Life Without Disease: The Pursuit of Medical Utopia

By William B. Schwartz

Book Overview

The chaotic state of today's health care is the result of an explosion of effective medical technologies. Rising costs will continue to trouble U.S. health care in the coming decades, but new molecular strategies may eventually contain costs. As life expectancy is dramatically extended by molecular medicine, a growing population of the aged will bring new problems. In the next fifty years genetic intervention will shift the focus of medicine in the United States from repairing the ravages of disease to preventing the onset of disease. Understanding the role of genes in human health, says Dr. William B. Schwartz, is the driving force that will change the direction of medical care, and the age-old dream of life without disease may come close to realization by the middle of the next century. Medical care in 2050 will be vastly more effective, Schwartz maintains, and it may also be less expensive than the resource-intensive procedures such as coronary bypass surgery that medicine relies on today.

Schwartz's alluring prospect of a medical utopia raises urgent questions, however. What are the scientific and public policy obstacles that must be overcome if such a goal is to become a reality? Restrictions on access imposed by managed care plans, the corporatization of charitable health care institutions, the increasing numbers of citizens without health insurance, the problems with malpractice insurance, and the threatened Medicare bankruptcy--all are the legacy of medicine's great progress in mastering the human body and society's inability to assimilate that mastery into existing economic, ethical, and legal structures. And if the average American life span is 130 years, a genuine possibility by 2050, what social and economic problems will result?

Schwartz examines the forces that have brought us to the current health care state and shows how those same forces will exert themselves in the decades ahead. Focusing on the inextricable link between scientific progress and health policy, he encourages a careful examination of these two forces in order to determine the kind of medical utopia that awaits us. The decisions we make will affect not only our own care, but also the system of care we bequeath to our children.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1998.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520335562
• ISBN13: 9780520335561
• Release Date: August 2022
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.64 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

The Manhattan project and the seeds of modern medicine

When I first happened upon this book a little over three years ago, I thought I was just going to have a short, interesting read. Little did I know that this book would change how I looked at medicine and bring me back to something I had detached myself from since I started University. I had always been interested in medicine since I was quite young, however for quite a number of reasons I just did not see myself in this role. I also assumed that medicine was not as interdisciplinary as I had hoped, but this book quickly changed my inaccurate assumptions. Dr. Schwartz boldly introduces his work by making the claim that in the next fifty years, genetic intervention will shift the present focus of medicine (in the United States) from repairing and maintenance therapies to preventing the onset of disease. Dr. Schwartz is hopeful that medical care in 50 years will be more effective, less expensive and will rely less on resource-intensive procedures. While I remain skeptical about such a utopian prospect, I can quickly see why he has such enthusiasm regarding the massive changes which is currently uprooting traditional medicine. Dr. Schwartz is not only a physician; he also is a professor, a former chair of the department of medicine at Tufts University, President of the American Society of Nephrology and Principal advisor to the health Sciences Program at the Rand Corporation. He is both is a practitioner of medicine as well as an administrator and policy maker, who views the onset of this utopia from two unique perspectives; as a Doctor where the practice of medicine will change from merely treating symptoms, as well as maintaining clients' levels of health, to that of an administrator who views the this new paradigm as one which will eliminate the sky rocking cost of care in patients which is only increasing. While I find Dr. Schwartz a little over-enthused about this new revolution in medicine, other parts of his work are really interesting, even if only from a historical as well as political viewpoint. Dr. Schwartz starts his examination with the birth as well growth of big medicine. Following World War II, scientists and government leaders became increasingly supportive of medical research which could yield dramatic results, such as the Manhattan Project had years earlier. It was out of this examination that they believed that the "American people were ready to harness some of the nation's growing economic muscle in the fight against disease". One of the main supporters of this program was actually a wealthy and successful woman named Mary Lasker, who along with her husband helped establish a coalition of public and private leaders who placed medical research funding on the national political agenda. Mary Lasker was also the individual who was responsible for the transformation of the American Cancer Society from a relatively insignificant support organization into a bulging source of money for medical research. I emphasize this aspect of t