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Imagine that police solved cases by dividing crime scenes up into physical segments and then not talking to each other about them. The guy who is looking for the murder weapon has no idea what the body looks like. The guy who is measuring the blood-splatter patterns doesn't know that a wild dog came onto the scene 20 minutes ago and ran away with the victim's leg. The crime-scene tech discovers a Bloodsport-style fighting ring in the basement with a fight still going on in it, but doesn't bother to tell the detective. This is pretty much what the medical system is like today.

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"Police are theorizing that the body was stolen by demons."

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Sick people with potentially curable illnesses are shunted around between separate specialists who don't pay attention to anything except the body part they've been trained to focus on, a problem known as care fragmentation or "butt doctors only look at butts." You might get sent to a dermatologist who is baffled by your skin rash, because it's caused by a food allergy and nobody knew much about food allergies when they invented dermatology. Or you'll visit six different psychiatrists who all fail to cure your crippling depression, because none of them ever thought to test to see if it was caused by an asshole thyroid.

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Because of care fragmentation, sick people often have to coordinate their own care if they want to get treated correctly. But that's not as easy as it sounds, because ...