What Medicine Cannot Heal
What chronic illness taught me about the modern view of the body
My family has always had an interesting relationship with medicine.
When I was young, my grandmother suffered from Parkinson’s disease, so visits to the hospital were part of the natural rhythm of our life. I grew up used to seeing prescription medicine on our kitchen counter, organized into those little containers with the days of the week marked out. When her condition began to decline in my later teenage years, I would watch my mother frequently on the phone, scheduling treatments and appointments with providers.
Those years led our family to develop a quiet reliance on healthcare. My parents had no background in medicine, and so they had no choice but to place their trust in whatever the doctors prescribed and ordered. Watching them interact with providers has, in ways I didn’t fully understand at the time, shaped my own perspective on medicine as well.
In 2018, my grandmother passed away. Her treatments had been showing diminishing returns for quite some time, and one day she didn’t wake up.
It was my first experience not only with death, but with the limits of what I believed medicine could achieve. In my naivety, I had been quietly convinced that medicine, science, and technology always had a solution — that it was only a matter of finding it.
The Limits of Medicine
Fast forward to 2023. I was diagnosed and treated for a condition called cervical myelopathy. I won’t rehash the details — I’ve written about it elsewhere — but my attitude going in was the same as it had always been. Every ailment I’d previously faced, the common cold, a broken wrist, had eventually yielded to medicine. Why would this be any different?
After my first fusion surgery, the results were pretty cut and dry. The nerve pain in my right arm was gone. Feeling had returned to my fingers. For my surgeon, I was one of a thousand cookie-cutter success stories that he could file way.
But only a month later, my symptoms returned. The sensation drained gradually from my fingers, my gait became unsteady, and fine motor movements grew increasingly difficult. Physical therapy offered little improvement, and I became wary of layering on more prescriptions.
In 2024, I opted for a second surgery. This time a laminoplasty, far more extensive than the first. Where the fusion had addressed a single level of my spine, this procedure involved five, opening the back of my spinal canal to relieve pressure on the cord. The recovery was difficult.
The surgery helped in some regards. However, I would be lying if I said it got me out of the woods. Months later, my symptoms returned, and to this day they continue to slowly progress, though at a much slower rate than before.
At this point for me, this seems like the end of what medicine currently knows. Several surgeons are unanimously uncertain why my symptoms persist. There are no surgeries left, no treatments on the table. Perhaps future advances will eventually shed light on cases like mine — but I doubt they will arrive in time to matter for me.
The Myth of Human Mastery
What this experience has taught me is that we often carry a near-utopian expectation of medicine. For every ailment, every disease, we assume there is a treatment waiting to fit the mold — a solution that just needs to be found and applied. We treat the body like a problem that, with enough expertise and technology, can always be solved.
After all, we now sail across oceans that once belonged to the “gods”. We scale mountains and cut through clouds as a matter of routine. It was only a matter of time before we convinced ourselves that the next frontier was the human body itself.
Health culture, bio-hacking, transhumanism: these are all symptoms of a shifting anthropology, one in which the body is no longer seen as something finite and given, but as a limit to be overcome. The belief that all disease, aging, and mortality can be overcome is the next natural step in mankind’s advancement.
And yet, while cases like mine are few, they exist in enough number to remind us that the body still holds mysteries that confound even the most capable of experts. A 3mm difference in cord compression and my body’s refusal to behave according to textbooks appropriately curbed my confidence.
One must be reminded that a Biblical anthropology has always respected the limitations of the human body. Humanity’s finite nature is not a challenge for the next innovator, but a reminder of the distinction between creature and Creator. Contrary to some strands of religion, the the telos of man was never to become like gods.
The real danger of modern medicine is not medicine itself, but the temptation to believe that human ingenuity can totally free us from the conditions of creatureliness. After all, the body, in all its frailty, still reminds us that we are dust — and that no amount of progress can erase that truth.