The only claim I can find on the internet is.
Some evidence supporting the theory that medicine is stagnating is:
1) The FDA put out a panic bulletin in 2008 complaining that for about a decade it had not been receiving signficiant new drug approval applications, but that these were generally just minor modifications of existing drugs to circumvent patent protection.
2) The last major disease overcome in the West was polio, almost 60 years ago.
3) Most drug treatments today just suppress the symptoms of disease but are not curative.
4) Despite huge increases in the basic science knowledge of disease, this accumulated knowledge is not being translated into clinically significant progress.
5) Major diseases are expanding as public health problems rather than coming under control. Thus the number of type 1 and type 2 diabetics is burgeoning, autoimmune illnesses of all kinds are becoming more prevalent death rates for many cancers are not improved (apart from apparently longer survival because of earlier diagnosis), lung cancer deaths are increasing now that the world has largely given up smoking, and new cases of endstage renal failure are skyrocketing -- yet medicine seems powerless to do anything about these problems.
6) Life expectancy in the United States is now ceasing to make gains, and in some population groups in the U.S. it is even declining -- for the first time since statistics on this topic were kept. The 'true' life expectancy, in the sense of the useful lifespan, is probably declining in all population groups with the rise of Alzheimer's Disease. Should people really be counted as alive if they are essentially just brainless zombies wandering about? If this happens to someone at 75 and they live to be 85, I think we should more honestly say that people are now dying younger.
7) I once wrote a history of the development of medical thinking on a given topic and consulted journals from 1980 to 2000. I was always worried that something new would come up that I would not include, but I realized that nothing seemed to have changed between the articles of 1980 and those of 2000, so what was I worried about?
8) To take an example from one field, as a student I was assigned to do a study of renal medicine in 1984, and then again later I dealt with the same subject from 1996 to the present. There is nothing different in dialysis centers, and very little of any significant difference at renal transplant centers, between 1984 and now, and when you listen to talks given by the manufacturers of dialysis machines and the makers of immunosuppressive drugs, they don't plan on there being much different over the coming 20 years. But dialysis technology was developed in 1942, and the first successful renal transplant occurred in 1954. The worst part is that almost no one working in the field seems to notice the stagnation! It is becoming a ritualized trade rather than an expanding science.
Some evidence supporting the theory that medicine is stagnating is:
1) The FDA put out a panic bulletin in 2008 complaining that for about a decade it had not been receiving signficiant new drug approval applications, but that these were generally just minor modifications of existing drugs to circumvent patent protection.
2) The last major disease overcome in the West was polio, almost 60 years ago.
3) Most drug treatments today just suppress the symptoms of disease but are not curative.
4) Despite huge increases in the basic science knowledge of disease, this accumulated knowledge is not being translated into clinically significant progress.
5) Major diseases are expanding as public health problems rather than coming under control. Thus the number of type 1 and type 2 diabetics is burgeoning, autoimmune illnesses of all kinds are becoming more prevalent death rates for many cancers are not improved (apart from apparently longer survival because of earlier diagnosis), lung cancer deaths are increasing now that the world has largely given up smoking, and new cases of endstage renal failure are skyrocketing -- yet medicine seems powerless to do anything about these problems.
6) Life expectancy in the United States is now ceasing to make gains, and in some population groups in the U.S. it is even declining -- for the first time since statistics on this topic were kept. The 'true' life expectancy, in the sense of the useful lifespan, is probably declining in all population groups with the rise of Alzheimer's Disease. Should people really be counted as alive if they are essentially just brainless zombies wandering about? If this happens to someone at 75 and they live to be 85, I think we should more honestly say that people are now dying younger.
7) I once wrote a history of the development of medical thinking on a given topic and consulted journals from 1980 to 2000. I was always worried that something new would come up that I would not include, but I realized that nothing seemed to have changed between the articles of 1980 and those of 2000, so what was I worried about?
8) To take an example from one field, as a student I was assigned to do a study of renal medicine in 1984, and then again later I dealt with the same subject from 1996 to the present. There is nothing different in dialysis centers, and very little of any significant difference at renal transplant centers, between 1984 and now, and when you listen to talks given by the manufacturers of dialysis machines and the makers of immunosuppressive drugs, they don't plan on there being much different over the coming 20 years. But dialysis technology was developed in 1942, and the first successful renal transplant occurred in 1954. The worst part is that almost no one working in the field seems to notice the stagnation! It is becoming a ritualized trade rather than an expanding science.