Whoa! There's no cure for that.

 

By Joseph Walther

 

Occasionally, if we’re lucky, we get to participate in an exploratory discussion of tremendous substance. I’m referring to the kind of discussion where the participants, while admitting the possibility that they may be relatively shortsighted, offer reflective insights to some yet-to-be-answered questions. I got lucky last Thursday evening. The discussion was both enjoyable and stimulating. It was unique in that none of the participants became dogmatically angry.

 

            There were nine of us seated around two tables pulled end-to-end. I lost track of the time, but I remember arriving at 4 PM and it was a little past 8 PM when we, reluctantly, broke it off.

 

            The initiating topic was cancer and whether we’d ever find a cure for it. A little later, the subject changed to death and eternal life. The majority (8 out of 9) conclusion to the cancer issue was “probably” not. There was one lone dissenter: me. Relative to the second topic, six participants emphatically support a life after death philosophy; two others just as emphatically disagreed. There was one lone dissenter from either opinion: me. I know! I know! It sounds as though I’m trying to vote “no” on “yes.” I’ll explain later.

 

            I’m not going to talk about the details of the discussions except to state that all of the participants offered their opinions replete with an obvious sense of discerning logic, thoughtfulness, and sensitivity. I am, however, going to state my reasons for offering my dissenting opinions.

 

            Lucky, lucky, knock on wood lucky ME. The tribal medicine man has never handed me the devastating news that I have cancer. I fully understand that, at 64-years of age, there’s still time. But, so far so good! On the other hand, cancer has viciously gut-punched me to my knees. You see, we don’t have to have it to experience its initial dread or utter desolation. Millions of people who have had someone they care about diagnosed with it will attest to this. Suddenly, WE feel an overwhelming stake in a “cure.”

 

            One of the things in our lives that begets pessimism and promotes fatalism is the human propensity to paraphrase unawareness into its prognostications. “Everything that can be invented has already been invented.” Mr. Charles Duel, Commissioner of the United States Patent Office said this in 1899. Here are some other gems.

 

·         "That’s an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?" ... President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, speaking about the telephone.

·         "There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom," ... Robert Milken, Nobel Prize winner in physics, said this in 1923.

·         "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible," ... Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, said this in 1895.

·         "Who the hell wants to watch movies with sound?" Harry Warner, president of Warner Brothers Studio said this in 1918.

 

            I could quote page after page of such nonsense. The point is that folks did not take it as nonsense back then. These were well-respected, sincerely driven people. But then, as now, people failed to account for fact that what we foresee is usually based on what we know and accept at the time. Of course, we must never lose sight of the fact that many socially anointed experts—past, present, AND future--let huge egos greatly enhance the sounds of their own voices, either. Some things never change.

 

            Many of what we consider today as commonplace, easily curable medical situations (I’m not going to list them here, but you can Google a list easily), constituted absolute death sentences as recently as sixty years ago. As a child of four, for example, I contracted scarlet fever. The Board of Health quarantined my parents’ home for 60-days. The tribal medicine man confined me to a hospital for 21-days, pumping my tender 4-year old butt with penicillin shots every 8-hours. Today, the medicine man calls this Strep Throat. Liquid Amoxicillin knocks it out in about 4-days. No hospital. No quarantine. No big deal.

 

            Here’s my point. I was lucky. I contracted the disease in 1946. It was life threatening at the time. Sir Alexander Fleming, who never knew me, discovered penicillin in 1928, but it didn’t come into widespread use until Howard Florey and Ernst Chain found a way to isolate the active ingredient and developed a way to administer it to the sick. That didn’t happen until the early ‘40s.

 

            I had a friend who died from an inoperable brain aneurism. That was 20-years ago. Back then, whenever the tribal medicine man discovered this sort of thing, he told the patient to go home and not to do anything exerting. Essentially, he was telling the patient to go home, lie down, and wait for it to burst. If he was lucky, he’d die instantly, otherwise he’d get to exist, perhaps indefinitely, as a human vegetable, a literal financial sinkhole for his family.

 

            Today, medical science can save some of these cases. Have you ever heard of suspended animation? Medical science calls it hypothermic cardiac standstill. They reduce a patient’s body temperature to such a cold temperature that it stops the heart. There is no pulse, brainwaves or heartbeat. All metabolic processes cease. The patient is clinically dead. The surgeon then removes the aneurism and reintroduces a warm blood flow that restarts the heart and reactivates the brain.

 

            Is it a dangerous procedure? Yes, it is. The experts use it as a last resort. The failure rate is 25%. That’s high. Would I submit to it if need be? Yes, I would. I rather have three chances in four of living the rest of my life normally. Besides, I’ve never thought of dying as the worst thing that can happen to me.

 

            Medical science will find a cure for cancer. It will find a cure for many other things, too. A few things have to happen first, though. One, we have to stop assuming that current reality is absolute. Second, we have to come to understand that much of our religious dogma ignores the fact that resuscitating organs is vastly different from resuscitating viable human beings. Third, we have to find a way to make sure that the lives medical scientific discoveries will prolong will have a world in which anyone would want to live.

 

            This column is long enough. I’ll write about the other discussion topic, death and eternal life, some other time. I’ll just say this about eternal life. Based on some of my personal experiences with certain people who claim to have tickets to eternal life, I’d rather not.

 

See you next week and thanks for reading.

 

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.