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People Are Living Longer, With More Disabilities Than Ever

Posted by Soulskill on from the no-boredom-does-not-count-as-a-disability dept.

skade88 writes "Worldwide, people are living longer. Their lives are starting to look more like the lives of Americans: too much food is a problem, death in childhood is becoming less common, and so on. Yet with a population that lives through what would once have killed us, disabilities are starting to become the norm. A research report from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation has a good glimpse into the new emerging world we find ourselves in." The Guardian has a nice visualization of the mortality data (but take note of shifting scales on the Y-axis).

30 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. It's not an obesity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    It's not an obesity, it's just a different body shape....

    1. Re:It's not an obesity by hairyfeet · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I have to wonder how much of the supposed "obesity" and illnesses can end up being traced to all the chemicals we are ingesting and are exposed to every damned day of our lives? I had a friend that was always sick with one thing or another, had problems with his weight, moved out into the middle of nowhere in the desert and all of his problems went away once he was no longer sucking down chemicals all the time.

      You look at the tests of the water that comes out the tap, the foods we eat, hell you can test the blood of a newborn and find plastic floating in the bloodstream. I would love to see someone just set vials up with the correct amounts of this and that chemical that the average person in the USA ingests because i'm sure it would shock most people.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  2. Speaking as an example... by RedHat+Rocky · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'm a guy who recently had a piece of matter removed from the brain area and am still recovering six months later.

    What's your point? Better that I was already dead?

    --
    Anything is possible given time and money.
    1. Re:Speaking as an example... by erice · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'm a guy who recently had a piece of matter removed from the brain area and am still recovering six months later.

      What's your point? Better that I was already dead?

      The point is that while there has a been a great deal of success in keeping people alive, there has been little success in keeping them healthy. Even putting aside the individual pain and suffering, there are serious economic consequences. Unhealthy people produce less and require more from society. The sicker they are, the more this is true. Eventually society may have to let people die that they technically could save because they can not afford the resources to keep these people alive.

    2. Re:Speaking as an example... by blue+trane · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Economics is a tool that we invented to serve us. It is not some God that we must practice human sacrifice to.

      If automation allows us to live a life where we are more free to do what we want, that's a good thing. We're closer to utopia.

    3. Re:Speaking as an example... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      What has changed is the way we see life. We see human life and teach it to our children as a problem. It's an overpopulation problem, people are evil, people are the earth's enemy, etc.

      Today we treat life as more precious than any time in our history. Up until the middle of this century, life was cheap. People regularly dying on their jobs was considered no big deal. People were left to starve or freeze if they couldn't afford to take care of themselves. We spend a fortune on the last few years of life now, before we'd just let people die. Your confused view of history makes me thing you're probably just as wrong about guns, but I don't think you should by trying to pull guns into this at all.

    4. Re:Speaking as an example... by fredprado · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Nope. Economy is a tool we invented to understand and control how limited resources are used. The resources, being limited, will exhaust themselves even if you refuse to learn Economy or believe in it.

    5. Re:Speaking as an example... by jc42 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The point is that while there has a been a great deal of success in keeping people alive, there has been little success in keeping them healthy.

      And assorted people, including those working in the health industry, have explained that this is a simple result of a "market" health system. Thus, I've heard or read a number of exchanges in which an interviewer asks a Pharm rep why their company has gotten out of the vaccine business. The reply is generally of the form "Because vaccines aren't profitable". The interviewer asks for further details. The rep explains that a vaccine cures the patient, or prevents them from even getting sick. This means that you sell them nothing, or maybe a few doses of a medicine, and then you make no more money from them. The profitable drugs/treatments are those that maintains the patient as a patient, requiring ongoing treatment for the rest of their lives.

      I first ran across this, years ago, as a criticism of the commercial health system. But now I'm hearing it from the supporters and reps of that health system, as an explanation for why they're so profitable.

      So if you want to be kept healthy, maybe you should be pushing for a system that wants you to be healthy, rather than one that wants you as a (paying) patient. The current system (at least here in the US) punishes the companies that market things that keep you healthy, and rewards those who convert you to a patient with a chronic condition.

