The OP makes a good point:
Don’t get me wrong, I’m aware of the wonders modern medicine has done for humanity, but at the same time, it feels like we’re so limited in what we can do when it comes to medical help.
Like, a pandemic just hit the world, and we can’t provide a vaccine for at least a year? I’m aware that there are limitations and logistics that go into Maki gg a vaccine, but man, it sucks to think that we’re that limited to combating a globally wide spread disease.
And we’re so helpless against cancer, I’m aware of chemo therapy and that there’s been plenty of people who recover, but there are also people who aren’t as fortunate. It kind of sucks to think that after all this time, there are times you can’t really do anything about cancer.
Then there’s the fact we have such a limited understanding of some parts of the human body, like how we know so little about how the human brain actually operates, or that we don’t even know where to begin with restoring something as crucial as eye sight.
And some people are just paralyzed forever, why don’t we have treatment for nerve damage?
I understand that each of these questions have a clear explanation for the state of their research, but my general question comes down to, why does “modern medicine” feel so much more limited than what I would normally think it’d be by our times? Perhaps it’s just the perception around the term “modern medicine” but it sucks to see that we’re so helpless against certain things.
And of course the big brained cope in the replies:
If you had to live for a year in the 1100s, see people die of condition we can cure now, see people suffer condition we can manage easily, you'd be a believer, but you can only read about them dryly and think something is lost there
I mean you could also apply this reasoning to things like racism, sexism, etc. "Bro at least it's way better than a thousand years ago HURR DURR."
Meanwhile you got countries like China that effectively stopped a major virus within its borders and you have Cuba developing a lung cancer vaccine and curing HIV in an infant along with developing its own vaccines that don't rely on needles (cuz of the blockade) or super sub-zero freezers (like the US vaccine).
I understand that some of the science is "hard." But my god, I can't help but think we would have cured (like actually cure, not "treat") so many things by now if it weren't for our fucked up system.
Here's the thing. Modern medicine isn't just vaccines. Modern medicine tells us that prevention is better than cure...In other words, a properly coordinated and well-organized lockdown would have ended covid. This is what research had told us for decades was the best way to end a pandemic, but of course politicians um'd and uh'd about it because they didn't want to sacrifice their capitalist master's profits. They did half measures and killed millions for profit. That's all there is to it.
Modern medicine isn't perfect, but you can't properly judge its performance in a system that kneecaps it.
What's sad is there's 100% ways of primary prevention for cancer and they aren't "hard" (in that there are actionable solutions but atent considered for political-economy reasons) but go against profit motives. Like, pollution, inadequate housing, wildfire smoke, poor diets, and so on.
And then the really sad stuff is something like the struggle against microplastics - well, that's just lost now. Even if we had a global communist revolution tomorrow, microplastics will be with us for tens of thousands of years. We didn't do any prevention because plastic made too much sense from the pov of capital and no one with power was around to intervene against it.