Modern Medicine Is Keeping Us Alive Longer, But That’s Not Necessarily a Good Thing

Good news! People around the world are living longer. The bad news is we’re spending a lot of that extra time in physical agony. Guess we haven’t quite figured out that part yet.

According to a massive new study published in The Lancet Public Health, as reported by US News & World Report, the average gap between how long people live and how long they stay healthy has grown from 8.8 years in 1990 to 10.7 years in 2023. Researchers morbidly call this the “morbidity gap.”

The study took a look at health data from 204 countries and found a nearly universal trend of medicine becoming extremely good at keeping us alive but not nearly as good at keeping us from being physically miserable while we’re here.

Around the world, life expectancy jumped from less than 65 years to nearly 74 years over the past 30 years. Healthy life expectancy increased too, but only between the ages of 56 and 63. This means that while we’ve effectively tacked on nearly an extra decade to our lives, we spend a good chunk of it complaining about being prisoners in these painful flesh prisons.

Unsurprisingly, the US Has the Most Miserable Older People

The US has the largest morbidity gap of any country studied, averaging about 14 years spent in poor health. Canada and Australia weren’t far behind. Weirdly, wealthier countries have larger gaps, which the researchers explain as meaning that they weren’t necessarily less healthy but that people were just living so long that the chronic conditions that would have killed prior generations kept piling up and making our lives miserable yet we were surviving them nonetheless.

The biggest causes of pain ensuring that we live long lives of physical torment were the usual culprits, like chronic back pain, arthritis, depression, anxiety, hearing loss, diabetes, obesity, falls, and the long-term effects of smoking. A lot of these maladies don’t always shorten life, but they ensure that they make it a whole lot less fun and carefree.

The researchers say the data suggests that we should stop measuring medical success in lifespan alone. Living longer is great, but we aren’t necessarily living well, or peacefully, in those extra years. The next challenge is making sure we make those extra years worth living.