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We may be on the cusp of a golden age for medicine
- mr-pink 3y agowho's we?
- bc3 3y agoYeah, I'm not so sure about this. It may be a "golden age" for medical innovation, but I have little expectation that this will reach anyone except for the ultra-wealthy.
- scarby2 3y agoExcept medicine never stays with the ultra wealthy. It only usually makes sense as a mass market product. Unless by ultra wealthy you may mean entire populations of developed countries? Then yes maybe
- Ihateyouall1234 3y ago[dead]
- rqtwteye 3y agoProbably the people who can afford super expensive treatments and those who profit from them.
- khaki54 3y agoBio-hackers and/or the wealthy. The best medicine will eventually become available to everyone who is a part of the global economy. At least it always has given enough time. In the last 25 years, more than a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty. The world is at 10% or less right now. A glaring counterpoint is certain things like eyeglasses probably aren't universally available to everyone who needs them, but those industries WILL develop.
- literalAardvark 3y agoEyeglasses are pretty common and can be dirt cheap, and testing requires only a ruler and a piece of paper with letters on it. One just needs to accept glass lenses and a chinesium frame, as all good manufacturers are bought out by Luxottica. What are you referring to when saying that they're not universally available? Or are we including the people who don't even have access to water in this?
- Ekaros 3y agoLooking at otherwise expensive country Finland. We can get 2 pairs of regular glasses for 29€ including eye check... Ofc, that is absolutely nothing fancy. It is surprisingly cheap when free market works. That should be in range of what nearly everyone can save up here.
- literalAardvark 3y agoYep, that's why I asked. Most of the developed and developing world can afford them. And i think 29 eur is actually quite pricy, if you want cheaper stuff you can probably go down to like... 4 euro?
- Ekaros 3y agoI think there is cheaper online options, but 29€ for prescription glasses made to order isn't bad price. With customer service and them fitting them for you. Standard reading glasses for example will be much cheaper again.
- khaki54 3y agoI've wondered if in the next 20 years they will learn to extend life 10 years, and in those 10 years learn to extend life 10 more years, and so on. We could be on the brink of human immortality and not even know it. It probably has to happen that way, some sort of exponential function pushes us into a singularity for life expectancy
- johnchristopher 3y agohttps://www.wired.com/2008/03/ff-kurzweil/ https://www.wired.com/2008/03/ff-kurzweil/ Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity Maybe we are in early or alpha pre-jackpot (one free upvote to people who got the ref).
- jb1991 3y agoI got it! thanks in advance for the upvote!
- rqtwteye 3y agoBefore we extend life span much, we first need to work on dementia. It won’t be pretty to have a lot of very people with dementia.
- khaki54 3y agoAgree. Does no good to have 200 year old people with osteoporosis, extreme cancer, and dementia.
- literalAardvark 3y agoAside from a handful of rare genetic issues and unlucky coin tosses, none of those are likely with a healthy lifestyle. We do have a frailty problem in old people, but pushing that back is more or less what "longevity" research is trying to do.
- 3y ago
- laxd 3y agoShow the results and declare a golden age later. The "golden age" label is not for contemporary journalists.
- Kapura 3y agoI would expect an article title like this to be backed up by some dramatic increase in healthcare availability (like free healthcare in the U.S.) but no, it's just the people at the high end have access to better care than ever before. Hooray.
- scarby2 3y agoExcept the high end will actually be the majority of the US population who don't have issues affording healthcare. Would I like to make things better for the bottom third? Absolutely. Am I happy about progress made that will improve the life of the rest of us? Also yes.
- Ma8ee 3y agoThe majority can only afford healthcare while they are healthy. Being insured doesn’t protect you from bankruptcy when you get sick.
- candiddevmike 3y agoWe can have all of this without a for profit health system though. The middle class are the ones being squeezed here.
- SamoyedFurFluff 3y agoI would say I make way more than the vast majority of Americans, and I still worry about medical expenses. Many insurance companies tend to either fight you on payments or force you to pay upfront and then reimburse, meaning a lack of significant cash on hand is a serious concern…
- xmprt 3y agoUnless you have at least $10k of liquid savings, you're one medical emergency away from bankruptcy. I have great employer sponsored healthcare and still had to pay around $1k for a kidney ultrasound that didn't find anything and a 30 minute zoom call with my PCP.
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- dustingetz 3y agohttps://archive.is/ihMYw https://archive.is/ihMYw
- nobodyandproud 3y agoReading articles like this is frustrating, when we can’t even get generic cancer treatments https://www.phillyvoice.com/cancer-drug-shortage-generics-rationing-fda-/ https://www.phillyvoice.com/cancer-drug-shortage-generics-ra... Pharmaceuticals and insurance should be ripe for disruption, yet it’s too big for anyone to take on because we can’t manufacture locally at scale. Meanwhile different actors will blame “government” or “big pharma” and nothing gets done.
- dr_dshiv 3y agoI was hoping medical tourism would make this happen. Alas.
- nobodyandproud 3y agoWhat are the hurdles? Not every first-tier (economically speaking) European or Asian country has a first-rate medical system but I think there are enough, so it must be logistics or legal issues? Japan and South Korea come to mind for Asia. I’m guessing Germany and France still have first-rate care in Europe?
