Why Are You Not Dead Yet? (In response to all the anti-vaxxers and anti-science folks these days)

[Quixote1818]

Life expectancy doubled in the past 150 years. Here’s why.

By Laura Helmuth
The most important difference between the world today and 150 years ago isn’t airplane flight or nuclear weapons or the Internet. It’s lifespan. We used to live 35 or 40 years on average in the United States, but now we live almost 80. We used to get one life. Now we get two.


You may well be living your second life already. Have you ever had some health problem that could have killed you if you’d been born in an earlier era? Leave aside for a minute the probabilistic ways you would have died in the past—the smallpox that didn’t kill you because it was eradicated by a massive global vaccine drive, the cholera you never contracted because you drink filtered and chemically treated water. Did some specific medical treatment save your life? It’s a fun conversation starter: Why are you not dead yet? It turns out almost everybody has a story, but we rarely hear them; life-saving treatments have become routine. I asked around, and here is a small sample of what would have killed my friends and acquaintances:

•Adrian’s lung spontaneously collapsed when he was 18.
•Becky had an ectopic pregnancy that caused massive internal bleeding.
•Carl had St. Anthony’s Fire, a strep infection of the skin that killed John Stuart Mill.*
•Dahlia would have died delivering a child (twice) or later of a ruptured gall bladder.
•David had an aortic valve replaced.
•Hanna acquired Type 1 diabetes during a pregnancy and would die without insulin.
•Julia had a burst appendix at age 14.
•Katherine was diagnosed with pernicious anemia in her 20s. She treats it with supplements of vitamin B-12, but in the past she would have withered away.
•Laura (that’s me) had scarlet fever when she was 2, which was once a leading cause of death among children but is now easily treatable with antibiotics.
•Mitch was bitten by a cat (filthy animals) and had to have emergency surgery and a month of antibiotics or he would have died of cat scratch fever.


More


http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_longevity/2013/09/life_expectancy_history_public_health_and_medical_advances_that_lead_to.html

[Thirties Child]

1. My appendix was an hour away from bursting when they operated.

This was 1946, before penicillin was in common use. It was also the start of the baby boom, and the only bed in the hospital was in the labor room. I was 11 and had no idea what I was listening to.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

2. I had pneumonia in my late 20's and without antibiotics, I could well have died.

I had scarlet fever when I was 8 and again, an antibiotic (PCN) saved my life.

I have many friends who could tell the same sorts of stories.

[LeftyMom]

3. I would have died being born and taken my mother with me.

And had I survived that somehow, I'd have died within the first few days of life of a birth defect without prompt surgical treatment.

[cherokeeprogressive]

4. I credit my continued existence to my regular consumption of protein derived from the flesh

of animals from Land and Sea.

[Hekate]

5. Appendix tried to take me out in my 40s and almost succeeded. Many antibiotics later...

....and almost a week in the hospital, I was sent home still shaky but on the mend.

My grandson's umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck. A C-section on my daughter saved him from being either badly damaged (cerebral palsy, retardation) or dead.

My son had a horrible accident in his teens, and his whole face had to be reconstructed with multiple surgeries. I don't think he could have survived without modern medicine.

One of my cousins was 12 years old when she began to ail, and the doc couldn't find anything specific wrong. She went for a nap one afternoon and fell into a diabetic coma. That would have been the end of her if her parents hadn't rushed her to the hospital.... Daily insulin shots over the past 60 years have kept her alive and healthy.

I have my own list, a fairly long one. Life's 100% mortal, but there's no need to hurry out of it any sooner than we must.

[eridani]

6. No, we didn't used to live 35-40 years. The catch is making it to age 5 without dying

If you did that, you had a reasonably good chance of la biblical lifespan, which was "three score and ten." That assumed that you survived childhood, though. The increase in life expectancy over the years has been mainly due to the reduction of infant and child mortality.

[hobbit709]

10. The old country cemetery where my wife's family are buried in E. TX

The earliest gravestones are from the mid 1840's. When you look at them you see a large percentage were for children under a year, sometimes only days.

[eridani]

15. I've done a bit of geaneological research on my family, and have noticed the same thing n/t

[Douglas Carpenter]

7. in about 1930 a 10 year old aunt of mine (who I obviously never met) died from an abscessed tooth

or to be more precise the infection and sepsis as a result of the abscess

[Hari Seldon]

8. Bloodletting

Bloodletting was a popular treatment that wasn't such a good idea it turns out.

They used to spray people with DDT to get rid of lice.

Pregant women were given Thalidomide in the 50s.

So YOU go putting your trust in these people if you really believe they have come that far from poisoning babies in the last few decases

[longship]

9. Well then, one might as well embrace homeopathy.

Which does absolutely nothing. But then again, when homeopathy was invented medicine was not scientific. We've learned a lot since homeopathy was invented out of whole cloth. The main thing is the germ theory of disease. You know, Louis Pasteur.

Nevertheless, there are still plenty of idiots who still embrace homeopathy, in spite of the fact that it is utter rubbish.

[Orrex]

11. The difference between those treatments and "alternative" "medicine"

is that real medicine abandons treatments that are shown to be harmful or ineffective, while "alternative" "medicine" embraces harmful or useless treatments all the more fiercely, while claiming to the be under stifling assault by science and actual medicine.

In all of history, can you name two "alternative" "medicine" treatments that were abandoned after "alternative" "medicine" found these treatments to be harmful or useless?

[trumad]

12. I'd rather trust them

Than Jenny McCarthy and the idiots Ant-Vaxxers.

[CanonRay]

13. My genealogical research indicates that if you lived to adulthood

you generally live a long life, at least in the past. I think our environment is killing us sooner that should be our time.

By the way, I had a immune system malfunction that attacked my lungs and almost killed me. My wife's appendix blew up on her ten years or so ago. We should both be dead.

[bemildred]

14. Most of us alive today would not be without cheap energy.

And most of the improvements in health and longevity are due to better nutrition, and a lot of our health and lifestyle issues are really nutrition and exercise issues.

That said, I can think of at least twice when modern medical interventions have saved my life. Probably several more that that.