Rousseau and Health

In A Dissertation on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality in Mankind, Rousseau asks if "any solid observations have been made from which it may be justly concluded that, in the countries where the art of medicine is most neglected, the mean duration of man's life is less than in those where it is most cultivated". Do poorly-developed countries with less medicine have the same quality of health that well-developed countries do?

In 2011, it was found that most countries have around the same life spans.

Country	Male		Female
Canada	77.3		82.8
Germany	77.8		82.8
Greece	77.8		82.7
Japan	79.6		86.4	(1st)
Slovenia	79.8		82.3
Spain	79.4		83.4
Switzerland	79.9	(1st)	84.6
United Kingdom	78.3		82.5
U.S.	76.0	(23rd)	80.9	(24th)

Source:  Health, U.S., 2011, Table 21

In fact, according to my Public Health professor, Kenneth Warner, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Jordan and South Korea all have longer average life spans than the United States. If the U.S. is the number one spender on health care in the world, why is it that Americans' life spans are not even in the top ten countries?

Does the fact that well-developed countries have more medicine than other countries just contribute to our health problems?


Some people believe this to be true.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBupargaLbY

This YouTube clip is from an Australian breakfast show which gives information about the news, views, entertainment, etc. If you don't want to watch the clip, basically the gist of it is that many medicines are tried on males, when females are the ones who are more likely to suffer from the side effects. Therefore, many women end up ill from medicine that they are taking to get better from other illness! Although Australia's health system and health expenditure is obviously not completely the same as the U.S.'s, they still are both similar in the fact that they are both well developed countries. So in this case, well-developed countries do not know the extent of the effects that the medicine they are taking has on their citizens' bodies.

Others believe that since people in well-developed countries have access to so many medicines, they think it's okay to not take as good of care of themselves, since they have the ability to cure most of their illnesses. This gives people a reason to not eat as well, not exercise very much, or to engage in behaviors that are harmful to their bodies, like drinking an excess of alcohol or doing drugs.

I think that many people take medicines for any ache or pain that they feel, some of which could be completely natural and do not need any medicine to take care of them. They grow so accustomed to taking pills whenever they think something is off in their body that they spend money on medicine they do not need, procedures that are not necessary, and treatment that is not always useful. Consequently, people, and the country as a whole, spend more money than is necessary to keep their citizens healthy. Less well-developed countries do not have extra money to spend on medicine that is not essential to their well-being, so they take care of extra aches and pains in other ways and usually have close to the same results.

Rousseau says the reason for the lack of difference between the health of well-developed countries and poorly-developed countries is 

"the great inequality in manner of living, the extreme idleness of some, and the excessive labour of others, the easiness of exciting and gratifying our sensual appetites, the too exquisite foods of the wealthy which overheat and fill them with indigestion, and, on the other hand, the unwholesome food of the poor, often, bad as it is, insufficient for their needs, which induces them, when opportunity offers, to eat voraciously and overcharge their stomachs; all these, together with sitting up late, and excesses of every kind, immoderate transports of every passion, fatigue, mental exhaustion, the innumerable pains and anxieties inseparable from every condition of life, by which the mind of man is incessantly tormented; these are too fatal proofs that the greater part of our ills are of our own making, and that we might have avoided them nearly all by adhering to that simple, uniform and solitary manner of life which nature prescribed".

He goes further to say that Plato claims that medicines were discovered even before the diseases that they cured, and that diet, which is so crucial for a healthy life now, was first invented by Hippocrates. 


Rousseau thinks that man has made himself a world in which sickness is common, where in the state of nature sickness was not something that natural man had to deal with very much.

Do you think most people know that America's health is quite similar to, or worse than, the health of other countries, even when we spend considerably more on health care? Why do you think this is?