This is the danger of applying industrial-process thinking to medicine. It dehumanises—reducing patients to units of demand, casting doctors as interchangeable production resources, and treating care as movement through a pathway. Patients with the same diagnostic label are not equivalent. They differ in pathology, comorbidities, frailty, capacity to heal, psychological resilience, family and home circumstances, attitudes towards illness, treatment preferences and willingness to accept risk. Doctors are no more uniform: differences in knowledge, experience, diagnostic ability, judgement, communication and continuity profoundly influence outcomes. These are not peripheral variables to be added to a model. They are the substance of clinical medicine. Most seriously, this mechanistic approach ignores the primacy of the patient–doctor relationship: the moral and clinical space in which trust is established, uncertainty interpreted, hidden concerns disclosed and treatment individualised. Once that relationship is subordinated to throughput, waiting-time targets, productivity metrics or financially rewarded points, the system may become more efficient at processing activity while becoming less capable of caring for people. A healthcare system can optimise every measurable stage of a pathway and still fail the human being travelling through it. Systems must serve patients and support professional judgement. Patients must never be made to serve the system.