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Why do health services mostly treat people who are already ill?
Mostly from tradition. Doctors, as a profession like to deal with
sick people, rather than well ones, because the body has a natural
tendency to get better. We can then take all the credit for what
Mother Nature does naturally. Incidentally, the human body was very
badly built, but has great back-up facilities. So we can manage with
about a third of our liver, less than half of our two kidneys, one
lung, quite a small amount of our brain, as long as we miss a few
vital bits. Frontal lobectomies consisted of making holes and
stirring the frontal lobes, causing extensive damage. People were
pretty quiet after, but they survived.
And as for our DNA, well there are yards of that that seems to be
doing very little.
Why are we so bad at helping people with long-term illness
Because they don't get better. They are a constant reminder of
our inabilities.
Inequalities
 Inequalities
in health are prevalent in most countries, most notably
in developing countries, especially Southern Asia and the Southern
states of Africa.
Yet, even in the UK and other developed countries
there are huge inequalities in the healthiness of different groups
of people. This is most easily expressed in terms of the wealth of
the individuals - poor people die younger and have more illness than
rich. A
House of Commons report in 2009 was the latest approach to sum
this up for the UK. This is in the form of an online Google
Document.
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