IceNine said:

All of this just serves your notions about life being absurd and meaningless. You offer no alternatives and no guidance...?

OOOoooOOOoooOOO Great point Teller! This thread is the best I've seen in ages!

teller said:

I suggest that we all wipe our asses with leaves and live in burrows.

IceNine said:

I'll take the risks of the industrialized world, thx.

teller said:

In actuality, I would propose a responsible system of development, but there is no way to enforce responsible development and such, therefore, we will spiral toward certain death as time moves on.

In relation to scientific developments, etc.:

*Just because we can do something doesn't necessarily mean that we should*

I believe in the holistic approach. My mom is a BIG believer in holisitc medicine.. Using natural things to mend certain illnesses. I do believe certain medicines may improve your wellness, but your body becomes immune to certain medicines after a while and will not help anymore after taken over a long period of time. Natural ways of cleansing yourself and taking natural remedies is a far greater and safer way to cure and heal a lot of illness.. I am certainly not saying this is the approach all the time, but it dont' hurt to try a more natural way instead of constatnly popping pills for every thing you have. Small things such as headaches or body aches or common colds can be cured with home rememdies or natual substances..
Just food for thought!!!

such a statement like "Are medical advances actually weakening the human race?" is difficult if not impossible to effectively debate, because it uses such sweeping generalizations.

there are and have been medical advances that have saved literally millions of lives polio and small pox are things unheard of today (except for the possible use of small pox as a biological weapon).

a hundred years ago, significant portions of children never made it to adulthood because of diseases that we easy treat with antibiotics today. yes, there are problems with antibiotic resistence, but i think the trade off has been well worth it.

the major part of the problem with antibiotic resistence is not the drug, per se, but in how it is prescibed and how it is taken. doctors definitely give out antibiotics too freely and when not wholly indicated in order to "make the patient happy".

the biggest part of antibiotic resistence is that folks don't take them properly. if the course of an antibiotic treament is 14 days, and they feel better after 8 days they stop taking them. what happens is that in a population of bacteria, each individual bacteria has a particular susceptablity/resistence to that drug. if you take the full course of the drug, it tends to overwhelm the very small popualtion of bacteria with slight resistence to the drug. however, if you stop taking the drug after "you feel better" that small population of slightly resistent bacteria begins to reproduce, maybe not at levels to immediately get you sick again, so you go on about your business. you spread it to the next guy and he does the same, and so on. then after several courses of this "selective breeding" you get a fully resistent organism.

i could go on but no one reads the really long posts.

medoc2003 said:

Everything you have said is 100% accurate.

the thing that worries me regarding survival of humanity or life on earth, what have you, in terms of technology and scientific advances, is not medical advances at all. the medical advances are probably one of the most benign if not positive ones around.

what worries me are 2 things.

1) pollution, both industrial and biological. in most experiments in a closed environment (and earth is a closed environment), the thing that kills off the population is that at some point, the environment reaches a point where it can not recycle and deal with the waste that is produced by its inhabitants and the population dies. obviously, we are far from that situation at this point in time, but it will become a life or death situation eventually if we don't kill each other off before that point.

2)weapons and those who possess and have the will to use them, and, that includes the u.s. a hundred years ago, the worst possible war imaginable could not really threaten humanity as a whole, but now that threat exists. however, my first concern is by far the greater of the two.


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[This message was edited Thu Apr 10 21:25:03 PDT 2003 by medoc2003]