Lung cancer patients can be allowed to die untreated. It is no longer economically viable to treat patients with chronic lung diseases. The clinical prognosis is no more the main factor in determining treatment but rather the cost of treatment. Yahoo News reports the appalling state of lung disease research. Life expectancy in other cancers has increased rapidly over the years while for lung cancer patients it had only increased by one month from 1983 to 1997. In the meantime, lung diseases have increased in their aggression, their occurrence and resistance to medicines. The main culprits are increasing air pollution, smoking and cancer-causing poisons in the food-chain. More alarming than this is the fact that doctors might practice a sort of genetic-discrimination in preferentially not treating patients with terminal lung-diseases. Also, there is the possibility of including other disease categories as untreatable and thus denying treatment to more groups of patients. Rebecca Woodward of the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research presented these facts after concluding a pan-American study. Her researchers studied changes in both costs and outcomes for lung cancer patients from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s. Their conclusion has shown that it is not cost-effective to help a lung-cancer patient survive an extra year. The US economy gets drained.
Sadly in a globalized economy, where China and India are purportedly shining and the US has billions of dollars to annihilate most countries, most people in the world cannot afford proper medical consultation, leave alone prescribed medicines. Brisk online trade is done for getting prescription drugs illegally and US citizens routinely sneak into Mexico to consult Mexican doctors. Medical care is often unaffordable by ordinary US citizens. If this is the situation in the US, we can understand what the situation is in the rest of the world or in which direction the sacred practice of medicine is moving. It is in this light that we should read this report. While countries, especially the US has the resources to fund huge weapons-cartels for various battles in the world and some of the American rich can buy up smaller nations, is it possible to believe that there is no money for treating cancer-patients? Is it once again the common good versus the individual who can be sacrificed easily? This problem is the classic thesis of Utilitarianism, much discussed in economics classes. Are we right to ignore even one person for the larger good? Is it not that a civilized society is known by how it treats it minorities? How can a mature country leave its dying to rot in anonymous, untreated pain? Do not doctors take an oath to protect human life at whatever the cost? Let us not forget, the same Hitler whom everyone hates, once proposed to deny treatment to Jews. The US and later, the imitating world, may one day cleanse society of the sick. Illness has no place in consumerist cultures. There, where medicine will be forgotten, economics is all.
Via: Yahoo News
Image: Mayo Clinic