Re: Aids and Evolution
- From: "g" <gillawton@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 20:13:51 -0500 (EST)
<whitesickle@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:doacvh$870$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> Hopefully the main thrust of "healthcare" with respect to HIV/AIDS is
> to
> find a cure for it. And, also hopefully, we will not exhaust society's
>
> resources on nurture and comfort of the doomed
> infected, and leave insufficient the resources required to find and
> refine -- most long-term effectively -- a cure or, at very least, a
> preventive.
>
>
> Change human nature through education?
>
>
> Get real.
>
>
> g
>
> Ragland:
> My mother had a friend who was dying of AIDS. He was in a military
> hospital. The nurses understandably wore gloves when changing his bed
> pan, etc. The man was emaciated. The skin on his face was very
> taut...like over a drum. You could tell how the disease had wasted him.
> He was wheeling around in a wheelchair frantic and knowing he would
> soon be dead. I said to him while he was in bed, "Eventually, they'll
> find a cure for AIDS" and he replied, "That's not going to do me much
> good now." He died about a week later. His death was a miserable one.
> Surrounded by strangers in gloves and frantically awaiting death. I
> don't think many "resources" are spent on the nurture and comfort of
> the doomed infected. If you consider drugs to be a "comfort" I trust
> you are aware this won't necessarily prevent the transmission of HIV to
> another person. They might die sooner without the drugs but this won't
> necessarily prevent them from infecting somebody else. There are also
> those who have HIV and don't know it and unwittingly transfer it to a
> sex partner.
>
> The best way to protect yourself is to know very well the person you
> plan on having sex with and have tests done before having sex. As far
> as resources it has primarily been priorities and not insufficient
> funding. HIV/AIDS is a very complex virus. If you are suggesting
> society should make it more difficult to receive care and let them die
> and focus totally on finding a cure that seems paradoxical. If you want
> society to speed up their death through not providing medical care then
> why would you be that concerned at finding a cure?
>
> Your perspective appears to be of a Hustler cartoon I saw once. A pink
> haired and pierced homosexual is standing on a building ledge and looks
> upset. A police officer is also on the ledge. Paramedics arrive and the
> police officer says to them, "He said he has AIDS. I said have a nice
> flight."
>
> Michael Ragland
Michael,
Due to inadvertent typo errors, I failed to make my perspective clear.
My perspective is that there are not sufficient means -- finances, manpower,
nor hours in a lifetime -- to treat symptomatically and hence relieve all
the world's suffering as it is, not even if all the stops were pulled out
today. Therefore, I would wish and recommend that first priority be
allocation of available funds and manpower and man-hours to the developing
of a vaccine, secondly to a cure, and only tertiarily to relieving the
suffering of the dying.
My clergyman brother has visited many young still-living skeletons being
kept alive and in agony at a cost of thousands of dollars per day.
My physician nephew has treated lots of them. There was a time when he said
his only mission was to prolong life and prevent suffering. Then one day he
said to me he had come to realize those are not one mission, but two, and
the two sometimes antagonists.
My sister, who worked in intra-cellular research, in connection with trauma
intervention, got out of that work when she came to realize that over two
decades the original driving motivation of those in her line of research had
been OVER-ACHIEVED. It becomes a nightmare when you begin to see patients
saved from death, with no eyes, no ears, no extremities, no face, no
voice... and loved ones go into shock upon seeing what remains. If she were
not in her late seventies now, she would be working in the area of
research that seeks to find ways to regrow destroyed body parts.
If your perspective is that all the money contributed to AIDS research be
spent first on keeping as many AIDS victims alive and comfortable as
possible, thus depleting all the money -- because there is not enough to
comfort all the dying, even if we tried -- that might be a short-term
feel-good solution. Over the long haul, it would be consummate insanity.
.
- References:
- Aids and Evolution
- From: g
- Re: Aids and Evolution
- From: whitesickle@xxxxxxx
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