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The real misunderstanding is how big an impact modern medicine has had. Public health efforts, better nutrition, ect have had a much bigger impact on lifespan t
by rjkennedy98 8y ago
The real misunderstanding is how big an impact modern medicine has had. Public health efforts, better nutrition, ect have had a much bigger impact on lifespan than medicine.
- naravara 8y ago>Public health efforts, better nutrition, ect I suspect almost ALL of this can be attributed to having plumbing that magically flushes your waste away, having people wash their hands after using the bathroom, and women being fed well enough to survive childbirth. It's astonishing how much morbidity happened in the past just because water sources would get contaminated by people bathing or excreting into them. Apparently even a crazy amount of deaths in childbirth were attributable to bad hygiene/sanitation. Once you correct for those three almost everything else looks like a little sliver. The presence of antibiotics is the only things that even come close in its impact. If we wanted to have a comparable additional impact today we'd need to accomplish something like wiping out all the disease-carrying insects (mosquitoes, tsetse flies, etc.)