Introduction: The Promise of the Art
19
lecular encounters, aided by no guiding principle but the changeless
properties of the atoms themselves.
The philosophical result of chemical medicine's success has been belief
in the Technological Fix. Drugs became the best or only valid treat-
ments for all ailments. Prevention, nutrition, exercise, lifestyle, the pa-
tient's physical and mental uniqueness, environmental pollutants—all
were glossed over. Even today, after so many years and millions of dol-
lars spent for negligible results, it's still assumed that the cure for cancer
will be a chemical that kills malignant cells without harming healthy
ones. As surgeons became more adept at repairing bodily structures or
replacing them with artificial parts, the technological faith came to in-
clude the idea that a transplanted kidney, a plastic heart valve, or a
stainless-steel-and-Teflon hip joint was just as good as the original—or
even better, because it wouldn't wear out as fast. The idea of a bionic
human was the natural outgrowth of the rapture over penicillin. If a
human is merely a chemical machine, then the ultimate human is a
robot.
No one who's seen the decline of pneumonia and a thousand other
infectious diseases, or has seen the eyes of a dying patient who's just
been given another decade by a new heart valve, will deny the benefits of
technology. But, as most advances do, this one has cost us something
irreplaceable: medicine's humanity. There's no room in technological
medicine for any presumed sanctity or uniqueness of life. There's no
need for the patient's own self-healing force nor any strategy for enhanc-
ing it. Treating a life as a chemical automaton means that it makes no
difference whether the doctor cares about—or even knows—the patient,
or whether the patient likes or trusts the doctor.
Because of what medicine left behind, we now find ourselves in a real
technological fix. The promise to humanity of a future of golden health
and extended life has turned out to be empty. Degenerative diseases—
heart attacks, arteriosclerosis, cancer, stroke, arthritis, hypertension, ul-
cers, and all the rest—have replaced infectious diseases as the major
enemies of life and destroyers of its quality. Modern medicine's incredi-
ble cost has put it farther than ever out of reach of the poor and now
threatens to sink the Western economies themselves. Our cures too often
have turned out to be double-edged swords, later producing a secondary
disease; then we search desperately for another cure. And the de-
humanized treatment of symptoms rather than patients has alienated
many of those who can afford to pay. The result has been a sort of
medical schizophrenia in which many have forsaken establishment medi-
cine in favor of a holistic, prescient type
that too often neglects