arcticorangutan on Nostr: The danger of quick fixes in human health: The way our society has learned to ...
The danger of quick fixes in human health:
The way our society has learned to approach health is through quick fixes.
There’s a simple and logical reason for this: Quick fixes generally alleviate the immediate symptoms a person is struggling with. And our healthcare system is primarily incentivized to alleviate symptoms.
Future consequences are exponentially less relevant to a pharmaceutical company or a doctor. This is because we simply have a very poor understanding of long term cause and effect in the human body. As an example, it’s just very hard to know what unique combination of genetics and external stressors have caused cancer in an individual.
If you build a house and the house collapses 10 years later, it’s still relatively easy to investigate who the culprit was and to hold them accountable. This level of accountability is difficult with a complex system like the human body and exponentially more so the further in the future the consequences.
Whether consciously or not, our system has internalized this principle.
Doctors simply do not have the time to really worry about the holistic health of their patients, they are incentivized to see as many patients as possible, relieve their symptoms and not kill them in the short term. And they do not have time to question whatever new treatment science funded by big pharma has most recently been recommended to them.
In brief: Your wish to live a long and healthy life is not aligned with the incentives of the system. Awareness of this problem is the first step towards a solution.
Published at
2024-03-28 11:06:02Event JSON
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"content": "The danger of quick fixes in human health:\n\nThe way our society has learned to approach health is through quick fixes.\n\nThere’s a simple and logical reason for this: Quick fixes generally alleviate the immediate symptoms a person is struggling with. And our healthcare system is primarily incentivized to alleviate symptoms.\n\nFuture consequences are exponentially less relevant to a pharmaceutical company or a doctor. This is because we simply have a very poor understanding of long term cause and effect in the human body. As an example, it’s just very hard to know what unique combination of genetics and external stressors have caused cancer in an individual.\n\nIf you build a house and the house collapses 10 years later, it’s still relatively easy to investigate who the culprit was and to hold them accountable. This level of accountability is difficult with a complex system like the human body and exponentially more so the further in the future the consequences.\n\nWhether consciously or not, our system has internalized this principle.\n\nDoctors simply do not have the time to really worry about the holistic health of their patients, they are incentivized to see as many patients as possible, relieve their symptoms and not kill them in the short term. And they do not have time to question whatever new treatment science funded by big pharma has most recently been recommended to them.\n\nIn brief: Your wish to live a long and healthy life is not aligned with the incentives of the system. Awareness of this problem is the first step towards a solution.\nhttps://m.primal.net/HpCk.jpg ",
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