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Salvaging Health

elbe said:
No, there's medicine, and there's not-medicine. You're advocating the use of not-medicine for, as far as I can tell, no real reason. Evidence based medicine uses natural sources, they use whatever works. Alt-med just makes baseless claims and then charges sick people with the promise of a miracle cure.
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Way to be a fundamentalist.

I'm advocating workable medical practices that will work in a post peak world. This doesn not include dumping what you call "medicine". Care to respond to anything I said in specific, or just vague hand waving?
 
TFian said:
Way to be a fundamentalist.
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In that I want medicine that works? Sure, why not. Medicine is anything that can actually treat the sick and injured. It's not some mythical "big pharma" type beast that the alt-med proponents complain about. If ancient natural treatments work, then that's a part of modern medicine.

TFian said:
I'm advocating workable medical practices that will work in a post peak world. This doesn not include dumping what you call "medicine". Care to respond to anything I said in specific, or just vague hand waving?
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No, what you're doing is trying to shoehorn stuff that doesn't work into what does work because you don't actually understand it. We've had evidence based medicine for a long, long time. Resorting to systems that we already know don't work, even as supplements, is just a waste of everyone's time. You appear to have a really poor grasp on these topics. And no, just because some guy you like said something doesn't make it true either.
 
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elbe said:
No, what you're doing is trying to shoehorn stuff that doesn't work into what does work because you don't actually understand it. We've had evidence based medicine for a long, long time. Resorting to systems that we already know don't work, even as supplements, is just a waste of everyone's time. You appear to have a really poor grasp on these topics. And no, just because some guy you like said something doesn't make it true either.
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Yeah, more hand waving.

I actually gave a more detailed response to this earlier, care to respond, or just go "wrong because it doesn't fit my scientism dogma?"
 
TFian said:
Yeah, more hand waving.

I actually gave a more detailed response to this earlier, care to respond, or just go "wrong because it doesn't fit my scientism dogma?"
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You don't actually read anything anyone says, do you?
 
TFian said:
Clearly you don't...
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I thought to myself 'you know what? maybe I am missing something. maybe he did say something more profound and I forgot it in the hustle and bustle of life', so I reread all your posts. I saw a distinct lack of content and understanding. You ignored other posters intelligent responses and focused on other issues, probably because you didn't actually have a response and it didn't mesh with your faulty world view that you can't accept might be deeply flawed.

So yeah, I'm not impressed. Remember, alt-meds aren't rejected because of any sort of scientific dogma, but because the studies show they don't work. Even in a post-apocalyptic wasteland those studies will still be valid and real medicine will still be used; maybe it'll be performed differently, but we'll act as the situation calls.
 
elbe said:
You ignored other posters intelligent responses and focused on other issues, probably because you didn't actually have a response and it didn't mesh with your faulty world view that you can't accept might be deeply flawed.
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Which "intelligent" responses? It's mostly been childish hand waving. The few intelligent ones posted I *did* respond to.
 
elbe said:
So yeah, I'm not impressed. Remember, alt-meds aren't rejected because of any sort of scientific dogma, but because the studies show they don't work.
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And don't forget the AMA.

elbe said:
Even in a post-apocalyptic wasteland those studies will still be valid and real medicine will still be used; maybe it'll be performed differently, but we'll act as the situation calls.
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Agreed.
 
TFian said:
It's also highly energy extensive.
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Do you even know what that means? What do you think is the energy cost of producing 500mg of valproic acid? Do you think that 500mg of valproic acid is more, or less valuable than any other things you can imagine doing with that amount of energy?

Eyeballing my way through the synthesis, valproic acid "costs" a few hundred kilojoules per mole. 500mg is a few millimoles., so one (large) valproic acid pill is worth about 1000 joules. That's ten seconds on an exercise bike. That's heating up one tablespoon of water to boiling. (2% of a 6oz cup of coffee).

So, TFian: walk up to your favorite epilepsy patient and tell them "in the future you will have to ride on an exercise bike for 10 seconds to manufacture each pill. Sorry, you can't have it, that is too much energy."

(What, are you going to object to the embodied energy of the glassware? Sorry, our agrarian ancestors somehow managed to have glassware. Raw ingredients? Ethanol, acetic acid, bromic acid, simple stuff.)

Source?
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_therapy#Yeast-based
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepatitis_B_vaccine
 
TFian said:
Don't forget MRI machines, intensive surgery, sterilization chemicals, etc., that require massive amounts of energy.
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MRI machines are hardly the be-all end-all of modern medicine.

Sterilization chemicals? Alcohol, bleach, carbolic acid, betadine, iodine? With the exception of betadine, they're all pre-modern.

Intensive surgery? What definition of energy are you talking about? Take something like open-heart surgery; you think patients are willing to pay $200,000 to occupy the attention of surgeons and nurses for several hours, but you think that keeping the lights on, running a pump in the heart-lung machine, etc., will put it out of reach?

Again, TFian: a human being on a bike can generate 100 watts. Suppose that a surgery suite requires 10 kW for five hours. You need 100 bikers to keep it going. Let's say they earn 10 hours pay at $10/hr---that's $10,000 worth of electricity. So bike-powered open heart surgery costs $210,000, as opposed to petro-powered surgery which costs $200,000.

