LARB
This is a story about the platform systems layered over our healthcare systems. We now use apps to message our providers (it is almost impossible to call them directly), and pharmacy renewals happen automatically. These systems can give the appearance of activity and care happening at the press of a button, but the platformization of medical care has mostly served to place patients’ bodies at a distance from their caregivers. This enables doctors to be assigned ever more patients, and it enables the deaths of people like my mother—albeit inadvertently, I am sure.