Medicine is a posable missile aimed at a dangerous, elusive target – The Health Care Blog

By HANS DUVEFELT

(Desperate times called for desperate measures.)

In the tech world, we expect our devices to become obsolete and outdated very quickly. The world’s largest tech companies didn’t even exist a few years ago. Bitcoin, a virtual currency that I at least can’t handle, seems to be more attractive than gold.

I have a feeling that most people are accepting, or at least accepting, the speed of technological change.

But medical advances, which are made quickly, are terrifying to many. Vaccination hesitation, for example, includes concerns and characterizations such as “unproven” and “guinea pig”.

But we as a society can strive for and reward rapid progress in one area and reject it in another, especially when we feel threatened by external influences or phenomena – be it a virus, climate change or the collapse of our economic infrastructure such as supply chains and raw material.

Technology has its own dynamic, driven more by profit motives than by altruism or the desire to improve people’s lives. Medicine clearly has profit as a driving force, but also aims to improve people’s lives. Healing or alleviating illness must have a higher priority than making life more pleasant.

But when a pandemic begins and its extent cannot be estimated, when the future of humanity and life on earth seems to be at stake – can we afford to forego the know-how and resources of medical science?

I’m not an early adopter when it comes to drugs that claim to reverse what people are putting on through their lifestyle choices. Rather, I’d encourage them to do the non-drug things that we know are safe and effective. But what choice does humanity really have in the face of a pandemic?

It seems now, a few years after the pandemic, to simply say that it’s not as bad as it could have been. But we don’t know for sure, we haven’t seen the end yet – the virus continues to mutate in case someone should forget.

Innovation cannot be stopped and we already live in a society where citizens are told to wear helmets, buckle up, drink and drive, not distribute or pollute, steal, rape or murder – and pretend to be get vaccinated at school entry.

Freedom without regard for others is selfish. It creates anarchy.

Hans Duvefelt is a Swedish born rural family doctor in Maine. This post originally appeared on his blog, A Country Doctor Writes. here.