Saturday, December 24, 2022

Ethics in Medicine

If our primary goal is to improve the human condition, then propagating suffering is the antithesis to it.  Any behavior that breeds more harm against the oath, "Thou shall do no harm," demonstrates an active flaunting of the ideals of medicine.  A self knighted "Health Foundation" must first actually refrain from harming hundreds of people before seeking out to deploy antique empires in far off places with a favorable international exchange rate where a peanut at home is a pound afar.

It is not a psychiatric playground to ruin yourself and everyone around you in a pyrrhic loss, not even a pyrrhic victory.  You leave that psychological baggage at the doorstep before you enter the hallowed halls of medicine.

It is not a place of judgement and social engineering.  This is not a wooden puppet theater.  This is why there are such explicit protections for belief, orientation, physical traits, gender, etc.  It applies to everyone, not just someone who thinks they are the prince or princess of the building.  I would privately joke about people carrying such fruity airs of faux royalty by prefacing their name with "King" _so and so__/  Even real royals, one who actually visited me from overseas, are not so self-absorbed.  Medicine is meant to heal ailments of the body and mind, not create more of them.

It is not a place to put your ego above the life and death reality of your words.  If you insist on erroneous ideas such as opposing the covid-19 vaccination campaign that has more or less restored normalcy to American life, what you do is indirectly mass murder people by encouraging vaccine denial, thereby allowing the covid-19 virus to be so much more severe and dangerous.  The vaccine turns a once deadly new plague into something like an old cold or flu.  Nobody is going to lug around the mountains of herbs and pints of oils with them all the time in case they catch covid-19.  It is simply more practical to upgrade everyone's immune system to be effective towards covid-19 all the time, without need for reactive herbal extracts which fresh supply you must have on standby at all times - great business model.  Moreover, those magic elixirs factually have not been tested in humans with covid-19 for effectiveness, patent or no patent.  The right to access over the counter herbs, vitamins, minerals, and natural supplements should exist and be maintained as a uniquely American right towards personal health, but these materials should not be construed as a cure without testing them as one first.  To suggest that a patent replaces a clinical trial fools nobody of importance or influence in legal medicine.

It is our place as scientists and those involved in the science to treat it with the utmost sense of responsibility it deserves.  Although the day to day should not be treated like a constant emergency, but with the appropriate amount of urgency or even calm, the fact is that we are dealing with the matters of life and death for some.  It is not a joke for people who have cancer, heart disease, brain ailments, or permanent infections.  It is not a joke for those who have been cosmetically disabled by a disease.  It is not a joke for those whose body is crumbling from underneath their mind long before natural old age.  It is not a game, and for those who abuse and have abused the channels of science as merely a game should read over this from the beginning to the end a few times.