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How many of you wouldn't be alive if it weren't for modern medicine?
I very much would not be. My son had a rough birth, but it probably wouldn't have killed him or my wife.
Both my brothers had children in the last six months. Neither of the kids would have survived, and one of the mothers would definitely have died.
The better question might be: how many of you can say for sure you'd be alive without modern medicine?
Born with cancer, had surgery, chemo, and radio before it went into remission when I reached the age of 2. Throughout that time, another baby of a very similar age had surgery for the same cancer, at the same hospital. They didn't make it. It was touch and go even -with- modern medicine, I wouldn't have stood a fraction of a chance without it.
I had appendicitis and my appendix had perforated, so I'd be dead without that appendectomy.
Ditto. Ruptured appendix due to a pot hole on the way to the hospital for the appendectomy.
Morphine was amazing though. The exact reason why, while experimenting with many other substances in college, heroin was never on my curiosity list!
Also ditto. I was ten and my parents had taken me and my sister out for tea at the start of the February half term. I was really unwell afterwards, my parents just thought I had eaten something that disagreed with me. I asked to sleep in a different bed, as I was afraid I was going to be sick, and didn't really want to do that from the great heights of my bunk. Good job I did, because with the amount of pain I was in the following morning, I couldn't manage to leave the normal bed, let alone a ladder.
12 hours later I had been x-rayed, 24 later and I was in theatre. I was in hospital on a cocktail of antibiotics for a week. Definitely wouldn't have survived without all of that. I still have the scar, and I suppose I'm one of the last bunch of people to have an appendectomy non-laproscopically.
15 years ago I got a herniated disc in my neck. If I raised my head, looking straight ahead, I got intense pain in my neck. While the pain in the neck was excruciating, it was nothing compared to the pain in my left arm, thumb and 1½ finger. Yes, half of a finger... Only the left side of my long finger was affected. Nerve connections are weird.
It took the doctors around 2 trips to the ER to take my complaints seriously and an additional 2 weeks before I was rolled into the MRI.
Before the broken disc was confirmed by MRI I was living in constant pain. Worst pain I've ever had. I popped Oxy like it was candy. It sort of numbed it the worst pain but it didn't help much. Two months earlier I had started at a new job. I have notes from that time, written in my handwriting but I have no memory of me writing or where I was making the notes.
This is where things turned really ugly.
After one week of 1-2 hours of sleep per night I really lost all hope in everything.
I've never been suicidal but what scares me is that on the second week in constant pain, unable to find any position where I could relax the slightest, ending it all emerged as a perfectly sane remedy.
It scares me when I think back. It was just relief. Ending my life was a positive thing.
When the results from the MRI came back the doctor prescribed Lyrica (Pregabalin).
Holy F***! Two weeks in and the pain was almost entirely gone. My fingers were still numb but my brain was clear and I could sleep!
I started catching up what I missed att my new job. Life slowly came back.
While there are risks of adverse side effects I am convinced that Lyrica (Pregabalin) saved my life. I know that I wouldn't have lasted another week without it.
I had something similar summer of last year. It wasn't a disc. It was really severe stenosis and bone spurs in all my cervical vertebrae.
The worst pain I've ever had by a large margin. It's only then that I learned what a 10 on a pain scale actually meant. I've got some permanent parethesia and loss of fine motor control.
For those that don't know. The nerves that exit your spine at your cervical vertebrae innervate your arms.
Damage and inflammation there manifests as pain, numbness, and tingling in your whole arm. Not because it's there. Because that's where your brain thinks it is.
Once you learn and experience it, you can tell the exact nerve that's giving you a problem. The mapping is called a dermatome. Unfortunately, most of the images you find of them are incorrect, including the one in Netter (famous anatomist's book, incredibly beautiful).
The ulnar nerve is one of these nerves. It controls your pinkie finger and half of your ring finger, right down the middle. The median nerve controls the other half.
Because humans were clearly designed perfectly by an all powerful deity and not, say full of shitty weirdness that we inherited from our fishy ancestors.
Did you ever get the disk fixed?
I was on scheduled for an operation but it got better just before the operation do I cancelled it out. I was under the impression that it's better to let the body heal itself instead of start cutting in it.
Later I would learn that a "degenerated disc" will never heal completely.
There will always be a high risk of it collapsing and with that a high risk of The same symptoms appearing again.
