In Praise of Physicians and Scientists

As 2018 draws to a close, I want to make a strong statement about the tireless and often under-appreciated efforts of physicians and scientists.  It is a sad truth in our society that we love to be cynical and suspicious about motivations.  Sometimes this cynicism is warranted, but it is often a herd instinct that has no real foundation in fact or evidence.

Many of our brightest citizens pursue careers in medicine and science.  In doing so, they typically work longer hours, and in the case of scientists, receive lower compensation, than other professionals.  I would add engineers to this description, but since I am an engineer, it would be somewhat self-serving!  So I will simply reference a previous blog on this topic: http://rvgeiger.blogspot.com/2014/11/thoughts-on-panic-over-engineering-and.html .

Science, and medicine in particular, have advanced dramatically in the last two hundred years. They have brought us out of darkness, given us incredible mobility, freed us from many forms of drudgery and physical discomfort, developed untold numbers of new materials and products, and improved our health and longevity in dramatic fashion.  They have also unleashed terrible destruction in the form of weapons and have wrought changes on our society that sometimes seem unsettling and alienating.

It is fashionable to complain about physicians; to enumerate situations where diagnoses have been mistaken or where medical knowledge is incomplete; to conjure up an image of the revolving door doctor’s office, where little time is spent with each patient and the bills seem out of proportion to the services rendered.

To be sure, the cost and delivery of medical services is far from a perfect system.  And there are certainly some physicians who are compensated more generously than a truly equitable system would prescribe.  But the fact is that medicine has benefited human society incredibly and we owe much of the enduring joy of living to the herculean efforts of the medical community.

Many people who indulge in wholesale criticism of modern medicine tout the results from natural or homeopathic medicine, chiropractic, Eastern medical traditions such as Ayurveda, Chinese and others.  No doubt these have something to offer – we are far from knowing everything about health and the human body – but many of these traditions were around for the last several thousand years and didn’t result in a general advancement of human health.

One merely needs to recall a few of the horrors of 18th century life to understand the miraculous impact of allopathic medical progress in the last two hundred years: 

• ·         Child birth was practically Russian roulette – one percent of women giving birth died in the act.  If you had 10 children, you had a 1 in 10 chance of dying by one of those births.  Today the percentage is one hundredth of that, and the few deaths that occur would generally be preventable if medical coverage were more universal.
• ·         The chance of a child dying before its 5^th birthday were generally 1 in 5, or 20%.  Today, the rate is 2-3 in 1000, which is about 0.2%.  Most of those are in impoverished populations who don’t receive good medical care.
• ·         The overall life expectancy was about 38 years.  That is somewhat deceptive, because if you made it to 10 years old, that life expectancy jumped to 58.  Still, it is dramatically shorter than the current 80 years in most of the developed world.
• ·         Epidemics raged throughout Europe and the rest of the world in previous centuries.  Today epidemics are very rare and most of the diseases that were incredibly deadly in the past (plague, smallpox, polio, typhoid fever, cholera, etc.) have been either completely eliminated or dramatically curtailed.

In more recent times, the progress made in the reduction of cardiovascular disease (which, by the way, is one of the primary reasons for the increasing global longevity) and the treatment of cancer is truly remarkable.  Also, the life expectancy for many chronic diseases such as diabetes, cystic fibrosis and others is much higher in recent years.

These wonderful improvements are a combination of medical care, sanitation, pharmaceutical discoveries, and many other contributing factors.  But the basis for all of this progress is medical science and the scientific method.

The scientific method insists on a rigorous approach to attaining knowledge.  It does not take a few anecdotal results and draw conclusions.  How many of us have cited the case of a friend or acquaintance who had success from some unusual therapy and implied that this is ‘evidence’ of its efficacy?  True science does not rush to a result.  It insists on numerous trials and experimentation with unyielding objectivity and rigor.  It can be frustratingly slow and tedious, but it is the only way to arrive at a conclusion that will yield predictable results and successes.

A couple hundred years ago, death from illness was all around us.  No one grew up without experiencing the pain of losing a close friend or relative from an early death.  Today, most of us have had the joy of sharing life with family and friends with very rare intrusions of grief from a sickness or death.  We have a long line of physicians and scientists to thank.