joanna bujes wrote: > > it's just that whatever I go in for he will offer three > solutions: antibiotics, chemicals, surgery.
Sometimes it's the patient who makes the demand for radical treatment. When I broke my hip & in the emergency room chose my surgeon (the daughter of a surgeon I had had for a minor affair many years earlier), Jan's response to my choice was that she vaguely remembered something negative about Dr. Wright. Then later Jan remembered what it was. A fellow employee at the P.O. had had back trouble and went to Wright: who prescribed a course of exercises and _cured_ the back trouble. But the patient was unhappy -- she was disappointed that surgery wasn't required! But sometimes surgery is required -- as for my broken hip. And while Wright tried to avoid surgery for my wrist, it was ultimately necessary. And anti-biotics have saved a lot of lives, as well as a lot of misery. Back in the '70s on three different occasions I was sick for over a month with what I thought was a cold, but was bronchitis, and each time anti-biotics finally cleared it up quickly. Also -- you apparently make an exception for dentistry. Anti-biotics are pretty important there as well. And Zanoflex stopped migraines that were so bad that had lived in a high rise or owned a gun I probably wouldn't be here today. So chemicals can be pretty important as well. I don't think it's correct to make blanket statements about medicine in the u.s. today. There are always going to be royal fuck-ups under capitalism. And even if and when we achieve communism, there will remain plenty of room for either sheer unavoidable error, the limits of technology and/or knowledge, and the basic fraility of the human body. Throwing money at in in the form of guaranteeing costs for patients would still make a lot of difference. And as both Marta & I have pointed out, some people would get a lot more out of their treatment if they had enough money to live on in addition. Social struggle can potentially improve on that (at least for temporary periods) even under capitalism. Incidentally, patient deaths go up as the number of patients per nurse go up. You can't blame medicine for that. And whatever the weaknesses and even crimes of neuropsychiatry, it is also true that the suicide rate is _much_ higher for patients who don't receive medical care. Carrol > > Joanna
