Key Nuances of Modern Medicine

Modern medicine has made significant progress—today, it can treat diseases that no one even suspected existed a hundred years ago. However, getting competent, qualified medical care is still not easy, and that’s because there are many nuances. This article will discuss some of these important aspects.

Poor Doctor Qualification Is the Norm, Not the Exception

Many have seen (or heard of) the TV show “House, M.D.,” where a genius doctor diagnoses and treats difficult cases. But if you look closely, he doesn’t do anything extraordinary—he doesn’t invent new drugs or diagnostic tools, nor does he push the boundaries of medical knowledge like geniuses in other scientific fields. He simply does his job well—exactly what any doctor should do. The problem isn’t that Dr. House is a genius; it’s that most other doctors are extremely unqualified. We’ve become so used to this that, in serious cases, raising money for treatment in Germany instead of going to a local physician seems completely normal.

Doctors Are Not Responsible for the Results of Their Work

Doctors simply follow instructions. If a patient dies as a result, it’s not considered the doctor’s fault—it’s “medicine is powerless here.” If the illness doesn’t go away, it’s not the doctor’s poor performance, but rather that the patient has an incurable disease. A medical error doesn’t mean the patient dies—everyone is mortal. A medical error means the instructions were not followed correctly.

Imagine if airplanes built from the same blueprints failed to fly or reach their destination, but production continued because it was considered a problem with the planes, not the engineers or pilots. No one questions their qualifications as long as their job title says “engineer” or “pilot.”

No one revokes a doctor’s license if they fail to cure a patient, even if another doctor could have done so, and not just once or twice, but regularly. Regional doctors keep working, while seriously ill patients continue to raise money for treatment abroad or at least in the capital.

Symptomatic Treatment Is Not Real Treatment

If your car’s “check engine” light comes on, should you go to a mechanic to fix the engine before it breaks down? No, you just cover the light with tape so it doesn’t distract you. That’s the logic behind symptomatic treatment—masking annoying symptoms instead of actually treating the cause.

A real doctor knows that symptoms like cough or fever are protective reactions, and suppressing them often makes things worse, not better. Such measures are only justified in borderline cases where the symptoms themselves become dangerous. But patients aren’t interested in these nuances—they want a miracle cure right now.

Symptomatic treatment has its place as “first aid,” but real treatment should follow. In reality, both patients and doctors quickly forget this. We’re so used to it that actually addressing the root cause of illness is often seen as “alternative medicine” at best, or as unscientific nonsense at worst. A doctor might calmly advise you to quit smoking, exercise more, and eat less—but no one takes these obvious truths seriously enough to follow them at all costs. We go to the doctor for a magic pill, not for lectures on healthy living.

A Doctor Is Not Necessarily a Healer

A doctor is not an angel whose sole purpose is to heal others. They are people just like us, with the same needs. The key difference isn’t that they work as doctors instead of programmers. Remember, kids:

• A doctor is simply a carrier of medical knowledge—nothing more.

This doesn’t mean that, upon meeting a patient, a doctor will immediately rush to help. It doesn’t mean that, faced with a difficult case, a doctor will lose sleep and devote all their energy to curing a single patient. Nor does it mean they can (or want to) solve all your health problems in one visit, especially if it’s a paid appointment. And it certainly doesn’t mean their medical knowledge is complete or free of contradictions.

Medicine Is a Business

This is obvious in a capitalist society, but many people pretend it’s not true. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t trust medicine at all—it means you should think critically and not trust everything blindly. The main law of the market is “demand creates supply”—as long as people are willing to pay any amount for their health, there will be those ready to take that money. It doesn’t matter if you’re getting a real drug or a homeopathic placebo, real surgery or lifelong symptomatic care—without money, there is no medicine, and the patient is the main regulator of this market, since they decide whom to pay.

No matter how altruistic drug manufacturers are, they also want to eat, live comfortably, and feel secure about the future. Production of anything is impossible without profit. And where there’s profit, there’s a desire to maximize it by any means, including ethically questionable ones.

Evidence-Based Medicine Is Not the Same as Science-Based Medicine

The term “evidence-based medicine” has replaced “scientific medicine,” shifting medicine from the realm of science to marketing. The problem is that, with statistics, you can “prove” almost anything if you set up the right testing conditions. A typical example is a popular flu drug advertised as “the most prescribed remedy”—a purely bureaucratic metric.

In contrast, scientific justification is much harder to fake, since other, unbiased experts can verify it. If the mechanism of action for a drug is unclear (even if it works), then its negative effects are also unclear, and doctors can’t account for or compensate for them. Over time, negative statistics may accumulate in clinical practice, but this will only be a limited set of symptoms, without predictive value or understanding of interactions with other drugs. No one wants to find out firsthand that a drug causes irreversible impotence or birth defects.

