Cultural Bias, Medicine, and Hoops

We believe that allopathic medicine is the only way to treat illness. But that's just a cultural bias, it's a prejudice. It's not true. We give doctors the power to define disease and then we give them an exclusive monopoly to treat it. But intellectual cerebralization is an American cultural bias. We don't think it is a bias, we think it's truth. But the attitude that mechanical, chemical, and technological methods of treating disease are superior simply because they are mechanical, chemical, and technological reflects the American financial bias towards our own competitive advantage.

And that is fine up until a point, but we have to appreciate that that bias crowds out competing viewpoints (in this case techniques for healing that are not technologically based). It's as if we were saying only white people can play basketball. That's how it was for a long time in this country, and it was a cultural bias. It didn't seem like a big deal at the time, but we didn't know what we were missing. Were there any Michael Jordans, Shaquil O'Neils, or LeBron Jameses back then? Not really. But because we were biased, we didn't ever have an opportunity to find out. We just didn't know what we didn't know. And it was all because of bias. How much better are we all - how much better is the sport of basketball - for these non-white players?

And how much better would be our health, how much better would be medicine if we took off our cultural blinders and allowed other viewpoints to compete fairly? This is the essence of capitalism, and it is the essence of America. We just don't always see where we don't do it. We usually think we know best - or some expert knows best - and so there are exceptions where competition shouldn't apply. We should be very leery when we see situations like that. And when we discover areas of massive waste and overweening expense, we should take that as a signal to start sniffing out where our biases are, where our short-sightedness is. In almost every event, they will be disguised as a common "good," but really they are concealing a destructive prejudice that hurts all but a very few.