[ExI] drugs and diagnosis

[William Flynn Wallace]

When I was a young libertarian I thought that all people should be able to
take any drug they wanted to.  The older I got the more I realized what
tremendous damage that would create.  Now I support prescription drugs.

Now another issue comes up:  I read about a 'lab on a chip' technology,
which promises to be able to diagnose many diseases.  Physicians probably
will be against this.  They are against self-medication and probably will
be against any reliable and valid diagnostic tests.

Do we have rights here? A right to know what our body is doing and maybe
get us to the physician before real trouble begins?  A libertarian has to
say yes.  The physicians will argue that self-diagnosis will lead to more
self-medication and not necessarily more physician visits.  And that's
probably true.  But where does this end?  People doing their own
chemotherapy?  And that many patients will not be aware of errors, such as
false positives. (I read that the virus test with 90% accuracy will have
70% false positives because of the rarity of the disease - Bayes Theorem).

I probably have missed some points, here, so supply them at will.

bill w

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