Health Myth 7: We Can Conquer Disease and Death

We spend a lot of time and money trying cure diseases. Owing to the ideology of progress, we have faith in the near inevitability that any given disease will eventually be cured, if only we devote enough research to it. Those who envision a future in which all diseases have been cured (most eradicated), allowing us to live long lives before dying peacefully of old age, are generally not considered pie-in-the-sky idealists.

Clearly our belief in progress necessitates a certain view of health as "conquest" (just as political and economic progress entailed colonial conquest). Progress involves the subordination of all things to human (generally means certain humans) control. But can death and disease ever be entirely within our control?

First, consider: everyone dies. Some people have noted that as the death rate from one disease goes down, the rates of others, by necessity go up. Is this really an accomplishment? Curing and preventing diseases never lowers the rate of death!

You may argue, "Yes, but by combating [another militaristic metaphor!] disease, even if those potentially affected die anyway, at least we have eliminated the suffering caused by that illness." True. But remember, old age comes with its own forms of suffering: mental deterioration, physical weakness and pains, accidents resulting from impaired abilities, etc. Eliminating a disease does not by any necessity reduce suffering in the long run. It might. But it might not.

"Maybe we could control that too. With medical advances, we could eventually prevent the mental and physical deteriorations of old age!" However, by believing that we can eventually control everything, we are once again relying upon the model of simple, linear causality, that is ultimately inadequate to account for a complex system like the human body. The environment is constantly changing in ways that we cannot predict (by virtue of the fact that it, too, is a complex system), and therefore the body will always be responding to these changes in unforeseen ways. The growth of antibiotic resistant bacteria is only one of many ways in which our world continues to transform itself.

To eliminate death and disease, we would have to be able to bring every single aspect of our living environment under our control. Unfortunately, the properties of complex systems and chaos make this goal completely unattainable.