- JPLeRouzic 3y agoI am French, nothing in France today is comparable to the France of De Gaulle or d'Estaing. You still can get good treatment in private clinics or in specialized centers such as Institut Gustave Roussy, but not in the average public hospitals which are constantly pushed to lower their costs, including by the “socialists”. Overall, I don't think the situation is any better in France than in the UK or the US. It is perhaps even worse than in the UK, for example in my small town of Saint-Malo, an elderly person lay on a stretcher in the emergency room for many hours and died there without seeing a doctor. On average in France, 20 to 30 people die per month in the emergency room without having received treatment.
- nobodyandproud 3y agoThanks for the local perspective. Would you say https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64216269 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64216269 is an accurate summary of the problem faced in France? No matter how bureaucrats or corporate/administrative bean counters want to massage the numbers, there’s clearly a patient to caregiver ratio ceiling. Our own structures in management understand and demand this, yet these “leaders” revert to factory approaches for anyone outside of their hierarchy. Collosally stupid.
- Solvency 3y agoWe wouldn't need to emphasize a "golden age of medicine" if everyone had the same access to proper nutritional foods. Most of America is an utter food desert. Read: not overprocessed, highly refined, ultra palettable shit. A "golden age of whole foods" (not the corporation, actual food) would be better for everyone. Just not Big Pharma shareholders.
- anjel 3y agoNor Big Ag, Big Supplement, or Big Restaurant shareholders (and don't forget the many livelihoods dependant upon same.)
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago> We wouldn't need to emphasize a "golden age of medicine" if everyone had the same access to proper nutritional foods. We still would. We still would have cancers, even with nutritional food. And we would still have pandemics like Covid-19 and even worse (see Black Plague). A lot more people would have died without vaccinations.
- 908B64B197 3y agoI don't think people realize how relatively easy it is today to have a healthy lifestyle. Don't smoke, don't vape, drink a little and cook at home. There has never been a better availability of fresh produce everywhere in America and they have never been as cheap at they are. The big killers today are cardiac diseases, diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases. All of these three are mostly preventable. An early 20's guy who follow these basic recommendations can be pretty certain to have a pretty nice quality of life.
- harry8 3y ago>An early 20's guy who follow these basic recommendations can be pretty certain to have a pretty nice quality of life. This is both delusional and horrible in the sense of being victim blaming. No amount of eating healthy and doing regular exercise helps you when bad luck gets hold of you. Lower probability of having a problem is flipping continents away from "pretty certain." Children's cancer wards exist.
- 908B64B197 3y ago> when bad luck gets hold of you > Children's cancer wards exist. They definitely do, and this is pure bad-luck. But go to a hospital today and take a look at the patient census: a great percentage of them have completely preventable diseases with the knowledge we have today. They (born in the 40's) didn't stand a chance as they lived through the rise of fast food and got hooked on cigarettes while it was believed to be safe. But it doesn't have to be the same for kids today.
- Supermancho 3y ago>> basic recommendations can be pretty certain to have a pretty nice quality of life. > This is both delusional and horrible in the sense of being victim blaming. > when bad luck gets hold of you. Bad luck can take you out when you're 5, as you mentioned, so I'm not sure what the point is in this conversation about statistically beneficial behavior. Eating healthy, drinking in low amounts (including none) will put you in a bell curve of longevity leaning into the 70s and 80s, not give you a 100% certainty (this is the obvious interpretation of "pretty certain"). "bad luck", as you put it, takes you out of the normal distribution into a tail. What you mean by "delusional" or "victim blaming" isn't clear, as it does not apply, in context.
- halestock 3y agoMight be more accurate to call it the gilded age of medicine?
- croes 3y agoWe have seen how fast a virus evades a vaccine. We have multiple strains of antibiotic resistant bacteria. We see how fungi evolve to survive in humans. Could also be the beginning of a new dark age.
- dang 3y agoNote how the claim in the title ("looks like we're in") is immediately walked back by the subtitle ("may be on the cusp"). Common trick. I've grafted the two in the title above.
- nathan_compton 3y agoHaha. An elderly friend of mine spent ~24 hours in an emergency room after breaking their hip recently. Save the innovation for after we resolve the universal health care access problem.
- whatscooking 3y agoIt’s a golden age for the upper class, not your average American lol
- atleastoptimal 3y agoYeah. Almost all innovation and economic improvement has only helped the upper classes and in many cases actually hurt the lower classes. What is going to happen in America is a 40 year life expectancy gap between the rich and the poor. Rich kids will grow to 6'5" with 180 IQs and end any economic opportunity for poor families.
- lkbm 3y ago> Yeah. Almost all innovation and economic improvement has only helped the upper classes and in many cases actually hurt the lower classes. When my parents were born, something like 30-60% of the homes in their states didn't have indoor plumbing.
- atleastoptimal 3y agoI meant to add "in the last 20-30 years".
- Ihateyouall1234 3y ago[dead]
- friend_and_foe 3y agoI'll believe it when I see it. Til then, I'm stuck with a pill pusher who charges me several hundred dollars for a 2 hour wait and a 15 minute consultation. A golden age tomorrow, emerging out of an environment today, where experimental chemicals are advertised directly to users in between scenes glorifying self destruction. A golden age will spring spontaneously out of this? Sure, I'm excited.
- Etrnl_President 3y agoNot surprising, with all the extra sick people suddenly popping up, more opportunity. Wonder how that happened?