[ExI] Medical Singularity pain

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of BillK
Subject: [ExI] Medical Singularity pain

>...If you read the medical news and science news streams, you get some
impression of the flood of research that is going on. Cancer news has
seeming breakthroughs published every day...The pain comes in realising that
we are going to lose loved ones during those twenty years. Perhaps I may not
last that long myself.  Accidents or illness can strike at any time...BillK
_______________________________________________

BillK, if we can get Snowmed CT to go critical mass, that might be the
biggest breakthrough in medicine since penicillin.  If we can somehow get
the masses of proles to help reduce their health history from a bunch of
words that only a few overworked doctors can use to a bunch of numbers that
millions of tireless computers can grind away on through the night, we might
get ten big news stories for every one we get now.

I am imagining creating an extension of Snowmed CT that would somehow
accommodate stuff like dietary intake, weight history, frequency of
copulation, mental outlook, although that might be redundant with the
previous, employment history, recreational drug use, environmental exposure
to known toxins, location of the patient, how well you sleep (not so well
lately alas) how many larvae you have spawned and when, accidents, sports
injuries, degenerative diseases, how much alcohol you have devoured and
when, all that kind of stuff.

All this reminds me of a discussion I had with my grandfather about smoking,
40 yrs ago.  At that time, the TV advertisers were getting into high gear
about about how bad it is to smoke.  My grandfather had given up smoking in
his 40s, before there was any of this (1950s.)  He was the kind of guy who
collected data and was always studying this variable vs that, so I asked him
about whether any of the old timers suspected a correlation between smoking
and lung cancer.  His answer is one I will never forget.  He said they never
knew about lung cancer, but they knew way back even before his time that
smoking was bad for the health and that smokers died sooner.  He always
suspected it caused emphysema, and of course there was that raspy smokers
cough.  According to him, it was obvious to anyone with at least one eye and
at least two functioning brain cells: you compared those who smoked with
those who didn't, and the signal was as subtle as a steamroller.  So he
quit.  

About 8 years after we had that discussion, one of his sons developed lung
cancer at age 34.  We buried him six months later.

spike