>> Sorry, but you appear to have gotten Religion in your science.

> I'm not drawing parallels between the two as I'm personally not Religious

And if I say “It’s just a metaphor, dude”, your reply is…?

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Here is your problem:

Having observed that existing systems are corrupt, you devoutly believe that your system will not be. You may be super smart (as you appear to be) but, honestly, you’re kinda naive and just a little bit dumb. I’m not telling you this to hurt you [mods take note], I’m telling you this to help you: to help you avoid hurting yourself, or—worse—others.

You’re just as fallible and foolish and myopic [metaphor!] as everyone, and here you’re telling us you’re on a messianic mission from DNA Jesus. If you aren’t very, VERY careful, you will make yourself Dangerous too. Look at Pauling or Montagnier—even more smart and successful than you, and yet they still went utterly off the rails at the end. How many have suffered and died from being sucked into the whole vast all-absorbing AltMeb web of delusions and deceits, to which Pauling’s Vitamin C quackery is just one of a myriad of gateway drugs?

Protip for Very Smart People: Don’t be a Pauling.

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To answer your question “Have you ever been in an ER or Cancer-ward?”, yes (for various ills) and no (family members got post-surgery mop-up chemo as out-patients). To say “radiation and chemotherapy is a barbaric relic” is grossly naive and ignorant of history: they are an improvement over what went before, just as modern BCS is an improvement over Halstead’s radical mastectomies for everyone, which was still an immeasurable improvement over every person who got breast cancer rotting to death in agony and darkness. Modern chemo has made great improvements since its origins, both in targeting and tolerance. Radiation? Good lord, until the middle of last century grandstanders and grifters were marketing radioactives as beauty products! All lab- and field-proven tools with known costs and benefits, constantly improved and refined.

Once again, you do an atrocious disservice to both practitioners and patients who have sweated and bled to get us even this far. And yes, ACT is bringing in a whole new toolset, and should it be so successful as to obsolete all its predecessors then that’ll be a good thing indeed. But you don’t get there cutting corners: you get there by proving your new therapy significantly improves on the current standard of care. This has nothing to do with the economics of healthcare, which Dog knows in the US is broken AF (and you should consider exactly who benefits by keeping it broken like that).

This is about raw comparative numbers: lives saved, lives lost, survival times between the two, and quality of life across it. You don’t get that by being the Hero who dashes in to save everyone; you get it by doing the work, doing the math, and knowing that you will not save everyone who is sick now, but if you do it right you will save the countless more who fall sick in the years and centuries to come.

You seriously need to step back and wrap a choke leash round that big ego of yours. Your motivation is admirable; your sense of professional and personal liability is not.

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My turn to ask you: Have you ever killed a patient?

Because I have.

Breech birth. Done it plenty times before. Get in there; turn, pull, wallop. Sorted.

Bad one. Start panicking. Tunnel vision (another metaphor). Forgot procedures, training, basic (if there is such a thing) common sense. Should’ve stopped, got help. Did not. Kept going.

Boss found out what’s happening; stepped in, got babby out.

But by then, I’d already torn a hole in mom’s uterus.

Baby lived. Mom bled out.

30 years on and I can still see her lying dead knowing it was me who had done it.

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I was lucky in that Mom was “only” a Cheviot ewe, not a member of Homo Sapiens. I got yelled at, and rightly so, but it’s not like I was up on charges. Far from my only fuckup in life, but one with an early and perhaps fortunate lesson. Now I can be sanguine and joke: Many a fluffy puppy dodged a bullet the day I crashed and burned out of vet pre-med.

Today I write software (Ground-Breaking! Revolutionary! Industry-Changing! no less) and the worst harm I can do is trigger a multi-million dollar product recall and some panic on the shelves. But if there’s a coda to my slow but eventual ability to learn from my own long and embarrassing narrative of total personal balls-ups, it’s that my last few braincells work not to be the Hero of the Day but to make bloody well sure my code has the appropriate checks and feedbacks and fail-safes up the wazoo. So that when it blows up (and it will and does blow up, like every complex imperfect system that works for a living out in the real world) that damage is limited, contained, admitted, acknowleged, and learned from.

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Which is much the same reasons modern research medicine has grown its own checks and balances. Because who in their right mind wants their ego writing the story ending in “killed a whole lot of people we meant to save instead”. So ponder that as you evolve your own narrative, and please remember you are not alone (in every sense, not just metaphor).