Danny Thrall is a college swimmer at Fordham University, but he encountered medical issues in his year as a sophomore. As a baby, Danny had a surgery when he was only six months old because his aorta(the heart’s main artery) was a bit undersized. After the operation, he was still allowed to swim. Later, he underwent another surgery, this time to remove part of the oversized aorta along with a portion of a leaky valve that forced the aorta to work harder. Both were replaced by mechanical variants, and Danny’s heart became more efficient than it ever was before. While most experts believe that Danny will never be able to compete in swimming competitions, his doctor thinks it is possible, just not in the upcoming season. It turned out that Danny had a learning disability, so swimming was the only way for him to earn a GPA of 3.6. This brings up a new topic for debate. Which is better: medicine or surgery?
One of the most common arguments against surgeries is that it takes a lot of time to recover from them. Based on the type of operation, it can take between one and 12 weeks to be able to return to physical labor. Danny meanwhile, started swimming after just six weeks, and his chest immediately got tight and his muscles ached. Unfortunately, there was no other choice, as Danny had a learning disability, and taking part in the University swim team was his only hope of earning a good GPA. However, even if doctors decided to instead focus on Danny’s ADHD, the medication against it merely relieves its symptoms and does nothing to actually cure it. So, surgery was the only way to guarantee that Danny would do well in college. Not only did it fix the problem with his aorta and the leaky valve, both were improved so that the heart’s performance was much higher than before. Surgeries offer solutions against physical impairments within the body that cannot be dealt with by medicine.
Unfortunately, surgery is painful and requires anesthetics which can be costly at times. Usually, the first 30 minutes of a surgery require 400 dollars worth of it and then it would be 10 dollars a minute onwards. If a surgery lasts for 2 hours, a total of 1300 dollars will be spent, not including equipment that the surgeons need to do their job along with their salary. Plus, it is not uncommon for a surgery to last more than 120 minutes and prices per hour can fluctuate because the aforementioned prices apply to General Anesthetics only. For Danny, this is a problem because he is still in his college years and likely will not be able to swim professionally for some time. As costly as surgeries are, the fact that their prices rise faster aggravates the situation. Hospital prices rose by 5.6% in 2017, 2.5 times more than the inflation rate. In 2016, drug prices rose by a measly 2.3%
Neither surgeries nor medicine are perfect, but drugs would be more effective in the end as long as they get the attention they need from the healthcare field. Because medicines are cheaper in the long run and work against most diseases and disorders, it would be advisable for hospitals to use them as much as possible. Surgeries, meanwhile, will likely fade into the darkness. Not only are they overly expensive, every patient will fear the idea of literally being cut open and their organs exposed. As more money is invested into research and development, most of the benefits will go to drugs instead of surgical equipment. There will eventually be a day when every disease on the planet will be treatable with either medication or vaccines. At this point, there would be no need for surgeries. While that day is a long way off, the inevitable cannot be prevented from happening.
Recently, there has been a debate in the medical field: should hospitals replace surgeries with prescriptions or the other way around? The obvious answer would be medicine. Since it does not cause any pain, there would be no need for anesthesia, which can be especially costly. Plus, while drugs do not cure everything, in the future, they can with enough research and improvements. When we consider the benefits of the alternatives of surgeries, it seems like the only logical way is to make the transition to medication. The downfall of surgery will arrive someday.
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