Practicing Medicine

A friend of mine has cancer. Sneaked up on him. One of those out-of-the-blue things. He’s done some therapy, not the usual chemo, but similar. Now, we wait to hear if it worked. And that has me examining all I thought I knew about our modern medical wonders.

I’ve heard people say (been guilty of it myself) that it’s this metalically-, chemically-, radiation-poisoned world we live in that’s to blame for cancer’s ubiquity. I don’t think, in the raft of studies done and reported daily, I’ve ever seen a study comparing the incidence of yesteryear with today’s figures. I have heard it said that cancer just wouldn’t show up dependably, if you tried for a summary of its frequency in the past. These explanations seem to be based on the idea that no one really recognized cancer back then. I have even heard it said that cancer just wasn’t a factor in the past. These explanations imply that while it may have existed, it was rare.

It’s possible, I suppose, that cancer had little hope of competing with other causes of death and disease before modern medicine. Dying from an infection planted by an injury must be rarer with available antibiotics---at least until now, when their usefulness has been subverted. Childhood diseases are only “childhood” diseases because you died or you lived, and were immune from then on. And now most of them are vaccinated against---as is smallpox, which was less choosy about the age of its victims. Before treatment, water carried several ways to die. Even the foods were more inventive in poisoning us before modern methods of refrigeration and pasteurization--again, that's only true if we ignore the last few years of salmonella, e-coli, etc. Add in the shorter life span, and accidents in work, and the foul air---yes, cancer had a lot of competition.

But I know for a fact that at least two of my forebears died comparatively young of cancer. This would have been around the turn of the last century. It was recognized, and it was not remarkable, then. So that would mean that many died of it, causing little shock value except to their loved ones. In the middle of the last century, as in the century before that, people died of skin cancer—another fact I can prove.

When you really think about it, with perspective, it sounds like all our assumptions that modern medicine is granting us less disease, making remaining diseases less deadly---is more hype than substance. The fact that people now regularly live into their 90s or even 100s, instead of the previously long life of four-score-and-ten, is pointed to as a major advance. But I’ve known many of these ancients, and found them unanimous in their decisions that the last ten to twenty years were an unwanted burden---not living, just existence. And if we’re still dying of the same things, despite all the advances, why is modern medicine so celebrated? Is it just a good job of brainwashing instead of a good job of innovative cures?

My friend and I will be oh, so, impressed with the new cure---if it does. And from happenings like that come the desperate impression that we are living in blessed days now, compared to our ancestors. Remove the voluntary blinders, however, and I have my doubts that we’ve done more than trade one COD for another. Substitute car accidents for farm accidents; accept cancer and heart disease as about the same; recognize that the air is only differently polluted, and that antibiotics were a short-run reprieve; and decide whether the chemicals, radiation and heavy metals have increased our peril---it could be possible that we’ve spent a lot of time running around in impressive circles to get to the same spot.

Still musing, no decision yet, but I suspect the return of the old-wives’ methods and medicines is no accident. Alternative medicine is becoming the alternative to failure of the modern miracles.