Luckily I haven't had any episodes since then. However, there is other things with my neck now that wasn't there before the disc herniated.
One thing is that I sometimes have to crack my neck to get a relief. It's like pain and tension build up in the neck without me registering it during the day.
I don't regret not getting the operation. Even though millions of patients have gone through the procedure there are still complications that can happen.
For example lose the ability to swallow among other things.
Fun thing: the surgeon good in in the front of your neck to be able to remove the disc. There is a lot of stuff that is in the way before getting access to the disc.
Developed type 1 diabetes as a teenager. I figure that would be a pretty definitive death sentence in any other period of human history. Just a huge financial burden as an American now but that's a whole other issue.
Type I guaranteed you a very early death up until well into the 21st century
I suppose that depends on what you mean by modern, but I've had pneumonia which I gather was pretty much a death sentence in the olden days.
Right, probably all of us have had bouts of minor stuff that once upon a time killed: bronchitis, infections cleared up by antibiotics, bone fractures, things that only soft tissue scans can reveal, childbirth complications,.... Even malnutrition and basic hygiene.
On the more drama front, my mom had a breached birth and darn near died even with top of the line 80s tech. I wouldn't have even existed if she hadn't (1) survived and (2) saw it as recoverable trauma and tried again to have kids.
I had some nasty strep when I didn’t have insurance. After a few days I eventually found special clinic but damn did that get dicey.
I'm sorry you had to experience that. That is horrifying.
Same for me.
Adding to that I most strongly react to dust mites. So yeah those old feather filled blankets to get through the cold of winter would probably be the end of me. (Which is a shame, because I love their weight)
Honestly, I'd probably be alive but, like, severely worse off. Like, crippled from all types of various afflictions or their historical cures.
Besides, although I can't point to specific singular procedures or medicines that have individually saved me, I've probably been saved by modern hygiene and food handling practices and such.
I 100% would be a goner. Had congestive heart failure and the only thing that worked was a cardiac ablation. I've thought about that a good bit and am very thankful to be around to raise my two children.
If I weren't dead I'd be in a very uncomfortable means of living, considering I already am with medicine?
Crohn's, fibromyalgia, gull stones, and a myriad of other fun stuff
Although I cannot prove that 100%, I strongly believe I would have killed myself without antidepressants, antipsychotics, or mood stabilizers.
I've had other stuff, but that is the reason I know for sure I would not be alive.
it's another one that is hard to say with certainty, but I likely wouldn't have made it this far, or much further, without gender affirming care. it's less direct than many of the other answers, but it removed the hazard of many and various modes of systematic self abuse and poor lifestyle behaviours...
Two years ago I had Thoracic Outlet Syndrome and had to have an emergency surgery to remove half a rib and replace part of the vein going into my right arm. Without modern medicine I would at minimum have lost an arm and likely would have ended up dying via the clot dislodging and going to my heart.
I don't think I've had anything that definitely would have killed me but I've probably taken antibiotics enough times that there's probably a decent chance an infection would have killed me.
Born with an umbilical hernia. Unfixed, I'd have gotten pregnant and likely died.
Ignoring flus and infections. Particularly multiple bouts of strep and scarlet fever as a kid.
Kidney Transplant. 🪦
Asthmatic here, I probably would have suffocated to death more than once when I was a kid or teenager. I'm doing better now, but not so long ago, the simple thought of not having my inhaler was enough to trigger a small asthma attack.
I've got brain cancer and the doctors found the tumor when it was the size of a baseball. I only had some light symptoms, like dizzyness and headaches, so if it hadn't been for an MR-scanning showing what was actually growing inside my brain, they probably wouldn't have guessed before it was too Late...
100% dead and it would have been a rough, lingering way out.
I have a weird history that can go either way. It's possible I would have been dead, but it's also possible I would have been healthier than now.
I got a resistant staph infection when I was 18 months old that very nearly killed me. The high-dose cocktail of broad spectrum antibiotics saved me in the end, but completely obliterated my gut microbiome in one of the most critical time periods for its formation.
Without modern medicine I would have 100% died, no question about it. However. The place where I contracted it was a warm chlorinated public pool. And from what the doctors told me, this is the issue - in a muddy pond, you're encountering a ton of bacteria that compete with each other, so usually no one dangerous bacteria overwhelms the others and endangers people swimming in it. But in a "clean" public pool the bacteria that survive tend to be the worst ones. So if my parents took me to a "dirty", pre-modern medicine body of water instead, this likely would not have happened at all.
