<p>1.) Physicians make errors, and sometimes quite severe ones. For these errors, patients who have suffered should have our – is it presumptuous of me to speak for the profession? – apologies. There’s no excusing these oversights.</p>
<p>2.) The field of medicine is still rapidly evolving. Many times we make new scientific discoveries that alter the way we’d previously perceived a disease or a treatment. I’m in the middle of reading Reynolds Price’s A Whole New Life, and he often talks about missing more powerful, more precise treatments by a few months. Price, however, does not hold such advances against the field of medicine as a whole – after all, it is still modern medicine that made the improvements. He speaks with surprising grace of the emergence of technologies which spared him some pain once they were implemented. We’re doing the best we can, both in research and in treatment, and our best efforts in the former often lead to rapid changes in the latter. We apologize if there’s any confusion, but we’re also not about to slow the rate of change just so that we can protect our own reputations.</p>
<p>3.) The persistence of hospital infections is one of the major failures of modern medicine. For this you’ll find no defense from me.</p>
<p>4.) Where you will not find me yielding ground is on vaccines, especially if (as I believe is the case) they have been cleared of thimerosol, which was of unclear harm to begin with. You may have had mild personal and familial experiences with hepatitis and meningitis, but had they become severe there might have been little that modern medicine could have done to fix them. These are serious diseases – as I hope this very thread makes clear – and if you were lucky enough to have gotten light courses of illness, you should not be encouraging others to bank on that same luck.</p>
<p>And in the meanwhile, what if you had been carrying contagious diseases? What if you had passed meningitis, mild in your case, to an elderly parent? Or a young child?</p>
<p>The concern with chicken pox, by the way, isn’t actually chicken pox. Since the virus responsible never clears out of your system, physicians are actually worried about the latent infection which can eventually become shingles – a very painful, debilitating, and uncurable disease.</p>
<p>5.) Nobody sane would suggest that pregnancy is a disease, and of course there is such a thing as overmanagement. Still, we’re well served to remember that the dramatic reductions in infant and maternal mortality are largely attributable to advances made in modern medicine – and that we neglect the attention of responsible physicians at the peril of inviting the dangers of that primitive, dangerous era.</p>
<p>6.) Within limits, second opinions should always be welcomed, and I recognize that this isn’t always the case. (Doctor-shopping until you find one willing to do whatever you ask, of course, is rightly understood as unsafe behavior.) However, second opinions should be provided by physicians with allopathic or osteopathic credentials. Ultimately, after all, these are the people you will turn to when all else is burning down around you. You’re exactly right: just as you would do when you look for any other service. You double check “your” expert, in case he’s failing to inform you completely or in case he’s making a mistake – but you use other professionals to do the double-checking.</p>
<p>When underwater births result in a half-drowned baby, or failure to vaccinate has resulted in a serious case of measles, or when herbal supplements turn out not to stop the spread of HIV, these patients invariably end up in allopathic hospitals anyway. Why the sudden show of faith?</p>