      --
      Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
    6. Re:Speaking as an example... by ColdWetDog · · Score: 2

      The point is that while there has a been a great deal of success in keeping people alive, there has been little success in keeping them healthy.

      As a generality, this isn't true. We are getting much better at successfully treating many diseases and problems such that people are returning to society more functional than ever. Even older people are often living healthier lives (with concomitantly fewer medical bills).

      Even putting aside the individual pain and suffering, there are serious economic consequences. Unhealthy people produce less and require more from society. The sicker they are, the more this is true. Eventually society may have to let people die that they technically could save because they can not afford the resources to keep these people alive.

      It's much more nuanced than that. Yes, there are economic consequences. There are always economic consequences. You have to decide just what the economy is there for. Is it to keep JRR Tolikien's heirs rolling in money for multiple generations or is it to keep as much of the populace as happy as possible or some complex mix of the two extremes? If you're trying to make as much money for the 'economy' as possible, yes, you euthanize everyone who isn't producing at some set level. But instead of building another Aircraft Carrier group, perhaps society decides to spend the money on nursing home care for the less 'productive' folks. Is that a bad thing.

      Economic arguments, when pushed to the extremes you seem to be pushing them, are pretty hollow constructs for a society.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    7. Re:Speaking as an example... by sjames · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Currently it seems to be more a tool to create fantasies about why under 1% of the population have a natural right to own more than half of everything while others die from overpriced medical care.

    8. Re:Speaking as an example... by Chewbacon · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You can do something for someone or something to someone. I see too many people come into my ICU, many are in their golden years, having treatment turn a fatally acute encounter turn into a long unhealthy condition. What does it do for them? Nothing. What does it do to them? Torture, steals their dignity. A neuro surgeon told me something like: sometimes my job is making people's time left on earth as undesirable and expensive as possible.

      --
      Chewbacon
      The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
    9. Re:Speaking as an example... by davester666 · · Score: 2

      Obviously, the solution is that we all pay big pharmacy a monthly fee unless we are sick, in which case they get nothing.

      --
      Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
    10. Re:Speaking as an example... by SternisheFan · · Score: 2

      So what? For each Stephen Hawking, who, despite his considerable disabilities, is able to give more to society than he takes, there are thousands of other who aren't. Nobody is saying that we would like to see them unattended, but at some point it may be necessary for society to severely limit the resources that are directed towards it.

      Now how can society know that a person who was allowed to die because of 'the cost' may or may not have been the person who in the future makes a discovery that would be of great benefit to humanity? Say, finds the cure for cancer or inexpensive power generation? Or would have been the parent of such a person?

      Now the Nazi's believed in killing off the weak and infirm of mind and body. Not 'desirable' candidates for their "master race". Would these same rules apply to a cherished family member of yours? What of just plain caring for another life?

      In the last 100 years many diseases have had cures, which never would have been cured if there had not been thoughtful, caring people to find the answers. No, I cannot accept this concept, it flys in the face of all that makes human beings worthy of being called "human".

    11. Re:Speaking as an example... by fredprado · · Score: 3, Insightful

      No they cannot. Nobody can know what a person who died could do, but when the cost to keep everyone alive no matter how much effort and resources need to be spent for that escalates to something that can't be sustained this becomes an irrelevant point.

      Sure in the future we may be able to ban all diseases, then again we may not, but now there is so much we can do as a society and we need to weight the efforts needed, the resources compromised by these efforts and what will be left unattended as consequence.

      If you have to neglect the education of 100 people to treat a very expensive disability of a single one for life what will you choose? These are the kind of hard choices that are necessary when the resources are not infinite.

    12. Re:Speaking as an example... by sjames · · Score: 2

      When the abuses are that rampant and the twisted and broken logic pervades the literature, it does warrant subjecting any claims made to extraordinarily high scrutiny.

    13. Re:Speaking as an example... by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Economy isn't about how limited resources are used, it is about how they are distributed and ownership. When it fails society steps in to redistribute, which is why most of western Europe has high quality social healthcare, for example.

