Medical consumerism -- like all sorts of consumerism, only more menacingly -- is designed
What an ignominious destiny for medicine if its future turned into one of bestowing meagre increments of unenjoyed life! It would mirror the fate of athletics, in which disproportionate energies and resources -- not least medical ones, like illegal steroids -- are now invested to shave records by milliseconds. And, it goes without saying, the logical extension of longevism -- the "abolition" of death -- would not be a solution but only an exacerbation. To air these predicaments is not anti-medical spleen, but simply to face the growing reality of medical power not exactly without responsibility but with dissolving goals.
Hence medicine's finest hour becomes the dawn of its dilemmas. For centuries, medicine was impotent and hence unproblematic. 'From the Greeks to the Great War, its job was simple: to struggle with lethal diseases and gross disabilities, to ensure live births, and to manage pain. It performed these uncontroversial tasks by and large with meagre success. Today, with mission accomplished, medicine's triumphs are dissolving in disorientation. Medicine has led to vastly inflated expectations, which the public has eagerly swallowed. Yet as these expectations grow unlimited, they become unfulfillable. The task facing medicine in the twenty-first century will be to redefine its limits even as it extends its capacities.
In the author's opinion, the prolongation of life is equal to
A.mobility.
B.deprivation.
C.autonomy.
D.awareness.