This is the one area that those who want to argue that civilization is beneficial—and progressively so—consider to be the ace up their sleeve. Clearly innovation in medical technology reflects progress. Where would we be without polio vaccine or Prozac or dialysis?
Let’s ignore for the moment the millions of people with medical problems that require technological intervention who will die because they do not have access to the technology, either because they are too poor or because they had the misfortune of being born on the wrong part of the planet—or both. We might start, instead, with the suffering that modern medical technology itself creates. We call specific instances of this suffering side effects as if they are not meaningful results of the technology’s application, and thus not to be given full weight in a cost-benefit analysis. Then add to that the fact that the number of people (with access) whose lives existing medical technology will be able to extend or improve does not begin to offset the suffering of people currently afflicted with medical conditions caused directly or indirectly by life in a physically and psychologically toxic industrial society. When you consider that the overwhelming majority of medical conditions that require treatment using advanced medicine are themselves direct or indirect results of our dependence on modern technology, the argument that medical technology is making things generally better dissolves entirely.
Consider, as salient examples, diabetes, heart disease, depression, and most types of cancer. Before anyone suggests that modern technology does more good than harm, they need to first weigh the costs and benefits associated with advanced medical technology—taking care to include the hidden physical and mental health costs associated with the corporate industrial infrastructure that serves as a precondition for modern medical technology’s existence in the first place. You don’t get MRIs or potent antibiotics without a toxic environment and a crowded, stress-filled, nutritionally-deficient modern lifestyle.
The need for advanced medicine is a direct byproduct of the conditions that support its very existence. And the increase in need has always outpaced medical tech’s ability to keep up—antibiotic resistance being a clear case in point.
