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from the getting-sick-is-hazardous-to-your-health dept.
Seamus O'Mahony, a gastroenterologist from Cork, has written the most devastating critique of modern medicine since Ivan Illich in Medical Nemesis in 1975. O'Mahony cites Illich and argues that many of his warnings of the medicalisation of life and death; runaway costs; ever declining value; patients reduced to consumers; growing empires of doctors, other health workers, and researchers; and the industrialisation of healthcare have come true.
[...] Unlike Illich, who believed that modern medicine counterproductively created sickness, O'Mahony does see what he calls a golden age of medicine that began after the Second World War with the appearance of antibiotics, vaccines, a swathe of effective drugs, surgical innovations, better anaesthetics, and universal health coverage for most of those in rich countries. It ended in the late 1970s, meaning that O'Mahony, who graduated in 1983 and is still practising, enjoyed little of the golden age. We are now "in the age of unmet and unrealistic expectations, the age of disappointment."
[...] O'Mahony begins his dissection with medical research, "the intellectual motor of the medico-industrial complex." Governments see life sciences as a saviour of economies, and charities urge us to give more to cure every disease. Big Science, which appeared after the golden age, has provided jobs and status but "benefits to patients have been modest and unspectacular." A study of 101 basic science discoveries published in major journals and claiming a clinical application found that 20 years later only one had produced clinical benefit. Big Science is corrupted by "perverse incentives, careerism, and commercialisation."
[...] No disease is better marketed than cancer, and after Richard Nixon's War on Cancer, Barack Obama launched his Cancer Moonshot, which is now renamed Cancer Breakthroughs under Donald Trump. As O'Mahony writes, the language around cancer "is infected with a sort of hubristic oedema." For Big Science cancer is a blessing, leading to huge investments in molecular biology and genetics, but, as cancer researcher David Pye put it: "How can we know so much about the causes and progression of disease, yet do so little to prevent death and incapacity."
[...] "The medical profession," he writes, "has become the front-of-house sales team for the [drug] industry." He argues that "doctors' professional culture obliges them to do something—anything," but he is too easy on doctors, who could push back. Society, he says, displays "childishness" in going along with these expensive treatments: "we must have higher, and better, priorities than feeble, incremental and attritional extension of survival in patients with incurable cancer."
[...] The first thing that I ever had published in a medical journal was a letter to the Lancet in 1974 asking why there had been no response to an article in the journal by Ivan Illich describing in detail how modern medicine was a threat to health. (It would cost me $35.95 today to access the letter, about 50 cents a word from memory.) As a medical student I expected that the leaders of medicine would carefully dissect Illich's argument and with evidence show him to be wrong. But such a response never came. I was naive: I know now that it's easier simply to ignore cogent criticisms. I hope that O'Mahony's book, a Medical Nemesis for 2019, will not be ignored. It deserves to be taken very seriously.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @06:37AM (20 children)
See the second paragraph. Vaccines fit perfectly with what is described. The promise was that measles would be eradicated by 1967 then vaccinations could be stopped. Promise not kept.
Now when is the last time you heard a vaccine promised to eradicate a virus? That was the original purpose, it has since morphed to "get society addicted for the indefinate future to vaccines out of fear for an epidemic."
(Score: 2, Disagree) by ants_in_pants on Monday February 18 2019, @08:11AM (12 children)
smallpox was eliminated with vaccines.
-Love, ants_in_pants
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @08:45AM (3 children)
Yep that campaign was run earlier.
(Score: 3, Informative) by sjames on Monday February 18 2019, @09:33AM (2 children)
We were well on our way with polio but then the CIA got involved.
