Criticism of Modern Medicine
According to Paul Farmer, the main problem for modern medicine is lack of access in poor regions. There is an "outcome gap" between the rich and poor that is most noticeable with expensive-to-treat diseases like AIDS and tuberculosis. The majority of medical resources and therapies are concentrated in the rich, low-incidence regions such as the West. On the other hand, countries in the developing world have high rates of HIV but lack the resources to treat them.
The Catholic social theorist Ivan Illich subjected contemporary western medicine to detailed attack in his Medical Nemesis, first published in 1975. He argued that the medicalization in recent decades of so many of life's vicissitudes — birth and death, for example — frequently caused more harm than good and rendered many people in effect lifelong patients. He marshalled a body of statistics to show what he considered the shocking extent of post-operative side-effects and drug-induced illness in advanced industrial society. He was the first to introduce to a wider public the notion of iatrogenesis. Others have since voiced similar views, but perhaps none so trenchantly as Illich.
Medical errors and overmedication are also the focus of complaints and negative coverage. Practitioners of human factors engineering believe that there is much that medicine may usefully gain by emulating concepts in aviation safety, where it is recognized that it is dangerous to place too much responsibility on one "superhuman" individual and expect him or her not to make errors. Reporting systems and checking mechanisms are becoming more common in identifying sources of error and improving practice. Clinical versus statistical, algorithmic diagnostic methods were famously examined in psychiatric practice in a 1954 book by Paul E. Meehl, which found statistical methods superior. A 2000 meta-analysis comparing these methods in both psychology and medicine found that statistical or "mechanical" diagnostic methods were, in general, although not always, superior.
Disparities in quality of care given among local demographics are often an additional cause of controversy. For example, elderly mentally ill patients received poorer care during hospitalization in a 2008 study. Rural poor African-American men were used in an infamous study of syphilis that denied them basic medical care.
Read more about this topic: Medicine
Other articles related to "modern, criticisms":
... Some other early Latter-day Saint leaders, including Brigham Young, Orson Pratt and Elizabeth Ann Whitney claimed to have received several words in the Adamic language in revelations ... Some Latter-day Saints believe that the Adamic language is the "pure language" spoken of by Zephaniah and that it will be restored as the universal language of humankind at the end of the world ...
... and so does not shed much light on the origins of the modern population ... there are some indications that it may derive from the Sunda Islands (modern Indonesia) ... continue to be passed through titled women and first daughters but there is also a modern patrilineal sentiment introduced by imperial Japan ...
... The revival of modern primitive archery may be traced to Ishi, who came out of hiding in California in 1911 Ishi was the last of the Yahi Indian tribe ... They led the commercial development of new forms of bow including the modern recurve and compound bow ... These modern forms are now dominant in modern Western archery traditional bows are in a minority ...
... history sees Chinese society as a "traditional" society needing to become "modern", usually with the implicit assumption that Western society is the definition of modern society ... its static past and bringing them into the modern world under European direction ... There are a number of other criticisms of this view ...
... primarily by European and American artists, the modern art collection occupies 60,000 square feet (6,000 m2), of gallery space and contains many iconic modern works ... in remarkable depth, for a museum whose focus is not exclusively on modern art for example, the collection contains forty paintings by Paul Klee ...
Famous quotes containing the words medicine, criticism and/or modern:
“Good medicine is bitter, but it cures illness.”
—Chinese proverb.
Confucius.
“It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“The modern picture of The Artist began to form: The poor, but free spirit, plebeian but aspiring only to be classless, to cut himself forever free from the bonds of the greedy bourgeoisie, to be whatever the fat burghers feared most, to cross the line wherever they drew it, to look at the world in a way they couldn’t see, to be high, live low, stay young forever—in short, to be the bohemian.”
—Tom Wolfe (b. 1931)