Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Summary
I began by asking us to imagine that we live in a medical utopia of unlimited resources and boundless technology. In this state, we don't have to set priorities or use triage. We are able to cure any and all conditions, any and all phenotypes, that can legitimately be deemed medical ones. In this world, there would be two principal objections to a cure: that it is mere enhancement or that it is cultural genocide. As utopian as it may seem, though, this world is one that our own will always resemble imperfectly. After all, the question as to what limits there are on medical resources and technology itself remains enormously contestable. And so even now, in our current far from utopian state, we engage in lively debates over the final limits to medicine, debates that engross medical ethicists, doctors, activists, patients, and would-be patients.
In the current debate over the final limits to medicine, many cure/enhancement writers and activists tend to make the cut at the societywide level. They deem a treatment to be a cure if it enables people harboring a particular condition to pursue a societywide range of life plans and in that way takes them to a state of social normality. The only alternative that's regularly entertained would direct us to the individual level, stamping a treatment as cure and not enhancement if, given the particular life plan of the person in question, it will make that individual whole.
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- The Limits of Medicine , pp. 187 - 198Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006