Making the Cut: How to Heal Modern Medicine

by Aaron Kheriaty

Overview

There is a cure for medicine’s ills, but it’s going to hurt. Effective treatment, as every doctor knows, begins with accurate diagnosis. Making the Cut is about what’s going on in the house of medicine.

Medicine got sick. One in three people now distrust the healthcare system. Following the pandemic, two-thirds of Americans doubt medical scientists will act in the best interest of the public. We are grappling with an epidemic of chronic illness—heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, stroke, and chronic lung and kidney disease—affecting six in ten Americans, which medicine seems powerless to fix. The overall life expectancy of Americans has declined for the first time since the Great Depression.

Not only are trust levels tanking, the number of doctors is dropping dramatically. Physicians are quitting in droves. One in five doctors will leave medicine in the next two years. One in three will reduce their hours. A doctor, we assume, wounds in order to heal. “You’re going to feel a sharp pain!” she says, before making the cut. Today, though, all too often the doctor wounds without healing. Why?

In Making the Cut, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, one of the country's leading public intellectuals and preeminent bioethicists, reveals what medicine gave him—and what it sometimes took from him. This book is about how he grew from an overconfident pre-med to an ambivalent medical student to a capable physician who had fallen in love with medicine—even if his lover has turned into a prostitute of late. While presenting a damning diagnosis of contemporary medicine, Making the Cut also applies the wounding scalpel in order to heal it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781510783522
Publisher:	Skyhorse Publishing
Publication date:	09/02/2025
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Aaron Kheriaty, M.D., a psychiatrist, is the director of the Program in Bioethics and American Democracy at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and the director of the Health and Human Flourishing Program at the Zephyr Institute in Palo Alto, Calif. He formerly taught psychiatry at the UCI School of Medicine, was the director of the Medical Ethics Program at UCI Health, and was the chairman of the ethics committee at the California Department of State Hospitals. Dr. Kheriaty’s work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Arc Digital, New Atlantis, Public Discourse, City Journal, and First Things.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Making the Cut

“When the courage and integrity of many in the medical community were put to the test, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty passed with flying colors. That so many others failed, reveals that there are broad and deep deficiencies in the culture of medical practice and medical education. In a great many crucial respects, medicine today is in need of healing. In Making the Cut, Dr. Kheriaty provides not only diagnosis but also prescription. It is essential reading for anyone interested in how to heal modern medicine.”
—Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and former member of the President’s Council on Bioethics

“How is the practice of medicine going to recover from the disaster of 2020 and following? To answer that question comes Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, one of the great heroes of the pandemic period. He reflects on his own early training and growing ambivalence toward professional orthodoxies. His doubts boiled over with the pandemic response that misdiagnosed the disease and cure at multiple levels. Trust has taken a huge hit. The profession must adapt. Dr. Kheriaty’s book is a fantastic guide to the healing both we and the practice of medicine desperately need.”
—Jeffrey Tucker, Founding President of the Brownstone Institute

“This highly readable book is, in part, an account of how and why Aaron Kheriaty survived the rigors of medical school—how he made the cut and became a physician, and why he is grateful for what he regards as the enormous privilege of that calling. But it is also an account of how and why the profession of medicine needs to make the cut—needs, that is, to cut through its enslavement to the managerial and highly centralized approaches that have come to dominate the physician’s art. Readers who are drawn in by the first of these, by the personal stories, will in the end find themselves invited to ponder how our approach to medical caregiving might be altered for the better. In the process they may become wiser patients.”
—Gilbert Meilaender, Senior Research Professor at Valparaiso University

“In the tradition of such medical chronicles as Intern and House of God, Dr. Kheriaty records his progression from medical student to a full-fledged attending physician by reflecting on the patients he cared for, and who taught him in turn. This outsider, not-quite-orthodox medical student evolves into a questioning physician—and questions abound. Both affectionate critique and pointed criticism from a self-professed reluctant romantic in love with flawed patients and his flawed profession, he looks at his profession as he would a patient and determines that it is sick indeed. This book is his prescription for a cure.”
—G. Kevin Donovan, MD, MA, Clinical Professor Emeritus and Director of the Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University

“Aaron Kheriaty has written a modern classic. Making the Cut is a captivating memoir cum profound meditation on what ails modern medicine—and how to heal it. Beautifully written, it should be required reading for all doctors and medical students, and really for anyone who cares about the health of our nation and our nation’s health.”
—Ryan T. Anderson, PhD, President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center

“If contemporary medicine has any chance of preserving itself as a coherent practice, the reforms for which Dr. Kheriaty argues here will be at the center of the game plan. Happily, readers will find a book unburdened by dry, hyper-academic, and white-papery prose—but will instead encounter a sophisticated, evidence-based proposal interwoven with and undergirded by Kheriaty’s own engrossing story. I cannot wait to use this book in the classroom.”
—Charles Camosy, bioethicist and author of Too Expensive to Treat?: Finitude, Tragedy, and the Neonatal ICU

“In Making the Cut, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty offers a luminous and unflinchingly candid memoir that traces the inner contours of medical formation with intellectual rigor and moral clarity. Through richly textured narrative and incisive reflection, he illuminates the ethical complexities, existential inquiries, and quiet crucibles that define the making of a physician. This is a rare work—at once literary and philosophical—that not only bears witness to the hidden struggles and redemptive moments of medical training but also reorients the reader toward the telos of good medicine: the integral flourishing of both patient and healer.”
—Keri O. Brenner, MD, MPA, Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at Stanford University

“Everyone knows that navigating the American healthcare system has become a costly nightmare. Perverse incentives mean doctors and hospitals prioritize quick fixes over helping patients achieve long-term health. Fortunately, some doctors are, well, sick of this state of affairs, and Aaron Kheriaty’s Making the Cut provides a refreshingly humanist dissection of all that’s gone wrong, one that seamlessly blends his captivating personal experience as a doctor with eye-opening facts and policy analysis. In the end, Kheriaty demonstrates to readers he’s exactly what our health system needs more of—a doctor you can trust.”
—Mollie Hemingway, Editor in Chief of The Federalist

From the Publisher