In their 2021 book, The Way of Medicine: Ethics and the Healing Profession, Duke University professor of medical humanities Farr Curlin and philosophy professor Christopher Tollefsen argued that the Western approach to healthcare has shifted in recent decades from the pursuit of objective well-being to consumer industry. In the process, doctors are increasingly seen as "service providers" whose main job is to help patients do whatever they want with their bodies. Just two years later, their analysis seems spot on.

For example, the healthy functioning of a woman's body during pregnancy is often treated and even labeled a "disease." Same-sex couples, who have chosen inherently sterile sexual unions, sue and then lobby legislatures to redefine their inability to procreate as "infertility." They act as if there's no difference between a man and a woman unable to conceive due to some medical situation and a man and a man unable to conceive due to, well, reality.

This shift-from medicine as the pursuit of health to medicine as confirmation of our self-expression-is most evident in the transgender movement. In Virginia, a man who claims to be a woman is suing a county for placing him in the men's jail. He argues that prison officials should be legally bound to accommodate his gender dysphoria under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ADA was designed to address conditions in which a person was injured or disabled. In this case, a fully functioning and capable person is claiming "disability" because his local prison does not accommodate his individual wishes. The very existence of so-called "transgender medicine" is, in fact, a case in point. Hindering the body's natural development or cutting off healthy body parts in service of an inner sense of self is an abject perversion of medicine as a "healing profession."

According to Curlin and Tollefsen, the way back to a healthy (no pun intended) healthcare system is by recovering the definition of health as "an objective bodily norm for all living organisms."

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