Western medicine today
A thought on western healthcare: I think our system of giving medical care has become morally bankrupt. I’m not talking about the lack of universal insurance, though that’s a whole other issue. I’m talking about the way we cling to old ethical ideas from an earlier age (at all costs try to preserve life) to the point that we have become more concerned with preserving life than with easing suffering. Watching medical shows, I always felt that I was somehow morally incapable of being a doctor because I couldn’t understand this urgent drive, this moral imperative to keep people alive who are past the point of getting any joy out of life or giving any joy; that I couldn’t somehow sense the meaning of the sanctity of life, quite, that the boundary between life and death seemed so fuzzy to me, it was so unclear how one ought to tread it.
But the more I’m thinking about it- particularly under the influence of reading “The spirit catches you and you fall down” and also- hmm…what have the other influences been, I’m not sure…- the more I’m feeling that we are, first of all, putting our desire to always push for the small-chance miracle cure without fully acknowledging how much suffering this can cause, and often for what? It’s unclear to me that we’re really evaluating clearly how successful these efforts are, because we’re all so unbelievably thrilled and awed by the success stories. And of course, the success stories aren’t mere coincidence, they ARE a result of actual high-quality techniques because the techniques are being used in cases where the survival rate without the technique would basically be zero. So it might be raising your odds of survival hundreds of times. But if it leaves still a pretty low chance of survival and guarantees a whole lot of suffering-suffering that it’s hard for the individual to predict how difficult it will be in making the decision, and that doctors and family members in our current culture pressure people to overlook so that I would consider it hard to argue that people are really choosing the option that actually has, in econ speak, the highest expected value-are we really improving the world by pushing this procedure on everyone it could possibly help? Think about this. Also, our failure to really make treating the soul an everyday part of medicine -rather than being the psychiatrists specialty (sort of, and only some psychiatrists-or what the chaplain quickly takes care of for an hour a day when he comes by-is TOTALLY unacceptable, particularly as it’s quite clear from all the placebo effect stuff, and the fact that people can do things like keep themselves alive until a loved one arrives that having our soul/mind in tune in the right way can have an extremely drastic effect on medical outcomes. We have a lot to learn from people like the Hmong (the Southeast Asian animist immigrant group focused on in the book "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down"), even though they also have much to learn from us.
But the more I’m thinking about it- particularly under the influence of reading “The spirit catches you and you fall down” and also- hmm…what have the other influences been, I’m not sure…- the more I’m feeling that we are, first of all, putting our desire to always push for the small-chance miracle cure without fully acknowledging how much suffering this can cause, and often for what? It’s unclear to me that we’re really evaluating clearly how successful these efforts are, because we’re all so unbelievably thrilled and awed by the success stories. And of course, the success stories aren’t mere coincidence, they ARE a result of actual high-quality techniques because the techniques are being used in cases where the survival rate without the technique would basically be zero. So it might be raising your odds of survival hundreds of times. But if it leaves still a pretty low chance of survival and guarantees a whole lot of suffering-suffering that it’s hard for the individual to predict how difficult it will be in making the decision, and that doctors and family members in our current culture pressure people to overlook so that I would consider it hard to argue that people are really choosing the option that actually has, in econ speak, the highest expected value-are we really improving the world by pushing this procedure on everyone it could possibly help? Think about this. Also, our failure to really make treating the soul an everyday part of medicine -rather than being the psychiatrists specialty (sort of, and only some psychiatrists-or what the chaplain quickly takes care of for an hour a day when he comes by-is TOTALLY unacceptable, particularly as it’s quite clear from all the placebo effect stuff, and the fact that people can do things like keep themselves alive until a loved one arrives that having our soul/mind in tune in the right way can have an extremely drastic effect on medical outcomes. We have a lot to learn from people like the Hmong (the Southeast Asian animist immigrant group focused on in the book "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down"), even though they also have much to learn from us.