The Growing Importance of Medical Intervention

For most of the years while I was coming up in the world of public health and social policy, it was accepted truth that medical intervention made only a small contribution to population health. Quantifying " population health " as a single entity is obviously highly problematic. There are many components that people will value differently. There is mean life expectancy at birth, which is a common measure that is not terribly difficult to calculate; although as I have explained here before and won ' t bother to do again right now it ' s a fictitious construct that does not predict how long you actually have to live. Rather it ' s a snapshot of the ages at which people are dying today.Regardless, there ' s a lot it doesn ' t tell you. Even with regard to lifespan, a few people living to a ridiculously old age will pull it up but maybe we care more about how many people get to live whatever we might consider to be a " full lifespan, " which conventionally has been three-score years and ten, i.e. 70. Maybe we care more about relatively early deaths rather than extremely long lives, in other words. It also doesn ' t say anything about inequity. And of course it doesn ' t say how healthy people are or how rewarding or happy their lives are. There are measures called Quality Adjusted Life Years and Disability Adjusted Life Years that try to provide aggregated measures of longevity and well-being combined, but they are highly value laden and controversial. (Again, I ' ve discussed th...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs