Question

What are some internal cultural patterns that cause vulnerabilities to disease?

Answer 1

For a majority of the history of modern medical science, health was viewed primarily as the absence of disease or defect. It was a state of being in which all of the systems that make up the individual were operating “normally.” A continuous battle was begun with ill health, and the weapons in this battle were better understanding of the mechanisms of disease and better understanding of the structures and processes of the human body. While this viewpoint achieved many victories and some spectacular successes, its weaknesses have become more and more apparent.

Chief among these limitations is that although there have been staggering developments in medicines and technologies currently available, there has been an equally staggering cost for their use. Prescription drugs are the primary cost driver in the modern health system, and these costs have been growing exponentially in the past few decades, with no expectation that this trend will slow in the future. The development of increasingly complex and specialized treatment and diagnostic technologies results in the allocation of significant resources to technological marvels that will only affect a comparatively small portion of the population. With the development of each new wonder drug or miracle machine, the system reinforces the idea that for complete health, society needs the newest, the best, and the most advanced treatments. The belief that diseases must be eradicated at all costs results in a system that misallocates resources.

A second limitation of the medical materialist approach is also, paradoxically, one of its greatest strengths. In dealing with individuals in a mechanistic way—that is, as a collection of parts working as a very complex machine—science and medicine have made great strides in our understanding of human biology and the biology of disease. In practice, however, this viewpoint results in a piecemeal and symptomatic approach to disease and ill health. Symptoms are “fixed” with a specific treatment or cure without, in many cases, dealing with the individual as a whole or with the underlying causes for those symptoms.