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Americans Are Seriously Sick
jd writes "A study by US and British researchers on frequency of illnesses shows that even when you compare like groups in the US and the UK, people in the US are considerably sicker than their counterparts in the UK. This is after factors such as age, race, income, education and gender were taken into consideration. The most startling conclusion was that although the richest Americans were better off than the poorest Americans, they did no better (health-wise) than the poorest of the English. Previous studies of the entire population had shown similar results, with America placing around 25th amongst industrialized countries on chronic disease prevention, but it had been assumed that minorities and economics were skewing the results. This study suggests that maybe that isn't the case."
Intelligent first post. Bravo sir.
I wholeheartedly agree. Having worked for 10 years in the US and now happily back in the UK, the lack of meaningful time off is stressful and damaging. And don't get me started on the unpaid overtime culture in the US that appears to be protected by statute - in IT anyway.
It's a Unix system - I know this.
Rick Mayes' Universal Coverage is a good book to pick up if you are curious on why the U.S. is among the only first-world countries with no universal healthcare. It should be available in any good university library. Unfortunately, the book is quite a downer, and sees little solution to the bureaucratic mire that Medicare and Social Security have created. After reading this book, you'll have a strong desire to emigrate.
Had President Clinton not appointed his wife over the issue just over a decade ago, we might have made some progress. Hillary has her talents, but she was so controversial that the entire matter of national healthcare became taboo for years afterward.
From TFA:
Even the U.S. obesity epidemic couldn't solve the mystery. The researchers crunched numbers to create a hypothetical statistical world in which the English had American lifestyle risk factors, including being as fat as Americans. In that model, Americans were still sicker.
I'm sure their methods were a little more rigorous than your heresay. I'd say that the GP is bang on, we're working ourselves to death.
Another interesting tidbit:
[...] the United States spends more on health care than any other industrialized nation, yet trails in rankings of life expectancy.
The United States spends about $5,200 per person on health care while England spends about half that in adjusted dollars.
Spending is only going to keep you alive for so long when you're overweight and out of shape from a poor diet and little exercise. That culture of 50 hour work weeks (or worse) just compounds these problems and shortens lives even more.
Japan has the same minimum leave policy (10 days + stats), but on top of that, the leave policies are rarely enforced. It would normally be seen as selfish and inconsiderate of one's coworkers to actually use all of your leave, anyway. In many cases, company employees work completely unpaid "service overtime" out of obligation. Still, Japan is among the healthiest and longest-lived countries in the world.
I'd say there must be more to the picture. Like any complex system, the health of a nation probably can't be pinned on one single factor.
The notion of Commonwealth seems to be abused too.
I remember being rather shocked a year or so back when a writer that is a favourite of mine on ESPN.com described the Commonwealth Games as basically being a European-only Olympics.
Well, that's utter rubbish, of course. Countries as geographically diverse as Canada, Australia, India and South Africa (and many, many more) are all in the Commonwealth. European nations outside of the UK, such as France, Germany, Italy and Spain, are not.
Commonwealth has nothing to do with Europe but, to some people at least, the two seem to be interchangeable, which is very worrying.
For anyone that's interested, the Commonwealth is made up of those nation states, territories and dependencies that were formally part of the British Empire that want to be in it, which is pretty much all former parts of the Empire bar a few exceptions, such as the USA and the Republic of Ireland.
By the way, I'm from London and when asked for my nationality I opt for whatever's the most appropriate choice. In some cases, that'll be English but in others, such as when travelling abroad, it'll be British. But, as the parent poster has pointed out, they're definitely not interchangeable terms.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Suicide isn't an injury, it's a psychological state leading to quite irrational behavior, and stress from long work days can have psychological effects. Not commiting suicide is clearly one measure of health to me.
