
What's killing us? - dxbydt
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2017/10/whats_killing_u.html
======
wyldfire
> 4\. Most of these leading killers are themselves mainly caused by old age.
> If "Old Age" were a category, it would be causing by far the majority of
> deaths. Again, it's not the case that nothing could be done about this. We
> could be doing much more medical research on aging.

I guess most of this article's discussion makes some sense, up until the point
above. There will always be a top ten causes of death but those causes
wouldn't always be interesting. If we lived 120 able-body-and-minded-years, I
would call that success or at the very least progress. How would this top ten
graph look then? Probably not very different. Before I read #4 I thought to
myself: "gee, as long as we're dying of old age, then that's probably a really
good sign." The author draws almost the opposite conclusion.

"We could be doing much more medical research on aging" \-- yes, that's fair.
What if research on aging led to us dying of Cancer and Alzheimers ten years
later than the baseline? Twenty? Again, progress, but it wouldn't be reflected
in this graph.

What might be a really useful use of this data is to show a fifty or hundred-
year-ago baseline. What if fifty years ago the pareto included causes like
auto collisions or home fires? If that were the case we might want to have
some clever quip like: "Regulations: the silent lifesavers." (Regulations are
often depicted as tools of the evil bureacracy).

------
AdeptusAquinas
Seems a bit of a stretch to say 'There are AIDS activists because there are
people who want to express sympathy for gays, to align themselves against
conservatives, and thereby to express "who they are". There are AIDS
activists, but there aren't any nephritis activists.'

AIDS is a preventable in many cases if people practice safe sex - something
that was not commonly known and/or a taboo topic for a long time. Activists
helped change that situation, saving many lives.

If there were Nephritis activists, what exactly would they be doing? What sort
of public awareness would they be promoting?

And then there is this: 'There are breast cancer walks, but there aren't any
colon cancer walks.' Breast cancer can be prevented by frequent tests and
self-examinations. Colon cancer cannot. Breast cancer awareness helps teach
woman and society that tests and examinations should be done: not doing this
simply because colon cancer is more prevalent (is it though?) seems a rather
idiotic utilitarian argument.

~~~
wwwtyro
> Breast cancer can be prevented by frequent tests and self-examinations.
> Colon cancer cannot.

Is that true? I was under the impression that colonoscopies can reveal polyps
which can be removed, thereby preventing progression to full-blown colon
cancer.

~~~
AdeptusAquinas
You're right, but my point is probably still valid: a quick check suggests
women over 40 should get a breast exam every year, while men and women should
get a colonoscopy every ten years, starting at 40.

------
hprotagonist
It is very instructive to listen to Atul Gawande's series of Reith Lectures
from a few years ago here.

in "the problem of hubris"
([http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04tjdlj#play](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04tjdlj#play)
, transcript [http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/radio4/open-
book/2014_reith_lectu...](http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/radio4/open-
book/2014_reith_lecture3_edinburgh.pdf) ), he makes the very fair point that
death is, ultimately, not something we can "fix".

 _We’ve had I think an about 50 year experiment with medicalising mortality,
with casting it as just another problem for us to treat like any other, and I
think that experiment is failing. But we have an alternative emerging. It’s
one where we learn and elicit what matters most to people in their lives
besides just surviving, and then we use our capabilities not to sacrifice it
but to protect, to protect it – to protect those priorities that people have.
And I think that is our opportunity._

