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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).

15 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. 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 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.

    4. 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.
    5. 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.

    6. 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.

  2. Well yeah by MichaelSmith · · Score: 3, Insightful

    People are dying slower.

    --
    http://michaelsmith.id.au
  3. 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...

  4. 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 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
    2. 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
  5. Re:Suicide Booths & Death Panels by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

  6. 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.
  7. 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....