I'm doing a lecture to foreign-trained doctors in NY talking a medical
communication course. One of the students asked me: "What is American
ethnicity anyway? No one can tell me?" So it got me thinking about
answering his question, for the class, by way of addressing prevailing
medical myths, American style. Not ethnic myths, American home-grown
myths about medicine. For example, the myth of the individual: "I'm
totally in control of my own health."

What other myths are out there, and how do they affect patient
interaction with doctors?

Here are some articles about the myth of the infallibility of doctors.

http://www.studentbmj.com/back_issues/1098/data/1098r2.htm
Doctors are socialised in medical school and residency to strive for
error-free practice, making it difficult to deal with human error when
it does occur.[10] This leads to an expectation of perfection that
doctors translate into the need to be infallible. Doctors may come to
view an error as a failure of character, leading to a reaction of 'How
can there be an error without negligence?'

http://www.babbitt-johnson.com/doctors_admit.html
We have created a myth in our society that doctors are infallible,
that they don?t make errors, don?t have to look things up, and have a
compendium of knowledge that incorporates every disease, every
treatment and every consequence of treatment in their field and know
it all by heart! Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth.
Doctors do make mistakes, do forget and don?t know everything.

http://www.mercola.com/2003/nov/26/death_by_medicine.htm
THE FIRST IATROGENIC STUDY
Dr. Lucian L. Leape opened medicine?s Pandora?s box in his 1994 JAMA
paper, "Error in Medicine".16 He began the paper by reminiscing about
Florence Nightingale?s maxim--"first do no harm." But he found
evidence of the opposite happening in medicine. He found that Schimmel
reported in 1964 that 20 percent of hospital patients suffered
iatrogenic injury, with a 20 percent fatality rate. Steel in 1981
reported that 36 percent of hospitalized patients experienced
iatrogenesis with a 25 percent fatality rate and adverse drug
reactions were involved in 50 percent of the injuries. Bedell in 1991
reported that 64 percent of acute heart attacks in one hospital were
preventable and were mostly due to adverse drug reactions.

Modiano --

CZH has given you an excellent start.  I might also suggest articles
written by Dr. Atul Gawande in the New Yorker Magazine.  Gawande has
written consistently over the years about the application of modern
management methods to medicine, including the "learning" effects of
Total Quality Management.

Linked is one example:
"The Bell Curve" (Dec. 6, 2004)
http://www.newyorker.com/online/content/?041206on_onlineonly01

A good place to start is at the New Yorker site, with a site: search in Google:
site:www.newyorker.com "Atul Gawande"
 
But note that The New Yorker doesn't have all of its content available
at that site.  However, if you have access to a good library, one of
the fee-based services (Ebsco, Infotrac One File, Proquest) will have
full text search capabilities for the magazine.

Best regards,

Omnivorous-GA

czh-ga sure has found the leading myth, but there is nothing
especially American about.  Germans talk about "Gods in White",

the subject has two sides, not only the doctors want to believe they
are infallible (and at least in the States they pay for very expensive
malpractice insurance because they aren't),
also the patients want to think they are, innerly refuse to question
that maybe the doctor isn't helping them and that maybe another one
could, after they have been in treatment by the first one.