An Uncommon Guide to Retirement by Jeff Haanen

Author:Jeff Haanen [Haanen, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Moody Publishers
Published: 2019-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE POWER OF MEDICINE

In the past century, medicine has changed the West and the whole world. Harvard historian Niall Ferguson makes the case in Civilization: The West and the Rest that science was key to the West’s global dominance in the last 500 years, especially with regard to healthcare. As scientists revealed the mysteries of the microbial world, doctors began to push back disease and illness as never before. Even in European colonies, often rife with injustice, life expectancy rose drastically. In French colonies, for example, life expectancy in Senegal grew from 30.2 years in 1945 to 52.3 in 2000; in Vietnam it grew from 22.5 years in 1930 to 69.4 in 2000; and it rose from 28.8 years in Tunisia in 1935 to 72.1 in 2000. Medicine and science were triumphant.4

Today, medicine is not just a service or profession, it’s a powerful force. Over 13 million people work in healthcare, the federal government spends over $1 trillion each year on Medicare and Medicaid, and each year Americans spend an average of $10,348 on healthcare per person.5 The medical establishment dominates human experience, from life’s first cry until final breath.

But some physicians see cracks in medicine’s promise to care for any and every need the body may have.

Abraham Nussbaum, a psychiatrist and author of The Finest Traditions of My Callings: One Physician’s Search for the Renewal of Medicine, began residency as all doctors do: working on dead body parts. For Nussbaum, the autopsy was a metaphor for how medicine sees its live patients today. “Parts and money—too often that is what we physicians see when we look at patients,” says Nussbaum. “What is broken? Can it be patched or does it need to be replaced? How much can I bill for the procedure?” Medicine has become efficient at “generating money by trying to fix faltering parts,” says Nussbaum. Hearts, hips, and hairlines can all be fixed … for a price.6

But have we come to not just trust our doctors for medical care, but place our hope in them as the high priests of the body offering health (and salvation?) to all who place their faith in their powers?

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