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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: 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.