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Organized Medicine

An Ounce of Prevention or a Pound of Cure

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Western Diseases

Abstract

Medicine, which here means medical practice in general, is a prisoner of its past. Medicine has scored tremendous successes in helping to eliminate infectious diseases, notably by immunization and by antibiotics. Similarly, in the latter part of the nineteenth century effective treatments were developed for a range of noninfectious diseases, such as gallstones, appendicitis, and various cancers. One hundred years later medicine is continuing its relentless search for new therapies. But success stories are increasingly rare. The golden age of therapeutics is dead.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw in Reason

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Authors
  1. Norman J. Temple
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Science, Athabasca University, Athabasca, Alberta, Canada

    Norman J. Temple PhD

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© 1994 Humana Press, Totowa, NJ

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Temple, N.J. (1994). Organized Medicine. In: Temple, N.J., Burkitt, D.P. (eds) Western Diseases. Humana Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-8136-5_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-8136-5_12

  • Publisher Name: Humana Press

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4684-8138-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4684-8136-5

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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