January 18, 2026

Power, Profit, and the Political Economy of AI Medicine.

By Prof. MarkAnthony Nze

The Question Medicine Can No Longer Avoid

Every medical system, regardless of how advanced its instruments or humanitarian its rhetoric—ultimately answers to power. Not power as spectacle or ideology, but power as governance: who controls access to care, who defines legitimacy, whose suffering is rendered visible, and which interventions are allowed to scale. Artificial intelligence has not altered this reality. It has intensified it.

As AI systems increasingly mediate diagnosis, triage, treatment prioritization, drug discovery, and population-level health surveillance, medicine is undergoing a structural transformation far more …