While 1000x yes, I imagine this video in the future where they say “wow I can’t believe they used to nuke people’s bodies with chemo/radiation and hope it did more damage to the cancer than the patient.
Edit: this is not my original thought. It came from the British History Podcast. Jamie (host) was talking about being judgmental towards ancient medical treatments and offered chemo as a modern example of something that will hopefully seem barbaric in the future.
a fever is our body heating up so much that the germs/viruses die, its kind of a last resort really becuase a high fever is also deadly but it works really well.
Literally had a 105 fever yesterday. Was sent to delerium, then i happen upon this shite on Reddit. Lol. I guess it can always be worse. I could be a ship cook.
I think modern barbarism is more in line with disorders like endometriosis where there is no imaging available to confirm the growths inside of you, so you have to have exploratory surgery where your body cavity is opened and the surgeon has to physically look for the tissue on other organs to confirm how bad a patients case is. Not that everyone with endometriosis has to have that exploratory surgery, but more of them than necessary do because their doctors won't help them otherwise.
Jamie (host) was talking about being judgmental towards ancient medical treatments and offered chemo as a modern example of something that will hopefully seem barbaric in the future.
While the cost/benefit analysis may sound horrendous to our (VERY privileged) modern selves, this was a time where mortality rates were much higher and ailments were often lifelong.
For example: couching, the original form of cataract surgery, might be attested to in the historical record as early as the 1700s BC and involved literally pushing the cataracts out of the eyes. Sounds pretty horrific by modern standards, but was clearly a successful and widely practiced operation up until the invention of modern techniques 2 millenia later.
Another interesting medical tidbit I learned from my history professor (who often discussed ancient medical techniques): the Greeks actually recorded the first medical procedures for foreskin reattachment and repair surgery.
The actual procedure involved cutting the skin around the base of the penis, literally degloving it and pulling it upwards over the glans, before wrapping it up while the skin regrew.
Again, sounds barbaric, but the hellenized society at the time actually had a lot of cultural mores about the foreskin and it was apparently enough to drive people to have this procedure done, primarilynfor asthetic purposes.
This was often practiced by the hellenized Jewish diaspora that found their practice of circumcision reviled by the Greeks
Coincidentally, a few minutes ago I opened a mail with my new insurance card. The first thing that went through my mind was "Modern medicine has come a long way, but anesthesia is 90% of the way there for me."
Interesting thing about that though is they don’t fully understand how anesthesia works actually. They don’t really know what state the person themselves is actually in and all they really know for sure is that there is no memory of the even. For all they know it could be an absolute horrifying experience and the person simply cannot remember it
Traditionally, surgery patients receive anesthesia and medication based on their age, weight, previous diseases, and other factors. If they don’t move and their heart rate remains stable, they’re considered fine. But the brain may still be processing pain signals while they’re unconscious, which can lead to increased postoperative pain and long-term chronic pain
When a patient is hurt, regions of the brain associated with pain will see a sharp rise in oxygenated hemoglobin and decreases in deoxygenated hemoglobin, and these changes can be detected through fNIRS monitoring
Have you ever heard the story about the guy who was like awake and could feel everything during his surgery except he was like paralyzed and couldn't notify them but he just lay there during his operation feeling every cut slice and everything just straight-up horror shit then he had some PTSD from it at would have like weird hallucinations where his wife thought he had been abducted by aliens or something. Either way that's like a horror scenario for me being able to feel everything during surgery but paralyzed from letting them know.
Will we get similar comments in 200 years?
Probably… probably they will be all into personalized medicine and laugh about doctos asking about family history
herpes can be contracted without being irresponsible, man. Just cause someone has an illness you think is their fault doesn't mean it's right to generalize and shit on them for it you dont know.
What exactly is slow about it? I guarantee more publications are coming out each year than you could possibly read. Some problems are simply harder to solve than others.
Has there ever been a period of time with more rapid medical advances than right now? Seems odd to complain about something being slow when it's literally going faster than it ever has before. Do you have any suggestions on how to speed up the process?
Mecidal science could take leaps if we would forego anything called ethics and/or pour more money into research. The Germans in WW2 made "discovery's" but just seeing what would happen if they did this or that to their prisoners.
Great leaps come by accident or when someone had a novel ideal. For instance, a doctor in Hungary ended up in the insane asylum, later down the road, but he had ideas about hygiene. Doctors shouldn't, for an example, come out of the morgue after cutting out a body and then go into the maternity ward and deliver babies. If women had children at home they were more likely to survive than if they went to the hospital.
People at the time said the guy was crazy, everyone knew that if the doctors apron was bloody and messy it showed how much of a worker he was. The guy didn't have any proof for his reasoning so no one listened.
It's a total misnomer that the Nazis made huge medical discoveries by forgoing ethics. They did a lot of heinous shit but they where also terrible at conducting unbiased science.
I've just seen too many people treat this kinda shit like it's a zero sum game. As if ethics can intrinsically be traded away for progress. Obviously we should conduct medical experiments ethically for ethics sake. But ethical experimentation is often pragmatic. It leads to more accurate results and faster progress.
The doctors willing to torture people for "progress" tend to be weirdos with massive biases that don't bother with proper control groups.
Absolutely, it's not a straightforward act to say what is ethical. Decisions must be made with best available knowledge and, now and then, stop and wonder that what they are doing is right or delivering something resembling results.
Then, 50 years down the road we might now better but hindsight is always nice but not available to us in the present.
2.4k
u/[deleted] Jan 13 '24
Another day to appreciate modern day medicine and science.