However, since differences in suicide rates are probably greatly overshadowed by other more common diseases and health standards, I don't think suicide have much to do with the discussion still. Both in Japan and USA is it a minority problem. Yes, Japan may have it be more common, but who knows why when countries with other stressful environments don't?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Y'know, I get the feeling I'd do a lot better with my career if I were to strike out on my own as an independent consultant or by founding a small start-up. The problem is, I have a health condition that requires a trip to the emergency room once every few years, and some seriously expensive medicine to keep it under control. There is no way in hell I can find affordable health insurance on my own, and I can't afford the enormous cost of an ER trip out-of-pocket, or the couple hundred bucks per-month in medication while I'm in the "Eat ramen, max out the credit cards and work out of the garage" phase any solo gig or small company goes through for the first year or so.
Even if I didn't have the health condition, and were fit as a fiddle, I'd be doing the equivalent of driving without car insurance. I'm one serious traffic accident or cancerous tumor away from financial ruin if I don't have healthcare.
So, I turn down all kinds of consulting gigs, and leaf wistfully through my file of business plans, and wonder, do I love my country more than I love my career? I'm poorer and less fulfilled by living in a country without a single-payer system. I'm dependent on a corporate benefits package, and unable to pursue the American Dream.
I could emigrate to New Zealand in a heartbeat, as they're looking for tech workers there and would put me on an immigration fast-track. I really like Montreal and Halifax, too... but I'm a New Englander at heart, and I would like to stay where I feel I belong, where all my family and freinds are.
Now I find out that even with a company-funded HMO, I'm not as healthy, either. I mean. what the hell am I getting for my healthcare dollar? It's a serious chunk of change out of my paycheck and my employer's operating budget, and an expense that gets more and more and more expensive every year without returning much in the way of improvement in quality of service or quality of life. As far as I can tell, I'm just paying to fund Washington lobbyists and golden parachute accounts for HMO and Big Pharma execs.
I think it's time to put to rest the United State's overpriced, poorly managed and underperforming healthcare system, and join the rest of the civilized worl in the 21st century.
I'm sure it's got absolutely nothing to do with industrial pollution. Only a paranoid hippy would think that.
Averege expected life spans for the US and the UK are nearly identical, and the average expected life span for non-hispanic white Americans is considrerably better than the UK average. So what does this study mean?
(1) Being more sick more often won't actually make a difference to how long you can expect to live? Sounds implausible.
(2) Americans get sick more often but their health care is better so they live just as long or longer? Sounds more plausible, although it seems like too much of a coincidence that better healthcare is almost exactly balancing worse health.
(3) Maybe better access to health care in the US results in a higher rate of diagnosis, rather than a higher rate of illness? That would explain the nearly identical lifespan, but only if the better access to healthcare makes little difference to lifespan.
(4) A difference in medical culture, where doctors in the US are more likely to diagnose and attempt to treat problems that doctors in the UK would just tell their patients to live with? I know that psychiatrists and psychologists in the US are very quick to diagnose and prescribe drugs compared to Japan or New Zealand (the other two countries that I am familiar with). Maybe there is something similar going on with the medical profession in general.
Walking. Seriously!
In British cities, we generally do a lot of walking compared to US cities. I once asked *in the visitor's centre* for directions to the public library in a US city. After getting a load of driving directions, when I told them I didn't have a car, the woman behind the counter looked horrified, and was stunned into disbelieving silence for several seconds, before giving the classic response :
Turns out it was only a ten-minute walk away. And virtually every car I passed on the way honked at me. Why? Because they thought I was a bum - after all, only bums don't have cars, right?
I'm not saying this is true of every US city - certainly people seem to walk in New York, for example - but by way of contrast, I live in London and I probably do about an hour of brisk walking every day just getting between tube stations, the office, and my home. That's not counting actual "exercise time", that's just getting about day-to-day. Even when I used to work in the northern cities like Leeds and Stockton-on-Tees, which don't have the Tube, I still did about an hour walking around at lunchtime.
