Today
•
reading time 4 minutes
The doctor is sick
Co-Med’s general practices are collapsing. That raises concerns about patients. Waiting lists in hospitals are so long that patients resort to abroad or are treated late. First aid stations sometimes have to close. Retiring general practitioners cannot find successors. The waiting lists in mental health care and youth care are incomparably long. According to a study by De Jonge Psychiater, half of psychiatrists suffer from emotional exhaustion. The doctor is doing badly. What is going on? An anthropological look at the current state of the medical field.
The archetypal role of the magician
As an anthropologist, I look at society and organizations as if they were villages. People once lived in it tribes of around 150 people. Whose name and lineage you know. In tribes, people have traditional, tribal roles. Chiefs protect their tribe members and provide direction for the future. Collectors look for berries and nuts. The village hunters go out with bows and arrows to shoot a deer or boar. Then we have the tribal elders who connect all the threads in the tribe. The others check whether the soul of the tribe is still in order. And… there are magicians living in every village.
Magical powers
In every tribe it is the magician, shaman, healer, seer, pastor who monitors the relationship between cosmos and people. Who performs miracles. He heals, curses, interprets and prays. Once adorned with feathers, robes and bones. In our current society, it has been elevated to a magical position by white coats, scientific titles and a protected professional group.
Our doctors are about life and death. The doctor has the magic to offer hope, healing and mercy to the parents of a sick child. To relieve soul pain. To enforce longevity in the fight against diseases.
Religion and medicine were once inseparable. Convent nuns were nurses, herbal women were midwives and voodoo priests were healers. But with Enlightenment thinking and the rationalization of medical science, we have not only achieved a separation of church and state, but also put a wall between faith and healing interventions. Anyone who makes too many connections quickly becomes a quack or a herbal witch.
Hope provider
And yet every doctor knows that he or she is not only a counselor, but above all a provider of hope. The conversations with colleagues and the intervision case studies are more often about the doctor-patient relationship than about a strange virus. It is not the technical diagnosis that leads to burnout, but the knowledge of the length of the waiting list or having to stop crying because of a full waiting room after an irreversible diagnosis. The doctor loves life, takes the oath very seriously and wants to be able to pay attention to a patient, even if he or she knows that he or she may not be able to provide help, but he or she can provide a lot of hope.
The magic diminishes
Do we still take the doctor seriously as a society? We have outsourced the organization of healthcare to economists, managers and politicians. Doctors are threatened if they do not want to provide follow-up treatment to a terminal patient and the family does. GPs and their assistants are berated over the telephone if they are not given a repeat of their addictive medication. COVID measures and the call for vaccination were experienced as oppressive by groups of people. Parents of newborns ignore vaccination advice. Doctor Google is the expert. The circuit of unregistered mental support workers is gigantic. It’s like we’re challenging the Doctor’s magic. As if we are asking the question: does the doctor’s magic wand still have enough power? Or is it, in our view, a money-hungry charlatan in the hands of the pharmaceutical lobby?
Put the doctor back on her pedestal
The doctor needs to get back on the pedestal. Otherwise we lose hope. Let doctors be at the forefront of the health debate. Let’s say you again. And we wait in turn at the emergency room when a more acute patient comes first. Go for a walk if the psychiatrist says it really helps with depression. Accept that the result of an investigation may also be that your mother does not have long to live.
Put your headdress back on
It’s up to the Doctor to stay magical. Scandals about unnecessary pacemaker operations, unnecessary declarations of actions, or conferences on tropical islands are disastrous. And get out of the ‘it used to be better’ mode. Doctors will have to be open to new treatment methods, AI and new psychotropic drugs. Thinking about the affordability of care and its new design. Perhaps shift the focus from growing older to a focus on dying with dignity. Understanding that your patients are emancipated. And simply put on your white coat again. And it is best to behave decently at your student association when you study medicine.
Make the doctor healthy again
It is a bad sign that so many doctors are sick or no longer want to be doctors. The magicians hang their heads. It’s high time to make the doctor healthy again. This is only possible if we dare to undertake a thorough reorientation of the role of the medical magician in our society and what we expect from him or her. Start showing respect again. This requires doctors to have a vision of the future and to let go of what once was. And for the respectable and incorruptible behavior that is expected of a magician.
Dr. Danielle Braun is an anthropologist and director of the Academy for Organizational Culture. Author of the books Da’s Gek, Patronen, Building Tribes and the Corporate Tribe.
