[extropy-chat] The Bureaucracy of Medicine (singularity conference at stanford)

[Kurt Schoedel]

You are correct, John Clark, in that there has been a noticable delay 
in translating research into cures by the medical meliu. The reason is 
very simple: The medical industry is an intensely gay bureaucracy, 
just like NASA and the Tokamak fusion program. And just like NASA and 
the fusion program, no progress will occur untill the system is 
eliminated or reformed.

Just like how progress in Soviet Communism was measured in ever larger 
and larger factories, progress in our medical industry is measured in 
ever more enormous hospitals and complex surguries. Very few MDs 
understand molecular biology as well as many posters here in extropy. 
Most of them have liberal arts degrees. The FDA and AMA makes sure 
that this situation never changes.

The fact that medicine and health care cost rise exponentially without 
any increase in lifespan or youthspan is as indicative that the 
current approach does not work as the fact that each generation of 
tokamaks is more expensive than the previous one and, yet, fusion 
remains 50 years in the future. Or how NASA keeps making space 
transportation more and more expensive.

Cost effective therapies that work do not get developed and 
dessiminated to the marketplace (you and I). Rather, expensive 
surguries that do nothing to cure the underlying condition (such as 
pypass surgury, which results in brain damage in the majority of 
cases) become the preferred methods of the medical industry. 

This is the reason why political action to maintain our access to 
nutritional supplements must be pursued at all costs. This is 
currently the only way to "end-run" around the system for many medical 
conditions.

The other is medical tourism. Many countries, such as India and China, 
do not have intrenched medical bureaucracies like those in the U.S. 
and Europe. Hence, no pre-existing system that must be fought in order 
to bring out new therapies (such as gene therapy and stem cells and 
the like).

The current medical bureaucracy will continue to grow and grow in the 
U.S. until it finally collapses (like Soviet Communism), probably 
under the financial weight of the baby boomers. My guess is this will 
be in the next 10-15 years, maybe sooner.

When the current system collapses, medical innovation in the U.S. will 
once again become possible.

Kurt Schoedel
MetaTechnica