Dedicated to the Game

While waiting for labs with me in the ER yesterday, a younger colleague made an offhand comment about quitting medicine. She felt frustrated because, instead of helping people get over their health problems and get on with their business, she spent her time treating public health problems in the clinic and emergency room. Even worse, she had begun to feel complicit in the distortion. I didn’t know whether to offer congratulations, condolences, or both. Most medical professionals never get that far. They continue to feel good about encouraging dialysis for blind, depressed diabetics with one remaining limb and prescribing cholesterol-lowering medication to nonagenarians. Thereby, only the superficial dissatisfactions of their jobs remain.

I don’t think that doctors should feel guilty about the public health problems confronting them in clinics. Nobody planned for our society to fail us. We spent so much of our history working so hard to make life easier and more certain that we just didn’t notice when we started working harder and harder to make life easier than we needed. The illusion of increasing certainty helped us zoom past the point of diminishing returns. Once enough surplus accumulated to ensure against starvation, twice the surplus seemed to offer twice the insurance against shortage, but the excess would only mold and spoil the lot. Our surplus is spoiling in us now, clogging our blood vessels and glycosylating our nerve fibers.

A solution to the problem lies beyond the scope of clinical medicine. The only solution may be time and economic dissolution. The furor over limiting soft-drink sizes in New York City does not bode well for self-conscious alternatives. But medical professionals can feel bad about their complicity in the whole scheme, because our business is to tell people that there’s a pill for all that.

We tell the public that we can “treat” and “manage” diabetes, coronary artery disease and heart failure. The proper terms would be “attenuate” and “temporize”. The proper terms would imply a lack of control however, and a sense of control is what we’re selling as much as medication or surgery. We keep the illusion of control on offer in the name of comfort. We want our patients to feel free from anxiety about their health. They should feel empowered, and they do, which is good since they will still be physically ill under treatment, just a bit less so than when they consulted us.

I guess there really is a pill for surplus-mold, at least on a psychological level, but it will cost those who take it a lot of money, and the motive to seek out the roots of their ailment. Besides, it will keep the doctors feeling good about something they shouldn’t be doing. It may appear to buy some time, but it won’t cure anything.