| I am fine with all of the above. The problem is that our increasing focus on solutions someone can monetize and make a mint off of are steadily crowding out other options. YC has a lot of power. Adding their muscle to the goal of finding business solutions to health issues is very likely to deepen that problem. 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. |
How much effort do you think it would take to force the adult population into "healthy lifestyle" (as defined by the usual good diet and lots of exercise, etc.)? How would one even do that? I can't imagine anything over a) upending the industrial revolution and getting us all back to the farmer's life, b) just forcing everyone by arbitrary government restrictions on everything, or c) doing massive brainwashing of everyone. All of those strategies are infeasible, and could have bad side effects.
OTOH money spent on biomedical research can lead to figuring out one cause of one disease, and a subsequent cure. Then another. Then another. A lot of those could allow us to sidestep the lifestyle requirements, which I believe to be a good outcome. It expands options. (This - using medicine to not change lifestyle being good - is where I think our beliefs strongly differ.)
--
> 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,
What? Who on Earth does "prophylactic antibiotics"? I thought this was restricted to surgery and some other very special cases...
> Limiting my exposure to other people and their germs is not viewed as a reasonable choice for avoiding that outcome.
This is a very reasonable strategy and is often used, but has lifestyle costs, so people avoid doing it anyway... No blame to be put on doctors for that one.
> 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.
When you were growing up, polio was a thing. Now, it isn't. There's not just a correlation there, there's actual causation. We're shooting for 100% vaccination for some of the things, because vaccines work, and happen to work superlinearly - the more people are vaccinated, the more likely it is those who are not vaccinated will not get infected either. And some people can't be vaccinated for health reasons, so they rely on that so-called "herd immunity".