Sick and Systemic

The medical system is still working.
Just not necessarily for you.

In this third volume of Sick and Systemic, physician-author Arthur Lazarus returns with ten longer, sharper, and more fully developed satirical scenes from the strange machinery of American health care.

Here, compassion must justify its productivity footprint. The slow practice of medicine is treated like a compliance risk. Wellness becomes an online subscription. Excellence is squeezed into financial dashboards. AI scribes testify in court. Internet symptom searches spiral into digital panic. And somewhere in the system, a sick person is still trying to become a patient before being routed into a queue.

With wit, bite, and clinical insight, Sick and Systemic, Volume 3 takes aim at the language, incentives, technologies, and administrative rituals that increasingly shape modern medicine. These scenes are fictional, but the dynamics are instantly recognizable to anyone who has worked in health care, waited for care, fought with a portal, questioned a hospital bill, searched symptoms online, or wondered why a system built around healing so often feels organized around everything else.

This volume includes ten expanded satirical pieces, each followed by an Author’s Note that briefly frames the real-world tension beneath the absurdity. Topics include "old-fashioned" medicine, wellness culture, measures of physician competence, patient labels, AI-assisted writing, informed consent, online health information, administrative burden, and the conversion of clinical values into measurable performance tools.

Satirical, humane, and immediately familiar, this book is for physicians, nurses, residents, medical students, health care leaders, administrators with a sense of humor, and patients who have learned that “the system worked” is not always good news.

Because sometimes satire is the only language left after the mission statement has failed.