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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: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 18 2019, @07:10AM (7 children)
Sources for this type of announcement pop up every year or so. Pick a search engine and look. The last one I saw was last fall out of Israel.
I'm not saying bet your life savings on it. I'm saying with this many people trying this many different approaches, it's going to happen sooner or later no matter what skeptics think.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @07:17AM (4 children)
No, it is no more likely to happen than if a bunch of monks were praying and waiting for a heavenly revelation about what to do. You can keep adding more monks all you want, it's never gonna happen.
But I don't want you to believe me, I want to know how to bet against people like you who believe this stuff.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 18 2019, @07:27AM (1 child)
I'm not saying the announcements are going to cause anything. I'm saying that many scientists looking into it eventually will no matter what you or I believe.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @07:58AM
I'm saying I know the current state of cancer research and the idea they could accomplish what you are claiming (I assume based off the marketing materials universities are pumping out) is laughable.
There's not a chance in the world. Monks just making shit up would probably have a better chance since at least they are thinking rather than doing the bio equivalent of string of together a bunch of poorly run AB tests.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @08:45AM (1 child)
None of those anouncements are about "cancer", they're about specific forms of cancer. Helpful to some people, but not many and who knows how many are every fully developed and actually create a tangible benefit?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday February 18 2019, @05:49PM
To an extent you're definitely correct. Cancer is not a disease, it's a syndrome. A collection of similar symptoms that are called by a common name. So curing one variety doesn't necessarily, or even probably, cure the others. Another example of that is the common cold, which is sometimes one of a number of different viruses, and sometimes an allergy.
But curing one kind of cancer cures that kind of cancer, and then you can address the next kind. Some kinds are known to be "caused" by viruses. (It's not clear whether the virus actively causes the cancer, or whether it just acts as an initiating agent, but if you could eliminate the virus, you'd eliminate the cancer, or at least retard its initiation by decades. And again, don't assume all of the viral cancers are identical. For that matter there's a couple of animal cancers that are known to be directly contagious. A genital one in dogs and a facial one in Tasmanian Devils. So there may be human cancers that are also directly contagious.)
As a result, all this "War against Cancer" stuff is drastically oversimplified. Try to explain it in detail and people go to sleep on you, even though it's a matter of life and death. But the clear implication is that if you want to model it with a war, a closer model is a guerrilla war than one with formal armies. And even so it's a lousy model. But progress has been made, and is being made. And it's almost guaranteed to continue to not be better than incremental.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @08:51AM (1 child)
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I am saying that this type of breakthrough is nowhere near as close as it may appear if you read just the research announcements.
To put it into computer terms, today's biomedical/cancer research is basically trying to support legacy code, that is
* about 4 billion years of basically randomly generated spaghetti code with zero documentation
* operating in an environment that is quite different from what the code has (new chemicals unseen before, new types of radiation, new types of social and physical stresses, etc.)
* barely figured out.
In other words, we're trying to fix catastrophic (GPF/OS) crash bugs in a very complicated legacy Excel 97/VBA app, running in Wine or Windows 10 Home Basic, and our level of skill so far has only reached knowing how to open a hex editor and edit the binary code directly (no "source code" to speak of.) Oh, and one catastrophic crash means we can't practice on that install anymore, can't really debug what happened, and we have to start over on a completely separate, differently configured/corrupted install of the same app.
It may work sometimes, and this can feel very empowering and encouraging to someone who's never used a computer before, but it's nowhere near knowing what the fuck is going on and having a god-like power of full control/understanding that some specialists may give the impression of.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @05:24PM
No, it is wrong. If you think there is any chance of this whatsoever tell me the odds and I will bet on it.