hurray for medical advances

thoughts on STEM

I heard the number of folks who saw the incredible medical efforts for Damar Hamlin just short of 72 hours ago were 23 million. Based on what I heard and read afterwards, most of us (I had the game on television) held our collective breath as it unfolded, often praying for his survival and restoration to health. He sounds a remarkable man.

Today’s update is really optimistic: he is communicating with the staff at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, though not verbally. In light of the excrutiating ten minutes of resuscitation, we could well have had a far worse outcome. I imagine his medical team still have steps they need work through for his release at some point. They describe him, though, as ‘neurologically intact’, a truly wonderous status.

The drama on the Hill, the weather bombs repeatedly hitting the Pacific coast, and the unending bombing of Ukraine draw our attention from the astonishing nature of Hamlin’s improvement made possible by medical advancements largely achieved in the lifetimes of many reading these words. The medical actions we take for granted as available, such as those for cancer, heart attacks, strokes, hit-and-run accidents, anaphylactic shock, and Lyme disease, to name so few, were largely unknown less than a century ago.

These treatments are frequently prohibitively expensive but they exist. Oddly, those who reject vaccinations probably would not turn down the ambulance appearing at their doors following a severe burn resulting from a housefire yet both vaccinations and burn treatments follow medical protocols developed with scientific evidence, procedures, and replicative processes.

Medicine, as the author John Barry illustrated in his wonderful The Great Influenza (New York: Penguin, 2005), grew in conjunction with addressing society’s needs. The task of confronting the devastating 1918 ‘Spanish flu’ forced doctors to refine their responses by testing assumptions, discarding them when proven wrong, and revising thinking to move forward. Barry highlights the scientific approach so crucially followed at the Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore because it was almost an outlier in the United States. Medical discoveries on other illnesses around the world, whether it was Alexander Fleming and penicillin in the 1940s or Louis Pasteur on germs in the nineteenth century, similarly built on trial and error with resulting documentation.

The point is that they are cumulative learning which builds confidence in understanding of the nature of illness and the body. Hamlin’s medical care builds on cases over centuries of learning about the body and treatments. It was not that long ago that professional footballers did not even wear pads; I suspect for the early game helmets were optional as they were in ice hockey through the early 1970s. The accumulated wisdom on trauma resides not only in sports medicine but in generalised trauma medicine and its specialties of which there are several. Thank goodness we are there in 2023 when Hamlin collapsed and that doctors talk with each other across specialties built on general medical knowledge .

Medical advances often confront skepticism. I am reading Lucy Ward’s volume, The Empress and the English Doctor (London: Oneworld Publication, 2022) on Catherine the Great and an English physician who risked a lot by inoculating her and the Tsarevich Paul against smallpox in the eighteenth century. The Russian ruler took the step to be embraced this preventive actions seen as dubious, if not deadly, by many but Doctor Dimsdale had been a risk-taker, as were a few brave doctors in Europe and North America, to address a seemingly pervasive killer disease.

What is so fascinating to me now is that we have voices calling to reverse these long-tested advances such as inoculation because people fear they have political or economic implications. The idea that Bill Gates seeks to inject microchips via vaccines apparently leads some to reject Covid vaccines; others fear the vaccinations are only to aggrandize ‘Big Pharma’. No doubt Big Pharma will see financial benefits but they also invest in the research which requires technical sophistication and investment. There are two sides to each point, of course. I assume others fear Gates has nefarious intentions but what about then dismissing those which have changed life as we know it such as that virtually eradicating the dreaded polio or measles whih still kill unvaccinated infants and toddlers?

Part of the problem is that people no longer study the science; we tend to run from it. We generally don’t know science, statistics, odds, or operating with supporting evidence, preferring instead to rely on either ideology or wishful thinking masquerading as personal research which tends to be a story which agrees with us rather than one with science behind it.. Biology, chemistry, math, physics, and logic matter. They matter. STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields are not just something one needs for a doctorate in evolutionary biology or aerospace engineering. They form the bases to medicine, astrophysics, physiology, and so much of our modern world. These are fields that matter a great deal and we are discarding them as a society. You don’t have to like math to realise it has applications in logical thinking.

A dear friend of mine had a mild stroke on Christmas Day. He is home and facing relatively minor effects as of today but I am so thankful there was a medicine that they could administer when it occurred. If we continue with mass doubts about medical advances and the intentions behind them, I am not sure we will advance as far in this field as we need as challenges and diseases evolve.

Millions of people are relieved and ecstatic that Damar Hamlin is similarly doing better but have we all realised why we are able to celebrate his good news? FIN