Wednesday, September 21, 2022

The Difference Between Sociology and Medicine

X has yet to have a coronavirus vaccine. 

X is sixty-five, had a very bad time with original COVID and barely noticeable symptoms with delta COVID. 

The thing about coronavirus is that, like mononucleosis and a couple of other known virus, it has a more complex relationship with the human immune system than bacteria or other virus have. Most people are immune to virus in this group for most of their lives. People who notice symptoms, however, don't build up immunity as people do to most infectious diseases. They can go on reinfecting themselves for months, which is why we hear of "Long COVID" and "chronic mononucleosis." Hence the rush to try an experimental type of vaccines, for the first time actually tracking the successes and failures of different formulas, not just exposing the body to weakened or killed disease agents, but tampering with the body's RNA. 

Here's the key fact I'd like to see people memorize before they start looking for conspiracies: All new, experimental vaccines have had mixed results. Many people who had an experimental vaccine were permanently disabled or killed. That old book, The Poisoned Needle, lists statistics and case histories for early versions of vaccines now regarded as safe and effective--for smallpox, diphtheria, polio, and so on. Those vaccines were developed by the survivors of human volunteers, too

The difference is that there was something heroic about being injured or killed in the effort to develop a vaccine against a deadly disease like polio, but there's nothing heroic about being injured or killed in the effort to develop a vaccine against a chest cold. Really. Coronavirus feels, to most people who feel it at all, like something for which the cold is the cure. 

"Have you had the vaccine?" X asked me.

"No thanks," I said. "People who are actually in danger can have mine. I don't think it's necessarily a good idea to have the vaccine after the disease."

X did the elbow bump of cheerful agreement. "The way I see it, doctors are smart enough that they ought to know that these vaccines are going to affect different people in different ways. They ought to be able to look at a person's medical history and know who should have a vaccine and who shouldn't have it. But now those nurses down the county health department are just having people drive past a window and shoving needles into them, no questions asked. You know that can't be right. People are dying from the vaccine, same as from the COVID!"

Some coronavirus vaccines, it seems, have unpredictable, unprecedented, bizarre effects on some people's blood (but not on other people's blood). Young, slim, previously healthy people are going down with strokes and heart attacks after vaccination. Abnormal blood clotting is being observed. A story going around the Internet claims that a teen athlete pulled up lame at football practice, was sent to a doctor, and had a blood clot six feet long pulled out of his leg. I'm not sure that that's even possible but blood clots of appalling sizes are being removed from dead bodies these days. People are suing vaccine manufacturers and being awarded money. The U.S. government has a policy of protecting vaccine manufacturers in lawsuits, so the payouts to even a few victims of adverse reactions to the Astra-Zeneca COVID vaccine are very significant news.

It's too soon for responsible doctors to be very positive about why some people have adverse reactions to COVID vaccines, but it's time they admitted that adverse reactions can be serious, and started tracking everything that can be learned and tracked about who is likely to have an adverse reaction to the vaccine, of what kind, and why. 

Without even being a doctor, I fnd myself tracking who is likely to be attracted to the kind of "alternative medicine" that distrusts conventional medicine. There's no obvious genetic similarity although Black, White, Chinese, Indian, and Caribbean Americans who favor "alternative medicine" don't seem to have much faith in one another's traditions. What they do have in common is some experience of a conventional medical practitioner's giving them inappropriate advice or treatment. 

"Alternative medicine" usually requires the patient to take some responsibility for per own care, to become per own primary practitioner, and this is likely to be why it serves so many followers of different traditions so well. Whether people seek homeopathic, Ayurvedic, acupuncture, or some other remedy they're taught that they need to pay attention to what works for them. Sometimes the "alternative treatment' itself is as uselessas the conventional prescription was, but the "alternative" practitioner empowers the patient to discover things like, "My trouble has been that, although White, I'm lactose-intolerant,"" Again and again these patients testify that conventional doctors ought to have known that a White patient could be lactose-intolerant, that the antibiotic applied to the infection would aggravate the fungi infecting the wound, that the "nervous breakdown" was caused by the lifelong thyroid condition the patient had rather than by brain damage the patient didn't have, and so on. 

If Dante were alive today, there'd be a special canto in his Inferno about the afterlife awaiting doctors who wring their hands and wail about the mysterious, baffling causes of things the patients feel they understand perfectly well. The medical profession's reluctance to confirm the role glyphosate plays in illness is criminal. I think we all know that, if doctors subsidized by chemical companies could prove that patients' acute reactions to "allergies" or "age" or "something going around," or their flare-ups of chronic conditions, were not correlated with glyphosate exposure, they would have done that many years ago. Doctors are afraid they'll find themselves verifying and quantifying the damage glyphosate does to human beings and lose their generous friends in the chemical companies.  

Whether a doctor is telling someone that his glyphosate reaction is Stage IV stomach cancer and he'll be dead in six months, as a doctor actually told a neighbor of mine, in 1995, and the man is still working today; or telling a White patient with a classic case of lactose intolerance that she might have some rare disease with a horrible prognosis that will require expensive treatment, while believing that White people don't have lactose intolerance; or jabbing COVID vaccine mindlessly into anything that appears to be an arm until the supply of vaccine is used up; or any other form of carelessness, the kind of stupidity that turns people against the conventional medical profession is this failure to consider the individual patient, this lazy-minded attempt to practice medicine by demographic generalizations rather than actually listening to the patient and testing the patient's hypotheses about diagosis, prognosis, and protocol. 

Demographic studies of "public health" are useful summaries for doctors to share with people who are not practicing medicine. The trouble is that lazy-minded doctors study the demographic reports, thus practicing sociology, rather than observing their individual patients' reactions, which is practcing medicine. 

Doctors need to beware of thoughts like "He's Black, so he must be lactose-intolerant" or "That young, slim woman who just went down with a massive stroke must have been reacting to contraceptive pills." For the sake of their own credibility, doctors need to make sure they don't practice sociology when they are being paid to practice medicine.

No comments:

Post a Comment