Healthcare not only fails to respond to suffering but often makes it worse

“What is medicine for?” is a hard question that is not as widely discussed as it should be. Medicine has a way of thinking that is very much bound up with the concept of disease, even though the idea of disease is a comparatively recently invention. Plus medicine behaves as if diseases are like animals species rather than complicated and changeable constructs. In practice medicine is about treating sick people, using knowledge of disease when it can. Medicine is also about fending off death. But medicine could be about promoting or preserving health rather than treating sickness, and much of medicine, particularly non-Western medicine, often was and is. It could be much more about communities and families than about individuals, and it could be about easing the path to death (and I don’t mean assisted dying) rather than fending it off. Or medicine could be about relieving suffering, and this blog, which I posted in 2020, discusses medicine’s relationship to suffering. It’s an…