When we’re ill, we trust in doctors to put our well-being first. But medicine’s expanding capabilities and soaring costs are putting this promise at risk. Increasingly, society is calling upon physicians to limit care and to use their skills on behalf of health plans, public officials, national security, and courts of law. And doctors are answering this call. They’re counting costs at the bedside, veiling moral choices behind the language of science, and putting novel technologies to use for the state’s purposes. In The Hippocratic Myth, Dr. Gregg Bloche marshals powerful narratives, fresh investigative reporting, and his expertise in medicine and the law to reveal how:

• Doctors ration care without admitting it – to their patients or even to themselves.
• Medicine’s therapeutic potential has surpassed our ability to pay for it, but our elected officials are afraid to tell us.
• The historic health reforms enacted last year will protect 30 million Americans from the Darwinian cruelty of lack of access to care. But contrary to much wishful thinking in Washington, these reforms do little to stave off looming medical cost catastrophe. Our future fiscal and social stability will turn on our ability to gain control of spending without imperiling patients’ trust in their caregivers. The Hippocratic Myth offers a bold plan for doing so.
• In the wake of 9/11, The Bush Administration turned to doctors to devise interrogation methods that bordered on torture. Drawing upon interviews with key actors who haven’t, until now, spoken publicly, The Hippocratic Myth tells the full story, for the first time, of how our government developed a science-based strategy to force terror suspects to speak truth.
• Medical judgment incorporates hidden political and moral beliefs, and doctors have become key political and legal decision-makers—on such matters as child custody, criminal punishment, access to performance-enhancing drugs, and the politics of obesity, abortion, and homosexuality.
• Doctors and the rest of us will need to address the morality of innovations we never thought possible. Drugs that block—or boost—biological mechanisms of stress resistance, brain-scanning methods that read minds, and medicines that interfere with formation of traumatic memories are among the technologies that will soon be with us.

Challenging, provocative, and insightful, The Hippocratic Myth breaks codes of silence and issues a powerful warning about the need for doctors to forge a new compact with patients and society.