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This seems like a good spot to repost a few passages from Limits to Medicine, Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health by Ivan Illich, 1974: "A world of op
by blueridge 4y ago
This seems like a good spot to repost a few passages from Limits to Medicine, Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health by Ivan Illich, 1974:
"A world of optimal and widespread health is obviously a world of minimal and only occasional medical intervention. Healthy people are those who live in healthy homes, on a healthy diet, in an environment equally fit for birth, growth, work, healing, and dying; they are sustained by a culture that enhances the conscious acceptance of limits to population, of aging, of incomplete recovery and ever-imminent death."
“Man's consciously lived fragility, individuality and relatedness make the experience of pain, of sickness and of death an integral part of his life. The ability to cope with this trio autonomously is fundamental to his health. As he becomes dependent on the management of his intimacy, he renounces his autonomy and his health must decline.”
“The more time, toil, and sacrifice spent by a population in producing medicine as a commodity, the larger will be the by-product, namely, the fallacy that society has a supply of health locked away which can be mined and marketed.”
"Health designates a process of adaptation. It is not the result of instinct, but of an autonomous yet culturally shaped reaction to socially created reality. It designates the ability to adapt to changing environments, to growing up and to aging, to healing when damaged, to suffering and to peaceful expectation of death. Health embraces the future as well, and therefore includes anguish and the inner resources to live with it".
""Health," after all, is simply an everyday word that is used to designate the intensity with which individuals cope with their internal states and their environmental conditions. The society which can reduce professional intervention to the minimum will provide the best conditions for health."
- spicyusername 4y agoGreat quote, thanks for sharing.
- noobermin 4y agoThe alternative you ask for then, is for people to merely die and suffer in pain while doing so. In the past, that's what we did, because there just was no option for such people. I looked up Ivan Illich, and this essay critiques modern medicine as creating "lifelong patients." That indeed is what has happened, but the alternative is for people to just die. The reality really is I don't really believe anyone ever took death "peacefully" as he puts it here, they too raged and cried and felt all the painful emotions people feel today, they just would actually die and so those emotions would eventually cease. The argument then should be about values: do we actually value human beings as sacred, important things, and their lives are worth preserving just because they are human? The only way you can accept his argument is your answer to this is no.
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- Der_Einzige 4y agoThe alternative could be to tax the fk out of sugar and other parts of our food chain known to cause people to go into the obesity-diabaetes pipeline. Obesity related health problems are BY FAR the most common killer in America today. But we won't do that because it'll make some very rich people upset and it'll reduce individual liberty. We value individual liberty over a healthy population.
- twelve40 4y agohaha the other thread said the real culprit is the vegetable oil, not sugar. Twenty years ago it probably would have been fat. Too many things to ban!
- Rury 4y agoI disagree. Look at your body. It's multicellular, not one living thing. Your very cells both compete and cooperate with one another for resources to survive (just as we humans do amongst ourselves). For the greater good of the organism (you), individual cells are programmed to die when they are in poor health or old age or in too much stress, to allow younger healthier cells to take their place for the greater good of the organism as a whole. When this process is averted, or goes awry, old/unhealthy cells remain and the organism suffers, as it has to support these old/unhealthy cells which don't contribute their fair share to the organism. It has to divert resources which could otherwise go to new younger healthier productive cells. Worse, is cancer, which is literally when cells rebel their original programming, and become selfishly greedy. Obviously, as we all know, these things can lead to the organism becoming dysfunctional and even dying. This reality applies to cells, and to organizations like companies, governments, and even species. So to answer: are lives worth preserving? Yes. But reality is, there can come times when the preserving the lives of the old, is directly at odds with the lives of the young, and choosing to preserve old lives over young lives, is harmful to lives as a whole.
- maerF0x0 4y agoUnfortunately we seem to be stuck in a local maxima, where we do not yet know how to do permanent regeneration to keep someone well in the healthy zone, but also know how to keep people into what can best be describe as "Not yet dead" (but certainly not "healthy" either). Groups focused on longevity and removing age related diseases, in theory, should eventually get us to a point where the best parts of youth (including learning and plasticity) should make it unnecessary to have children any more, save for replacement of those who die from other causes (and maybe populating other planets etc).