Would you still be alive without modern medicine?

As long as I avoided diphtheria/smallpox/plague, I’d still be kicking around. Lack of ibuprofen would make Aunt Flo’s visits pretty rough, though.

On the other hand, things being as they were, you might’ve been pregnant so constantly 200 or so years ago that Aunt Flo’s visits would’ve been fairly rare!

Most likely alive but miserable. No real physical health issues, two fairly easy pregnancies, but crippling depression/anxiety and severe myopia would make things rough.

Like I pointed out in an earlier thread a few years ago, some of the problems we have are probably caused by a modern lifestyle. Take a look at a few of the problems listed in this thread: There’s pretty good evidence from Eskimo/Inuit studies that myopia is caused either by lifestyle, diet, or a combination of both. Kidney stones can be caused by a number of dietary factors, including a high intake of processed carbohydrates or high sodium. Psoriasis has an auto-immune component, which may be triggered by common modern foodstuffs like grains and nightshades (potatoes, peppers, eggplant). Type 2 diabetes is almost certainly caused by modern diet and activity patterns. So it’s kind of hard to say whether you’d still have the same problems in the past. Living conditions change a lot depending on whether you were a hunter-gatherer, or living in the Bronze age, or Iron age, or the medieval era, to name a few very broad categories.

Take my family: I was born by caesarian section. But, would my mother have needed a caesarian if she hadn’t been giving birth in a hospital in the US? She was flat on her back in a bed, under induced labor for hours before they decided to cut her. If she’d been in natural labor with a midwife, allowed to walk around and change positions freely, would she have needed surgery to get me out?

Either that doctor or a subsequent one — I have two younger siblings — did so much damage that when she later got a consultation for elective cosmetic abdominal surgery she was bluntly asked by that doctor, “Who butchered you?” She’d had years of occasionally crippling backaches, probably because her stomach muscles were unable to support her torso properly.

Aggressive breast cancer killed her more slowly than it would have if she hadn’t had radiation treatment. The radiation was necessary because the cancer had spread to her brain, which they didn’t catch with all the fancy MRIs and other diagnostics simply because they don’t normally screen for brain tumors in patients with breast cancer. Oops. Rendered the 6 months of chemo she underwent, that destroyed any semblance of health almost immediately, rather pointless. But hey, the radiation treatment meant that my severely brain-damaged mother was able to live on for another 9 months of disability and agony. Bit of a mixed bag there for my mother. And my family.

I had pneumonia when I was four. But, we were dirt-poor at the time. I have a vivid memory at about that age of my father going hunting and bringing back a couple of deer which he butchered in the garage. That would be about the time we were using food stamps for shitty white bread and surplus government cheese. Would I have gotten sick at all if I’d had a better diet, or one with fewer processed ingredients? Or, conversely, if we’d been living in rougher conditions and I’d been exposed to more pathogens at a younger age when my mother was still nursing me (we lived in the city until I was about 3) would those bacteria have been a problem for me later?

When it comes to acute medical problems, there’s no question that modern medicine is a life saver. Even there, though, the mechanisms that help the most are processes and modes of thinking (diagnosis, stabilization, step-by-step narrowing down causes to find the origin of the problem) and refined techniques for crisis management.

The physical tools matter much less. Physicians themselves have said that the innovations in medicine that made the biggest changes in the last 200 years are better sanitation (i.e. not dumping untreated shit in your water supply, not having rotting garbage near your living areas, not having dead bodies nearby) sterile technique, and anesthesia.

For anything other than traumatic and acute injury, modern medicine is not particularly great. The “wonder drugs” usually mentioned in threads like these are developed to address chronic health problems, mostly caused by modern lifestyle and diet (and to make shitloads of money for pharmaceutical companies). Ironically, many of these drugs don’t even work. Ben Goldacre has written a couple of books on this. Many of the surgical interventions are also necessary in large part because of the “diseases of affluence” causing systemic damage.

Some of what you’re saying makes sense.

On the other hand, some of it doesn’t.

On the induction and caesarian: It depends on why your birth was induced. I’m very much in favor of letting nature take her course when possible. However, induction may have been necessary because you were too far overdue – post-maturity births may not be as scary as premature births, but there are definitely potential problems. Another reason, which often saves the life of both mother and child, is pre-eclampsia. If she’d been with a midwife, walking about, etc., it’s also possible that both of you would have died.

Food stamps, IIRC, can be used for lots of food purchases. Surplus cheese was a freebee. White bread can be nutririous. Heck, I grew up on it. Whole wheat bread was a special treat.

Sanitation and anesthesia are great. Most of the rest of modern medicine would be pointless without it. I’m real glad there are heart bypasses readily available now, though. They gave my dad and extra couple of decades. My husband is still here although over 20 years ago his main coronary artery was mostly blocked. (In his case it was probably a childhood infection that caused the damage, or something congenital, because all the rest of the blood vessels were quite clear. )

Died in childhood. I had 6 cycscopys before I was 7 years old. My bladder would have been too badly infected for me to live past 9 years old.

IMHO:

This poll is going to self-select from those with a story to tell.

The folks who have never had any serious medical intervention are not as likely to say “Me Too! Me Too!” as those who can then tell us all about it.

Me - dead.

you get to wonder about the detail :slight_smile:

Highly likely to have been dead by pneumonia, and dead again with gangrene (unless I survive the foot amputation).

I would have died at birth, I was born early and needed to be given an iv drug so I could breathe.

Though makes me wonder if my birth was induced, I would have been a big baby if I was born on time and my parents stories of why I was born early didn’t add up. So maybe I wouldn’t have been early to begin with.

I said “died during childbirth” though it’s certainly possible I wouldn’t have made it that long. Ignoring things that didn’t happen (e.g. I never got smallpox or polio), I had asthma as a child and the treatment back in the 1960s wasn’t as good as it is now, but still better than the 1860s. I think that’s the only thing I’ve had that might have killed me.

OK, the gallbladder might have eventually as well but in less-modern times I might not have had the lifestyle issues that contributed to that.

And of course my daughter would have died too, when I died - I had pre-eclampsia that would have killed me within a week if they hadn’t delivered her.

  1. I would have died in childbirth, at 16, without medical intervention.

  2. Hypertension Urgency would surely have killed me last spring. My wild hypertension is only controlled with drugs. Without those drugs I’d probably not be alive today.

Interesting question, I had to think about it for awhile!

I’m honestly not sure. I’ve only had one possibly life-threatening illness - some kind of kidney thing that sent me to hospital when I was three. But my family was living in a small town in the middle of nowhere at the time, and apparently the medical facilities there left much to be desired. My mother the nurse can still work herself into a rage over the incompetence of the doctors who treated me. But somehow, even though all the medical people in my family say they did everything wrong, my condition turned around and I got better. So maybe that would have killed me without modern medicine or maybe I’d have recovered for the same inexplicable reason.

Would have died at age 9 from pneumonia. I recall full blown pneumonia where I could barely move and was high fever. Now thinking about it, surprised I wasn’t brain damaged (I have a doctorate).

I also suffered from appendicitis, so not sure what would have happened to me a century ago.

Assuming I did not die in childbirth, I would not have made it to my first birthday without modern surgery.

More recently, I had a “depressed skull fracture with subdural hematoma”. A decade or two earlier, that would probably have killed or crippled me.

Surgeons are wonderful people.

Angina and diabetes. Dead as a very dead thing.