and protocols structure the care they can provide and create the dilemmas they and their patients face. In these issues, the NHS is a canary in the mineshaft of contemporary Western health care. NHS practices are understood as how states and state-like entities, Leviathans, seek to render their subjects legible; in this instance, to make both physicians and patients transparently visible to surveillance and administration by standardizing medical work and patient need. Physicians respond by engaging in workarounds, finding ways to provide care despite systemic restrictions.
ISSN:1529-8795
DOI:10.1353/pbm.2024.a936222