ABSTRACT

T he great paradox for patients today is that as they acquire a postmodern sensitivity to their bodies, their attitudes toward the medical profession are becoming once again traditional This chapter tries to make sense of two events. First, people in the 1980s are far more sensitive to symptoms and more willing to seek care for them than ever before. Whatever the reason for this sensitivity , it has become a troubling factor in their relations with doctors. Second, patients in the 1980s are showing the classic signs of alienation from the medical profession, namely, diagnosing and treating themselves independent of physicians, using doctors merely as conduits for “drugs that really work,” and consulting nonmedical practitioners: “quacks” in those days, “alternative healers” in ours. It is this growing desperation of patients about their own health, combined with increasing mistrust of official medicine, that sets the stage for a crisis.