Unsustainable medicine

It's routine, as you get out your credit card in the supermarket
checkout line, to be asked to donate a few dollars to medical research. It's an
easy way to contribute--and who wouldn't want to help conquer breast cancer or
prostate cancer?

But Daniel Callahan and Sherwin Nuland, writing in the New
Republic, contend that
enlisting Americans in the war against disease conveys a dangerously
unrealistic picture of contemporary medicine. Over the past generation, they
say, very little progress has been made toward finding a cure for the major
lethal diseases, such as cancer, heart disease and stroke. "Our main
achievements today consist of devising ways to marginally extend the lives of
the very sick." (The Hastings Center offers a summary of the article.)

This extension of life can be a blessing, of course--but overall
it is a huge burden, financial and human. "The struggle against disease has
begun to look like the trench warfare of World War I: little real progress in
taking enemy territory but enormous economic and human cost in trying to do
so." The war against disease, they write, has created a medical system "that is
barely affordable now and forbiddingly unaffordable in the long run." (See the Century editorial on health-care costs and
the federal budget.)