How does the author use dramatic irony in the novel, Medicine Men?

Adams builds dramatic irony from the juxtaposition of interminable conversations (termed "consultations," when doctors have them) and the contrast between the doctor's perceptions and those of the despised "lay people." Doctors are a new priesthood— impatient, judgmental, and sanctimonious, especially towards women. Encounters with them are enervating, ritualistic, incomprehensible, demeaning, and infantilizing to the patient: "Different, widely differing (male) doctors were visited, but the format was much the same. First, a long wait in the doctor's waiting room, followed by a nurse's summons to an examining room. At last, the doctor's entrance ..." The doctor-patient relationship becomes a metaphor for the dyad of male dominance and female dependency wherever it occurs, a dependency from which Molly must escape, as from Alta Linda: ". . . she had taken charge of her own life, she had listened to her own clear inner voice. She had freed herself, at least temporarily, from the ruling tyrants, from Dave, from doctors."