After The End of American Medical Ideology – Building a New Foundation For US Health

Thursday, March 23 at 12 PM CENTRAL (1 PM EST)

In a recent essay, “Doctors Aren’t Burned Out From Overwork. We’re Demoralized by Our Health System,” published in The New York Times, Dr. Reinhart attempted to reframe “burnout” among healthcare workers to explain how perverse financial motivations pervading the US health system undercut the ethical and pragmatic value of our labor––a process he argued is accelerating the collapse of American medical ideology. This talk will expand on that essay, developing the intertwined ideas of medical ideology, clinicism, accompaniment, and the paradoxes of prevention in order to move from diagnostic reflection to solutions-oriented action. He will propose that to achieve the changes that both patients and caregivers need will require a renewed ethics of care tied to a health systems revolution that reorganizes both US health policy around bottom-up, community-based care systems rather than reactive, top-down biomedical treatment paradigms.

Guest:
Eric Reinhart, MD, PhD
Political Anthropologist, Psychoanalyst, and Resident Physician
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine