What went wrong when medicine became a business? The truth is….in this day and age people strive to make money and yes, medicine may now be considered a business but does this really matter? Has much changed? Or have the things that have changed just been seen more publicly?
There was a time when doctors and nurses had a different way of doing things but then, unfortunately, people died more often. Now, in the 21st century, technology has been developed to cure numerous diseases, fatal or not. However, this machinery is harder to operate and dangerous if you get it wrong. Now doctors and nurses have to work harder, they then demand for more money and that is when the business side kicks in. It doesn’t matter if it is a private practice or is run by the NHS, the doctors and nurses who keep it running need to make money in order to survive.
This has always been the case, people have always needed money to survive and one could say that today you need more money than before. So now there may be a business side to all work types but has this really made a dramatic change? Have the small changes been bad?
Another person might say that with the strikes and the recession the NHS especially have changed and to some extent I agree but so what? Doctors and nurses have always been needed and will be until the day we all die! Being a doctor is considered a profession and therefore medicine may be a business but not much has gone wrong. You occasionally hear a story on the news where it seems money took over a patient’s care and I do sympathise because no person deserves that kind of treatment. However, that mistake was not made by medicine being a business but instead by a selfish doctor or nurse who quite frankly should not be in the profession.
So some may say that medicine was never a business and never will be. This may be true but others say that it has changed into a business and carries on changing radically. Again this may be true. We just have to take it the way it comes and deal with whatever changes the medical profession throws at us because after all, next time you are ill, are you going to think of how business like the NHS is? Or are you going to find the treatment you need? We need the services these people provide no matter how business like they are.