(That comes to $200/kWh---2000 times the present-day price of electricity.)

This is exactly what I'm talking about. If you increase the cost of electricity by a factor of 2000, it still doesn't put a dent in the desirability and value of "energy intensive" medicine.

In my opinion, your inability (or unwillingness) to do this sort of analysis makes you completely unqualified to say anything worth listening to about life in a petroleum-free future. All you are doing is looking at modern-looking, modern-sounding things and saying "Wow, that sure sounds too modern for my agrarian vision! Must be energy-intensive too! Out it goes!"
 
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ben m said:
MRI machines are hardly the be-all end-all of modern medicine.
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Actually in many ways they are.

ben m said:
Sterilization chemicals? Alcohol, bleach, carbolic acid, betadine, iodine? With the exception of betadine, they're all pre-modern.
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Can you produce those locally?

ben m said:
Intensive surgery? What definition of energy are you talking about? Take something like open-heart surgery; you think patients are willing to pay $200,000 to occupy the attention of surgeons and nurses for several hours, but you think that keeping the lights on, running a pump in the heart-lung machine, etc., will put it out of reach?
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No, I'm saying without the energy inputs of our industrial civilization, no matter how much money people have, they won't be *able* to pay for it. How can you do modern surgery with the energy base of the 1800s?

ben m said:
Again, TFian: a human being on a bike can generate 100 watts. Suppose that a surgery suite requires 10 kW for five hours. You need 100 bikers to keep it going. Let's say they earn 10 hours pay at $10/hr---that's $10,000 worth of electricity. So bike-powered open heart surgery costs $210,000, as opposed to petro-powered surgery which costs $200,000.
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You're forgetting an important detail, the surgeons themselves. I'll get to that in a moment.

ben m said:
In my opinion, your inability (or unwillingness) to do this sort of analysis makes you completely unqualified to say anything worth listening to about life in a petroleum-free future. All you are doing is looking at modern-looking, modern-sounding things and saying "Wow, that sure sounds too modern for my agrarian vision! Must be energy-intensive too! Out it goes!"
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In my opinion, you're leaving an important factor out Ben, humans. It reminds me of the nuclear energy advocates. In the world of logic and numbers and predictable machines, nuclear power is totally safe. Chernobyl doesn't count because, for political reasons, the plant was not designed, regulated, or run correctly. Fukushima doesn't count because, for economic reasons, the plant was not built to withstand an 8.9 earthquake and tsunami. Nuclear power would be perfect if only you irrational humans would obey our beautiful science!

How does this tie into this subject? Humans are also subject to institutional culture and dependence. If we enter a world where 80% of your time must be spend just feeding yourself, that leaves far far less leeway for specialization and academics, which means, less surgeons, and less chemists making pharmaceuticals. Much less in fact. It's the same flaw with you (and others) stated about why the Internet will stick around in an energy deficit future (a thread I plan to revisit in the future). Simply put, we won't have the resources, infrastructure or money to fund exotic specialties anymore. So yeah, just looking at the numbers, you're right. Looking at humans on the other hands, brings us an entirely different conclusion.
 
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TFian said:
How does this tie into this subject? Humans are also subject to institutional research. If we enter a world where 80% of your time must be spend just feeding yourself, that leaves far far less leeway for specialization and academics, which means, less surgeons, and less chemists making pharmaceuticals.
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Hey, you went out of your way to cite energy intensive medicine. Pardon me for supposing that you actually cared about its energy intensiveness.
 
ben m said:
Hey, you went out of your way to cite energy intensive medicine. Pardon me for supposing that you actually cared about its energy intensiveness.
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I most certainly do. But raw numbers aren't the only angle to factor in, not by a long shot. Energy depletion takes many twists, and is more complex than "can we produce enough kilowatts?"
 
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The problem is that the whole alt-med medicine thing is a red herring, then. That part of the argument should be dumped, since supporting homeopathy or quoting whale.to just makes someone look clueless.

Alt-med isn't effective medicine done cheaply. It's ineffective medicine done to distract. And it doesn't sound like a post-peak world will be able to afford to waste resources on useless distractions.

Also, ben m is right - the bulk of the useful stuff medicine does is cheap and local. The high tech, resource intensive stuff is operating well beyond the point of diminishing returns.

Linda
 
TFian, other than hand waving and your personal philosophy, what have you got? Western medicine has flaws? We agree. Do the benefits by far outweigh the risks/costs? I take it I agree with that and you don't.

What am I missing here?
 
Perhaps the main problem with your view is your assumption about how people will respond to challenging times. You have very particular assumptions about what people want, what tradeoffs they'll make, how they'll specialize or generalize. Your assumptions are rooted in blunt ignorance of the physics and economics of energy---which makes your life easy, because your statement "future societies won't X because I can't see people choosing to X amid privation" is immune to any information whatsoever about X.

So: sure, believe whatever you want. Future societies won't have shoes, because tanning leather is energy-intensive---I mean, cobbling is specialized---I mean, who has time to make shoes when you're busy turning the beet-fields with a harrow made from your own ribs? And if you did make shoes no one would buy them because you can't walk to a cobbler's shop when you don't have any shoes. You see, it's all connected to petroleum.
 
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