Some Thoughts on the Field of Medicine
Pharyngula goes off on doctors and the field of medicine. Senator/Doctor Bill Frist was his inspiration.
While contemplating that phrase, “graduated from Harvard Medical School” [Frist graduated from Harvard Medical School], I had an epiphany. This is the death of expertise. Who cares what a bunch of biologists say about biology…so who cares what a Harvard Med grad says about medicine? I am liberated and empowered by these statements. I may have no training at all in medicine, but so what? The more closely I looked at the medical establishment, the more clear it became that there is a conspiracy to keep the failings of Hippocratism hidden.
There are many problems with the practice of medicine these days. Underlying most of them is the fact that doctors and their friends in the government believe they have a “right” to control what people do with their bodies. Objectively, there is no scientific evidence that such a right exists.
One horror that results from this belief is that doctors and scientists in union with drug companies and government can use patients has guinea pigs. They can test out their theories and new medicines on patients who do not have the same level of freedom to test out possible therapies to treat their illnesses.
Of course patients in most cases much consent to any type of treatment or experimentation, but without the option to choose therapies not approved by the government, they are really not consenting at all. Without choice, there can be no genuine consent.
If you are forced to use a particular medical system, to seek treatment only from certain individuals, there is no consent. If your choice is to use the approved system or die, that is not consent. There might be a better, cheaper alternative which can only be found if the patients who is facing death has the freedom to search for it and experiment on his own body.
Think about it.
Others have the right to use your body to advance their own ends which usually involve making huge profits, but you don’t have the right to treat your own illness, which could ultimately be very profitable to you. You don’t have the right to try and save your own life if you are terminally ill without working with or getting permission from doctors and/or the government.
That process guarantees that if a patient stumbles upon a therapy that works better than any existing government approved therapies, the doctors or researchers that he is forced to work with will end up benefitting from the patient’s efforts and intellectual property.
The fact is that many patients have a stronger background in science that their doctors do. Many have higher IQs than their doctors. ALL patients have a greater incentive to cure themselves than the doctors do, yet they are required to use government approved doctors and drugs to treat themselves.
Of course they should have the option to use a system like the one we currently have, but it should never be a requirement.
If thousands of people have a particular disease, say AIDS for example, then all of those people are potential researchers in the hunt for a cure. They will take many different approaches to solving the problem and I guarantee you that one of them, probably working in conjunction with scientists, will find a cure or a cheaper more effective therapy much faster than our current government regulated system, which is not based on science, and is as much about concentrating power and wealth into the hands of a few as it is about finding cures for diseases.
Consider the system that evolution has created for the survival of the human species. It is built upon genetic variation, not uniformity. When faced with a disease, every individual has a unique set of genes. If we all had the same genes then a disease that killed one human would likely kill us all and the species would die out.
Governments like uniformity, nature does not.
The reason that there is so much genetic variation in the gene pool is because giving every human being a unique genetic makeup greatly increases the chances that some individuals will be resistant to any given selective force like a disease. Likewise, if every patient with a disease could try a unique approach to solving his/her health problems, the chances are greatly increased that somebody will find a solution.
A medical system based on science would take advantage of this inbred biological diversity and allow for all possible pathways to treatments and cures to be explored.
| Go to Home - Most Recent Posts