Is medicine 'messing with nature'?

[XmasCrap]

Prompted by something I read earlier and a discussion at the dinner table this evening.

Do you consider medicine to be 'messing with nature'? Keeping people alive, albeit not 'well', so poor quality of life. IVF - if not allowed, people would unfortunately be childless and that would be that. Transplants, etc.

Is medicine to blame for some of the problems the NHS experiences?

although I really don't see the point of keeping people alive who aren't going to get better, blocking beds, etc.

I have an ileostomy. Without it I was emptying my bowels 25 times a day, I frequently soiled myself, I was unable to leave the house as it was completely unpredictable, excruciatingly painful and exhaustingly debilitating. Bowel removed and I have quality of life, albeit I shit into a bag stuck to my stomach.

I'm 56 so would definitely be dead without medicine.

It's far too wide a parameter to have a meaningful discussion.
"Medicine", "nature" it's like talking about "chemicals". Too broad a base.
Though the inference that the elderly are clogging up the NHS in the OP is unpleasant.

[quote XmasCrap]@Lockdownbear, I'm not suggesting we 'do' anything, although I really don't see the point of keeping people alive who aren't going to get better, blocking beds, etc.[/quote]

What is your guideline for "not going to get better"? What do you mean by this, exactly? For example, would you refuse treatment to a man with a type and stage of cancer that doctors know they cannot cure? (This person may not even be elderly.) Or are you referring to the elderly only?

I don’t understand the intent of this post singling out medicine to be ‘messing with nature and keeping people alive’. I mean surely, anything short of us living in caves or shelters made from some bark cobbled together and existing as hunter/gatherers is ‘messing with nature’. Living in brick houses with heating/cooling and well protected from the elements artificially extends our lives. So does everything else we do pretty much, why target medicine?

Keeping people alive, albeit not 'well', so poor quality of life

Well if you're suggesting people who aren't 'well' shouldn't be kept alive, I'd say there's a bloody massive need for medicine. Palliative care - pain relief, sedation etc. It would be really quite psychopathic not to offer it.

But it would be interesting to know what you mean by 'not well' and not getting better. Millions of people in the UK alone have various health conditions and/or disabilities. They live mostly normal lives. Thanks to medicine (keeping their health condition well managed).

Pp have made the point too that sometimes people not expected to survive - including some premature and/or ill babies - actually do end up surviving. The wonders of medicine.

The problems with the 'bed blocking' are due to successive governments failing to decently fund care homes for the elderly (and also young disabled) who need them. Privatisation probably exacerbated this issue. No money apparently for decent pay or working conditions for care staff - but it does however seem to be there for the millionaire owners with strings of care homes their name.

The problems experienced by the NHS are due to decades by successive governments (both sides of the political divide) of mismanagement and underfunding. This extends beyond the NHS to services and facilities that would provide people with preventative healthcare.

Eg. The public health housing and homelessness emergency not only costs the taxpayer billions (housing homeless families and vulnerable individuals in expensive temporary accommodation, and billions on housing benefits for high private rents) it also has huge indirect costs.

Homelessness and insecure housing take a terrible toll on the victims of this (both adults and children). It impacts often heavily on their physical and mental health.

Health is holistic.

I do think modern medicine has crossed a line. And I'm not talking about end of life care etc. Rather cosmetic uses that allow us to mess with our bodies for no real benefit or purpose.

IVF is an interesting one. My friend struggled to conceive and was finally successful through IVF. She was ill throughout the entire pregnancy and almost died as a result of complications in childbirth. She said afterwards that she wondered if she had gone against what her body was trying to warn her of, that some people were just not built to have children. But it is easy to say that with hindsight and a much longed for child.

I struggled to conceive & I often wonder if my body was trying to tell me I wasn't cut out to be a mum. Should I have listened & accepted that I wasn't meant to have children?

This is a tricky one. ALL medicine is messing with nature, but (at the moment) for the better.

I have, for a very brief time, worked in geriatric medicine before, and I found some really hard questions that need to be answered.

It's human nature to try to change things. We find discomfort and suffering uncomfortable. So this makes medicine "natural", in that it's natural for us.

There’s nothing more natural than a tumour. Are you happy to give it free rein if you get one?

DC1 was so large he would not come out the natural way and was forcefully evicted from me by emcs. DC and I would have died without that intervention. DC2 was transverse, so had an elcs to evict him- again, would likely have had poor outcomes for us both if allowed to labour the "natural" way. Clearly I am rubbish at birthing humans, so probably shouldn't have my genes out there causing issues. I'm very glad modern medicine was there to save me and DC though!

OP here, can I just point out that there's nothing ageist in my post. I mentioned keeping people alive who aren't going to get better.

I genuinely don't understand why that happens. We don't (usually) allow animals to suffer but do with humans?

Maybe there's another discussion in here for assisted dying, or possibly that's messing with nature' too?