      The reality is that most western countries have more resources than we need, they are just distributed badly due to economics.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  3. Well yeah by MichaelSmith · · Score: 3, Insightful

    People are dying slower.

    --
    http://michaelsmith.id.au
  4. With More Disabilities Than Ever? by G3ckoG33k · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "With More Disabilities Than Ever"?

    That is not necessarily so. There may just be more diagnosed and reported than ever, at least in releative terms.

    In absolute numbers, yes. But that is due to Earth's population growth...

  5. Another in the list of "duh" studies by neminem · · Score: 2

    Torchwood: Miracle Day was a great glimpse into the concept taken to the extreme. *Obviously* the more things used to kill you and now don't, the more people will live with crippling issues that used to be fatal ones. Not really news?

  6. Not too much food. Too much BAD food. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As in:

    - Destruction through heating (like that whole heated dairy protein causing auto-immune diseases thing, but also destroying vitamins and enzymes).
    - Extreme concentrations that would never appear in nature and cause strong imbalances (to the point of collapse) in the body (like sweets / stuff that's nearly pure starch, etc. but also salt or saturated fats).
    - Lack of vital substances in plants grown on depleted soil that are only bigger because they have more water in them (adding to the imbalances, and causing many diseases).
    - Thousands of drugs and unnatural substances given to animals and added to processed "food".

    We shouldn't be surprised we get sick from them. We should be surprised our bodies are so resilient to survive this nasty waste at all!

    Dr. M. O. Bruker studied these exact problems for five decades with over 50,000 patients... as did many others. And the result was always, that those so-called "age-related diseases" didn't come because of age, but *with* age... with decades of bad nutrition!

    We've known this for 50 years now. But as long as the industry doesn't put the illness and pain of seven billion people above corporate greed, and as long as we the people don't stop buying their trash, and start supporting people people that *do* make good food for us... as long as *we* don't make that happen, nothing will change.
    (Ask your local farmer and butcher and baker, etc. He'd love to sell you something of better quality. But he can't give you the illusion of cheapness because he won't employ the tricks and lies and shit that make you sick and will *really* cost you in the long term.)

    Final conclusion: Thinking for the long term... thinking ahead... equals intelligence. The more a life-form can predict the future, and manipulate things so it ends up in his favor, the more intelligence it is. But it seems that nowadays, both people and companies, are just really fuckin' stupid.

    1. Re:Not too much food. Too much BAD food. by Endovior · · Score: 2

      Well... it doesn't help that you're an AC. Show some balls and post with your name. Maybe your karma will take a hit, maybe not, but you'll never know if you hide in the shadows. Really, it's just a number. Does the idea of it going down a little frighten you?
      That said, I'd be inclined to argue that the 'quality of ingredients' problem is really two problems; one is how to keep good food fresh and healthy between production and consumption (a preservation and distribution problem), and the other is the competition between expensive good food and cheap inferior food (an economic problem).
      The first problem is a big deal; fresh food, in the most natural and healthy forms, doesn't have much shelf life... so to continue to feed a growing population, all kinds of preservation tricks were thought up. This is a millennia-old problem; and it's seriously a matter of life-and-death, since failing to use proper preservation and transportation techniques mean that whenever anything happens to the food supply, lots of people die; this is called 'famine'. It's not as much of a problem these days, thanks to preservatives; we can leave processed food in cans and bags on shelves for years, then ship it to the other side of the world when it's needed. Less healthy, sure, but starvation is MUCH less healthy.
      The second problem is the result of the practical consequences of solving the first. Preservatives and such make it easy to have cheap food available, and easy to sell it. Quality ingredients don't retain their quality for long; they rot. Yes, you can sell them for more when fresh... but only if you can sell them quickly. To call it 'greed' that corporations prefer to sell inferior, mass-market, preservative-laden food is to ignore the bigger picture; it's not feasible for seven billion people to get their food fresh from the farms, regardless of whatever companies stand between producer and consumer. The current population of the world is unsustainable without modern methods of preservation and distribution.
      You, individually, may or may not be in a position to choose better. Many people are too poor to choose otherwise; these people are among those who would die of starvation in the absence of the modern system. Those who can, may not choose to go to the effort regardless; they weigh other factors above their health, and make their purchasing decisions accordingly. Don't judge them too harshly; it's likely that you, too, have economic priorities higher than your own health. The economic state we are in now results from the decisions everyone makes, yes... but that doesn't mean that it's something that anyone or everyone could change. Population continues to increase. The modern system of preservation and distribution is part of the larger system that keeps them alive. There's only so much that can be done to increase productivity of land, so expect to see even more artificial chemicals and such in food as time goes on, not less. This will, of course, have negative local consequences. But life expectancy, on the whole, will continue to increase with population. This is called progress.

