Medicine Today: Threat to Humanity?

A friend and I had an interesting discussion . We proposed that children who will die of a naturally occurring disease should indeed die. Should child contract strep-throat and the progress to a severe ear-infection which it seems shall progress further and kill the child, should they not be killed? Not to say we should allow the child to die painfully at the hands of the disease itself, but perhaps we should kill them ourselves?

And why not? The strong, those best fit to survive in our ever-evolving universe, will bear stronger, better adapted children. These children will in turn be better adapted to their ENVIRONMENT. As once it was and perhaps should always be....

Now that is the general idea regarding our genetics and environment. Then comes the implications of this idea for those of belief. Our other friend, a Catholic, was somewhat given to the idea of smiting us for the very thought alone of infanticide for medical reasoning. Especially when the implications are not one of mending the body, but repelling invaders the body is ill equipped to defend itself against.

What do you think? I guess we should include deformities and other birth defects in the discussion as well. Why only kill those that become a liability to our species as whole, and not include those born that way?

 

Whose to be the one to set the standards for what is a liability to our species and what is not? Once treated by medicine the body then knows how to fight off another infection due to the medication help fight it off. The next time one is infected it has a better chance of survival, so on and so forth. Even the weak can surpass the strong so can the strong really be considered strong? The Strong and the weak need to survive together to help fill in the gaps which each could potentially have.

Heck you could be considered a liability to our species for wanting to kill off a huge chunk of it. The Weak NEED the strong to survive and vice versa in other situations.

A 'Weak' 'Deformed' 'Incapable' Person has the type of antibodies in their blood to fight off a certain species-threatening virus which barely a handful could survive, oh but wait, he's weak, let's kill him.

20 years later that species-threatening virus comes along, and by chance, kills everyone, even the 'strong' ones.

 

Using medicine can threaten living. If you view it this way:

IF the child is infected with something, we should kill it, therefore we can adapt and the stronger people can overcome.

Myself, I'm not sure. I use medicine, but this is just my point of view. I'm both ways with this case. So, I'm a bit unsure.

 

How cn you overcome what you have not experienced? You NEED to become infected with something be be able to overcome and conquer it. If you just go and kill everything that becomes sick then you will be left with nooone because everyone is succeptable to something

 

Or, we could just treat the child, and have them live. What's the negative effect of that?

 

I think the negative effect of that would be the repetitiveness of that; doctors have been treating diseases for years, now, don't you think it is time we try to kill the disease rather then treating it's symptoms? Doctors are supposed to treat diseases, not treat sick children that probably spread the disease; it is because of the irresponsibility of youth today that we still have illnesses like AIDS, MRSA, Strep.

Please go don't smite me for that paragraph above We all were childreen once.

 

As medical science advances, we'll likely have cures to all of these diseases very soon.

 

I thought you were a christian? This is a little bit hypocritical, to say the least.

Anyways, I do agree to a certain agree. Eventually, if we are able to cure everything and anything, we'll have a population crisis in which we are overrun with an overpopulation, limiting our food, shelter, and space.

That won't be for a good while, though.

 

There will be more diseases, and some we cannot treat.

 

There will never be a disease that the ingenuity of man cannot handle.

 

Nailed it!

I infer that in at least 30 years, ALL and i mean ALL diseases of this/that time will be either treatable or better yet curable....

Just a prediction

 

So true, i mean this is a little crazy

 

Hmm shredder, as much as i like you, im going to have to start an argument here.

Anyways, once the medicine is released, it is good for about a year. Then after that year (usually) it is obsolete.

The reason is because when you have a perscription drug, most of the people that have access to the medicine, they stop taking it after there symptoms are over. Well, then the bacteria become immune to that disease or whatever, and now you have a new thread. Then you have to go through the process of making a new drug.

This is why you should always take your medicine for the full term.

 

1). That is only for antibiotics, and the resistance time is usually a bit longer than one year.

2). There are other cures that don't hinge on antibiotics.

 

Yes, i guess what im saying is that eventually our cures become obsolete because there are always mutations that happen, evolutions occuring, etc.

 

Bacteria will never evolve a resistance to the cure that kills all of them (such as the "genetically engineer bacteria to destroy the sickness" method currently being developed).

 

as you know, there are mutations that might cause them to be immune to that certain "kill"

 

Depends on how they kill them. If they swallow them whole, and digest them, then a mutation that would prevent against that would be like humans mutating so that they could survive a strong acid bath.

 

"But if we want to get serious about it, you're basically arguing that all of human civilization is bad for human survival, and that we're somehow running counter to evolution by using technology to make life better for ourselves. Your clothes? Your medicine? Your supermarket food? Your car? None of that crap exists in nature. So by your reasoning, the fact that we survive with these and all the other trappings of modern civilization is a bad thing."

