Lots of modern medicine doesn't actually work; the stuff that does work (like vaccines) is cheap and doctors will spend little time on it; most doctor time and medical cost is spent on managing chronic diseases of aging that we cannot cure.
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Caring for the chronically/permanently ill is still important but it's depressing as hell and often more about kindness and low-tech caretaking than "cure."
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You could read this in a fatalist sense — “we need to accept illness and death as a reality and be kind to each other instead of obsessing over fancy medical technologies” — but that’s not my takeaway.
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My takeaway is that, once you admit that current medicine really can’t help a lot of people, that’s a really strong argument for inventing medicine that can.
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Samuel Shem isn’t anti-treatment in all cases. He loves surgery — because surgery often *just works.* Nothing *just works* on dementia.
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“Gomer” is a rude word for a geriatric, demented, often institutionalized patient with multiple illnesses. But whatever you call them, the reality is that they’re not going to get *well*.
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It’s the job of those who care for them (doctors, nurses, aides, family, etc) to be kind and make their lives bearable without burning out.
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It’s the job of medical and biological researchers to figure out how to keep people from getting into that screwed-up state to begin with.
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End of conversation
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Then you can read Mount Misery http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/SamuelShem
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