We may be on the cusp of a golden age for medicine
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
What is going to happen in America is a 40 year life expectancy gap between the rich and the poor. Rich kids will grow to 6'5" with 180 IQs and end any economic opportunity for poor families.
When my parents were born, something like 30-60% of the homes in their states didn't have indoor plumbing.
I remember when I first started seeing people with broken ankles/feet using those one-leg scooters. It took us until the 2000s to think of that!
Everything they post that is of the "the new trend" schtick is things happening to young rich white couples that live in Manhattan.
To be fair... Those are the people that read them.
Pharmaceuticals and insurance should be ripe for disruption, yet it’s too big for anyone to take on because we can’t manufacture locally at scale.
Meanwhile different actors will blame “government” or “big pharma” and nothing gets done.
Not every first-tier (economically speaking) European or Asian country has a first-rate medical system but I think there are enough, so it must be logistics or legal issues?
Japan and South Korea come to mind for Asia. I’m guessing Germany and France still have first-rate care in Europe?
You still can get good treatment in private clinics or in specialized centers such as Institut Gustave Roussy, but not in the average public hospitals which are constantly pushed to lower their costs, including by the “socialists”.
Overall, I don't think the situation is any better in France than in the UK or the US.
It is perhaps even worse than in the UK, for example in my small town of Saint-Malo, an elderly person lay on a stretcher in the emergency room for many hours and died there without seeing a doctor.
On average in France, 20 to 30 people die per month in the emergency room without having received treatment.
No matter how bureaucrats or corporate/administrative bean counters want to massage the numbers, there’s clearly a patient to caregiver ratio ceiling.
Our own structures in management understand and demand this, yet these “leaders” revert to factory approaches for anyone outside of their hierarchy.
Collosally stupid.
It's true there were astonishing demographic changes, we went from a pyramid /\ to a column | | in 50 years. There are nearly as retirees than employees. This situation is not sustainable. And people are more and more upset.
I guess there is no quick fix.
Read: not overprocessed, highly refined, ultra palettable shit.
A "golden age of whole foods" (not the corporation, actual food) would be better for everyone. Just not Big Pharma shareholders.
We still would. We still would have cancers, even with nutritional food. And we would still have pandemics like Covid-19 and even worse (see Black Plague). A lot more people would have died without vaccinations.
Don't smoke, don't vape, drink a little and cook at home. There has never been a better availability of fresh produce everywhere in America and they have never been as cheap at they are. The big killers today are cardiac diseases, diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases. All of these three are mostly preventable.
An early 20's guy who follow these basic recommendations can be pretty certain to have a pretty nice quality of life.
This is both delusional and horrible in the sense of being victim blaming. No amount of eating healthy and doing regular exercise helps you when bad luck gets hold of you. Lower probability of having a problem is flipping continents away from "pretty certain." Children's cancer wards exist.
> Children's cancer wards exist.
They definitely do, and this is pure bad-luck. But go to a hospital today and take a look at the patient census: a great percentage of them have completely preventable diseases with the knowledge we have today. They (born in the 40's) didn't stand a chance as they lived through the rise of fast food and got hooked on cigarettes while it was believed to be safe. But it doesn't have to be the same for kids today.
> This is both delusional and horrible in the sense of being victim blaming.
> when bad luck gets hold of you.
Bad luck can take you out when you're 5, as you mentioned, so I'm not sure what the point is in this conversation about statistically beneficial behavior.
Eating healthy, drinking in low amounts (including none) will put you in a bell curve of longevity leaning into the 70s and 80s, not give you a 100% certainty (this is the obvious interpretation of "pretty certain"). "bad luck", as you put it, takes you out of the normal distribution into a tail. What you mean by "delusional" or "victim blaming" isn't clear, as it does not apply, in context.
>> Lower probability of having a problem is flipping continents away from "pretty certain."
>> delusional and horrible in the sense of being victim blaming.
Sadly, one day, statistically speaking, you /will/ understand someone calling this attitude out without needing any empathy. If you're lucky it will be your own health rather than the more likely case of someone very close whom you love.
Definitely I recommend everyone try to follow healthy behaviors to reduce their chances of having particular health problems.
Absolutely not. That one study you're thinking about is confounded by having a social life, which is indeed healthy. Drinking alcohol is horrible for health.
Sort of. Most grocery store produce in the US will have several days of shipping time and shelf time before being purchased, followed by additional storage time in refrigerators or fruit baskets. Additionally nutrient losses can be incurred when cooking with heat, which is also more frequent in modernity.
This can still result in substantial nutritional decline, and is often very significant in vitamins (especially vitamin C) that oxidize readily.
If you want to have a cigarette, please go and do. If you are smoking 2 packs a day, you probably should change your job or country. But living a sterile life is death itself.
Maybe we are in early or alpha pre-jackpot (one free upvote to people who got the ref).
We do have a frailty problem in old people, but pushing that back is more or less what "longevity" research is trying to do.
I guess you are a young person!
I'm not young enough to get hired in faang.
Also, wealth redistribution will need to be addressed if Rockefellers, Musks, and Bezos's are going to live in perpetuity.
I suppose we should add politics to the list. We're already plagued by political dynasties, e.g. the Clintons, the Bush's, the Kennedies. And it's common for senators and congresspeople to have de-facto lifetime tenure. Can you imagine still having Confederate veterans in the Senate today?
I've grafted the two in the title above.
We have multiple strains of antibiotic resistant bacteria.
We see how fungi evolve to survive in humans.
Could also be the beginning of a new dark age.
A glaring counterpoint is certain things like eyeglasses probably aren't universally available to everyone who needs them, but those industries WILL develop.
What are you referring to when saying that they're not universally available? Or are we including the people who don't even have access to water in this?
That should be in range of what nearly everyone can save up here.
Standard reading glasses for example will be much cheaper again.
Would I like to make things better for the bottom third? Absolutely. Am I happy about progress made that will improve the life of the rest of us? Also yes.
Ultimately, the supply of healthcare is increasing, but still finite. The demand for healthcare is unlimited.
Your claim is fundamentally impossible. Regardless of what kind of system is used to subsidize care, there’s still a problem of allocating limited resources. It’s always a tradeoff between prices (or levels of subsidization), eligibility requirements and, at the margins, waiting times.
The desire for health care is virtually limitless. Spain could literally spend its entire GDP on medical care and not meet everyone’s needs.
“We may be on the cusp of an era of astonishing innovation”
One of us must have developed a flawed model of the world in which we live.
A lot of innovation starts off expensive then becomes much cheaper, and more prevalent, over time. Do we agree on this model? Electric vehicles, televisions, computers, DNA sequencing,…
The “astonishing innovation” developed today will be everywhere within a decade.
And access to these technologies is much faster than most healthcare systems in the world.
I mean, 85% are insured and ambulances are paid for.