Palliative & Curative
When our home is on fire, we tend to—rationally—focus on putting out the fire.
It’s only later that we might worry about the faulty wiring that initially sparked that fire.
In the medical world, the term used for putting out the fire and taking care of those who survived it is “palliative care,” while a focus on the latter—figuring out what happened and attempting to keep it from happening again—is called “curative” or “etiological” treatment.
Palliative care more literally focuses on taking care of people who are suffering from some kind of illness or medical condition, and the general aim is to mitigate suffering and improve—to whatever degree possible—the patient’s quality of life.
As such, palliative care is a very nice thing to have available within one’s medical system, because there’s a good chance that if something bad happens, those within said system will suffer less, overall, than someone within a medical system lacking this capacity and focus.
That said, too much focus on the palliative side of things can funnel societal (or personal) resources away from potential preventative measures: we can become so absorbed with taking care of people who have suffered that we neglect investments that might prevent future (maybe even greater) suffering.
Part of why it’s seemingly easy to get stuck in that kind of loop, where more and more people need care, and thus, we have fewer and fewer resources to invest in things that might enable fewer people to live without palliative care in the future, comes down to the often non-intuitive nature of causality.
Speaking in logical rather than metaphysical terms, causality tracks causes and effects, often across a long chain of both. And such chains start with an ultimate cause, but tend to have many links of what’re called proximate causes in between.
We most commonly engage with the results of such chains of cause and effect, then, but we can sometimes, if we’re thoughtful and thorough, also perceive one or more proximate causes: we see the suffering caused by the fire, but we also take the time to figure out that the wiring was causing sparks and those sparks were the source of the blaze.
More rare, because it often requires a lot more effort without obvious, immediate benefit—according to most incentive structures, at least—is tracking that causal chain backward to see what else we might learn.
Maybe that wiring was faulty because of flawed certification structures in that community. Maybe those structures are flawed because construction industry lobbyists had outsized influence within the local government for a while, and were able to nudge things so they could build new homes inexpensively—using inferior hardware—during a particular decade.
These chains, in some cases, can be traced back seemingly infinitely, potentially showing us cracks in our foundations and flaws in our systems at every step along the way.
That’s another reason why this isn’t a particularly popular activity: it can be exhausting doing that kind of systemic archaeology, and that process may show us uncomfortable things that we can’t necessarily do anything about—which can be frustrating.
Many of us are not latently primed to explore such chains due to that inconvenience, but also because we’re often energetically and/or economically exhausted by the process of dealing with the symptoms of whatever we and/or our societies are suffering.
Emotionally, it’s much more satisfying to focus on the suffering that’s already happening; and it would be difficult to argue in favor of taking some of the resources allocated for that purpose to invest in changing our regulatory environment or other common causal links.
That said, it’s often only by taking that time and exploring these chains that we can get ahead of problems before they become sources of suffering and instability.
Especially in periods of increased uncertainty, being able to forecast what sorts of suffering might be coming next, at what scale, and what options we might have to prevent that suffering is a compelling argument for more causation exploration and investment in potential solutions for issues we find further down that chain—before they sneak up on us and become yet more contemporary sources of suffering.
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