I am completely, profoundly, eternally grateful to modern medicine for the advances it's made. I feel this way, and I'm a healthy enough person that I haven't had to use it a great deal in my life. When I have though, it's worked wonders for me. When I was four, I cracked my skull, and without the benefit of modern medicine, I would have surely succumbed to infection. I'd be virtually blind without the glory of optometry. Without the miracle of orthodontics, I'd be a snaggle-toothed freak. Most recently, I was able to get rid of an incredibly painful ingrown toenail with the help of podiatry. Yep, I owe a lot to modern medicine, and so does everyone else.

I read a lot of history books. I'm well aware of how the human race was drowning in a cesspool of virulent microbes and biological superstition prior to the last 150 years. Yellow fever, small pox, cholera, and typhoid were daily facts of life. If you broke a bone, you would be lucky if it didn't heal at a weird angle. Heck, before the discovery of antibiotics (thank you, God!), a tiny cut could lead to your slow, painful death due to infection. The discoveries of modern medicine (and their application to other fields) have made our lives damn good.

And yet, some people just don't get it. 

A lot of people fall into that group, mostly New Age and Alternative Medicine whackos who can't even spell "bacteria". Yes, without any knowledge of biology or epidemiology, they claim to have found some magic and simple cure that will fix everything from the common cold to pancreatic cancer. Incredibly, nobody before them has figured this out before them, but it's the One True Universal Treatment, and everything else is quackery. Say, that sounds a lot like religion&ldots;

I'm not going to pay too much attention to quackery today, though. No, I'm going to focus on a group that was brought to my attention by our friends at the now-defunct Autonomy Party Web page. They call themselves "Vegan Straight-Edge". Vegan, as we all know, are the microcephalics who eschew any product that could be conceivably derived from an animal. "Straight-Edge" is ostensibly a punk rock-ish movement that forbids members to partake of drugs and alcohol. That, at least, seems reasonable. The combination leads to some craziness.

Mixing the irrational Puritanism of the vegan mindset and the aversion to chemical abuse of Straight-Edge with a "fuck the establishment" attitude of youth has yielded a strange beast indeed. Their stance is strongly opposed to modern medicine, accusing doctors of making people sicker. They claim that medicinal drugs are responsible for all of the maladies that we experience today. They claim that all medical procedures amount to human vivisection and even give X-rays the catchy name "Death rays".

I suppose we could chalk this up to a bunch of idiots who think they know everything about a subject but instead are so grossly ignorant that they aren't even aware of what they don't know. Still, the fact that they're maligning something that has saved countless lives and seriously decreased the misery factor in our daily lives vexes me mightily. That, and they're astonishingly stupid.

Stupid claim # 1: "So we see that the most medicated and otherwise poisoned citizens of the modern world suffer the largest array of different diseases, whereas those living in the developing world suffer from a small range of diseases." It is clear that these morons have never been out of the country. I'm sure that those inhabitants of developing countries who are stricken with malaria, ebola, dengue, HIV, and all of the other hundreds of tropical diseases that make life hell would beg to differ. A friend of mine did Peace Corps duty in Gabon, and people were always getting sick with something or another. Of course, since we aren't dying at a young age of those disease, we get illness more symptomatic of getting old, like cancer, Alzheimer's, bunions, and "old age smell".

Stupid claim #2: "Only a society in which the majority of people are ill can afford to support a medical system. If only a few people were ill, then no medical system would get off the ground." This demonstrates how a little bit of knowledge, the principle of supply and demand in this case, can be dangerous. First, a majority of people WERE ill a couple of hundred years ago, and a majority of people WILL get ill with something even today. Even if the world wasn't crawling with hostile microbes, we'd still need a medical system to help us out with accidents and when things non-microbe related go wrong, like appendicitis. So no matter what, we need medicine.

Stupid claim #3: "This "scientific" druggery (sic) is a religion of the worst kind, a modern abomination derived from the darkage (sic) mindset of noxious cures and evil spirits. All they did was lower the doses and call the evil spirits germs, then go backwards further by making newer super poisons to aid the masses with their wickedest of all arts." So now we see that these guys don't believe in germs. As everyone but these knuckleheads knows, the discovery of pathogens was a slow and well-documented process. Any imbecile with a microscope can prove it for themselves. Maybe these guys don't believe in microscopes, either.

Stupid claim #4: They also say something I've heard from other lunatics, that drugs only treat symptoms, not cure disease. Well, if we exclude antibiotics, anti-parasitic drugs, and other drugs that actually DO cure the disease, they're right. A lot of times, though, treating the symptoms is all you need to stay alive until your body heals itself. Other things like pain medication may not cure diseases or even treat symptoms, but they'll keep you from killing yourself.

I'd hate to say it, but I do agree with them a LITTLE. I do think that some people are too apt to reflexively demand drugs for every little malady they have. The plethora of drugs designed to treat the crazies is particularly troubling to me, and I surreptitiously back away when anyone announces they're taking any such drug. I guess if it keeps you from going on a shooting spree, that's ok, I guess, but some people just don't feel complete unless they're popping pills. Ironically, I suspect these are the same people who are suckers for all of the New Age crap out there, since they're not happy if they're not medicating themselves. At least the Vegan Straight-Edge freaks hate both New Age and conventional medicine.

You know what would make me happy? If these Vegan Straight-Edge guys would get bitten by a rabid raccoon.

That would crack me up.