    2. Re:Not too much food. Too much BAD food. by Paracelcus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Not like "the good old days" when we all ate organic food and lived to the ripe old age of forty!

      --
      I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
    3. Re:Not too much food. Too much BAD food. by tbird81 · · Score: 2

      "Unnatural", "processed" - you know these are bullshit terms right?

      Organic food is unhealthier. Plenty of natural things are poison. And plenty of unprocessed things would be impossible to digest.

      Heating milk doesn't "cause auto-immune disease". I've drunk plenty of heated dairy products - no auto-immune disease. It doesn't even increase the risk! I hate that evil arseholes like you always pick on auto-immune disease to blame your pet hate for causing. But I know you do it because we don't know much about the triggers of AI conditions.

    4. Re:Not too much food. Too much BAD food. by ppanon · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That average life expectancy was heavily pulled down by high infant mortality, lack of antibiotics to treat nasty bacterial infections like pneumonia, and agrarian lifestyles that were both harder on the body than modern white collar work and more dangerous (scythes, angry/in-pain animals, predators, sun exposure, etc.) . If you control for those differences, what do you get? Well, we don't know because they didn't realize 250 years ago that we would find useful background histories to supplement what little mortality/morbidity statistics they did collect.

      --
      Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
  7. Re:And the biggest disability is . . . obesity! by timeOday · · Score: 2
    You mis-quoted your link, which states that obesity is now a bigger killer than hunger. But not, in fact, the biggest (from the article):

    In charting risk factors, the researchers found that diets low in fruit were responsible for more disease than obesity or physical inactivity. That conclusion was reached through analysis of the health effects of various components of diet and the number of people consuming diets high or low in those components.

    "We were very surprised," Murray said of the fruit finding. "I'm a pretty profound diet skeptic. But the evidence on diet is as convincing as on obesity."

    I guess I can admit to being completely surprised by that, if the study's authors were too.

  8. Re:Suicide Booths & Death Panels by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    We already have death panels. They're called insurance companies.

  9. How did our species survive the 90s!? by artor3 · · Score: 2

    According to this graph, in 1990, there were 120k deaths per 100k people amongst the 0-6 day age group alone. I could have sworn that there were at least a few children that survived the decade.

  10. Re:Darwin was right. by KarlIsNotMyName · · Score: 2

    The easiest thing to do, is just stop reproducing. At least stop reproducing at these rates. We don't need for every couple to breed, one in ten could do us just fine for a couple of generations. Yes, there's the problem that the elderly depend on the young, but the biggest problem of all, is how many of us there are. We experience Earth's limited resources as more limited, the faster we consume them.

    And I'd much rather see people not be born, than be born and then die a slow and painful death.

    --
    We are all God's parents.
  11. WOW!!! by Evtim · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The most wasteful system ever devised by human is suggested as a "tool we invented to understand and control how limited resources are used"?
    The system that burns hydrocarbons instead of using them only for organic synthesis (plastics, medicine). The system that resulted in planned obsolesce? The system that...I am lost for words.
    There is only one sensible thing in your post - the word "believe" There is no other way to support this inhuman, irrational, wasteful socioeconomic system that to accept it is faith....

  12. Do non-market systems change things? by Beryllium+Sphere(tm) · · Score: 2

    The biggest richest EU countries have some flavor of public health care (different in all of them, of course). They have universities and scientists: the US isn't the only place capable of inventing drugs and cures.

    Do they have single-dose medicines or curative therapies that the US doesn't?