A theory for why medicine is meddled?

Mine says that medicine got misdirected for economic reasons. Pharmaceutical medicine is a major part of the problem. It is great business, but like all business, it requires continuous growth.

After initial successes, any alternative to pharmaceutical intervention was scrapped as "bad for business" and labeled bad medicine or quackery. Research was directed ONLY towards finding those causes for illness that are amenable to pharmaceutical intervention.

This has been going on for close to a hundred years, started in the US by Rockefeller and his medical schools. The result: Good business for pharma but bad medicine.

It is almost impossible today to do basic research in health that is not financed by pharma and therefore directed towards ends that will forward the business model.

The model has blinded us to the greater part of possible health interventions, leaving us with a very poor understanding of disease processes and tools that don't work in the majority of cases.

Your comment about smoking cigarettes reminded me of this exchange from Woody Allen's Sleeper, "
Dr. Melik: This morning for breakfast he requested something called "wheat germ, organic honey and tiger's milk."
Dr. Aragon: [chuckling] Oh, yes. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.
Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or... hot fudge?
Dr. Aragon: Those were thought to be unhealthy... precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.
Dr. Melik: Incredible. "

I think medicine got muddled in part when investigators started using computers to analyze data. They could plug in any variable against a population and quickly come up with association data--which were then reported to the public, and often led to interventions based on what affected the association variable. Results that varied widely were accepted as part of the deal, because the goal was to lower "overall risk"--the thing that was "identified" in the first place. Treatment needs to go back to an orientation on single patients and cause-effect.

that's an excellent point, joan.

Actually, for some gastrointestinal conditions (in my understanding Crohn's and Celiac's are two of them), smoking helps reduce the constipating effects and alleviate symptoms / blockages, and is considered by some doctors to be less risky than allowing the condition to progress unchecked. Since the long-term prognosis for those conditions isn't especially good, some of the side effects of smoking outweigh the health risks when compared to the disease.

The sad truth is medicine most often makes you more sick and encourages you to give up responsibility for your own well being. A truly profound book on this topic is Ivan Illich's Limits to Medicine. I urge everyone to read it.

Take a look at history - medicine has always been muddled. Even in modern times, the process of figuring out best how to treat ailing human beings has always been two steps forward, one step back. The problem here is not that medicine has changed. It's that too many people - including doctors, patients, and the public - buy into the archetypal modern myth that scientific progress necessarily follows a smooth, linear path. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.

Re: the diabetes study--because of the care they received, the annual death rate for both groups in the study was far below patients in the general population at similarly high risk.

it's great that doctors are re-examining current theories of disease. mabey, somewhere, a pendulum is changing direction. . . (cue overture)

This is a great round up of health related topics Philip.

Though Sara-- I'm pretty sure there are some life-saving medications out there.

Just enough chemo to kill the cancer not the patient; has saved many breast cancer survivors for instance.

Yeah, the side effects can be deadly, hair falls out, you come to a near death, but there is the % rate of survivors at least in that category, who may even be bipolar or depressed or SZ and be alive to tell about it.