It’s quite common for a “standard” medical treatment to work no better than older treatments or none at all.https://twitter.com/StephenPiment/status/1237598764023476225 …
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When a TV show like House MD wants to show that a doctor is a brave maverick, they show him breaking the rules to give patients risky treatments — never breaking the rules to leave patients alone.
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It takes effort to give fair consideration to “what if this *doesn’t* work? How does this procedure or drug compare to *doing nothing*?” When the evidence is ambiguous, err on the side of LESS treatment.
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I sometimes fantasize that to really fix this problem we’d need more opportunities to get caring personal attention *with no* drugs or surgeries.
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Like, if someone is sick with something there’s no effective treatment for, they should still get to rest up in a special healing environment and temporarily have other people take care of their needs.
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I loved giving birth in a hospital — because there were nice nurses around who encouraged me & helped me to the potty when I was too weak to stand. I fucking *loved* having the friendly company and the reassuring structure of a familiar (medical) culture.
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But you know what? It cost me thousands of dollars, even with health insurance. And I had a perfectly healthy birth that didn’t need much medical intervention. Why am I paying thousands of dollars for, mostly, *company*?
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(Yeah, it’s a bit less risky to have a hospital birth than a home birth, and it makes a big difference in an emergency. But in most cases, you’re fine either way.)
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Doctors and nurses should not be the only professional be-nice-to-you-when-you’re-sick-ers. Medical hospitals should not be the only place you can go when you need caretaking.
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Before they could treat TB with antibiotics, they took sick people to sanitariums. Basically no effective medicine went on there, just rest, care, a change of scene, and natural beauty. This fundamentally makes sense to me, given a disease medicine doesn’t know how to treat yet.
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(Plus it’s good for public health! Keeps sick people from infecting others!)
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Immune function affects how well you recover from *a lot* of diseases; and it responds to stress. “Be nice to sick people and make their lives easier” is not pseudoscience; it makes a measurable difference.
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Obligatory topical tie-in: hospitals are gonna be overwhelmed with COVID19. Some people who get the disease need specialized equipment you can only get in an ICU to survive. Far more people are just gonna be, y’know, sick. Laid up, contagious, unable to get much done.
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We have *terrible* infrastructure as a society for dealing with “a lot of people need to rest up.” They’ll be clogging hospitals, they’ll be trying to push through and go to work, etc.
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It’s a measure of how good or bad we are at translating wealth into leisure, to see how well or poorly we can adapt to “lots of people are sick in bed.”
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End of conversation
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