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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."
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.
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 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