I was a breach birth that necessitated a c-section. That may or may not have been a deal breaker, however. A breach birth is much more dangerous for the mother than the baby, and in any case c-sections have a recorded history of over 800 years, so modern medicine couldn’t realistically claim the save on this one. Although, my sisters probably wouldn’t have been born and my mother might not have lived through the surgery in an earlier time.
This was in the early 70s, when US doctors seemed to have less idea about how to deal with childbirth than some third-world nations. My mom was only in labor for 12 hours with me before they put her under the knife, and she was a first time mother who was made to lie flat on her back. An upright birthing position reportedly helps a lot in giving birth and inducing the baby to turn. At least one of the surgeries my mother needed for the three of us kids to be born was botched so badly that her stomach muscles were permanently weakened, leading to years of backaches and a greatly reduced ability to do anything physical. When she finally went to get it treated, the doctor asked, “So, who butchered you?”
In all fairness, my mother would now have a lower chance of serious problems since doctors are finally taking notice of the lower rates of complications midwives usually have and are making changes in how they deal with birth. My aunt specifically went to a midwife for her second birth because of a very unpleasant experience in the hospital with her first one. She had fewer problems, no medical interventions, and a much shorter recovery time. 'Course, it was her second birth too.
I had pneumonia when I was four, and I’m assuming that antibiotics reduced the chances of my dying from it pretty significantly. Of course, I probably wouldn’t have gotten pneumonia if both my parents hadn’t been smokers. Nice feature of modern life, that. I don’t remember it being bad enough to be admitted to the hospital. I pretty clearly remember convalescing at home. So it’s also possible I would have recovered on my own without medical intervention. On the plus side, this eventually led to my parents quitting smoking.
My first bone injury occurred about four years ago. It was serious enough to cripple without surgery, but I wouldn’t have died from it. I also wouldn’t have been in a position to be injured in that way 100 years ago. Modern medicine hasn’t really conjured up any miracles a 19th century surgeon wasn’t capable of. Bone and joint injury treatment still pretty much consists of putting all the pieces back in the right places, immobilizing the joint, and hoping it heals straight.
Other than those things, I’m pretty darn healthy. Lucky combinations of genes have protected me against most of the genetic screwups in one or the other branches of my family. I don’t have the allergies of my mom’s side or the nasty astigmatism. I don’t have dad’s color blindness or my aunt’s digestive disorders, and that side’s tendency to gain lots of mid-section weight is reduced by a tendency to leanness on my mom’s side, from what I can tell.
On the other hand, I’m virtually guaranteed a slow wasting death from cancer if losing my mother, great-uncle, and 3 of 4 grandparents to the big C is any indication. Modern medicine has done squat to increase my chances of living through that. All of their cases were diagnosed early, all of them had early indications of successful remission, and all of my relatives croaked about a year after diagnosis. But not before lots of insurance money changed hands in degrading, painful, highly unpleasant procedures with side effects that rivaled the symptoms of the disease they were being treated for. About all that was accomplished was to prolong the inevitable.
My mother’s death was the most fun since she had so many brain tumors from breast cancer, that had an initial “very promising response to treatment” that her personality changed and she had trouble communicating at the best of times. At the worst of times, the lights were possibly on but it was pretty obvious that she was simply not home. All of the usual tests had came back negative, so she was going to stop chemo six months early before she collapsed with multiple gran mal seizures. Whoops, missed the multiple masses in the brain! Not that we could do anything but zap her with radiation and make things last longer anyway. Let’s give a big “yay!” for modern treatments that stretched this hell out over 9 months from her collapse instead of a few weeks.
The best treatment for cancer, in my experience, is morphine. Hopefully, by the time I get it, I’ll be legally able to kill myself without dispossessing my heirs or getting anybody in trouble with the law.
On the whole, I’d say that for me and most members of my family, modern life and modern medicine has probably done at least as much harm as good. That doesn’t mean I begrudge others their successful treatments; I just don’t think that medicine deserves its reputation for working miracles. More than one expert has remarked that cleanliness and sterilization have saved more lives than any other medical procedure or treatment. Gee, washing stuff is good for you. Whoda thunk it.
Many of the “advanced” treatments we have now are allowing people to live long enough to–as an earlier poster in this thread put it–pee in the gene pool. Those treatments may be good in the short term, but will undoubtedly cause problems and misery in the future. Lucky for us, we’ll all be dead by then, eh?
