How does a nation decide what healthcare to pay for?

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The development and evolution of any system–person, organization–nation depends on how the system succeeds to bridge the gap between what the system knows and what the system does (with the knowledge). We call this the gap between knowing and doing or the knowing-doing gap. If the system does not do what it knows, it will lose out in competition with other systems, its relative performance in...

Medicalisation and Overdiagnosis: What Society Does to Medicine

The concept of overdiagnosis is a dominant topic in medical literature and discussions. In research that targets overdiagnosis, medicalisation is often presented as the societal and individual burden of unnecessary medical expansion. In this way, the focus lies on the influence of medicine on society, neglecting the possible influence of society on medicine. In this perspective, we aim to provi...

The Why, Who, What, How, and When of Patient Engagement in Healthcare Organizations: A Response to Recent Commentaries

O1: Defining Talent: A Cultural Perspective

What is talent? How can it be identified? Who is responsible for identifying it? Are there universally valued talents, or are they all culturally bound? There are at least three different levels of analysis to explore these questions. On the government level, we must philosophically decide on how our country chooses and expresses its values through what is taught, to whom, and for what periods ...

Mistaking the Map for the Territory: What Society Does With Medicine; Comment on “Medicalisation and Overdiagnosis: What Society Does to Medicine”

Van Dijk et al describe how society’s influence on medicine drives both medicalisation and overdiagnosis, and allege that a major political and ethical concern regarding our increasingly interpreting the world through a biomedical lens is that it serves to individualise and depoliticize social problems. I argue that for medicalisation to serve this purpose, it would have to exclude the possibil...