When it comes to medicine I think the key thing we notice stagnation is in lifespans. Focusing on individual diseases is misleading. Curing cancer is commonly seen as being worth three years in life-span. Health in Hong-Kong is two times curing cancer better then health in the US if you use lifespan as your measuring stick.
Looking at the history it seems interesting that the change in progress in lifespan was more in the early 1960s then in the 1970s. The Kefauver Harris Amendment in 1962 might be one of the key drivers.
In the last decades we had conceptual innovations in medicine like Evidence-Based medicine and meta-studies. We can finally say that Chiropratics do roughly as much for back pain as our other medical interventions for back pain because we can use metastudies which means we have an alternative to rejecting it because we don’t like the theory.
I think that the reason we don’t use average lifespan as our measuring stick is because people are far more bothered by the variability in that metric than its mean. If 20 year olds were offered the choice of “do you want the average life expectancy or do you want a rock-solid guarantee that you will achieve average minus 5”, I suspect that most people choose the guarantee. Not just because of hyperbolic discounting, but also because the average 73 year old has accomplished what they plan to accomplish in life. Whereas people are very afraid to die while they have small children, before they’ve proven themselves in their careers and before they’ve experienced retirement.
When it comes to medicine I think the key thing we notice stagnation is in lifespans. Focusing on individual diseases is misleading. Curing cancer is commonly seen as being worth three years in life-span. Health in Hong-Kong is two times curing cancer better then health in the US if you use lifespan as your measuring stick.
Looking at the history it seems interesting that the change in progress in lifespan was more in the early 1960s then in the 1970s. The Kefauver Harris Amendment in 1962 might be one of the key drivers.
In the last decades we had conceptual innovations in medicine like Evidence-Based medicine and meta-studies. We can finally say that Chiropratics do roughly as much for back pain as our other medical interventions for back pain because we can use metastudies which means we have an alternative to rejecting it because we don’t like the theory.
I think that the reason we don’t use average lifespan as our measuring stick is because people are far more bothered by the variability in that metric than its mean. If 20 year olds were offered the choice of “do you want the average life expectancy or do you want a rock-solid guarantee that you will achieve average minus 5”, I suspect that most people choose the guarantee. Not just because of hyperbolic discounting, but also because the average 73 year old has accomplished what they plan to accomplish in life. Whereas people are very afraid to die while they have small children, before they’ve proven themselves in their careers and before they’ve experienced retirement.