ABSTRACT
Medicine does an exceptional job under extreme pressure, but it also shoots itself in the foot unnecessarily. That medicine inflicts avoidable physical and psychological wounds on patients, colleagues and doctors is clear, despite the Hippocratic injunction to ‘first, do no harm.’ Medicine’s inflation depends in part upon a parallel and compensatory deflation of patients, while reduction of the complexity of the body to a linear machine suggests intolerance of ambiguity. Machine and martial metaphors, however, offer necessary but not sufficient explanations for medicine’s inflation. Medicine can democratise under its own steam by challenging long-held subscription to ideals of health, embracing the paradoxical value of sickness and suffering. The checks and balances that control potential inflation in a democracy, whether in persons or economies, arise from tolerant, collaborative engagement. Where the heroic imagination, and a certain level of intolerance, continues to feed medicine there is no check on inflation.
