The Benefit

So it would be nice, even profitable, if Mr O. Block actually felt healthier for this vast expenditure and manipulation, if he lived longer; if he could work more man hours, but he doesn't. A little better off than he was 100 years ago perhaps, but mainly because of other factors like cleaner conditions, fresher water, availability of certain vaccinations, none of which are essentially medical.

Unfortunately for Medicine's reputation, in almost every case of improvement in general public health, its discoveries and interventions have come after the actual improvement, the relevant contributions having been social rather than medical. So today instead of dying of tuberculosis or the infectious diseases, we are dying of the degenerative diseases, the heart and chest complications, the mental syndromes; a reflection of the society and environment.

Health, therefore, cannot simply be left to the medical profession with it's vast mechanisms and complications which revolve distances away from the essential existence of a health disorder in a certain situation, but which tries nevertheless to remove it from that situation to enable a categorization in its own terms. Health is necessarily and vitally the society's responsibility, or more particularly the individuals' within it. The biggest misconception is that doctors alone can give this health, but it is God or whoever else you believe in, which is far the more likely, and doctors with a nod and a shisk, charge the tax. The statement is of course misleading, however, as it implies some premotivation to the connivance on behalf of the doctors, where rather they are at best described as phsical pawns to some, blind alturistic mental process, which drives them to lumber onto this health something more gross than God actuall prescribed. If only Mr O. Block weren't blasted with the medical paraphernalia bit, he wouldn't be quite so blinded to his own self-curing abilities.