All men are created equal

[andrewducker]

As some of you know, Erin has PCOS. The solution to this is to basically give her drugs that return her body to normal levels of insulin/glucose so that her testosterone levels drop and she's normal again.

Now, I have insulin problems too. And according to recent statistics a large proportion is ending up with type 2 diabetes because of dietary problems. So it'd be great if we could brute-force a solution to this.

In some ways.

How far from the norm do people have to be before they are considered eligible? Do you allow people to self-medicate away their problems? Do we allow people to use this tech to make themselves thinner (or fatter) than normal by medicating? Is it reasonable to allow people to basically make themselves dependent on this technology so that their hormone levels are constantly monitored and adjusted and tuned to keep them at optimum levels.

More to the point, lets extend that to a general level. We're gaining more and more control over our bodies and brains. Are we going to take control of our bodies on a deep invasive level (eventually redefining what it means to be human) or are we going to decide that only certain changes are to be allowed? This underlies many issues facing modern politics, from cloning to genetic manipulation to human/machine interfaces. At some point this basic issue is going to have to be faced, or the decisions will be taken piece by piece and not in the directions we necessarily want them to.

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I think that it's a rather dangerous precedent, all of this self-medicating. It promotes the understanding that we are somehow not responsible, by the way we live our lives, the kinds of things we choose to put into our bodies, for the condition in which our bodies are, but that if we're fat and unheathly it's because there's something wrong with us and medical science can fix it. Even if it is explicitly understood that what we're doing when we self-medicate to alleviate symptoms that are directly caused by choices that we make, it encourages complacency. It probably isn't physically very healthy, as well. Further, it reduces the body's ability to adapt to new things if you're dependent upon all these drugs just to keep yourself in operating condition.

The growing range of drugs we have access to are actually allowing people to have far greater control over their bodies. One could easily make your argument about contraceptives or anti-depressants. Why should we be at the mercy of our bodies whims, regardless of whether those whims are getting ill from eating a certain type of diet or getting pregnant from having a certain type of sex? Much of human technology has been about learning how to modify our external environment, and it seems fairly obvious that artificial lighting, running water and indoor heat and ir conditioning are all positive changes we have made to our environment. I see nothing wrong with applying the same changes to our internal environment (ie our bodies).