I'm not trying to troll here, but I think this picture says a lot : Only In America.
http://instantbadger.blogspot.com
the United States spends more on health care than any other industrialized nation
Wait, I thought the free market and privatization was supposed to make things cheaper? While state-run systems like the British NHS were supposed to be horribly inefficient and expensive?
Any economists care to explain what's going on here? Is the free market a failure, or is this the way it's supposed to be? Are those extortionate health costs translating into increased prosperity for America in some way?
The answer is indeed simple: among industrial nations one of the most significant predictors of health is the gap between rich and poor. The larger this gap, the worse the health of both groups. It is not surprising that poor people have worse health, but it is interesting that riches don't buy better health. More information is available here, and here's a related editorial from Newsweek.
In short, the study looked at the following health factors: life expectancy, infant mortality, death rates, disability, quality of life, self-assessed health, happiness and well-being. The high-level summary from the linked article: "Populations whose income is below a threshold (about $5,000 - $10,000 in US per capita income) generally have poorer health. Increasing income in such societies leads to better health. Above the threshold, national health is not necessarily related to absolute income, but rather to the gap between rich and poor. Studies in the past 15 years found that where income gaps are smaller, health appears to be better."
The researchers' hypothesis is that societies with a large gap between the rich and poor have a more hierarchical organization. Such an organization is based on coercion and resignation. More egalitarian societies do not engender the negative emotions needed to sustain a hierarchy.
Perhaps what is most surprising is that despite the maturity of this research, it seems (at least to me) that very few people are aware of it.
you are right that there belongs more to the picture that Japan belongs to the healthiest and longest-lived countries in the world although the average working time might is much higher than in most of the other industrial countries.
....
the other factor which comes in here which benefits the japanese is the way they eat or better, what they eat. A lot of fish, a lot of vegetables, green tea... To sum it up: they eat little fat and healthier stuff.
compare this to USA or UK, where fast food dominates what people eat, where coffee and coke often is the only stuff people drink the whole day.
other thing: the majority of my american coworkers here never go to doctors. they take pills and drugs the whole day. instead of changing their way of life, calming down, solving their personal problems, eating better stuff (!) they try to cure everything with drugs, drink coke the whole day, eat a kilo of steak every day and then complain that they suffer from heartburn and again take pills against heartburn
of course this is not representative, might be strange co-workers here. but on the other hand i noticed something the last time i was in new york when i watched TV ads: i have never travelled to a country where there are dozens of tv ads every hour for products to reduce heartburn - this confirms my observation. instead of eating different stuff people buy these drugs. this is obviosuly not the right solution. in the long run this affects your health.
Lord "not Gargamel's Cat!" Azrael
I saw an interesting documentary that described how hospitals couldn't afford to offer a comprehensive preventative care program for diabetics. They made plenty of money caring for the complications of diabetes, but preventative care was a big money loser. What a perverse system we have.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I was reading this report on the BBC website earlier today, and I thought then that there is always the possibility that there is a flaw in the study method itself. As the study looks at self-reported health issues, you could also draw the conclusion that people in the US are more aware of health problems than the British.
I'm British and I haven't been to the doctors in about five years. I know several people who aren't even registered with doctors. No-one I know of my age (36) has had tests for prostate cancer, checked themselves for testicular cancer or even has regular annual check-ups.
There's a possibility, IMHO, that relying on self-reporting of illness would produce this kind of result in the older generation of Brits, as they're still following the "just get on with life and don't bother the doctors" mentality of those who grew up in the aftermath of WWII.
My mother had a lot of pain in her lower back for years - when I eventually persuaded her to go to the doctors he got her to go to hospital. They did a scan of her lower back - nothing wrong with it - but noticed something wrong with one of her kidneys (it had never grown from when she was a child). So they took another scan higher up to have a better look at that. Then noticed something wrong with her liver. So they took another scan higher up and saw that she had severe cancer of the liver (despite her being a non-smoker and a very light drinker). She died about 6 weeks later.