------
mbroshi
As pointed out in the comments section, the chart does not account for years
of life lost, simply numbers of lives. I'd be interested with whether the ex-
post explanation still applies if we did a simple transformation like weighted
each category by average age of death. Suicide, homicide and drugs skew a lot
younger than heart disease.

~~~
emodendroket
That's a great point. An elderly man dying of heart disease may be sad, but
not tragic in the way a 20-year-old overdosing on heroin is.

------
rndmize
It feels like the author of this piece lists a variety of interesting
observations, some useful facts, and then completely misses the boat.

As a society we put effort into finding ways to help sick people that are not
old because we can generally expect them to have a good number of productive
years if they are cured. There's a good return value, and it feels just.

This isn't the case with older folk. At a guess, if we found a magical way to
cure heart disease and completely take it off the list there, most of those
people will still die, a few months/years later, from something else (cancer
maybe, or that very descriptive "other" block).

Old age isn't just some single disease we can fix, its a general purpose
failure of the body. If you can heal that in a cost effective way (or in any
way, really), congrats, you're a trillionare, but I'd bet we'll see full-body
cybernetics before we figure out a way to cure aging.

~~~
emodendroket
To be fair, not everyone dying of heart disease is old.

------
groceryheist
Don't represent 1-dimensional quantities like proportions or numbers of people
as area. This is actively misleading because area it squares the magnitude of
differences.

------
panic
_> There are AIDS activists because there are people who want to express
sympathy for gays, to align themselves against conservatives, and thereby to
express "who they are"._

Millions of people have died of AIDS, and more are dying every day (around 18
per day in the U.S. as of 2014, according to [https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-
basics/overview/data-and-trends/stat...](https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-
basics/overview/data-and-trends/statistics)). If your friend or family member
died to AIDS, wouldn't you advocate for its prevention and treatment? To say
that these activists are fighting simply to "align themselves against
conservatives" is insulting, to say the least.

 _> There are no nephritis activists, because there's no salient group you
align yourself with (kidney disease sufferers?) by advocating for nephritis
research, there's no group you thereby align yourself _against _, and you don
't tell any story about what kind of person you are._

What about organizations like this?
[http://advocacy.kidney.org](http://advocacy.kidney.org)

~~~
glandium
> Millions of people have died of AIDS

Note, people don't actually die _of_ AIDS. They die of something else, that
their body can't fight because they have AIDS. Which leads to the interesting
question: what counts as a death by AIDS in those statistics? Are some deaths
that _might_ be rooted to AIDS not included somehow because of causality
uncertainty? (it's not because you have AIDS and die that you died because of
it)

> around 18 per day in the U.S. as of 2014

That's... less than 7000 a year, so according to the data from OP, less than
homicide (15k), or illegal drugs (17k).

~~~
panic
From the hiv.gov page: _In 2014, there were 12,333 deaths (due to any cause)
of people with diagnosed HIV infection ever classified as AIDS, and 6,721
deaths were attributed directly to HIV._

------
emodendroket
I'd dispute both the claim that nobody talks about heart disease, especially
in relation to obesity, and also the claim that we "know" how to get people to
lose weight in any but the most literal and useless sense. By my second point
I mean to say, sure, we know that what we want to achieve is a caloric
intake/use rate that leads to weight loss followed by a steady weight, but the
real-world success percentage of people trying to do this is abysmal.

------
quuquuquu
>Hypothesis: We don't much care about the good of society.

"We" is a very big blanket term. Quite a few of us care about preventable
deaths from bad health choices.

However, quite a few people on this Earth exist that don't care very much
about the good of society.

These people run the corporations that are VERY GOOD at selling things that
kill us, namely junk foods, alcohol and tobacco.

~~~
emodendroket
Well, also, for any given problem, one might feel like the cure proposed is
worse than the disease. Maybe we could "solve" obesity by strictly rationing
every person's daily food intake and not allowing them to eat anything else
besides what they've been provisioned. Who wants to live in that world?

~~~
quuquuquu
Definitely not I, it's true :)

The nihilistic reality is that none of this matters, everyone will do what
they want, people will profit, others will die.

All I ever try to do is provide true information- the user will need to draw
their own plan of action from it :)

------
singularity2001
the image is completely illegible here:
[http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/Willis/huemer2.jpg](http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/Willis/huemer2.jpg)

------
jeffehobbs
The illegible labels on this non-enlargable chart are currently what’s killing
me.

