X-Message-Number: 17381
From: 
Date: Sat, 25 Aug 2001 16:12:13 -0400
Subject: Re: CryoNet #17367

>Message #17367
>Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2001 12:17:25 +0100
>From: theo theodorus ibrahim 
>Subject: Selling Cryonics

>Many people (now and in the past) have talked about selling cryonics.

>Rather than just convince the public it makes more sense to >primarily sell it 
to the medical community as an idea. Most people >don't after all on their own 
initiative go and "buy" heart >transplants or other significant medical 
procedures, in fact they >want to AVOID these things. Ultimately the reason they
have them is >because in times of need, people they contact i.e. medical 
>professionals, recommend them.


COMMENT:


While we're at it, let me point out that instead of worrying about global 
warming from CO2, why don't we just move the Earth a little farther out from the
Sun?


I'm tired of people showing up with a new way to sell cryonics. My answer is: 
you're welcome to try it and show us. Or write a check and we'll hire somebody 
to try it.


FYI, the history of medicine is mostly the history of new things being tried 
first by a few desperate people with problems, who goaded or allowed a very few 
mavericks (professional and not) into doing something odd and new. This 
continued until there arose a general demand (as with bone marrow transplants to
in-vitro fertilization), following which the service was offered at a few 
centers, then more generally.  Even the fastest revolution in medicine that I 
know of (introduction of anaesthesia) was still driven by public demand. In 
fact, ESPECIALLY by public demand.


Throughout history, the great mass of the medical profession has been almost 
completely reactionary/conservative. That modern scrourge, the professional 
academic "ethicist", has been no exception, either. Which is to say, that (as 
J.B.S. Haldane said) the average mind treats a new idea at first in the same way
the body treats a foreign protein: it rejects it. The handwringers who become 
professional ethicists and the oldfarts who become the grey eminances of the 
great medical institutions are not known for their willingess to "try it and 
see." Unfortunately, that is how cryonics has to be done, and done for an 
unusually long time, before the final facts are in. If you think you're going to
involve the entire medical profession in the doing of a vast and difficult and 
dubious experiment on par with heart transplantation, but with outcomes unknown 
for 50 years (or more), think again.


Let me give just one illustration. Have you all been following the BRCA-1 and 
BRCA-2 stories? These were genes discovered in the 1980s which, if a woman had 
them, gave a woman a 50 to 80% chance of eventually developing breast or ovarian
cancer. A commercial test for the gene was developed by Skolnik and others, who
argued that women from families with a high breast or ovarian cancer 
predominance might want to have the information, so that they could make a 
decision to have breasts and ovaries removed prophylactically, after they had 
children but before they reached the age of maximal risk. 


The ethicists, naturally, threw a fit. They argued that such surgery hadn't been
proven to affect cancer risk, or (if it did) affect survival. Maybe close 
screening was as good. They argued that Skolnik had financial biases. They 
argued that more epidemiologic studies had to be done before a test of surgery 
could be ethically rationalized. They accused men of wanting to mutilate women, 
as effort to preserve paternalistic patriarchy. They argued that until the 
surgical test was done, doctors could ethically make no recommendations from the
gene test. They argued against doing the gene test at all, because (chicken and
egg) there could be no ethical recommendations forthcomming about what to do 
about the results...


While all this hysteria was going on, a number of concerned women from at-risk 
families took the test, and demanded the surgery after finding out the results. 
Very recently, it has been shown that what happened to these women was exactly 
what you would expect, and what they expected: they saved their own lives. Women
who did not have the surgery but opted for careful screening, not only 
developed cancer at the expected rate, but some died from it anyway.


Presently, recommendations for what to do with BRCA gene evidence are undergoing
a quiet revolution in medicine. Not only are the patriarchy doing prophylactic 
mastectomies, but the Amazon female surgeons, too. But that revolution did NOT 
come from the medical establishment at large. THEY fought it all the way, as did
the medical decision-making "scholars."  And all of this over a fairly 
straighforward peice of induction involving an outcome which finally had to be 
proven anyway, in order to change anything about the general recommendations of 
physicians. 

Now, apply this lesson to cryonics.


Do I think that all of this will be repeated in 50 or 100 years or whenever, 
after the first cryopreserved human is reanimated? Sure. Medical recommendations
will change. Meanwhile, however, you're all dead.

Unless, of course, you screw up your courage and think for yourself.

SBH

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