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Comment by bwestergard | Hacker News Reader

"Medical advances have obviously been huge in making life longer and less painful for the (lucky subsets of the) masses."

Even this much is not clear. The economist Robert Gordon has argued, to my mind pretty persuasively, that medicine (i.e. doctors, hospitals, routine checkups) has received undue credit for improvements in health between 1870-1970 that are actually attributable to improved sanitation, diet, vaccination, etc.

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This is definitely the case.

> Analysis of the mid-Victorian period in the U.K. reveals that life expectancy at age 5 was as good or better than exists today, and the incidence of degenerative disease was 10% of ours.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2672390/

Medical advances for adults since 1870 have mostly done little besides hold the line on keeping us alive through the effects of increased pollution, worse diets, and lower physical activity.

This is really, really disturbing when you think about how much of GDP is dedicated to health care.

I'm shocked that I've never heard this argument before. Very interesting and indeed, disturbing as well.

I find it weird to define medicine in a way that excludes sanitation and vaccination. The other elephant in the room is antibiotics, which have managed to make many previously lethal infections manageable or even trivial.

Sanitation is a task performed by plumbers and garbage collectors, not by physicians.

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