Turning healthy people into gods
Posted on 10. Mar, 2008 by kchristieh in education, health, things that bug me
Most people would agree that it’s wrong for professional athletes to take performance-enhancing drugs, but what about Nobel Prize winners? Or college professors?
Yesterday’s NY Times article, Brain Enhancement is Wrong, Right?, says that some of the world’s top researchers use ADHD and narcolepsy drugs such as Adderall and Provigil to focus and stay awake, therefore giving them an edge over the competition.
At what point is this unethical? The Times article has a great quote from Francis Fukuyama,
“The original purpose of medicine is to heal the sick, not turn healthy people into gods.”
When the bar is raised so high that only drugs will help most people perform at that level, it puts people who either don’t have access to the medication or refuse to use the medication at an unfair disadvantage. Unfortunately, that happens in many other areas also. For example, wealthier kids often attend well-endowed private schools and drive their scores up with SAT prep classes that poorer kids can’t afford. And not surprisingly, there are kids who don’t have prescriptions for medications who use them to perform better on tests.
And where do we draw the line on “medication”? Coffee and cigarettes help some people to focus; do they count? And of the people who use the latter, how many of them are self-medicating when they actually could legitimately qualify for a prescription medication? Yesterday I heard Dr. Skip Baker speak at my church, and he estimated that about 10% – 20% of high schoolers need medication, but that only about half that many get it.
I don’t even like to use Tylenol unless I really need it, so this trend dismays me. Besides being unfair to those without access, there are always extra risks when you take a medication. (Then again, we sometimes unknowingly consume prescription medications when we drink our tap water.)
I’m not optimistic about this issue. I wouldn’t be surprised if this trend continues, and it becomes de rigueur for people to use prescription medications for non-medical issues.
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