Making the Cut: The Education of a Physician and the Crisis of Medicine

There is a cure for medicine’s ills, but it’s going to hurt. Effective treatment, as every doctor knows, begins with accurate diagnosis. Making the Cut is about what’s going on in the house of medicine.

Medicine got sick. One in three people now distrust the healthcare system. Following the pandemic, two-thirds of Americans doubt medical scientists will act in the best interest of the public. We are grappling with an epidemic of chronic illness--heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, stroke, and chronic lung and kidney disease--affecting six in ten Americans, which medicine seems powerless to fix. The overall life expectancy of Americans has declined for the first time since the Great Depression.

Not only are trust levels tanking, the number of doctors is dropping dramatically. Physicians are quitting in droves. One in five doctors will leave medicine in the next two years. One in three will reduce their hours. A doctor, we assume, wounds in order to heal. ＂You’re going to feel a sharp pain!＂ she says, before making the cut. Today, though, all too often the doctor wounds without healing. Why?

In Making the Cut, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, one of the country’s leading public intellectuals and preeminent bioethicists, reveals what medicine gave him--and what it sometimes took from him. This book is about how he grew from an overconfident pre-med to an ambivalent medical student to a capable physician who had fallen in love with medicine--even if his lover has turned into a prostitute of late. While presenting a damning diagnosis of contemporary medicine, Making the Cut also applies the wounding scalpel in order to heal it.

Aaron Kheriaty, MD, is a physician specializing in psychiatry and author of several books, including The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State (Regnery, 2022). He is a Scholar and Director of the Program in Bioethics and American Democracy at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Dr. Kheriaty received his undergraduate from the University of Notre Dame, earned his MD degree from Georgetown University, and completed residency training in psychiatry at the University of California Irvine. For sixteen years he was Professor of Psychiatry at UCI School of Medicine and Director of the Medical Ethics Program at UCI Health, where he chaired the ethics committee. While at UCI he was awarded the Excellence in Teaching Award three times by medical students. He also chaired the ethics committee at the California Department of State Hospitals for several years. Dr. Kheriaty has published over one hundred articles for professional and lay audiences on bioethics, public health, civil liberties, political theory, social science, psychiatry, philosophy, religion, and culture.