A Little Paternalism in Medicine Is a Good Thing

My family had lived in America for only a handful of years when my grandfather had a heart attack. It was the early 1980s, before statins and baby aspirins were routinely prescribed to delay the abnormal hardening, or sclerosis, in Bapu’s vessels, and before the advent of cardiac catheterization that may have precluded the much more invasive (think rib spreaders) coronary artery bypass graft that the doctors later offered him.

It was also before doctors had learned to talk to their patients like consumers, rather than children. Bapu was fluent in the Queen’s English, but looking back—I was a child at the time—that was likely irrelevant. I’m confident his doctors would not have spoken to him with