You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an alternative browser.
You should upgrade or use an alternative browser.
I don't suppose you have ever really been in danger of death then Devil's Reject, I know lots of people who have survived cancer, knife wounds and pneumonia and none of them could have done it without medicine. It's not always drugs, sometimes it's just a person who you trust with your life telling you what changes you need to make. Doctors themselves make wonderful placebos. (They do other useful stuff as well.)
on a skew to devilsreject's point, i do think that medicine is dragging human biological evolution off at a tangent somewhat.. it helps sustain the lives of people who, for one reason or another, are defective and wouldnt persist to live. natural selection has the potential to cure a lot of illnesses because a condition that kills the carrier runs risk of disappearing itself. in interfering with this, we are going against natural selection's ultimate design plan..
in response to something devilsreject said; dont be too condescending towards medicine with things like "we cant even cure the common cold" - the common cold is a virus, and in incredibly successful one. it is really quite good at infecting a host and we should be thankful that its payload is light. virii mutate, and your body's immune system is not an intelligent, calculating computer that builds antibodies based on logic.. upon infection, your body just throws every antibody it knows how to make, at the infection. any antibodies that are successful are replicated in large amounts. if no antibody is successful, your body produces mutations of them.
it doesnt analyse the structure of a virus and build the perfect antibody first time out..
this is why some people catch the same cold and get affected in different ways or for different times - two or 3 antibodies might work with different effectivenesses for a given strain of virus. if you have the antibody that kills it off very quickly, you dont suffer as much as another person whose antibody is different from yours, and less effective.
for a cold, the biggest problem comes from secondary infections after the virus has finished destroying your cell structure leaving bursted cells as ripe feeding grounds for passing bacteria etc
there is nothing medicine can do to help this, because the virus mutates randomly and there is no way to predict its form - if we could do this, we could also predict the lottery. immunisation usually involves injecting a person with a disabled version of a virus, so the antibodies react to the protein structure and build in some numbers, but the virus (being disabled) cannot replicate (which it would do faster than the antibodies could be tried and assembled). upon real infection, the body has a cache of antibodies that already work, and can more quickly produce additional ones to curb the virus population
its a very politically incorrect thing for me to say, if i were to assert that medicine should not treat some things.. im sure noone would really be prepared to draw the line splitting what should and shouldnt be treated, but in keeping defective organisms alive, we arent doing the future generations any favours..
in response to something devilsreject said; dont be too condescending towards medicine with things like "we cant even cure the common cold" - the common cold is a virus, and in incredibly successful one. it is really quite good at infecting a host and we should be thankful that its payload is light. virii mutate, and your body's immune system is not an intelligent, calculating computer that builds antibodies based on logic.. upon infection, your body just throws every antibody it knows how to make, at the infection. any antibodies that are successful are replicated in large amounts. if no antibody is successful, your body produces mutations of them.
it doesnt analyse the structure of a virus and build the perfect antibody first time out..
this is why some people catch the same cold and get affected in different ways or for different times - two or 3 antibodies might work with different effectivenesses for a given strain of virus. if you have the antibody that kills it off very quickly, you dont suffer as much as another person whose antibody is different from yours, and less effective.
for a cold, the biggest problem comes from secondary infections after the virus has finished destroying your cell structure leaving bursted cells as ripe feeding grounds for passing bacteria etc
there is nothing medicine can do to help this, because the virus mutates randomly and there is no way to predict its form - if we could do this, we could also predict the lottery. immunisation usually involves injecting a person with a disabled version of a virus, so the antibodies react to the protein structure and build in some numbers, but the virus (being disabled) cannot replicate (which it would do faster than the antibodies could be tried and assembled). upon real infection, the body has a cache of antibodies that already work, and can more quickly produce additional ones to curb the virus population
its a very politically incorrect thing for me to say, if i were to assert that medicine should not treat some things.. im sure noone would really be prepared to draw the line splitting what should and shouldnt be treated, but in keeping defective organisms alive, we arent doing the future generations any favours..
fetus_fajitas said:There have been loads of cases of people cheating death, paramedics bringing ppl back and all sorts of miracles. And i for one think that is possible to avoid death, death is NOT inevitable and Science has the cure.
I really don't know why you say this since so far nobody has survived death.
Well as far as saying that "medicine is crap," that's a bunch of bull. People who wsh to prolong their lives have medicine in some cases to prolong their lives in order to enjoy a natural death at a natural age for death. I think that it would be increasingly difficult to live a longer life than is naturally possible because of the amount of knowledge and memories that you would accumulate along the way and the inability to remember those memories as you grow older.