[quote XmasCrap]@Lockdownbear, I'm not suggesting we 'do' anything, although I really don't see the point of keeping people alive who aren't going to get better, blocking beds, etc.[/quote]
Yea lets close down every NICU in the country. Half those babies will never be independent.

In answer to the original question yes medicine is messing with nature but so is just about everything humans do.

Living in houses, writing, roads, footpaths, buildings, cooking...

Good points @sashh, good points.

'there's nothing ageist in my post. I mentioned keeping people alive who aren't going to get better.'

Just to make sure understand.

Thread is not about certain medicines (treatments) done on NHS could be responsible for NHS struggling.

But more who receives treatment. If someone ill won't get better leave nature to take it's course. Blocking beds with patients in that situation not right.

I'm interested in how IVF and transplants eg corneal fit into the ill not get better thing?

When you say ill and won't get better how are you defining that?
Loads of people become ill, and without treatment would not get better (I think you mean die?).
Eg. Type 1 diabetes
Various injuries to important areas like chest, head, lungs etc. Car crash, fall down stairs, nasty mugging etc
Infections that get v nasty

And in fact simply growing older leads to death for everyone.

The situations you have in mind are different only in parameters. How long/ difficult to treat, how much risk treatment won't work and they die anyway, how long until death anyway due to age...

The against nature thing is nothing to do with the topic I think?

It's more value judgement combining -

How quick/ cheap treatment is.
How likely to live if successful treatment.
Risk of treatment not working, or not making much difference as person only likely to live X time anyway.

Combine factors and decide treatment or not.

Other thing is how you would handle this in practice.

The two people I've known ill hosp died both had cancer.

One 60ish had lots rounds breast cancer treatment. Kept coming back. In end just iller iller, v ill, hosp ICU. Help with breathing, tracheostomy, pain relief. She was dying ICU was to alleviate suffering on way out.

-Still took up a hosp bed and ICU as well

• When should have stopped treatment? After 1st, 2nd, 3rd chemo etc effort?

Freeing bed in ICU, what would you have done Instead to shift out of that bed?

Ditto other. Elderly cancer. No cancer treatment. Died in hosp. Painkillers etc. Also took up a bed.

In these conversations, theory all well and good, what done in practice is key though.

[quote XmasCrap]@Lockdownbear, I'm not suggesting we 'do' anything, although I really don't see the point of keeping people alive who aren't going to get better, blocking beds, etc.[/quote]
I think you'll find that these people who are blocking beds are on very little medication. I assume you are talking about elderly people who need to be in a care home ? Having worked in a care home, I can tell you that many of the people at that stage of life don't take much medication at all. They are certainly not "being kept alive' , a scenario which sounds awful , like something out of a science fiction novel. Most of them are only taking pain relief, or other medications for symptomatic relief for things like arthritis, etc.

If you want to take this idea to the nth degree, maybe you'd like to stop women from getting medical help with childbirth, so women could "naturally" die when giving birth like they did / do where there isn't any medical care.

Or let's stop treating sick children - after all they take up beds too ! Letting them all die would improve NHS bed numbers no end . Good luck with your ideas, OP.

I’ve wondered myself and yes it probably is but then I think about Stephen Hawking and have concluded it’s a good thing we can mess with nature.

I do think though that if I developed Alzheimer’s or dementia I wouldn’t want my life extended unnaturally. But thats just me, I’ve seen people with a an extraordinary will to live despite suffering from things like vascular dementia etc.

I think end of life care definitely needs a rethink. I'm a nurse and I treat patients every day with interventions that distress them, cause them pain and may or may not prolong their life, which seems to be agony anyway and/or they have little consciousness left due to dementia. Who are these treatments benefiting. All we can do is do the treatment as gently as possible.

However whether medicine itself is wrong is too broad of a question, and what is wrong with being against nature anyway?

I am very grateful that the medicines I currently take keep me alive.

I know that I have a potential terminal illness and if I have to swallow 10 pills a day to keep me alive longer, than so be it.

Without medicine, hospitals wouldn't need to exist at all as there would be basically no treatments available (can't perform surgery without it either) so the idea that medicines in general cause bed blocking isn't quite right.

I think the basic proposition of your OP is what Christian Scientists believe. There are lots of people for whom fairly aggressive treatments and/or palliative care allow them longer with their loved ones and the opportunity to achieve some of their dreams and wishes. Denying this would be 1. cruel and 2. something you may well feel differently about if it were to happen to you.

Of course it’s ‘messing with nature’ but then if we left it up to nature a good many of those posting here wouldn’t have made it beyond 5.

So many babies and young children died in infancy - you only have to look in some old graveyards - 3 or 4 in the same family wiped out by measles, diphtheria or chest infections that turned to pneumonia. One of my GMs lost a baby at 8 months to a chest infection - this would have been in the 1920s, well before ABs and vaccinations.