If you would like to read my essay, you can find it #19 - The Neverending Cycle of Prescription - Welcome
This episode examines a quiet tragedy in modern healthcare: the way a system built for speed, billing, and efficiency has replaced conversation with transactions, curiosity with checklists, and healing with throughput.
We follow the familiar cycle:
A patient sits before a clinician. A number is declared “high.” A prescription is issued. No exploration of the life behind the lab value—no questions about stress, sleep, food, work, fear, or the burdens that shape a body’s chemistry. Medicine becomes a monologue, even though health is a dialogue between biology and biography.
Clinicians aren’t uncaring; they’re constrained. Ten‑minute visits, endless checkboxes, documentation demands, and invisible auditors leave no room for wonder or listening. Pharmacists face the same pressures—sixty seconds to counsel, not to teach. The system rewards speed, not understanding, and both patients and clinicians feel the loss.
Patients internalize this structure. They learn that health is something done to them, not with them. Curiosity fades. Compliance becomes the only expected role. And when lifestyle change is recommended, it collides with the realities of modern life—exhaustion, caregiving, multiple jobs, financial strain, and the architecture of a world that leaves little room for slow transformation.
Some patients turn to the digital bazaar of short‑form videos, where genuine insight, misinformation, and charismatic falsehoods mix freely. Others struggle against genetics and chance, doing everything “right” while numbers still rise. Still others understand exactly what to do but lack the capacity to reshape their days. Knowledge is not the same as ability.
Through all of this, the system continues its loop: labs, numbers, prescriptions, pharmacies, reminders, renewals. A cycle that treats symptoms but not soil, bodies but not lives.
The episode argues that the crisis is not a failure of individuals—patients or clinicians—but a failure of structure. To restore humanity to care, the system must remember that both parties are meaning‑making beings, not components on a conveyor belt.
Until then, the cycle repeats:
“Your results are in. High.”
A pause.
“I’ve written a prescription.”
