miracle of modern medicine

June 24th, 2015 § Comments Off on miracle of modern medicine § permalink

i was at a fun dinner tonight, with almost a dozen participants. at one point we were chatting about various health topics, and two things really stroke me.

1) three out of the 11 people present had laser corrective eye surgery done. that’s almost a quarter! it’s amazing how widely spread this procedure was in the group, which is of course not representative of the whole society, but at least indicative of a decent portion of it.

2) and 9 of us have kids, but four of us had kids with some kind of developmental disorder. one had cross eye issues, one had minor asperger syndrome, two had dyslexia. nothing dramatic by modern standards, but that’s only because our health system is able to detect them early on, and fix them before they even become real problems. that’s another quarter of the population represented at the table!

i can imagine even just a hundred years ago, all these problems just developing into a grow up age, rendering a decent chunk of the society somewhat impaired.

we should feel fortunate we live in a time where such problems are fixable, in society where they are systematically detected early on, and we should feel good about paying the taxes that make both of these points possible in the first place. full stop.

Where am I?

You are currently viewing the archives for June, 2015 at Rational Idealist.