According to Dr. Michael Greger, medical care is the third leading cause of death in America:
"Since side effects from prescription drugs kill an estimated 106,000 Americans a year, the sixth leading cause of death may actually be (gulp) doctors. And that’s just from adverse drug reactions. Add in medical mistakes (which the U.S. Institute of Medicine estimates kills at least 44,000) and that brings “healthcare” up to our country’s third leading cause of death. Throw in hospital-acquired infections, and we’re talking maybe 187,000 Americans dead every year (and millions injured) by medical care."
> According to Dr. Michael Greger, medical care is the third leading cause of death in America:
Everyone is going to die of something. If our medicine is good enough that, barring errors, it solves all other sources of mortality, then medical care would be the first (and indeed only) cause of death.
That it's the third (and there are still others after it) is obviously not ideal, but it's not necessarily a bad sign, either.
Nor does it mean a large share of the problems we face are of our own science/medicine/engineering, it means a large share of the problems we face that aren't solved by our own science/medicine/engineering involve failure of that science/medicine/engineering when deployed against some problem (of whatever origin.)
Sure. First, I want to make it clear that I am a technophile: I really like technology. I'm also really grateful for the benefits of modern technology. I'm also a Nature-lover, but I don't think that technology is necessarily antithetical to healthy ecology. (For example, I am pro-nuclear-power.)
With that out of the way...
Here's a thought experiment. Humans lived for a few million years before developing agriculture and villages starting about ten to fourteen thousand years ago. I'm not an anthropologist, but I think we would be safe to assume that the causes of death during the first period were "natural": disease, predators, fighting, famine... have I missed any?
We can then call the causes of death arising after the advent of agriculture "technological" and add up all the deaths so far from each category and see which number is bigger.
I would reckon the "natural" deaths would be outstripped by the "technological" deaths by a wide margin, with the tipping point sometime in the last few thousand years.
So, heart disease, infectious and parasitic diseases, cancer, ... Er, um, I think I have to "roll back" my comment...
I was thinking of car accidents, pollution, and the general ecological problems that have developed as unintended consequences of our technology. (We're victims of our own success.)
(There is also the "medical care is the third leading cause of death in America" issue already mentioned by jmulho, which should be a much bigger deal than it is: side-effects and out-right errors kill over 100,000 people in the US a year!)
But really, it's the time-scale that matters: if the ecology tanks and takes us with it then our technology (in hindsight) really is (was) the existential threat, despite the good run we had.
