From: Lee March (cyberlee@earthlink.net)
Date: Sun Apr 04 1999 - 22:05:59 MDT
Michael Butler wrote:
>
> I think there's a key point here. Consider:
>
> Hereabouts, "medicine" is not solely the province of doctors. Many things
> are available *over the counter*, *in the water supply* and so forth
> today.
>
> The triple antibiotic (which, when I dispose of it, contributes to MRSA
> :\) and Band-Aids (tm) I can buy in the pharmacy without ever seeing an MD
> can keep a heel blister from becoming infected and killing me (as happened
> to one of Woodrow Wilson's sons after a tennis game).
>
> Chlorinated water, for all its potential low-level biohazard, and other
> standard public health measures, again make a difference to me day to day
> without my going to a clinic.
>
> These thing synergize with the fact that I'm (and many people in the
> developed nations are) to some degree my own doctor for routine matters.
>
> Plus I'm affluent enough and my bosses are considerate enough to give me a
> day or more off if I come down with something. I'm not a subsistence
> farmer who has to keep plowing my rocky fields in the rain while fighting
> off hostile enteric parasites.
>
> My apologies if all this was already obvious to others.
>
> MMB
While these ideas should be obvious to others most are not. We take
medician and all the trickle down products almost totally for granted in
this country.
Another thing that most people do not understand is that the proceedures
and treatment done in the end stages of peoples lives serve to further
medician much more than the everyday proceedures. It is by operating on
the person who will die in 3 months anyways that we learn how to do an
operation that will give someone 3 years of added life in the future.
Lee
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