Jack
28-10-2009, 03:07 PM
This is an excerpt from a column in a medical magazine by a Dr Liam Farrel.
We live lives of unprecedented luxury and comfort, and much longer than nature had ordained. Ten thousand years ago, with the same DNA we have now, we were lucky to see 40. No woman lived to see the menopause, and all the great epidemics of our age - cancers, heart disease and dementia - occur because we were not designed to live this long. (To digress, I read somewhere that only one other mammal has a menopause, apparently some kind of seal. Could this be true?).
Science has gifted us these years. Not medical science, I hasten to add, with the possible exception of mass vaccination programmes, but rather improvements in lifestyle such as sanitation and diet; having enough to eat is obviously a sign of progress.
But do we bask in the happiness brought by these advances? Do we give thanks every day that nearly all children will now reach their fifth birthday.
No chance. We are surly and ungrateful, and now consider perfect health to be an immutable right. And if we don't get it, someone must be to blame.
I’m 12 years in to my ‘borrowed time’ and I am grateful, Dr Farrel, and not often surly! :greengrin
Bit of a bugger that all these ‘new’ diseases have to come with the extra life. :grr:
We live lives of unprecedented luxury and comfort, and much longer than nature had ordained. Ten thousand years ago, with the same DNA we have now, we were lucky to see 40. No woman lived to see the menopause, and all the great epidemics of our age - cancers, heart disease and dementia - occur because we were not designed to live this long. (To digress, I read somewhere that only one other mammal has a menopause, apparently some kind of seal. Could this be true?).
Science has gifted us these years. Not medical science, I hasten to add, with the possible exception of mass vaccination programmes, but rather improvements in lifestyle such as sanitation and diet; having enough to eat is obviously a sign of progress.
But do we bask in the happiness brought by these advances? Do we give thanks every day that nearly all children will now reach their fifth birthday.
No chance. We are surly and ungrateful, and now consider perfect health to be an immutable right. And if we don't get it, someone must be to blame.
I’m 12 years in to my ‘borrowed time’ and I am grateful, Dr Farrel, and not often surly! :greengrin
Bit of a bugger that all these ‘new’ diseases have to come with the extra life. :grr: