{"id":33816,"date":"2015-12-03T05:00:10","date_gmt":"2015-12-03T10:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=33816"},"modified":"2015-12-02T13:47:53","modified_gmt":"2015-12-02T18:47:53","slug":"medical-charities-and-their-prime-mission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/12\/03\/medical-charities-and-their-prime-mission\/","title":{"rendered":"Medical charities and their prime mission"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Warren<\/a> is rather a skeptic on the long-term usefulness of big medical charities (and not just because, like any big bureaucracy, sooner or later the primary goal becomes for the organization itself to survive and grow rather than pursuing whatever they were originally created to do):<\/p>\n

Medical \u201cresearch\u201d does similar direct damage. Huge foundations are created to \u201cfight\u201d every imaginable human ailment, and find new ones on which to build fresh fundraising efforts, should any of the old ones go stale. Grand sums are expended on \u201cpublic awareness\u201d campaigns, to encourage hypochondria and psychosomatic disorders. (I suspect, for instance, that the chief cause of lung cancer today is grisly health warnings on packets of cigarettes.) Money is raised in billions to \u201cfind a cure\u201d for whatever. (Snake oil sales were on a much smaller scale.)<\/p>\n

At the most elementary level, people should try to understand cause and effect. Vast numbers come to rely upon the metastasis of these soi-disant<\/em> \u201ccharitable\u201d bureaucracies. And if a cure is ever found, they will all be out of their overpaid jobs. Moreover, it is almost invariably some isolated, eccentric, unqualified and unfunded tyro, who makes the fatal discovery. That is why one of the principal tasks of any large medical foundation is to locate these brilliant \u201cinventor\u201d types, and sue them into surrender.<\/p>\n

Does gentle reader know that almost all the increase in human longevity, over the last century or so, can be attributed to people washing their hands and taking showers? And most of the rest to better sewage disposal? Or that it took until almost the middle of the last century for life expectancy in the West to rise to levels last seen in the parish records of the Middle Ages? Which was when \u201cmodern\u201d hygienic practices were last observed. (Large, centralized hospitals are the most efficient spreaders of infection today.)<\/p>\n

Painkillers are nice, and I\u2019m inclined to keep them, only if we realize that the blessing is mixed. They turn our minds away from futurity; they displace faith in God, to faith in doctors. They create the mindset that embraces \u201ceuthanasia.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, the main focus of contemporary liberal \u201cphilanthropy\u201d is not on saving lives at all; rather on killing off babies \u2014 in Africa, by first choice. It is what the proggies used to call \u201cpopulation control,\u201d until they invented better euphemisms. That is what truly gladdens the peons in the foundations of all the Bills and Melindas; and lights the corridors of the United Nations. That and the (still historically recent) \u201cclimate change\u201d agenda.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Warren is rather a skeptic on the long-term usefulness of big medical charities (and not just because, like any big bureaucracy, sooner or later the primary goal becomes for the organization itself to survive and grow rather than pursuing whatever they were originally created to do): Medical \u201cresearch\u201d does similar direct damage. Huge foundations […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,66],"tags":[744,244,513],"class_list":["post-33816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-health-science","tag-charity","tag-publichealth","tag-research"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8Nq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33816"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33816\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33817,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33816\/revisions\/33817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}