The commodity view of medicine.

Abstract

Cassell discusses the dichotomy of medical care as being both a technical service and a personal interaction. He states that consumers want personal medical care to be readily available at a low cost. He sees this as a contradiction arguing that "the forces necessary to keep every medical service identical and cheap discourage the intense personal involvement by the physician in the patient's care that is required to lift medicine above the merely technical." Further, waning trust in individual physicians has been exacerbated by the use of more technical services in medical examinations and by higher costs. Cassell believes that medical care should be conceptualized as a personal service rather than a social commodity which employs individual knowledge, human concern, judgement and experience. This would re-establish trust between doctors and patients and, hopefully, would reduce the reliance on expensive medical technology, allowing health care costs to decline.