At the beginning of the twentieth century, medicine appeared to “stand on the shoulders” of these and other fine physicians. Since then, medical discoveries have followed one after another: insulin for diabetics, chemotherapy for cancer, hormone treatment for glandular dysfunction, antibiotics for tuberculosis, chloroquine for certain forms of malaria, dialysis for kidney disease, and open heart surgery and organ transplants. This list could go on and on.
But how close is medicine to achieving its goal now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century? Can it guarantee “an acceptable level of health for all people in the world”?
An unattainable goal?
Children climbing on the shoulders of their fellows find that they cannot reach all the apples: the juiciest apples still hang from the top of the tree. So, too, is medicine: it paces from one achievement to another, but the most coveted goal–good health for all–remains out of reach.
Although the European Commission reported in 1998 that “Europeans have never lived as long or in as good health as they do now,” it also found that “one in five people will die before they reach age 65. Approximately 40% of deaths will be from cancer, another 30% from cardiovascular disease… It is necessary to provide protection against new, health-threatening diseases”.
The German medical journal “Gesundheit” (“Gesundheit”) reported in November 1998 that infectious diseases like cholera and tuberculosis are of increasing concern. Why? Antibiotics “are no longer effective. More and more bacteria are no longer responding to at least one of the common drugs, and many are no longer responding to several at once.” Old diseases are returning and new ones are emerging, such as AIDS. The German pharmaceutical publication “Statistics ’97” reminds us: “For two-thirds of all known diseases (and there are about 20,000) no cure has yet been devised.
Can we hope for gene therapy?
More and more treatments keep being invented. For example, many believe that genetic engineering will be the key to solving many health problems. In the 1990s, the writings of American doctors such as Dr. French Anderson called genetic engineering “the newest field of medical research. The book “Gene Therapy” claimed that gene therapy could lead “medical science to new frontiers of innovation. This is especially true for the treatment of as yet incurable diseases” (“Heilen mit Genen”).
Scientists hope to eventually be able to treat congenital genetic diseases by injecting patients with corrective genes. It may even be possible to find a mechanism that causes malignant cancer cells to self-destruct. It is already possible to perform genetic diagnostics to determine a person’s predisposition to certain diseases. Some say that the next invention will be medications that take into account a patient’s genome. One famous researcher suggests that doctors will one day be able to “diagnose their patients’ diseases and inject them with the appropriate piece of DNA strand as a treatment.
But not everyone is convinced that gene therapy will be the magic wand for curing diseases in the future. In fact, according to surveys, some people don’t want their genetic characteristics analyzed at all. Many fear that gene therapy could prove to be a dangerous interference with nature.
Time will tell whether genetic engineering and other high-tech methods will live up to expectations. But don’t be too optimistic. The book “Clay Pedestal” describes a very familiar process: “A new treatment appears, it is lauded at medical meetings and in specialist journals. Its creators become famous among colleagues; the media sing the praises of progress. A period of euphoria – documented evidence in favor of a miracle cure – is followed by a period of gradual disappointment, which lasts from a few months to a few decades. Then a new remedy is found, which almost overnight replaces the previous one, which everyone is already convinced is ineffective and has stopped using it. Many of the remedies that doctors have stopped using because they are ineffective were not long ago considered common knowledge remedies.