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I relate to your sentiment, but it seems to me that promoting healthy lifestyles and inventing new cures doesn't have to be in opposition. Like you, I spend a lot of time figuring out how to live better. But also grateful for the medicine I got for illnesses when they do arise. I use and apply free health advice. Then again, I also use gym and supplements, which may have made VCs rich. Likewise, in cures, I appreciate that they are available in the low probability I get seriously ill. I am sure many suffering from alzheimer, cancer or other age-related diseases, would want there to be cures. In the goal increasing healthspan, can't one favour the all-of-the-above approach? Primarily rely on healthy living like you suggest, yet support people developing cures for diseases. PS. Almost all cures come from the US, 57 % of them, and 13 % from Switzerland. While this health care system is dysfunctional in many ways, it also is the market new cures are being developed for. In Europe, where I am from, most drugs are purchased by a single large purchaser, which has negotiation power to buy a drug at close to marginal cost. This makes drugs cheaper, but also makes less people try to invent new cures. So, it's a bit of a trade-off between the present and the future. |
I quit taking the flu vax years ago and have done better since. In the eyes of some people, this makes me a nutcase antivaxxer even though flu vaccines are not required.
When I was growing up, anyone getting vaccinated was a success. People who didn't weren't all that uncommon. Now we are shooting for 100% of the population being vaccinated and you need to justify not getting it.
The further we go down this road, the more those options narrow rather than expand. I am some nutter who "lives in a bubble" for preferring to limit my exposure to germs as effective prevention rather than live on prophylactic antibiotics all the time, never mind that one of the outcomes of putting people with CF on antibiotics constantly is a high incidence of C-dif infections which are then treated by surgically removing your colon. Limiting my exposure to other people and their germs is not viewed as a reasonable choice for avoiding that outcome.
I am not seeing similar amounts of muscle put into policy changes that are more family friendly, people friendly etc. Saying there is nothing wrong with developing this stuff ignores the context in which this is occurring. If all of the above were equally accepted answers, I would not get so much ugly and threatening push back for talking about the choices I have made. I should not need to defend the idea that I would just rather not be sick, thanks, and I am willing to limit my social life to have that. But I get outright attacked for that.
So you would be wise to be a tad more skeptical about where such things lead. They tend to lead to promoting one path over another, at the expense of the other, rather than a broadening of options.