Let us begin. Clothes are not entirely necessary for survival but shelter is and is sought by all creatures that roam the land. Clothing can be seen simply as an extension of the protection from the elements that shelter gives us. Additionally, it has little or no impact on our fitness for the world in general. Cars fall into the same category as clothes really, but they also allow us to travel and expand our awareness of the universe as a whole. Again, nothing to impact our fitness for the world. Supermarket food. Gods where to begin? Supermarket food is actually bad for your. Most is too heavily processed to be usable by the body for any practical purpose and give only the barest minimum nutrition we need to survive. Additionally, supermarkets don't choose their foods by what's the most flavorful, nutritious or aesthetically appealing to us as consumers. They choose food by determining what travels best, what ripens of the vine best and what will be as devoid of indications of earthly interaction as possible. Because we Americans tend to fear the earth for some reason... but that's a different topic.

"And that of course is patently ridiculous. Our ability to create tools, better understand the world we live in, and improve our quality of life is our great evolutionary strength. It's what has allowed us as a species to spread to every continent on the planet except Antarctica, and survive in every environment imaginable from the Siberian tundra to the Sahara desert. We don't have to adapt to ourselves to the environment, we adapt our tools to the environment and then we adapt the environment to our needs."

Creating tools has nothing to do with our fitness to survive. It may be an aid in creating civilization but hammers and chisels have nothing to do with our body’s fitness. Understanding the world is what has lead me to this question... and that is good. Improving our quality of life is one of the fundamentals of my argument. We would all have a better quality of life if there were A. less of us and B. we were all more fit beings for this world having been tested for our capability to be a part of it in the first place. Spreading throughout the world is fine and one thing; but we tread on dangerous ground when we say such things as "we adapt the environment to our needs." In some ways this is fine, in others it releases plagues like Ebola. A bit more caution and care might be evidenced by those whose philosophy ran more in tune with the one I am proposing, as opposed to the Conquestadorial (sp?) one we have now.


And that is indeed the problem. Disease generally affects the weaker and less healthy individuals. In nature this aids in weeding out the weaker creatures that've not adapted or evolved to their environment. It helps reduce populations to reasonable levels and maintains a healthy breeding stock for an ever-evolving world.

Evolution. We are evolving, changing, dynamic creatures. Regardless of where you think we may have come from in the beginning, we are not stagnant. Nothing in our universe is. And therein lies a certain problem. Our universe is ever evolving and changing. Bacteria, birds, lizards, mammals, grass, trees, grapes, earth, water; all these things are in a constant state of flux.

Some of these are fated to die.

We have a choice. Medicine has weakened our breeding pool. By allowing the survival of those unfit for our current universal state to exist, we have lessened our chances for survival in the next state. And the one after that... and so on. We are seeing a new rise in "super-bugs" due to the over use of medicine that is directly linked to saving those unfit for survival. This is threatening the rest of the breeding pool.

Who is more important to the survival of our species? Those who can survive? Or those we choose to allow to survive?

Pyromagi:

The pandemic is already here. Super-bugs threaten those who would normally have nothing to fear from the base virus or bacteria from which the enhanced disease was derived. Though in all reality we have much more to fear from Prions. They are not treatable in any way, have found their way into the blood supplies of over 46 countries and have found their way into a wide variety of food products ranging from beef to sugar (tainted bone used in the bleaching process) to French fries (as beef fat is used in the seasoning). It's really just a choice of pandemics at this point, but the choice has always been ours.

As for your CBA, I see things differently. Most people do nothing to advance their species. We could do with less people and have better quality of life for those remaining. It would certainly stretch our resources further. At our level of technology, we don't really need more people, but less to get the same amount of actual work done.

To be perfectly blunt, your next assumption seems foolish to me. We would value life MORE not less. Each life that survived into adulthood would be more precious for all the contributions it would have and the new life it could more capably produce. This isn't a cutthroat-every-man-for-himself deal; it's a matter of taking our future into our hands and securing it.

 

But wouldn't it be so much better if we could survive without clothing? It would better the species so that we wouldn't have to spend a tiny amount of energy producing clothing!

Our food, while heavily processed, actually does contain a fair amount of nutrition. We're not quite as bad as that...

Wrong. Without those tools, we'd surely have evolved to become stronger individuals.

We conquer the land, and use our ingenuity to subdue the diseases that are apparently released. What's so bad about that?

It can very easily affect the strong, too, you know.

Anyway, I still don't see what's so bad about having humans reliant upon their own technology.

We are the masters of our own fate.

Not really. Medicine will keep them alive.

You're getting carried away. This isn't going to destroy humanity.

Wrong! The only different thing about a super-bug is that it can survive antibiotics. It's not deadlier than the regular version to a normal person.

I'd agree with that. Less people = better life for me.