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 18 2019, @09:51AM (1 child)
I like water polio better. It's more entertaining when a participant poops in the playing area in the water version.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Troll) by realDonaldTrump on Monday February 18 2019, @01:04PM
That, actually, that's how it used to be passed. They didn't call it water polio. But, that's what it was. When the sick kid "poops" and the "poop" gets into the drinking water. Folks drink that "poopy" water, now they're getting sick too. And they're "pooping" too. Sounds so horrible, right? Disgusting. And it was. Except, very important, everybody got the polio when they were very young. I'm talking about, when they were babies. And it barely affected them. Except, they would never get it again -- NO SHOTS but they were IMMUNE!!!
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday February 18 2019, @09:57AM (7 children)
Was it, though? I read of campaigns in India often enough to cast doubts on that claim. Polio is the one that most often makes the news. Volunteers wander through the villages, trying to get every last child, because - obviously - polio is still a thing. In 2012, WHO published an article that India had not recorded a new polio case for one year - https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2012/polio_20120113/en/ [who.int]
Browse this map, and you'll find that polio still exists, not only in Asia, but in much of equatorial Africa, and Indonesia. Let's call them "underdeveloped countries". http://polioeradication.org/polio-today/polio-now/ [polioeradication.org]
Bottom line, IMO, we still have a genetic pool of all of our worst diseases, waiting for the opportunity to spread around the world again.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @10:34AM
Other diseases with the exact same symptoms of polio are rising as polio falls, sounds like a measurement issue to me.
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/135/Supplement_1/S16.2 [aappublications.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by realDonaldTrump on Monday February 18 2019, @01:36PM (5 children)
Ants in Pants was saying, no more smallpox. But you're talking polio, it's not the same. Polio is the one where you see these guys and they have one leg much shorter than the other, one arm much shorter. They're crippled, so ugly. Smallpox is the one where they have the pock marks all over the face, their face looks like an orange. Like the skin of an orange. Except for the color. And frankly, it would look better if they did the color too.
And we have the Smallpox Pill now. Which, maybe that one works. And maybe it doesn't. We need to find some people, give them the Pill and try to give them smallpox. So we'll know.
And we can do that, very easily. Because we kept the smallpox, from when it was going around a lot, in little bottles. And my Generals say it's very easy to crank up the production from there. Just from a few little bottles.
And if those bottles get lost, if somebody drops them and they break, if somebody steals them, that's O.K. Because, here's the most amazing part. Have you ever seen Star Trek? If you ever see it, they have the very special Computer. They say, "oh Computer, make me a steak & fries -- with a Coke." And by the way, they didn't say Coke because Coke didn't pay them. But they could have any drink you can imagine, just by asking. Which at the time was make-believe. It's make-believe no longer. Because we have that. We're getting that. It doesn't make steaks, doesn't make fries or drinks. But it makes diseases, very beautifully. Including smallpox. We have smallpox -- the digital of smallpox -- on a Cyber Chip. We checked the Copyright on that one (so important). And maybe we'll do super duper smallpox or something even better. I like thinking big. If you’re going to be thinking anything, you might as well think big!
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday February 18 2019, @02:05PM (3 children)
My whole point was, diseases that we thought were eradicated still show up.
https://www.who.int/csr/disease/smallpox/faq/en/ [who.int]
Declared eradicated doesn't mean it won't crop up from somewhere again. I'm pretty sure that polio was also declared eradicated a couple of times.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Monday February 18 2019, @03:54PM (1 child)
Sorry, but the U.K. is in many ways a very backward country. They had an "accident." It wasn't an accident. It was BAD PEOPLE & BAD INFRASTRUCTURE. And they gave away their smallpox bottles after that one. Trust me, the U.S.A. won't have any accidents. Because we have the best people. Working with the most modern digital. Our smallpox won't be getting out until we want it to.
The Eradication, you have to look at the small print on that one. The asterik. They say, "oh we eradicated Polio." But, look for the asterik. And it's going to say, "oh by the way, there are many kinds, or types, of Polio, now there's one less." It's like the H.P.V. So many kinds, also referred to as types. And maybe they eradicate some. But the others are still going around!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 20 2019, @06:00PM
Not just smallpox, Birmingham is effectively a no-go zone thanks to Mooslim breeding terrorists.
