25
Occasionally, your physician changes tactics. He gives you a
name for your problem, but no cure. The name alone--like a magic
talisman--makes you feel you have a problem your doctor can control.
Or the doctor gives you a prescription. Often it's simply for an
anti-inflammatory drug, an imitation aspirin. In most cases, an
anti-inflammatory agent will not cure you. But it may provide
momentary relief from a symptom. And it could produce the placebo
effect, another benefit of the illusion of control.
The doctor may send you to the hospital for tests. But try asking
him what treatments are available once the tests are over. In many
cases there are none--or at most one or two. The tests--and the
elaborate equipment used to administer them--are frequently part of a
show designed to enhance the illusion of a vast technology providing
the doctor with control.
Take, for example, one of the current age's most common
afflictions-- the back problem. If you come down with back pain and
are sent for tests, you can have myelograms, x-rays, CAT scans or
nuclear magnetic resonance scans. But ask first what the doctor can do
to treat you when the tests are over. The range of remedies includes a
laminectomy (surgical removal of a disk, after which two vertebrae are
generally fused)38, an anti-inflammatory drug, a psychiatrist, physio-
therapy or the injection of papain. Will the test results influence the
doctor's choice of cure? Generally not. So why the tests? To cover the
doctor against potential malpractice claims...and to sell the illusion of
control.
Medical science has made massive progress since the days of
leeches and bleedings. But it is still helpless in the face of many of
mankind's ailments. In fact, there is a good chance that the doctor's art
has had far less to do with the advance of modern health than any of us
would like to think. Several medical authors in 1987 and 1988
produced illuminating historical critiques of mortality statistics. These
analyses demonstrated a puzzling fact: that mankind's lengthening
lifespan owes less than we might imagine to modern drugs, diagnostic
techniques, surgery, hospitals, or any of the other tools of
<< < GO > >>