an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, by el gato malo

In light of what the American medical establishment has done since the onset of COVID, you’re better being your own doctor. From el gato malo at boriquagato.substack.com:

there was once a longstanding truth:

“an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

your grandma knew this. everyone did.

but consider the incentives this creates for a modern pharmico-medical complex whose living hinges upon selling cure by the pound.

now consider how those incentives may diverge from your own.

yeah, that gets pretty ugly pretty fast, doesn’t it?

because that ounce costs them the ballgame.

truly, this meme is destined to be evergreen:

(and we would all do well to remember it)

it is not my intent to malign all pharma. there are good companies and useful drugs and lots of life and world changing technology that has come out of this space. you would NOT want to live in a pre-pharma world. but like any commercial sphere, incentives matter and when the incentives are perverse so too are the results and that which maximizes power and profit may not be what maximizes your welfare.

from private actors subject to market forces and consumer sovereignty this is fine because they cannot run unchecked, but when these forces are short circuited or outright abrogated by, say, government agencies that fund studies, give grants, and approve products as part of the endless revolving door of staff from public to private sectors and back again and therefore constitute captured game preserves of complicit co-conspirators in the place where “public servants” are supposed to be, well, then we land in altogether more treacherous terrain where bad ideas persist and good ones can be ignored forever.

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