Medical innovation has transformed our lives,
but hardly anyone realizes it.
You can tell people that global life expectancy has doubledin a century and watch it fail to register
– it just sounds like an abstract number, and numbers don’t convey how different life used to be.
So let me describe it another way.
If you collapsed with a heart attack in 1950, hardly anyone around you would know how to help.
CPR wouldn’t be invented for another decade.
If you reached a hospital, a doctor would likely give you morphine, tell you to lie still and hope for the best:
the prevailing view was that once the heart stopped pumping, nothing could be done.
That changed in the 1970s.
Cardiologists began to understand that with each passing minute, more heart muscle would be starved of oxygen,
and once dead, it wouldn’t be able to recover.
But doctors could limit that damage by swiftly restoring oxygen supply with a clot-busting drug
or a balloon catheter, opening blocked blood vessels and rescuing heart muscle.
In other words, the idea that a heart attack is something you could actively treat is only about fifty years old.
Since then, the share of patients who have died within a month of having the most severe type of heart attack has fallen by two thirds.
https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/future-of-medicine
Zoom out to cardiovascular diseases overall, and the trend is even more dramatic.
People in rich countries today have roughly a quarter the chance of dying from cardiovascular diseases as they did in the 1950s at the same ages.
Back then, there were no statins, no cholesterol testing, no bans on trans-fats, no anti-smoking campaigns, no bypass surgery, and no implanted pacemakers.
Diabetes, certain cancers, infectious diseases and other conditions have also become far more treatable than they used to be.
A century ago, if you were diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, your remaining life expectancy would be a few months,
and a ‘starvation diet’ would be one of your few options.
Today, you’d simply need to wear a small device on your arm to track your blood sugar level and release insulin to stabilize it in real time.
A century ago, it was unheard of for anyone to be cured of cancer, except, in rare cases, by a surgeon’s knife.
Penicillin hadn’t been discovered,
and a simple wound infection could result in sepsis and death.
Smallpox still existed.
It swept across the world and killed millions globally, year after year.