21/11/2025
Remember those old SAT analogies?
To me this would be:
Patient : Doctor
as
Client : Business person
I get it, this may seem trivial but I think it is symbolic of the changes we are seeing in men's healthcare.
Maybe I'm just old-school.
But these days we are seeing more clinics, which presumably contend to be providing healthcare, starting to refer to patients as clients. What is the significance of this?
In truth, it clearly coincides with the shift of ownership of health clinics from doctors to business people.
And the crux of this is that I think this terminology is more than just semantics.
As an insider and a urologist, it's easy for me to see how far down the slippery slope from patient-first to profit-first some clinics are going. One of the biggest indicators is when you see clinics pushing high margin yet ineffective therapies.
Another shift that we're seeing in business-owned healthcare is related to cost-cutting provider structure. If you are an owner of a men's health clinic and cannot provide the care yourself, it is far cheaper to employ a PA or nurse practitioner and also pay a small fee to a rubber-stamping, nominally involved "medical director" rather than to pay an actual doctor see the patients.
Go to a private equity-owned emergency department and you also will see this. This is a bottom-line driven decision, to the clear detriment of expertise.
When patients are no longer patients, where does this leave the Hippocratic Oath? How about primum non nocere (first do no harm)?
Maybe this is just the way healthcare is going, but I'm not loving it, because it's not hard to read between the lines.
Philosophizing complete. Continue your weekend.
