Pain Points

An Abolitionist Approach to Medical Education

Abstract

This article is a meditation on ongoing efforts to redesign clinical education through the framework of abolition medicine. Although the turn toward cultural humility and structural competencies in medical education acknowledges the gaps and limitations of clinical education, it does not go far enough in dismantling systemic inequities and reimagining better care. Abolition medicine is characterized by the imagination and invention of new modes and manners for the redress of suffering that take seriously the history and current practice of medicine as it relates to settler coloniality and chattel slavery. A substantive and holistic understanding of suffering within the medical system requires the abolition of extant structures of domination and exploitation and their replacement by radically new approaches. This article examines some of the barriers, or pain points, that stand in the way of imagining and inventing a new way to care, including the fixation on certainty and the cure, the general lack of relational thinking in medicine, and the privileging of professionalization over subject formation. To throw these points of tension into greater relief, we close with a case study in anatomy.