ABSTRACT
Susan Wolf discusses common practitioner strategies for retaining authority in the clinical encounter, beginning with persistent silence. Susan Sherwin claims that many medical practitioners also encourage anxiety and dependence in clients as a means of controlling the clinical encounter. It has been suggested that medicine's monopoly of health care service provision is a conscious strategy to access and maintain the privileges associated with social and cultural power, and that control of the client group is essential to maintaining this power. Health care consumerism was part of the general growth of public agitation for greater regulation of the marketplace in the United States in the 1960s. Medicine's claim to power is based on the developments in medical science and practice following the Second World War, including the discovery of penicillin, improvements in anaethesiology and advances in biomedical knowledge. These developments were initially welcomed by a public anxious for better health care.
