Feel like a guinea pig yet?

[Berzerker]

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-04-exposure-bpa-substitute-bps-breast.html

I dont want to go into detail, but I lost someone to breast cancer... They were given estrogen birth control pills in the 60s to avoid unwanted pregnancies by parents who thought they were doing the right thing. What the doctors thought is beyond me, but I've learned not to trust them either.
Your life belongs to you, not slimy politicians taking bribes from corporations and the medical industry. You will pay the price if they're wrong or just using you for a guinea pig.

How do we empower people to make their own medical decisions if the state gives politicians and doctors that power for our own good?

 

[El_Machinae]

It's a real dilemma. And I fully grant the premise, you do lose the ability to empower people to make their own medical decisions if doctors too closely retain that power. But it's also vastly impossible to 'empower people to make their own medical decisions'. We just don't have an information base that we can properly dump into people's heads. So, you can make decisions, and they're your own. But they're not really 'decisions'.

I mean, at least this way we know to force people to keep looking for BPA substitutes. If we back off on 'the state' too much, then we'd not even get the choice as to whether we can avoid BPA. We'd never have found out that it was a concern.

But sometimes doctors can be pretty patronizing. They get to decide whether they're supposed to tell us about a tumor on our prostate. And this decision is discussed at a meta level - will it cause us to be more pained by hearing about it now or finding out about it later? Ain't easy.

 

[Broken_Erika]

Steve Jobs made his own medical decisions.....

 

[Silurian]

From the link in the OP

Bisphenol S (BPS), a substitute for the chemical bisphenol A (BPA) in the plastic industry, shows the potential for increasing the aggressiveness of breast cancer through its behavior as an endocrine-disrupting chemical, a new study finds.

Read more at: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-04-exposure-bpa-substitute-bps-breast.html#jCp

Many chemicals can cause cancer and the use of such chemicals should be minimised where it could cause harm, but this should be balanced against the benefit. As Machine stated we should keeplooking for BPA substitutes. We should look at all materials periodically to see if current knowledge changes the risk benefit ratio.

The risk of death caused by the contraceptive pill is lower than the risk of death from childbirth.

 

[Ryika]

I think as sad as it is, most things in medicine are ultimately balanced on a risk-reward-scale. When bad doctors are involved and make terrible decisions, then the risk goes up exponentially, but it is always there.
Hell, if everything goes wrong you can bleed to death as a result of visiting your dentist and getting a routine operation, but that doesn't mean that people shouldn't have their bad teeth repaired or, if necessary to prevent future problems, removed.

Generally the "reward" that we get for doing something severely outweighs the risk that we take in the overall picture, but that also means that for some unfortunate individuals the risk will have severe consequences.
That's a terrible thing for them and their relatives + friends, but it doesn't mean that we should change our course. Unfortunately, "unfair" losses are part of life, and all we can do is try to minimize them as much as possible - by continuously checking whether our products are as safe as they can be, and by making sure we keep the quality of our doctors high, and their stress-levels low.