We're in an uncanny valley in medicine right now where it is good enough to give the impression that we have more control over human health than we actually do.

We're in an uncanny valley in medicine right now where it is good enough to give the impression that we have more control over human health than we actually do. More and more, the general public has come to see medicine as the Genius Bar service department for the human body. Everything that can be fixed, should be fixed. Let's get this thing back to like-new condition as we can, right? But in reality, medicine is still much closer to the older model of simply seeking to reduce human suffering. You will die of something one day and most likely you will have 8 other things wrong with you when it happens. Curing all cancer in all humans would only at about 2 years of average increased lifespan because of all the other causes of death that are creeping up right behind it in the background. So there is a tension here of what medicine should conceptually be doing. If, in the effort to "fix everything" (which is impossible), you actually introduce more suffering (by treating a diagnostic finding that may never have resulted in symptomatic disease), then many would say that's a failure of medicine.