You will take the medicine unless it makes us feel icky 

You will take the medicine unless it makes us feel icky

If I have a conduction problem in my heart I can get a pace maker that with shock my heart into beating when necessary. If I have a brain problem (such as depression) I could have a similar device inserted that would relieve me of this depression. That article is worth a read.

“A woman of indeterminate age lies on a narrow cot, a giant bandage covering her skull. At the start of the film she seems locked inside some private vortex of despair. Her face is as blank as her white hospital gown and her voice is a remote, tired monotone.

"Sixty pulses," says a disembodied voice. It belongs to the technician in the next room, who is sending a current to the electrode inside the woman's head. The patient, inside her soundproof cubicle, does not hear him.

Suddenly, she smiles. "Why are you smiling?" asks Dr. Heath, sitting by her bedside.
"I don't know … Are you doing something to me? [Giggles.] I don't usually sit around and laugh at nothing. I must be laughing at something." "One hundred forty," says the offscreen technician.
The patient giggles again, transformed from a stone-faced zombie into a little girl with a secret joke. "What in the hell are you doing?" she asks. "You must be hitting some goody place."

Both the heart and the brain are organs which obey physical laws, they are hunks of meat with electrical and chemical signalling systems working to carry out a task. We do not allow “brain pacemakers” to be used. Our society regards them as ethically dubious probably I believe because of a dualist belief that the brain somehow is the seat of our soul. So a possibly life saving procedure is denied to people on no legal or rational grounds purely because of our social beliefs.

Now take the case of a Jehovah’s witness. Who today was made have a blood transfusion against her beliefs. Here we have someone of different beliefs who is made have a possibly life saving medical procedure.

So to save your life you must have the procedures that we agree with and you cannot have the ones that we do not agree with.