The Illness Narratives

[...]Kleinman, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, is drawing on his interviews and research across years of contact with patients in the United States and China. Others are more cynical, more beaten down, with the threat of litigation ever present: "The medical-legal crisis makes all of us run scared-not just of malpractice, but failure to provide fully informed consent about medications." How can he practise medicine with one eye on the patient, the other on "a potential jury trial"? Despite advances in drugs, in therapy, in imaging; despite the profound change in the NHS's political landscape; despite the idea that the world has never been more complex, we find that nothing has really changed since the 1980s.