Sickness not Reducing in Number, only Changing in Type
Mood:  quizzical
Topic: Medicine
Innovation in medicine is keeping in step with aggressive marketing of health services. The patient consumer has at his disposal a vast array of therapeutic facilities, all attractively packaged, and convincingly portrayed.The physician too has to keep abreast of a sea of fresh information bombarding him from numerous quarters, some genuine, some not so genuine. And he often finds himself at a loss to discriminate between the two.

Health awareness has increased. So has the average life expectancy.Medical science boasts of a vast array of treatment modalities for an equally vast array of diseases. Distress has been ameliorated, disability curtailed,death postponed.

And yet, if the booming medical practice and pharma industry are any indication, the patient population has not reduced. In fact, it has multiplied. Not all of this is because of increased health awareness. While individual distress may have been reduced, individual disability curtailed and individual death postponed due to better treatment facilities, the number of distressed have not reduced. Neither have the number of disabled, nor that of the dead.

What does this signify?

It signifies, if nothing else, that while individual disease treatment is progressing, so also is human pathology. Newer and more ingenious ways of falling ill are seeing the light of day, and the body is finding newer ways of getting out of order.

Sicknesses are not reducing in number. They are changing in type. If infectious diseases and malnutrition took their toll in the earlier centuries(and in certain sections of the world even today), life style diseases, chronic conditions and neoplastic disorders are taking their toll in the present. It is almost like changing fashions in the world of disease.

If we ever do feel we are successful in reducing morbidity and mortality of these conditions, along will come new diseases introduced by use of modern gadgetry. This century will surely witness an upsurge in sicknesses from use of wireless technology, permissive morality and greater commercialization. It will be compounded with deaths not because of infectious epidemics, but mass destruction due to external calamities like earthquakes, floods, tsunamis and hurricanes. As also man-made ones like terrorist attacks using modern technology on inimical civilizations. As though aiming to convert modern technology itself into an inimical civilization.


Ajai

(From Mens Sana Monographs, III,4-5, Nov. 2005-Feb. 2006, p15-16. Reproduced with permission of coauthor and publisher.)