Mirage of Health

My personal update is that I ' m recovering day by day, but it ' s taking a while. I get a little stronger, a little more stamina each day and I expect to get back to my previous full strength in time to put in a solid week of work starting Monday. Meanwhile a little down time isn ' t the worse thing that could have happened.I ' ve gotten some very odd comments which show that some people harbor very basic misunderstandings about heath, illness and medicine. As I have noted here many times, medical intervention was largely ineffective until the 20th Century. It has grown more effective over the past 100+ years, but you need to keep in mind some important reservations. I ' ll list some of the most important:Erratic progress, blind alleys, and big mistakes: Progress has been very far from straightforward. We tend to remember the sudden and dramatic solutions to long-term scourges: penicillin, the polio vaccine, insulin. (The latter not a cure, of course.) But the past 100 years is better characterized by long periods of futility throwing money and effort against problems; entrenched practices that turned out to be useless or even harmful after decades of being the standard of care; false breakthroughs such as bone marrow transplant for breast cancer; and fundamentally wrong theories, such as gastric ulcers having a psychological cause. (They ' re actually an infectious disease.) Over time, many such mistakes were recognized and rectified, and medical intervention has continued ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs