Importance of prevention
During the years following the graduation of the medical school, I noticed that there is something very particular with the kind of medicine we’re practicing. Hypertension cannot be cured, but only controlled under medication; it’s the same with diabetes, asthma, and most other diseases, this is the limit of medical knowledge. In general, drugs used currently usually inhibit something, either an enzyme, a specific receptor, a biochemical reaction, there’re very few which actually help build something in the organism and these are used only a secondary line of treatment.
Relatives and friends told me often of various herbal remedies which allegedly could help cure such diseases, and I used to rebuke them, as not scientifically proven and inefficient
Recently, I was drawn attention to this article in Spanish, an 2006 interview with Nobel prize winner Richard J. Roberts, a British biochemist and molecular biologist.
In this interview, he states that in the pharmaceutical industry, as researchers are financed from private sources, they follow lines of research oriented towards finding new drugs that don’t cure diseases, only alleviate its symptoms, so that the end users, the patients, keep buying and using the respective products. This is logical from an economical point of view, but obviously it’s totally unacceptable from an ethical or medical point of view.
Given the aging tendency of the population on one hand and the increasing environmental pollution and altering of healthy life habits, I can foresee that the market for the pharmaceutical companies will expand, further increasing their profits.
Suddenly, I found myself in a privileged medical specialty, one of the few which take action to prevent diseases, rather than treat them for as long as the patient lives.
For instance, I was reading recently some statistics about the guarded prognosis of the occupational skin diseases: despite proper treatment, only 25% of the patients have clearance of the dermatitis, even with a change in jobs, 50% of the cases improve with treatment, but the remaining 25% are the same or worse. This is just an example of how hard it is to actually treat and completely cure a disease once it’s there. Prevention is therefore of paramount importance, and occupational medicine has its well-established role here.