Writer Between Worlds

“Waitzkin characterizes medicine as an ideological system that “calls” the patient to be an identity that medicine maintains for him; the diagnosis is the most prevalent form of this identity. The ideological work of medicine is to get the patient to accept this diagnostic identity as appropriate and moral. When the patient accepts this identity, he aligns himself as subordinate in a power relation.”

[Frank, Arthur W.. The wounded storyteller : body, illness, and ethics ]