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Comment by robertlagrant | Hacker News Reader

> But alas, it turns out you have to do your own studies to improve life expectency with our western medical system

It's a shame this possibility wasn't suggested before to you, but I have never seen any evidence that western medicine isn't one of the primary drivers of global life expectancy increases.

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Western medicine is one of the primary drivers of global life expectancy increases only though vaccines, antibiotics, and trauma care. Other than that it has had very little effect: we could eliminate all other forms of medical care and average life expectancy would decrease only marginally. Public sanitation and food safety enforcement have had much larger effects.

Where western medicine has had larger effects is increasing quality of life. Now you can get a hip replacement to restore your mobility or take a pill to fix your erectile dysfunction.

Really curious about your sources, because it doesn’t vibe with me at all (trained MD).

Statins have a phenomenal improvement in outcome on cardiovascular disease. So do many cancer drugs nowadays. Diabetes also has great improvement with good treatment.

Removing these would reduce life expectancy drastically.

Fair enough. It's true that modern drugs are fairly effective at extending the lives of patients with certain serious chronic conditions by a few years. But at the same time, ASCVD and T2D were much less serious problems prior to the establishment of modern medicine. So to a large extent we are just patching over problems that we have created for ourselves rather than fixing the root causes.

https://www.thelancet.com/gbd

Thanks for saying that, I couldn't agree more. If you break your leg, western mdeicine is great. For almost everything else, it fails pretty miserably because doctors have effectively no time to actually care for an individual. If it isn't done in 5 minutes, things are getting complicated.

This is just not true at all. E.g. in the UK 10 times as many babies died in 1950 as do today[0]. I cannot believe with all the incredible efforts and advances the medical, scientific, pharmaceutical and manufacturing and logistics fields have made, it's reduced to "this is only good if you break your leg".

[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/inf...

Sanitation and hygiene, dental care, antibiotics, and vaccines.

In some cases, improved diet.

Those are, I believe, the biggest factors in increasing life expectancies.

Perhaps also pregnancy and infant care, getting 0 to 5 year olds past historically high death rates. And, sadly, an area (not the only one) where the U.S. has regressed significantly.

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