"When many cures are offered for a disease, it means the disease is not curable" -Anton Chekhov
''Once you tell people there's a cure for something, the more likely they are to pressure doctors to prescribe it.'' -Robert Ehrlich, drug advertising executive.
"Opinions are like sphincters, everyone has one." - Chris Rangel
Derek Lowe waxes depressive about modern medicine in a post from yesterday. At least he starts out that way and then becomes wildly optimistic about its future. I have to disagree with his premise that we “have no wonderful therapies for much of anything.” We do. We may not be able to cure all cancers yet, but there are a lot that we can cure or prevent. Cervical cancer, for example, used to be a common killer of young women, but now death at its hands is virtually unheard of in developed (read affluent) countries thanks both to pap smears and successful treatments of its early precursors. We may not have medication that makes headaches disappear in seconds, but we do have medication that makes them disappear in minutes. Cuts may not heal in seconds, but it’s the rare person now who dies from tetanus or sepsis as a result of the cut. As for arthritis, Alzheimer’s, osteoporosis, and Parkinson’s, and even most cancers those are all diseases that are prevalent today solely because our life spans are longer, thanks in large part to the advancements we’ve made against infectious diseases and heart disease. Yes, it’s true that bacteria are growing resistant to our armamentarium, but we still beat them the vast majority of the time with antibiotics; and yes, it’s true that with the exception of HIV we have few effective anti-viral agents, but on the other hand we have few deadly and highly contagious viruses. The hemorrhagic viruses, though deadly, deplete their supply of hosts before spreading any further than a small geographic area. They are nothing compared to the scourges we have conquered. Polio is rare where it was once commonplace, smallpox has been irradicated except as a bioterrorist threat, and even lowly chickenpox has declined significantly in the past five years all thanks to immunizations. To be sure, there is much that we do not yet understand about our bodies and what ails them, but we are light years away from where we stood even fifty years ago.
And what does the future hold? Surely, there will be breakthroughs in treating many diseases that baffle us now, but old age isn’t one of those diseases. Old age and our ultimate mortality is as much due to wear and tear and the passage of time as it to disease. Everything must come to an end in this finite world, and our bodies are no exception. We will probably never be able to arrest or turn back that process, but we will continue to find ways to treat the symptoms and consequences of it; and the longer we live, the more of them there will be. It is there, I fear, that we will end up spending more and more money with each medical advancement, for old age and its consequences are a curse none of us can escape if we survive all the other perils of life. posted by Sydney on
4/04/2002 09:42:00 PM
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