Modern medicine - still the third leading cause of death

[Fidel_Castronaut]

Had a good sleep.

Still can't understand what the point of this could possibly be.

A joke maybe?

I hardly consider 250,000 deaths a year - and that's just in America - to be a joke.

Modern western medicine has increased life spans because it's really good at a few things:

- trauma care
- antibiotics
- certain vaccines

Other than that it's largely an industry that makes more money by keeping us sick, and it kills an awful lot of us.

Toxicology, microbiology, endocrinology, pharmacology, neuroscience, molecular biology, bio-chemistry, oncology, among many others.

Fields which were either non-existent or people throwing powders at people's faces hoping for divine intervention. People have had cancer for centuries, only in the past 30 to 40 years have we learned how to start treating it.

Or, people have had kidney failures for centuries, only recently have we discovered the broad range of scientific disciplines necessary to go about transplanting one.

The list goes on and on and on. ^_^