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Modern Medicine is not Humane

  • Assessing our health used to be a process of analyzing our external visible behavior and our body's fluids: blood, urine, feces, mucus, etc.
  • Those fluids constituted the only clue to divine the secret inner life of our body.
  • Then machines began to explore and reveal our internal organs. X-rays and MRIs create a visual image of what goes on inside our body. Invasive procedures like endoscopy and colonoscopy physically enter our body.
  • The more visual information we obtain about our own body the less special our body (and therefore our existence) seems to be.
  • Hospitals reveal that we are just a bunch of pulsing organs wrapped in skin.
  • The merciless denuding and baring of our body's machinery has made us less special, less beautiful and less interesting.
  • Most tests result in a long list of technical words and numbers, symbols that a doctor can decipher based on algorithms that she learned in school.
  • The numbers of a clinical result are simply a measurement of how long you are likely to live. And a reminder that we all have to die, sooner or later. So why bother to feel bad about someone's numbers?
  • Our life becomes less interesting, and the lives of others become less interesting.
  • Ironically, in order to save lives, modern medicine has to destroy the magic of being alive.