She would never have thought of getting either her kidneys or her liver checked out. If she had then maybe she would still be alive. But, like so many people from her (and her parents) generation going to the doctor was only something you avoided as you didn't like to bother him/her.
As usual, your views may vary.
--
silas
A lot of studies I've read have tried to pin breast cancer entirely on milk consumption. {And if you've ever looked into the quality control process of milk, what they filter out of what you drink, it really is rather gross. But then again I don't think about what I'm eating when I'm eating :-) } But wait! People get lung cancer without smoking!
I study malignant melanoma in particular, and the whole business is rather nasty. What bothers me the most about it is how completely unnatural everyday life has become: the materials we're exposed to in our day to day lives, our living environments and conditions... but it wouldn't do us any good to go all primitive and animalistic again, either. I think the price we pay to try to keep everyone alive, even adapting for mutations in genetics and malformed tissue, ie. the entire practice of medicine, is a consequence. To me it's fascinating.
Why do some people get skin cancer and some don't? I really can't advise people to stay out of the sun completely. My suspicion is that certain people are more susceptible than others, and we're just too young technologically to accurately guess who.
I apologize for being all over the place - my point is this: you healthy people think this is all so simple because your personal philosophy works for you. I assure you, this is no easy question.
In contrast, when my mother had breast cancer, whatever she needed, she got, and fast too. Surgery the day after tomorrow? No problem. Home care nurse? No problem. And no cash exchanged hands - my parents didn't have to sell their house to pay for it all. No system is perfect, but I have few complaints about Canada's public health care (now if only I could find a GP in this town who's taking patients...).
Freedom: "I won't!"
Nitwit...our disgestive tract is evolved around an omnivore's diet. We can process plant matter, but not as well as dedicated plant eaters which we aren't designed to be. We can process meat, but not quite as well as dedicated carnivores. What we're evolved towards is a more flexable diet, but one which does nutritionally require materials from both plants and animals. We're similar to bears, racoons, coyotes, and a number of other predators in that respect. And it's proven a superior survival mechanism in nature than being either a pure herbavore (which vegitarians obviously aspire to be), or being a pure carnivore. Omnivores for the win!
Isn't it possible the health differences may be food related, and that even the rather greasy English cuisine, if you could call it that, is better than the American junk culture of pizza, McDonald's and KFC? Not much bettter, perhaps, but on the whole less fatty, sugary and salty? It would be interesting to see a comparison with data from France, Spain and Italy. French and Mediterranean food is regarded as the healthiest in the world.
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
You're quite right, there's loads of cool things to see & do in the US.
However - the main reason people in other parts of the world travel is to go and experience a different culture - that's something you're not really going to get in your own country.
The main reason Americans don't travel is because they know virtually nothing about the world outside of the US & everyone fears the unkown.
(Oh, and honestly, drop the "World's Best National Parks" in favour of "some of the most fantastic National Parks in the world").
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Americans burn the candle at both ends far too much, and don't get nearly enough sleep. One of the biggest contributors to all kinds of illness, disease, and the ability to properly recover from both is the lack of sleep.
...because you never know who you're dealing with.
I'm responding to the grandparent post that has been modded into oblivion, not yours. The one where some fool said:
I know you'll shake your head at it like everybody does, but the typical vegetarian gets no cancer, never gets influenza (yes your flu last year could be avoided if you dumped meat) and will never have the depression, bowel disease, heart problems and overweight that inflict meat eaters!
I would like to point out that I was vegan for three years and vegetarian for ten, and that I enjoyed the flu a half-dozen times in that stretch. People making claims like this are idiots.
I eat a little fish now, on advice from several doctors who were kind enough to point to well-done studies that argued for the health benefits. There is no reason that eating some meat is bad for you. There are, however, problems with getting an excess of iron (in men), too much fat from the wrong meats in excess, and so forth-- but the same downsides are true of anything with a lot of bioavailable iron or fat.
Meat does not magically cause the flu.