… the human population only exploded after the discovery of medicines and double blind clinical trials ….

This is a demonstrably erroneous statement—and a surprising one, too, from a usually knowledgeable commenter. Precious little progress has been made in the past 150 years against the primary scourges of mankind since the dawn of civilization: terminal heart conditions, strokes, and above all, the major cancers.

Massive population growth, attributable almost entirely to a drastic reduction of child and infant mortality, stems primarily from the widespread introduction—first in England, France, and Germany; soon after in the Nordic countries and the USA and Canada—of public sanitation and health measures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These things that almost everyone now takes for granted—isolation of human and animal waste from sources of fresh water, routine handwashing and personal hygiene, the introduction of antisepsis to surgical procedures both major and minor, etc.—were  barely (if at all) known or understood even in 1850. Of course, the centrality of public health and waste disposal were to a certain extent matters of common knowledge in ancient Rome, but they were among the many Roman advances largely lost for fifteen hundred years.

The rediscovery of the relation of public health measures to individuals' health and to human life itself is one of modern history's greatest humanistic achievements. And the first-time-ever discovery of the scientific bases of such measures is something for which we all owe an unrepayable debt of gratitude to such giants as Pasteur, Lister, and Koch.

Lepanto Again, good luck in your quest for a natural resolution to the problem!

The Determinants of Mortality

In "Determinants of Mortality" (NBER Working Paper 11963), David Cutler, Angus Deaton, and Adriana Lleras-Muney explore many aspects of this important topic, including the decline in mortality rates over time, differences in mortality across countries, and differences in mortality across groups within countries.

For most of human history, life expectancy has been short - perhaps 25 years for our hunter-gatherer ancestors and only 37 years for residents of England in 1700. Dramatic changes began in the 18th century, with life expectancy in England rising to 41 years by 1820, 50 years by the early 20th century, and 77 years today. The decline in mortality rates was particularly sharp among children. This can be explained by the near elimination of deaths from infectious diseases, formerly the most common cause of death, since the young are most susceptible to infection.

Weighing the various explanations for these mortality reductions, the authors see three phases. From the mid-18th century to the mid-19th century, improved nutrition and economic growth played a large role, as did emerging public health measures. From the mid-19th century to the early 20th century, the delivery of clean water, removal of waste, and advice about personal health practices all led to lower mortality rates, though urbanization had the opposite effect, due to high mortality rates in cities. Since the 1930s, mortality reductions have been driven primarily by medicine, first by vaccination and antibiotics and later by the expensive and intensive interventions that characterize modern medicine.

Looking across countries, there are vast differences in life expectancy, as illustrated in Figure 1. There are also sharp differences in who dies and from what. Deaths among children account for 30 percent of deaths in poor countries but less than 1 percent of deaths in rich countries. Most deaths in rich countries are from cancers and cardiovascular disease, while most deaths in poor countries are from infectious diseases.

Err.... "one of the reasons"

Selectively quoting people is best done when their original quote is on a previous page.  That way lazy people are apt to side with you.



Absolutely clear that heart disease and cancer were never the PRIMARY scourges of mankind in history.  They are only those today because people are living long enough to be affected by them because modern medicine has cured the historically primary ones.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1113569?query=featured_home&

Our ability to contend with infectious diseases like TB and influenza has had a profound impact on our health. But as time passes, we find ourselves exposed to new problems. Some 35.7% of Americans are obese — and the numbers keep climbing year after year. And by virtue of extending life we are uncovering age-related ailments like Alzheimer's. As the NEJM article suggests, moving forward, we can safely assume that these trends will continue – that diseases will come and go, only to be replaced by a litany of new ones, created by our ongoing technological achievements and ever-changing social norms.

At the same time however, the NEJM analysis shows cause for optimism. Steady advancements in the health sciences are helping physicians to better quantify and target specific ailments — a trend that will have the potential to result in ever-expanding lifespans.

Source - New England Journal of Medicine.

http://io9.com/5920871/how-we-died-200-years-ago-compared-to-how-we-die-today

Precisely so.  Prior to the latter half of the twentieth century, the worldwide life expectancy was approximately thirty, and in the best of circuмstances was not far beyond forty.  During the period of 1975 - 2011, there were approximately 216 presentations of malignant neoplasms per 100,000 people aged 40 - 44, an incidence of just over two-tenths of one percent.  The current median expectancy is approximately 67 years, with the edge going to women, and that age bracket sees approximately 1732 presentations of cancer per the same sample size, an eight-fold increase in cancer cases.

Err.... "one of the reasons"

Selectively quoting people is best done when their original quote is on a previous page.  That way lazy people are apt to side with you.

In closing, shame on you for your evidently serious suggestion that I was "selectively quoting" you to the end of distorting your meaning. Must I assume that your principled view is that readers need to be led by the hand to the entirety of your comment lest they be subject to your censure and reprimand? If your answer is yes, that's quite a slap at whoever else is emptily passing his day reading this thread.

What about the cyst question?

Here is something by way of an answer. The ball is in your court now.