On Apr 7, 3:08*am, Tom Emano > wrote:
> I remember being a kid in the 1950's. People were a LOT healthier
> then. Almost no one had health insurance and they rarely went to
> the doctor and rarely took drugs of any kind.

You must have serious memory issues. I was raised in the 40s and 50s,
and my elder relatives were dying all around me. I expected to live no
older than 60, because none of the elder males of the family outlived
their 50s. They dropped off from heart attacks and obesity and alcohol
related illnesses all the time. Exercise was supposed to be healthy,
but no one understood why, and few adults did it unless their jobs
demanded it. They drank their beer and smoked their cigarettes and
told us kids to go outside and get some healthy exercise.

When I bought my first life insurance policy in 1970, I was told that
the actuarial tables gave me only a 60% chance of living to 65.

When my father had his first heart attack (of four), he was 38. The
doctor made him stay in bed for six weeks, which kept him screaming in
anger and frustration. When he went back to work, they took him off
his active outdoor job and put him in the control cab of a steel mill,
where he sat for eight hours a day and inhaled so much carbon monoxide
that he could barely drive home. Today, his case would have been
managed quite differently.

I was encouraged to eat fatty foods, which were supposed to be good
for me, but helped me develop an obesity problem that haunts me to
this day. But thanks to modern medicine, I'm a healthy 67 and expect
at least another decade. Statins have kept my arteries almost free of
plaque, and fenofibrates have kept triglycerides down in a pancreas-
friendly way. Flurazepam, taken as needed, combats my chronic
insomnia. Regular exercise at the YMCA, hiking and rockhounding have
kept me in good shape even though I carry the weight of a cinder block
around on my gut.

Much of your argument is correct. The medical-industrial complex
creates diseases and then charges for the cures. My son was prescribed
the expensive Ambien for his insomnia, a $100+ prescription to treat
the condition that I treat for $4.00 a month. Last year, he had an
apparent heart attack which landed him in the hospital for 22 hours.
It turned out to be a side effect of the Ambien, but it cost him and
his insurance company nearly $12000 to find that out. (Did you know
that hospitals now charge by the hour, not by the day?)

I also know that doctors are bribed with golf vacations and cruises to
prescribe the most expensive medicines, not the most effective. My son
was taken off Ambien and put on Lunesta, also a high-priced medicine,
which is only an equivalent to Ambien, with worse side effects. He
finally ended up on a cheap generic, which was the first drug that had
no side effects.

But his doctor was reluctant to prescribe the generic. One of the last
gifts of George Bush to the pharma industry was a bill giving them the
authority to go into your pharmacy records to make sure your doctor
was prescribing the medications they bribed him to order. IE, they
wanted to know whether your doctor was staying bought. So now it's
harder than ever to get a doctor to prescribe generics.

Don't get me started on health insurance, the nation's deadliest form
of blackmail. The recent healthcare bill will cure some of the worst
abuses, provided the Republimorons don't repeal it next year. But the
solution isn't as simple as canceling your insurance and eating
lettuce.

>>...The average person
> could work hard all day long and enjoy it. Serious illnesses were
> so rare that they were newsworthy and became the talk of the
> town. Healthy old people ...

Now I know you have a memory problem. Black wreaths on someone's door
on the street every month? Quarantine postings on people's doors:
rheumatic fever, measles, mumps? People died of those things *all the
time*. And 'healthy old people' weren't 90. Nearly all were in their
60s at best. Only the tip of the bell-shaped curve made it into their
80s and many fewer to their 90s.

DB

On Apr 8, 1:31*pm, Bill Penrose > wrote:

> on the street every month? Quarantine postings on people's doors:
> rheumatic fever, measles, mumps? People died of those things *all the
> time*.

Measles? Mumps? People died of those things? When I was a kid, I got
lots of diseases: measles, mumps, chicken pox, colds, the flu, scurvy
at the age of 3, and other diseases that I don't remember. They were
no worse than the common cold. They were an excuse to not go to
school. I did not get treatment for any of these diseases (except
oranges for scurvy). Maybe what people died of was drugs taken for
these diseases.

Dear Jerry:

On Apr 8, 1:05*pm, Jerry > wrote:
> On Apr 8, 1:31*pm, Bill Penrose > wrote:
>
> > on the street every month? Quarantine postings on
> > people's doors: rheumatic fever, measles, mumps?
> > People died of those things *all the time*.
>
> Measles? Mumps? *People died of those things?

Yes. By the thousands, worldwide.

>*When I was a kid, I got lots of diseases: measles,
> mumps, chicken pox, colds, the flu, scurvy at the age
> of 3, and other diseases that I don't remember. They
> were no worse than the common cold. They were an
> excuse to not go to school. I did not get treatment for
> any of these diseases (except oranges for scurvy).
>*Maybe what people died of was drugs taken for
> these diseases.

More than likely, the people died because they had no drugs, no
medical direction to take, and / or because the genome had not been
weeded out to the level of including you and those like you. Not
everyone died, but those that did, could no longer reproduce.

David A. Smith

On Apr 8, 1:05*pm, Jerry > wrote:
> Measles? Mumps? *People died of those things? *When I was a kid, I got
> lots of diseases: measles, mumps, chicken pox, colds, the flu, scurvy
> at the age of 3, and other diseases that I don't remember.

There were no drugs for measles and mumps. Most people survived, but a
significant proportion of folks were damaged or killed. God bless
vaccines.

Measles - they kept you in a dark room because the light was painful.
You might end up blind or deaf, or brain damaged.

Mumps - could make you sterile.

Rheumatic fever - was considered to be contagious, but was actually
the autoimmune aftereffect of a Strep Group A infection. It attacked
heart valves, kidneys, vascular system, etc, doing every sort of
damage, depending mainly on what strain of strep had got you down. The
period of contagion began and ended long before the rheumatic fever
period, which could go on for days or weeks before resolving itself as
permanent loss of kidney function (no transplants then) and heart
failure (before routine valve jobs).

Nowadays, the evil medical industry does a quick outpatient saliva
check for streptococcus and gives you a prescription for a $5
penicillin drug and sends you home, and you may wonder what all the
excitement is about.

DB