Life Expectancy Going Down
My dad started an online course with the University of Arizona recently educating doctors in the practices of Ayurvedic medicine. Ayurvedic medicine is an ancient Hindu system of healthcare that is quite different from the traditional western medicine that we all love and trust. In recent years, there has been a great intermixing of medicinal knowledge between the West and the East with more doctors educating themselves in the West with regards to Eastern medical knowledge like Acupuncture, Ayurveda, and Reiki. The advantages of these alternate forms of medicine are that they are generally low cost and in some cases work better for specific illnesses.
I am actually a big fan of acupuncture as it helps me de-stress which I have a hard time doing for some reason. These alternative types of medicine have aided in changing the American healthcare system to a small degree however greater change is advocated by Dr. Patch Adams. Dr. Adams has worked for the last 35 years to promote his different vision for healthcare and in doing so has traveled all over the world including 3 different war zones.
If anyone is a fan of Robin Williams, you might remember the movie Patch Adams which is actually about Dr. Adams and his life changing healthcare. The reason I bring up Dr. Adams today is because I am a big believer in Universal Healthcare having spoken to my older brother who lives under the NHS system in London. A few former french classmates for my post-grad who have nothing but good things to say about the French system. My father, a doctor who has worked within the Irish medical system for as long as I can remember and believes that everyone person has the right to health care.
Al Jazeera has a weekly segment entitled inside America, the most recent segment appearing two weeks ago concerning the healthcare system in America:
Inside USA - Healthcare Part 1
Inside USA - Healthcare Part 2
The simple and most startling point in this 30 minute show is that life expectancy in rural America is decreasing.
August 03 2008 11:22 pm | American Politics
August 4th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
The compelling problem with healthcare in the US IMO, is that it costs nearly twice as much per capita than any other country. Yet it is not universal as it is in most countries, nor are we very high on the list of health criteria.
The counter argument that we
can pick any doctor and go in at any time is weak for those of us with insurance and simply false for the many without.
August 4th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
Hey BB, cost is definitely an issue, I was looking at the 2007 OECD data and the costs for the USA are nearly off the chart.
I remember on my health insurance working within the healthcare industry. I actually had to phone around to find a doctor who would accept new patients. Also if you look at the OECD data, we have the same number of doctors per 1000 people as Germany so that whole availability argument is false.
August 5th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Life expectancy in rural America is not decreasing. That was an erroneous conclusion drawn by a reporter too dumb to understand the statistics.
August 5th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
How did you come to that conclusion Gordon, when I watched this show, the reporter said the study was done by Harvard? Are you questioning the reporters interpretation or the Harvard results?
August 6th, 2008 at 1:16 am
My mistake; we’re talking about two different reports. The one I was writing about was in the UK Independent here .
The writer misinterpreted the data to mean that some folks were living 30 years less than the average.
August 6th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
If folks were living 30 years less than the average, that would be a serious problem. Thankfully it was a misintepretation. In the Al Jazeetra show, they don’t mentions specifics but a decrease is a decrease no matter which way you look at it.