Only just over a century ago ‘doctors’ used to inject mercury into the urethras of sailors with a large metal syringe to treat VD (venereal disease). Today we inject various tissues with radioactive material to treat cancer. In both cases the level of understanding regarding the condition was in flux and hardly warrants(ed) the use of any treatment if you stop to think about it. As the Victorian Era doctors were certain that mercury was the cure for what we now would call a bacterial infection we too are made to believe that certainty exists regarding modern treatments. Using only the example of mercury and VD, we can reason that due to the constantly changing state of human knowledge, the culturally constructed manner in which scientific knowledge is generated and disseminated, and the simple, yet distressing, fact that we know very little about anything as a species it is possible to reason that modern medicine is faulty. Scientists today are flailing about in the dark just as much as a poor sailor with metal syringe in his pee pee after sticking it where it doesn’t belong. It happens to be a property of mercury that it kills organic life. So, if your VD (a term originally used to describe a host of infections and viruses) happens to be a bacterial infection primarily located in your urinary tract then filling that tract with an agent that kills organisms would do the trick. However, imagine that it only works 30% of the time - although no such trials and publications were being made at the time - is it really a cure for anything? The mercury is also poisonous to the human organism. Similarly, modern scientists would say to the public that chemotherapy works - a percentage of the time if you read the medical publications. So, is chemotherapy really a cure? It’s poisonous and doesn’t always work. What will science uncover tomorrow about the nature of cancer and the relationship between radiation and cancerous cells? Tomorrow we may me reprobating the irradiation of our bodies as a ‘cure’ for anything. It may simply be the case that radiation has a deleterious effect on cancerous cells a percentage of the time for reasons as yet unknown giving the impression that it is a valid treatment. Now, all that being said, there is something else to consider before abandoning the system altogether. At the time, there was no understanding of the nature of VD (today we’re still working on it and likely haven’t got many more answers comparatively although we think we do). Our options as a society are limited not only by our state of understanding, but also by our responsibility to at least try. The question becomes simple. Do we allow people to suffer and close down the hospitals because we do not yet have perfect knowledge (assuming for a moment that we ever would)? Do we stop treatment of cancer with chemotherapy and offer no treatment because science can only see a correlation and does not understand the causative relationship between the ailments we suffer from and the cures that they cause us to suffer with? Just some food for thought…