(Score: 2) by ants_in_pants on Tuesday February 19 2019, @04:50AM
I was pointing out that you can't get smallpox no matter how filthy of a hole you live in. You're free to try, you'll die of something else before you get a whiff of smallpox. All because of vaccination. I'd call that eradication of the disease, even though it's now a WMD.
-Love, ants_in_pants
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday February 19 2019, @04:15AM
Fast forward 20 years, and people will be able to download polio/etc. and make it in the basement.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @12:56PM (6 children)
Perhaps we need to create an annoying dumber sibling of the deadly pathogen, able to spread around and infect people, but too weak to knock patients out, so it just gets patients' immune systems angry and spreads bad name for all its kin, including the deadly one.
That would be a sort of involuntary vaccination, if you will. The milder variant (dumb sibling) outcompetes the deadly one, because due to a lighter clinical image it gets to spread faster, staying a step ahead and "burning the dry grass" leaving immunity in its wake.
Upside: none skims vaccination. Downside (for pharma): patients don't explicitly pay.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @05:28PM
Great idea, I'll pass it on to the "Green New Deal" team.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday February 18 2019, @07:07PM (4 children)
Well, but cowpox didn't eliminate smallpox except among milkmaids. Getting something to do just what you want would be extremely tricky. And viruses mutate.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday February 19 2019, @04:16AM (3 children)
A lot of these diseases seem to have been less destructive when people were routinely exposed and got the diseases when young. By the time I was around 4, I had had the measles, chicken pox and the mumps, none of which did more then make me sick for a week or so. The only thing that came close to killing me was tonsillitis at an older age, and that was bacterial rather then virus. Another example was polio, which used to be common enough that most were exposed to it when young and few had the bad reaction, though sadly some did. Once hygiene became more common, we had the big outbreaks about a hundred+ years back with people being exposed at an older age.
Now if we can eliminate these viruses, great, but we seem to be failing and most of them have way worse actions on older people. It's a complex problem.
Other diseases such as smallpox seem to have been just plain old destructive.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday February 19 2019, @05:26AM (2 children)
I think you've never met anyone who had a severe case of polio. Among Europeans, and probably asians, the bad effects of measles are rare except when a pregnant woman is exposed, but occasional severe reactions occurred. Just because you didn't meet them doesn't mean they didn't exist. These would be the kids who dropped out of school because they were sick and never came back. Disabled children were not mainstreamed. (Are they now?) Etc.
Also among the polynesians and AmerInds the effects of measles was *much* more severe.
FWIW, I've known a person who had a bad case of polio. He considered himself extremely lucky to have only ended up with a bad limp and the inability to stand in place. He was treated by a method that the AMA called "witchcraft". Today it's generally called the Sister Kenny method https://www.google.com/search?q=sister+kenny+method [google.com] but most people at that time who had a bad case of polio ended up either dead, in an iron lung (and short life), or permanently seriously crippled.
So I think you've formed your ideas out of a small biased sample. Most people survived most diseases without permanent harm. The exceptions, however, were numerous.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday February 19 2019, @06:44AM (1 child)
I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't be vaccinating, just that it is complex. Polio is an example of a disease that actually became worse when we got clean water, due to the age that people were exposed to it though it had always affected some kids negatively. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poliomyelitis#History [wikipedia.org]
And yes, I was going to mention the populations where measles etc were unknown, though once again, older people were more negatively affected.
It's a complicated thing, disease and vaccination, with as is often the case a spectrum from where it is obviously good to more questionable. So far it hasn't really entered the questionable area though the flu vaccine is close, but I do wonder if in the future there will be vaccinations, perhaps for the common cold or similar, where vaccination is a worse choice, but is still pushed in the name of profits, I mean public health.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 20 2019, @06:09PM
I love your high moral standard on profit-making for things that are actually good for you. Just keep your darn goody toochoos hands off my Double Super Gulp.