humor - "The Countess's Bitter Pill" | Arthritis Information

 

"Louise is royally peeved about the sorry state of our healthcare system."

FYI - it's two pages, click to advance.Just as I suspected---we all have to become our own doctors....drrrrrrr.......Fab and sooooo true!Um...when it became "for profit"?I'm not an advocate for greed but what's wrong with makinga profit?What's wrong with profit in medicine? Just about everything. What's wrong with it is that money becomes the bottom line in all decision making processes. Have a cure? Forget it. Cures cure people and healthy people don't need medicine. In fact, with corporate law the way it is a pharmaceutical corporation is LEGALLY OBLIGATED to maximise profit regardless of humanitarian considerations, so they would be LEGALLY REQUIRED to withold a cure if one were available. That's just one of the many things wrong with it when applied to the field of healing.

I have some friends working in gene cure research and they have been approached many times by pharmaceutical companies looking to buy their research so they can suppress it. These people are altruists trying to help people they love and since that is their motivation rather than increasing personal wealth they have of course refused to sell over their research. (Hopefully it won't get dirty).

I have another friend who had a debilitating condition which motivated him to study bio-chemical research. He eventually worked for a pharmaceutical company who made medicines for his condition and found out that it could be easily controlled with a common non-toxic substance found in most pet stores rather than the medication he had been taking every 6 hours since he was 11 (which, btw, he found out via the same channel, was completely ineffectual). This same peson told me he had once sat in on a meeting where a new drug was decided to not be put on the market because the patient had to use TOO LITTLE of it. They developed a less effective drug that would keep the patient on the hook for more and marketed that.

Profit has a place in industry but it's not the only model available to run a system. In not-for-profit people still make money on salaries but it's not the bottom line. In a not-for-profit model cures would be universally sought after because they place less of a strain on the medical system, and the goal would be to alleviate suffering rather than personally profit from other people's misery. Profit is also an added expense to the consumer and as we all well know many people do not have optimal helath care for reasons of unaffordability.

Some people take for granted that of course we all should be making as much money as possible, that somehow greed is a virtue. I believe as humans we are all in this together and that certain elements of how we run our society should be kept out of the for profit sector. Healthcare and the healing arts are one of those things.

edited for clarityGimpy-a-gogo2008-03-08 12:09:58
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