Utah mom says healthy 19-year-old son died from flu shot
Many people manifest a strong belief that doctors are only in it for the money, that they are nothing more than pill salesmen for Big Pharma. I believe that is very far from the truth.
Medicine is science and science is evolving – as are the problems it works to solve.
The reality is that medicine will always be a hit and miss science because each of us is different, and close enough is not always good enough.
Modern medicine enables more people to survive who would otherwise die. Consider someone with a peanut or egg allergy who gets anaphylactic shock. In the past such people simply died, and if they died young enough they didn’t reproduce to pass on the allergy.
Now they do survive, and so more and more people are born with life-threatening anaphylactic allergies because we’ve stopped them from being non-survival traits.
These allergies are going to affect different people in different ways. An allergy to peanuts could be an allergy to a chemical present in peanuts – or in vaccines.
I wonder how many vaccine deaths are due to an anaphylactic allergy to some chemical used in vaccines?
But consider that there may be different allergies in different people to different chemicals. So if you isolate the chemical that kills one kid, and replace it with something else, why wouldn’t the replacement kill a kid who the original chemical might not have affected?
Medicine is no cakewalk.
I believe most doctors do their best for their patients. If you think about it, while the money is lucrative it’s not a pleasant or easy job. You have to be pretty dedicated to earn your crust looking and digging through people’s guts and organs. And you have the ever present risk of a patient dying under your care. Lawsuits aside, the simple human factor of wanting to save a person’s life and failing is hardly a pleasant experience.
Doctors are not big pharma stooges. My doctor, who I’ve known and been treated by for many years, hates big pharma, and the grip they have on the medical profession. He’s seen shit that would turn anyone’s stomach. No way would I ever want to do that job, not if it paid ten times as much. Yet he does, and has done all his life.
Doctors become doctors because they want to save lives, not because they’re after an easy buck. The medical profession executives and big pharma are the ones who set the prices and costs. I’ve never met a doctor who says they wouldn’t treat a patient even if the patient couldn’t pay, and leave the payment to be sorted out later by the beancounters and lawyers.
Evolution works both ways.
However, the more lives doctors save, the more we preserve life-threatening pathologies in our species. Pathologies that will develop and become worse with every generation, because we will do everything in our power to keep people alive despite them.
Because of this dichotomy, this is a war that doctors and medicine can never hope to win, since their efforts to save lives also preserve the disorders. All they can do is keep trying, and that means mistakes will be made and kids will die and lessons will be learned, and the endless path of evolution will continue.
