ABSTRACT
Medicine as a profession is essentially irrelevant to the health of the population, although the services of individual physicians can be important to the life, and comfort of individuals. The ancient profession of medicine is defined by a social contract, an implicit and explicit relationship between society and physicians. The contract places obligations on the relationship between individual patients and individual physicians, as well as on the relationship between all physicians, taken as a class, and society as a whole. The expense associated with each of these levels of care, however, is very nearly the inverse of its utilization. The role of the physician and physicians as a class in un-self-interested advocacy for patients and for the health of society points to a disjunction between the health of individuals, of populations, and of society as a whole. There is no measure of the effect of medicine as a profession on individual health, because individual health is self-defined.
