When you’re vulnerable in a hospital bed — confused, frightened, surrounded by machines — it might seem obvious you’re not in charge. A doctor speaks, a patient listens. But Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in the 1830s about a new country, not about its health care, would have predicted the opposite.
De Tocqueville observed that Americans carry two powerful, conflicting instincts. We want experts. And we resist experts. We crave guidance. And we resent hierarchy. Equality, he noted, “begets in men the desire of judging everything for themselves,” and pushes them to look not to superiors but to people like themselves for guidance.
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— Source: STAT News (https://www.statnews.com/2026/03/04/medicine-experts-tbi-de-tocqueville-brain-democracy-hospital/)
