Are you a healer or a widget?
In the “Show-Me State” of Missouri, physicians receive their licenses from the Board of Registration for the Healing Arts. Seriously! This quaint term harkens back to a time when newly minted doctors had a relatively easy time realizing their desire to meld compassion, knowledge, and skill in order to relieve human suffering.
Armed with credentials suggesting that we have the right stuff to avoid doing harm, many of us are drawn to medicine with a heartfelt desire to help others. However, in the last half-century, the “healing art” that is the medical profession has gradually morphed into a complex, corporatized, and commodified system that psychiatrist Alex Sabo refers to as “industrialized medicine.”