re: Medicine Isn't A Science. Practice of the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease

Modern medicine is “sick care”. The author below refers to most conventional medicine as being palliative (meaning meant to provide relief, but not cure)

Background reading to understand where we are as a species



Agriculture and industrial revolution led to many improvements/achievements, but some trade off were made:

Famine has been replaced by obesity (and chronic illness that follows)

Antibiotics did indeed revolutionize the management of infectious disease (but effect is waning due in large part to injudicious use). Most people fail to understand that the impact that modern living plays in infectious diseases. Agriculture led to humans living in one place in close proximity to other humans and domesticated animals. Increased exposure to pathogens became the norm (as did plagues even to this day as we are even more interconnected globally). Hunter gatherers living in small bands geographically isolated would have been less impacted.

Most people in Western countries are living with /dying from diseases of chronic illnesses. The author makes a case that many of these are driven by evolutionary mismatch (cultural evolution has outpaced biological evolution).

We are designed for cyclical exposures to:

Famine and food abundance (feast/famine cycles) - sabotaged by abundant, low quality food. Guidelines to eat frequently (support the economy…)
Daily strenuous exercise - sabotaged by technology making our lives “easier”
Sleep regulated by rising and falling of the sun - sabotaged by artificial lighting, shift work, screens
Rare, but severe stressors in the environment - chronic stressors from news, social media, driving, dealing with others trapped unaware in the construct (in failing health)

Culture has made all of these changes acceptable…

A reductionist approach to deliver sick care services will not address what I listed above. What you get is an expensive system that bails people out, but does not make them healthy (which is where we are)

In some ways, we are victims of our own success (some are more aware than others)

PS: lots of conjecture as to how/why humans decided to farm. I and others have speculated that humanity was nudged in that direction by others…