The preference for “evidence” over “science” may be because we’re used to proofs in mathematics. But mathematical proofs are fundamentally different and not based on statistics. In math, proofs demonstrate relationships and consistency; in medicine, statistics show correlation between taking a drug and recovery. But correlation does not imply causation—it’s just a mathematical relationship between two data sets, with nothing else considered.

Statistics are used when the internal workings of a system are unknown or too complex to analyze, and sometimes you can’t even control the input data. If the mechanism is understood, there’s no need for statistics—except perhaps to demonstrate correctness in specific cases. There’s no point in checking every value in Fermat’s theorem if you already have an analytical proof. There’s no need for a discrete Fourier transform if you already have the system’s transfer function calculated for a specific frequency range.

Drugs Don’t Work Like Magic

Many people, including practicing doctors, treat medications as if they work magically. But that’s not the case. When a drug enters the body, it triggers a chemical reaction with a beginning, end, and byproducts. The drug interacts not only with the body, but also with other drugs and even food—often with negative rather than positive effects. More importantly:

Drugs Can Heal and Harm

If you read the leaflet for any real (not homeopathic) drug, you’ll find that the list of side effects is often much longer and more interesting than its actual benefits, which may not even be clearly stated. And rest assured—everything listed as a side effect is not theoretical, but has been observed in clinical trials with real people. If the leaflet says “may cause multiple birth defects in newborns,” that knowledge was gained at the cost of real children born with defects to mothers who took the drug during pregnancy. That’s why doctors are strongly against any form of self-medication—taking unknown substances or even real pharmaceuticals without guidance is likely to do more harm than good, either through action or inaction.

Sarcasm alert: If you look into the history of the pharmaceutical industry, you’ll find many examples of drugs being recalled or reclassified as dangerous narcotics, with their production moving from legal to illegal. Typical examples include once-popular sleeping pills and well-known cough medicines.

Self-Treatment Is Not Evil, but Good

If by self-treatment you mean not the reckless use of chemicals (as doctors often assume), but actually getting rid of an illness, there’s nothing wrong with it. Adults have the right to solve their own problems—especially if they bear the consequences.

However, it’s important to understand that diagnosing and prescribing drugs is the doctor’s tool, not the patient’s. The patient’s main tool is to find and eliminate the causes of their health problems, regardless of how they’re classified in medical handbooks. Typical causes include smoking and other bad habits, lack of physical activity, poor diet, vitamin deficiencies or excesses, and occupational factors. Once these causes are gone, their negative effects will also disappear or at least weaken.

Our Main Doctor Is Hygiene and Immunity

If you view treatment as killing harmful bacteria, the most effective way is to prevent them from entering the body in the first place, minimizing the need for toxic drugs. Hygiene has made the biggest contribution to improved health and longer life expectancy.

Immunity, in turn, can handle diseases that modern medicine still can’t—like flu viruses and their variations. Flu vaccines can speed up recovery or prevent fatal outcomes, but they don’t cure and only serve as “information” for the immune system.

The human body is not static. It develops and adapts to the environment both during life and through evolution. Immunity and other subsystems also adapt. So, from an evolutionary perspective, there’s nothing supernatural about self-healing from diseases that were once deadly.

But it’s not that simple—hygiene and immunity are almost at odds. The more obsessed you are with hygiene, the weaker your immunity, since it gets less “information” to work with. Finding the right balance is a separate challenge.

Real Treatment Should Be Finite

If a doctor uses drugs to kill fungi and parasites inside the body, that’s treatment. If a doctor removes an arrow from your leg or pulls a rotten tooth, that’s also treatment. But if instead, the doctor prescribes painkillers, anti-inflammatories, ointments, or antidepressants that you must take for life—or else face pain, fear, and suffering—that’s not treatment. At best, it’s a service. The more often a patient gets sick, the longer the list of drugs they need to take regularly, and the more side effects accumulate in the body over time.

Real Treatment Should (Not) Be the Same for Everyone

If different doctors give the same patient different diagnoses and treatments, that’s not science—it’s shamanism with scientific words. True scientific knowledge doesn’t depend on who holds it; mathematical results don’t depend on the status or salary of the person doing the calculations, and the laws of physics don’t change from one engineer to another. Software bugs don’t change whether they’re found by human programmers or static code analyzers.

There’s another extreme—universal cures for all diseases. At various times, aspirin, penicillin, vitamin C, and even more radical things like mercury, radiation, trepanation/lobotomy, or fire have played this role. Here, too, we’re not dealing with scientific knowledge, but with a variation on the “holy grail”—even if it’s dressed up in scientific language.

Conclusion

The goal of this article is not to cast doubt on doctors or medicine as a whole. There are real doctors who work for the sake of helping others, real surgeons whose work is admirable, and real scientists who develop real medicines in real labs. The aim is to show that, in today’s world, not everything is as it appears in the information space or as we might wish it to be.