Ditto.
The thinking which has driven digital technology to satisfy moore's law
to create "faster, better, cheaper" for the consumer has created a
massive consolidation of economic resources based upon
physical assets which are essentially nearly worthless in a traditional
economic sense.
Medicine is still based upon assumptions that disease and death are
inevitable and rewards to the economic engine are to be based upon
keeping societal medical costs to less than $830,000 per first world
citizen. A paridigm shift which would give medical economists and
ethicists some grief would be a public mandated requirement to
apply moore's law to medical economics.
To be both cost effective and ethical , medicine has to fully
commercialize medical knowledge in extremely short time slices.
Developments which had product life cycles starting with extremely
expensive procedures or medical products used by a handful and ending
in cheap procedures/products utilized by anyone with even marginal
resources and a desire to access a procedure/product traditionally took
decades to reach full worldwide commercialization. Digital technology
is the key to making moore's law applicable to medicine.
The cost to generate the code underlying a windows 2000 program is only
justified if there are a hundred million users in less than 3 years
willing to fork out $100 each for the end product. The key to making
medical economics ethical is to deliver drugs, procedures similarly.
Doctors are to be advisors and the patient the ones to satisfy.
The need to mate the trillion in internet market capitalization with a
trillion in real world business
(ex the AOL -Time Warner merger) might just be the spark to start a
medical economics and ethics paridigm shift.
Anyway it's 3 AM here so I will have to leave these thoughts for another
day.
attached mail follows:
A gaggle of medical ethicists had a conference in Philadelphia last week. It was about
the need for death. Apparently all these people are smart enough to dress and feed
themselves without help and some have even learned to read and write. They learned how
to write doctoral dissertations and how receive government grants. It made them more
ethical. I guess that's how they became so much more moral than you or me.
Here are a few of the things these wise sages had to say:
"We can't ban this [longer life] research but we can make it socially despicable."
" The finitude of human life is a blessing whether he knows it or not."
"To delay death is to delay union with God."
"[immortality is] a pagan and sub Christian quest."
"To argue that human life is better without death is to argue human life would
be better without being human."
The really strange thing is that I read about this in the Science section of the
New York Times, not the religion section or the comics. I said it before I'll say
it again, medical ethicists are the lowest form of human life.
John K Clark jonkc@att.net
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