Reddit mentions of Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis, the Expropriation of Health

I often think about this passage from Ivan Illich's Medical Nemesis:

>Most of man's ailments consist of illnesses that are acute and benign— either self- limiting or subject to control through a few dozen routine interventions. For a wide range of conditions, those who are treated least probably make the best progress.

>"For the sick," Hippocrates said, "the least is best." More often than not, the best a learned and conscientious physician can do is convince his patient that he can live with his impairment, reassure him of an eventual recovery or of the availability of morphine at the time when he will need it, do for him what grandmother could have done, and otherwise defer to nature.

>The new tricks that have frequent application are so simple that the last generation of grandmothers would have learned them long ago had they not been browbeaten into incompetency by medical mystification.[...]For acute sickness, treatment so complex that it requires a specialist is often ineffective and much more often inaccessible or simply too late.

Bring back medical metis!

Check out couple of books, once called "Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis, the Expropriation of Health" and another that takes broadens it to other professions and services called "Careless Society: Community And Its Counterfeits".

And realize that in our modern "service" economy, the ever-increasing number of "professionals" in the various "helping professions" have an inherent NEED for an ever-increasing number of clients (i.e. expanded markets) and an ever-increasing number of "conditions" (i.e. products/services) which then have to be "consumed" by someone... all to the goal of increasing the GDP (and their own personal "slice" of it).

Ergo, whenever their is an increased supply of money to PAY for such things (and professionals are always pushing the envelope to make certain the "new" thing is covered by insurance/disability etc) -- end result is that there becomes and increased demand (even if they have to fill the pages of Reader's Digest and the airwaves of TV with commercials to create the demand -- you know, all of the "awareness" campaigns).

What is pretty slick is that advertising money is 100% tax deductible expense.

And what is even slicker is when you can create a grassroots "interest group" as a non-profit organization (initially funded by industry, but then later by the clients themselves and/or by government under pressure from the client interest group) that does your advertising and promotion and advocacy for you!