earlymedical1.2. A Brief Journey Through the History of Medicine
Medicine and technology have come a long way: the average person today has a life expectancy much longer than the King of England’s five hundred years ago. Our current approach to medicine has done wonders in reducing deaths from things like infection and trauma. However, the same tools that have revolutionized our ability to prevent deaths from acute problems don’t work nearly as well for chronic diseases like cardiovascular disease, dementia, and diabetes. To put this more starkly, if you pull out deaths from the top 8 infectious diseases going back to 1900, there has been virtually no improvement in human mortality. Why? I would argue it’s because what got us those gains (Medicine 2.0) is not what will get us the next set of gains. This video is an introduction to that new paradigm: Medicine 3.0. This approach takes into account the entire life course, acknowledges the difference between individuals in terms of risks and rewards, and incorporates evidence-informed care rather than only evidence-based care. All of this contributes to your goal of preventing disease rather than merely treating it after the horse has already left the barn.
Additional Resources
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Sources
Mortality data (4:21) derived from: Gordon, R.J. (2016). The rise and fall of American growth: The U.S. standard of living since the Civil War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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