This is Bob's thread, and I should not be opining so much.
Health care in the USA, in particular, has gone so high-tech and "protect the doctor from lawsuit",
that even routine "it's probably just a minor infection", scenarios, turn into tens of thousands of dollars of cost to the system,
or to the self-payer.
They run tests to rule out the rare duck that quacks. They do surgeries for ailments that are essentially incurable.
No more letting people die of natural causes. Many deaths are actually hastened by doctors who just need to, for money,
or for their alleged Hipocratic oath, to JUST DO SOMETHING. Hence we have kidney transplants put into people with mulitple-other death-dealing problems. Heart transplants for the elderly? All this costs huge sums of money.
My take: Go the way of all flesh, don't strain the system. Don't put big bucks into the pockets of billion-dollar fraudulent "health care" systems.
Eat and exercise in moderation. Die when your jig is up. We are all slated to die, anyway.
The worst sort of example: lobectomy for lung cancer victims. The five year survival rate for such cancers,
pancreatic, and liver cancer too, is very low, even today. My father died an agonizing death eight months after lung cancer surgery;
his was a hopeless case.
Eddie James, sixty five, lung cancer. He "followed the doctor's recommendation and did the surgical thing.
Four days post op, his remaining lung, for some reason, collapsed, and Eddie died, suffocation, whilst pressing the call button on a cord,
calling for a nurse who came too late: his last gasp was silent and he had a literal "death grip" on that button. Google "death grip rigor mortis" (it's quite rare). What a horrible way to die!
And it was the SURGEONS' fault!
As I wrote elsewhere on one of these panels, "Surgeons surge". Ask a surgeon for advice, and you get, "Well, let's operate and then do chemo and radiation therapy." In lung cancer, the most common, lethal cancer, people mostly all die. I know of only one person who lived many years after such a cancer operation; his lung cancer was of a species not particularly lethal: "oat cell carcinoma", and it was caught =early=
My dad was not so lucky. He could have lived two years or so had he NOT gone for the surgery, from which he never recovered.
He was dead in eight months, eight months of pure, daily agony. I put his body in the casket with my bare hands! I am torn up over this sort of thing all the time.
POINT: when we are confronted with our mortality, just deal with it. A heart disease patient can often live for decades without "bypass surgery"; just chill and take meds.
But, as Thurber so famously said in a book preface, blackly, "The claw of the sea-puss gets us all in the end".
And surgeons surge, and health care costs rocket ever higher, not for the benefit of the ill,
but to MAKE MONEY for the medicos and for the systems they are part of;
can hardly blame the doctor who takes home, after taxes, 500 grand per year.
Five thousand dollars per hour 'wages', and sometimes, all for naught.
Remember Eddie James, a man who did not know enough to get a second, third and fourth opinion.
He went with the flow, right down to the morgue, to be incinerated. He, like my dad, could have lived for a year or three
had he NOT had surgery for his lung cancer.
He was a good guy. DEAD because of $$$$$ vainglorious, false-idol physicians.
Yet, some doctors are miracle workers. It's just...that the system is so overwrought, and now, a mess, totally unfixable.
My opining,
r.
