Reply #1: You're on the right track

[onebigbadwulf]

This is basically the problem that happens when you try to help anyone. More damage is created down the road. It's something like a domino + butterfly effect put together.


Take for instance a starving country like etheopia.

We see all kinds of people starving so we ship them a year's supply of food and water.

Then what? All those people have babies and the food is gone. Now we have an even greater crisis of starvation on our hands.


Now for medicine. We put people on medication, say insulin for diabetes. Diabetics who normally would have died and whose genes would have been deleted from the pool, now live and spread more defective genes by reproducing. We create an even bigger need for insulin because an unnatural proportion of the population will now be born with diabetes.

This is the eternal paradox of medicine. We help people in the short term, but in the long term we're making things a lot worse for future generations. We're making things like sickel cell, diabetes, and even cancer more prominant than if we just left these people alone.

Then again, it's important to look at the data for immunizations (which can be considered a type of medicine). These affect the entire world and are absolutely necessary.

So to answer your question in short - yes and no.