ABSTRACT
In Canada, as in many Western countries, there is an epidemic of burnout occurring among health-care providers. But what if the concept of burnout as defined by biomedicine is part of the problem? In this article, I consider biomedicine and neoliberalism as mutually reinforcing epistemologies that prevent the very thing doctors are suffering from being properly framed. To enrich the argument, I (ironically) offer mutually reinforcing anecdotes from my practicing and scholarly life in order to show how Canada’s socialized health system is in a kind of trouble it does not yet understand, for the solutions vended to ameliorate the problem extend from toxic, entrapping epistemologies. The bulk of my argument uses short stories from Vincent Lam’s Giller Prize—winning Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures to dramatize the potent interaction of neoliberalism and biomedicine. Because I use scholarly health humanities methodologies to better understand the problem and critique the problem of burnout as currently framed, I enact what I have come to see as the only way medicine can be saved from its own overweighted power.
