Man Is Fallible, But Maybe Men Are

We Have Medicalized Aging, And That Experiment Is Failing Us.

Go Back To The '30s, '40s, '50s, And It Was The Discovery Of Heroic Interventions, The Ability To Cure People With Penicillin Or Do An Operation To Stop Disease That Was What Saved The Day. Primary Care Physicians Couldn't Do All That Much That Really Demonstrated A Difference. The People Who Control And Work With You To Control Your Blood Pressure, They're Not Rewarded For Doing That Or To Be Innovative About Doing That. So, The Result Is Half Of Americans Have Uncontrolled High Blood Pressure, Despite Seeing Clinicians.

Once You Start To Ask Patients About Their Priorities, You Discover What They're Living For. Once You Uncover That, It Helps You, As A Doctor, Decide What To Fight For. And When We Do That, We Often End Up Identifying Limits To The Kind Of Care That People Want. One's Assumption Is That These People Are Going To Live Shorter Lives, But What We're Doing Is Protecting Quality Of Life. In Doing So, You Sometimes End Up Helping People Live Longer. Certainly, You Help People Live Better Days And With More Purpose In Their Lives.

If We Took Away The Ability To Put Defibrillators In People In Their Last Years, People Would Be Shouting In The Streets.

After Readinf Some Essay On The Nature Of Human Fallibility, I Was Very Aware That We Are The Recipients Of A Huge Amount Of Discovery Over The Last Century. Medicine Exemplifies This. And That Has Transitioned Us From A World In Which People's Lives Were Mostly Governed By Ignorance To One That's Constrained By Ineptitude. A Century Ago, We Didn't Know, For Instance, What Diseases Afflicted Us, What Their Nature Really Was, Or What To Do About Them. And That Has Changed.