Medicine and Wisdom
2013-02-19
As I have been getting older, I have become increasing skeptical about some large segments of medical science. It seems they have largely mastered the skill of changing how your body, but are still lacking in the area of when this is a good idea.
Some examples I have come across:
- Fever are part of your body's immune system. In most case, taking something such as aspirin to lower it will make the actual sickness last longer.
- Morning sickness largely prevents a pregnant woman from eating things that would be harmful to her child (which has lower tolerance for toxins).
- Contraception and/or abortion has dropped the fertility rate well below replacement level across most of the west, with no foreseeable way of getting it back.
- High blood pressure is usually the result of atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries). There is ongoing debate over whether treating the high blood pressure itself actually increases your life expectancy at all.
- Evolution requires that living individuals die off in order to free up resources for their offspring. Low-food-chain creatures such as mice and rabbits can be depended on to get themselves eaten sooner or later (usually sooner), but apex predators such as such as wolves and crocodiles need (and have) other mechanisms. This suggests that trying to increase human life expectancy indefinitely is a bad idea. (Logically, this would not apply to creationists, but I have found they generally already think that people should not live forever, at least in theory).
Response
The following alternative view was suggested:
I am not sure that morning sickness is just nature's way to prevent the mother from eating toxiins, but instead just the body's period of adjusting to a new hormonal balance. Later in the pregnancy, the morning sickness passes but still there remains the mother's sensitivity to toxins ingested throughout her pregnancy, no?
According to Wikipedia, the baby starts becoming less vulnerable after about three months. The mother gets to keep her fully-developed resistances throughout the process. Hormonal change is definitely a proximate cause, and possibly the main one (in biology, things are rarely simple). That does not, in itself, mean that the adjustment process serves no purpose. My point was about the dangers of assuming that things like that are useless without checking.
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