The New X-Files
By Michael Applebaum, MD, JD,
FCLM
The truth is out
there.
It is just that no
one knows it.
“Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of
Unintended Consequences” by Edward Tenner (Knopf; 1st edition, May 7, 1996,
346 pages), describes the author’s concept of "revenge effects"--the
unintended consequences of the so-called ingenuities that characterize the
mechanical, chemical, biological, and medical forms of “progress” in our
modern age.
The book begins, "One of
industrial and postindustrial humanity's perennial nightmares is the machine
that passes from stubbornness to rebellion..." According
to Tenner, our confidence in technological solutions may be misplaced.
He posits that despite technology's advances allowing "human
modification of the natural world," "reality is always gaining on
us." Tenner argues that
progress in numerous fields of endeavor has been undercut by unanticipated
revenge effects, such as antibiotics that promise the cure of age-old disease
but end up breeding resistant microorganisms.
What would Tenner say about the
files on the new Xs: CelebreX, VioXX and BeXtra? “I told you so.”
But drug problems are not new.
There are numerous other examples of drugs gone bad from way before the
Xs.
When it comes to a lot of things
medical, there is a whole lot of ignorance going on. Really, how can the manufacturers and FDA know ALL the
consequences of a substance put into the body and under what conditions those
outcomes will occur? They can’t.
(Of course, those of which they are aware should be made public in a
timely fashion.)
Much of medicine is a religion
complete with priests (physicians), houses of worship (hospitals/cathedrals and
doctor’s offices/churches), temple servants (nurses, techs, etc.), sacraments
(drugs and procedures) and supplicants (patients). Then there are those who create the commandments of the
faith, e.g., drug manufacturers, medical journals, government regulatory
agencies. Call them what you will.
Patients have faith in the system so they submit.
So do the priests. The physicians work in the belief that what they are told to
prescribe or do is what is best for the patient. As “captains of the ship” they direct others to fall in
line to do their bidding. And
(again) their bidding is usually motivated by doing what is thought to be right
for the patient. Thus nurses,
assistants, techs, etc. act as the agents of the priests multiplying and
proliferating the faith-based treatments into the population.
It is this multiplicative effect that makes the physician so dangerous
for neither he nor she knows what he or she does. A physician mostly believes that what he or she does is
right.
Forgive them Lord, for they KNOW not what they are doing.
The system is flawed and can be improved.
Of this there can be no doubt. Anything
can be improved. The physician is
the epitome of the middleperson. If
the system could be represented as an hourglass, the physician would be the
narrow part in the center. This
gives the physician “funnel vision.” If
you cut an hourglass in the very middle you have a right-side up funnel above
sitting on top of an upside-down funnel below.
Looking upwards, the doc is the unknowing, faith-filling repository of
“information” and “treatment regimens” from the many above (e.g., drug
companies, medical journals). Looking
downwards, the physician then distributes the “information” and “treatment
regimens” to the many more below. Picture
the products and information from the big businesses of medicine as germs; the
physician is the one who inhales them from above, becomes infected and then
sneezes the germs down on the rest of us.
Any physician worth his or her
salt, would counsel every person to avoid the sick care system like the plague.
This is especially true for the chemicals that we are told to put into
our bodies, i.e., drugs.
The X drugs were designed for
pain relief, in particular, joint pain. Although
there are numerous causes of joint pain, many result from being too fat and too
sedentary. There is a choice.
You can get your heart problems naturally from growing old or you can get
them young and unnaturally from the drugs you took because you needed rescue
from overweight and inactivity in the worst way.
This is how most of your
illnesses occur—body neglect. You
have the choice to get fit or take their drugs and get set for another
self-induced problem.
You might think that medications
will take a bite out of your illness. Think
again. Their revenge effects will take a bite out of your life.
The truth is no longer out there.
Now you know it. The truth
is within you.