Genesis
Wednesday, December 3 2008
From Deutsche-Welle: Treatments help turn HIV into manageable disease.
German can be a tricky language, so let me translate: Treatments help turn HIV patients into chronically ill patients.
From the HIV patients’ perspective, this may seem like a good thing – and it is. But it’s not a sufficient thing. Turning someone’s disease from fatal to ‘manageable’ solves some big problems, but creates a bunch more new problems.
From a societal perspective, this is yet another way in which modern health care cultivates sick people. Gone are the days when the goal of medical care was patient exit – alive and healthy if possible, dead if unavoidable. Now there are dozens of conditions that were once fatal or debilitating, but which are now “manageable”; a person can spend his entire adult life in the grip of modern medicine. We have created a new sort of human being: Homo Chronicillnus, the Chronically-Ill Man.
The problem for the U.S. is that our health care system, having created this monster, is now poorly equipped to deal with him – as is always, inevitably, the case when we create monsters. Thus a constant theme of this blog is that any successful health care reform has to pay attention – a lot of attention – to those of us with chronic illness. All in all, we’d rather be cured – but even short of that, there’s lots of room for improvement.
