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.
|
