Conclusion: Professing Medical Identities in the Liquid World of Teams

Abstract

Having taken an exhaustive tour through current and historical issues concerning communication in medicine, what can be concluded? The key focus for medical education is the wider cultural issue of the democratizing of medical practice. The feminizing of medicine may play a key role in this, but certainly the most important factor will be the thoughtful empowerment of patients and the mobilizing of patients’ collective expertise. In parallel, doctors must be politicized, to form a new identity of ‘medical citizens’.

A psychoanalytic perspective is adopted, where medicine is put on the couch to identify key symptoms that may frustrate the development of the democratization of medicine. These include lingering paranoia (fear of failure) that frustrates tolerance of ambiguity, transparency, and public accountability, and a kind of autism, where anal and sadistic traits are still present in stunted approaches to teaching. The future, however, promises new generations of doctors shaped by liquid work practices who will not only demonstrate excellent patient care and safety but will also be able to account reflexively for why they work the way they do and will exercise deliberate self-care.