"Modern Medicine Is a Scam" Is Not the Same as Medical Nihilism

 There's a serious philosophical argument going around that we should trust medical treatments less than we do. There's also a much louder, much lazier claim that medicine is a scam. People increasingly treat these as the same idea, wearing different volumes. They are not the same idea, and conflating them lets the weaker one borrow credibility it hasn't earned.

The serious version has a name: medical nihilism, developed most rigorously by philosopher of science Jacob Stegenga. His argument is not that medicine doesn't work. It's that our methods for finding out whether it works are weaker than we like to admit. Clinical trials can be designed, analysed, and published in ways that favour a positive result. The same data, run through different statistical choices, can support different conclusions. And most interventions we test, given how complicated human biology is, were never likely to have large effects in the first place. Put those together and Stegenga's conclusion follows: for most treatments, we should hold our confidence a notch lower than the evidence appears to license.

Notice what this argument is about. It's about the reliability of evidence — trial design, statistical bias, publication incentives. It is, in its own way, an act of good faith toward medicine: it assumes researchers are genuinely trying to find the truth and asks whether their tools are good enough to reach it. You can accept every word of it and still take your antibiotics.

"Modern medicine is a scam" is a different accusation altogether. It isn't a claim about weak evidence — it's a claim about bad intent. It says doctors, or drug companies, or the whole institution, know their treatments don't work and sell them anyway. That's not scepticism about evidence; it's an allegation of fraud, and it needs a different kind of proof — proof of deception, not proof of uncertainty. Rarely does anyone making the claim supply it.

The tell is what happens to real evidence in each hand. A nihilist looks at a reversed medical practice or an industry-funded trial and concludes: we should have been more careful, and we should be more careful going forward. A scam-theorist looks at the same case and concludes: this proves the whole system is rotten. One is calibration. The other is a leap dressed up as an inference — asserting a sweeping, unfalsifiable verdict on the strength of a single, often true, data point.

There's a useful test here, and it cuts both ways. Ask of any confident claim — including the confident dismissal — what would have to be true for it to be wrong, and whether anyone bothered to check. Genuine scepticism survives that question by staying proportionate: doubting exactly as much as the evidence warrants, no more. "It's all a scam" fails the moment you ask it, because there is no finding that would ever be allowed to count against it.

Healthy scepticism about medicine is not the enemy of trusting it. Cynicism dressed as scepticism is.

When Advanced Technology Do not Salvage The Day......

This Corona virus pandemic has exposed the many weaknesses of health systems of many countries. In fact,all countries for that matter, from the richest and most powerful such as USA to the poorest countries of Africa.
Common virus infections is a daily occurence in most people. Name me one person who never caught some kind of virus infections in his or her life?
But this Corona virus is a novel species of the known genus of Corona virus. In fact,during my student days in the late 70s-early 80s, I have learned about the model structure of viruses including the Corona virus. How this new corona virus become pathogenetic to humans is still an ongoing studies by scientists. But the real fatal clinical effects of this virus is very well known to clinicians by now.
The main stay of treatment of any virus infections is merely supportive, meaning; there is no specific treatment against the virus per se, but the treatments merely support the normal body functions to ride through the duration of illness.
These include;
-rehydration of the body by giving intravenous fluids
-paracetamol to reduce temperature
-painkillers for any pain
-even the controversial anti-malarial Hydrochloroquinine was used as an anti-oxidant to mitigate the abnormal production of the oxygen free radicals produced by the body in reaction to the virus
-the most resource and capital intensive support system is non other than the Ventilator machine in ICU to sustain body oxygenation

The sudden geometric rise in demands for Ventilators and ICU care during this pandemic has caught all health services systems by surprise. Even the richest countries which pride advanced technology in medical services were inundated by this sudden demand. I just turned 60 recently and on my birthday, my son reminded me that if I had caught coronavirus in Italy and required a ventilator to sustain my oxygen, I would have been dead since the cutoff age to triage for ventilator use was 60 years old.

This is the irony, ventilator is relatively low tech as compared to many high tech cancer-treating machines and also the many robotic systems. Even the ventilator-producing manufacturers could not increase the ventilator production in short space of time. The existing medical instruments manufacturing processes are not versatile enough to design and produce the standard medical devices on demand. This is due to sheer priority of resource allocation rather than lack of technical capability.
One big lesson of this pandemic crisis is the way we invest in our technology. There should be enough flexibility in medical device manufacturing through appropriate resource investment instead of merely spending on highly advanced technology which are useless in time of crisis.