Category Reform

What you tell your doctor and what ends up in your file are often two different things. Somewhere between your sentence and the clinician's typing, your account gets translated into their interpretation of it — and that interpretation, not your words, becomes the permanent record every future clinician will read first. This piece makes the case for a simple, structural reform: document what patients say, before anyone decides what to make of it.

A doctor tells a chronic pain patient their scans are normal, then refers them to psychiatry as "evidence-based" care. This article looks at why that's become such a common story: how the biopsychosocial model drifted from its original, holistic intent into a reason to stop investigating pain, why it has so much more research behind it than Māori health models like Te Whare Tapa Whā, and why offering that alternative only to Māori patients, while leaving everyone else with the same flawed default, isn't the fix it looks like.