Health and Hacks

Sometimes you can find a truth spelled out in a novel quite accidentally.

Case in point I am reading this SF thriller trilogy where one of the plot points involves alien nanotechnology. When injected into humans these swarms of nanobots repair any damage and brings the person to perfect health.

There is a side-effect mentioned in the novel as a negative. When these nanobots are introduced into a population the “problem” is that chemical contraception stops working. Vasectomies are healed as would other forms of surgical sterilization. Abortion also becomes much harder as the child heals faster than they can kill it. This is remarked rather off-handily in the novel and is really not part of the plot.

This is also probably an unintended insight into the nature of contraception, sterilization, and abortion. The fact that none of this is related to a required medical procedure and instead of bringing a body to health mutilates it or uses hormonal tricks to break a functioning system. Medicine has been corrupted not to mean a remedy or a cure, but to include disrupting or removing a functioning system for reasons other than health.

This distinction seems to be lost more an more. This is obvious by the fact that you so often hear that if medical insurance pays for Viagra then it must also pay for birth control pills. That one restores function and the other removes function is lost in the haze of false equality.

No distinction is made between health and what are bodily hacks. We will probably seem more and more forms of bodily hacks falsely grouped under the category of healthcare. They will also more than likely be ironically named. For example reproductive healthcare is mostly aimed and making sure you don’t reproduce.