My Ethical Issues Regarding Medicine

I have recently been experiencing a feeling/thought process that I would like to share with you, because it's a reoccurring theme for my ethical issues with the whole process of medicine and patient care. First of all, as we all know, medicine has come a very long way even as recently as in the last 50 years. The leading cause of death in the early 1900s was pneumonia. The further we've gotten with medications, technology, and new discoveries like germs (amazing), we've whittled down the things that kill us to where it seems like we are fighting Death itself. We have acquired the medical ability to keep alive, what would have never lived in the past, and this is a good thing. Or sort of. What has become of this are several cultural phenomenons that I do not agree with. First of all, medical professionals acquire a God-complex in which we will FIX you, no matter what. Secondly, everyone else believes them and acquire a reckless, teenage boy outlook, in which everything can be fixed, and nothing bad will ever happen to them. This combined with human nature, which already tends to be gluttonous, greedy, and reckless, gives people the idea that treating their bodies and their life poorly is a right which they possess. And it is. What happens in result is that when something does inevitably go wrong with their health, they expect us (healthcare workers) to cure them. Oh, and on House, this is exactly how it happens. In real life, however, we can usually only "manage" the disease you helped yourself get with a pill, which seems so easy to take. I realize that I'm starting to rant. The point I'm trying to make, is that it's tragic to me that people can be so careless with themselves (myself included) and so selfish to expect that you can get away with it forever. What's even worse, is that usually you can get away with it for a very long time, and that brings me to my next major concern. I'm wondering if using all of our medications and technologies in order to put off the inevitable is even morally sound. People tend to think the American society is a "throw away" culture where we even dump our loved ones into "homes." But what is more wrong with that, I feel, is that before Grandma got to where she couldn't even function anymore and had to be put away, she had a disease process that would have killed her 10 years before that's been "managed" with her medications. I conjure up pictures of nursing home nurses spoon feeding crushed up blood pressure pills to patients who have no idea what's going on, and it makes me feel like somehow Medicine has become a torture device for the 20th century. Is it really so bad to let people go? Is Death really that bad? What I end up feeling, sometimes, is that I'm an enabler. I give people the means in which they can continue being bad to themselves, and then physically last long enough to see their life become only a fraction of what it once was. And this bothers me. I know this sounds incredibly pessimistic. There are plenty of people who are legitimately sick (healthcare people use the word "sick" as a blanket term meaning they are having very serious medical issues, that need acute help) and plenty of people who need all the medical advances we've made. But medicine is being exploited to become something it shouldn't, and everyone does it, and everyone knows it. I love working in an environment where these issues are one everyone's mind in someway, I find it really interesting and fulfilling. Everyonce in a while, however, I start feeling that instead of performing my duty to society (I'm of Kantian ideology), instead, I'm assisting in it's failures.