The side effects I got from that had been relatively mild for a long time (slightly worse immune system and possibly tinnitus - the antibiotics were ototoxic, but paradoxically apart from tinnitus my hearing is great). But then I got chronic fatigue syndrome that, based on current research, I know with reasonable certainty is connected to my gut microbiome, and it's highly likely that destroying it in the critical formative time is one of the causes.
Of course, modern experimental medicine is the only thing that is likely to help me with that.
Make sure you're screened for Celiac disease as well (hopefully you've already had duodenal biopsy ruling it out with your extensive medical history). Mine was misdiagnosed as IBS-D for 3 years due to false negative blood test, and before that I spent 30 years thinking morning nausea, stomach pain, bloating, and dozens of other issues were completely normal. Diagnostics in the U.S. are severely lacking; it is estimated that over 60% of people with it are undiagnosed here.
I bring it up because of your mention of tinnitus with otherwise great hearing. Most people do just have tinnitus, but mine was caused by Celiac disease, and I otherwise have above average hearing. It has mostly gone away since I started treatment.
Thanks! Yeah, I've had the biopsy done (plus genetic screening recently). That was a fun thing, I was very skinny and you could see my stomach move from the outside when the doctor pulled out the bit of tissue during gastroscopy.
Funnily enough, until I got covid a year ago, I never had any symptoms most people would associate with gut issues apart from a sudden change in regularity. No bloating, diarrhea, constipation, clear food reactions, nausea... But when I got worse several times after using new antibiotics, got better once after specific probiotics and finally had my microbiome sequenced, the situation was pretty clear.
Have you looked into fecal transplants? I assume that might be what you mean in your last sentence. It seems a couple of treatments have been approved for medical use in the US at least:
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-first-fecal-microbiota-product
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-first-orally-administered-fecal-microbiota-product-prevention-recurrence-clostridioides
I have. I'm not in the US, but there's a private clinic that does it about 400 km from me. The problem, apart from price, is that it's risky - it may not work, when it works it may not last, and it may introduce new symptoms from a bad donor. So I'm keeping it as the last option.
edit: Forgot to respond to the links: generally when treating more complex microbiome issues, you need to be much more brutal with the fecal microbiota transplants than when treating c. diff, where a slight shift is enough for the good bacteria to take over again and one transplant is often enough. So it's not really relevant for me. The protocol used by the private clinic for illness like mine plus other things like IBD etc. is to do 10 transplants from 10 donors in 11 days, for example.
I'm currently trying a safer experimental way, which is basically
Sequencing is relatively affordable nowadays, the second and third step are what's hard. I'm using an experimental service that's free to use, but it's not exactly easy to do it and the amount of published data needed is just barely large enough for it to work. So we'll see if it works for me in particular.
Ah I see, I wish you the best of luck on your search for solutions!!
I found this explanation of your approach to modifying your own gut biome fascinating, thanks for sharing.
It seems like I was too large to go through the pelvis, we would have both died when I was born. Note that a c-section is not the most modern thing either
I don't have a condition, but I am sure I would be gone if not for modern medicine. It stops so many problems I'm sure I am taking it for granted and not noticing. I'm sure my health would be much worse if not for an occasional intervention -- especially physical therapy.
I feel this way times 100 for the public health movement of another century, refrigeration, sewers, municipal water processing, garbage collection, commodes, and regulations to keep crap out of air, water, and food.
I'd probably be dead. Shortly after I was born and taken home, I became ill. They had to bring me back to the hospital, where I was kept in an incubator for a while. Not entirely sure what the illness was, but it was life-threatening.
Definitely dead. I have been fighting with Crohn's disease since college. A couple years ago the drugs stopped working and I had to have my entire colon removed. Much better now but impossible without modern medicine/techniques.
Blood poisoning from an infected wound, I would absolutely be dead without antibiotics. I barely made it even with them.
Neither of my kids would have made it without a C-section, probably my wife would have died too.
I would have likely died in childbirth, and if not, a nasty bacteria in my blood would have offed me at the age of eight-ish. Oh no, I forgot the pneumonia they treated when I was four.
Either way, I'd be dead now.
I have asthma. I enjoy breathing. These things are incompatible without modern medicine.
Me. I have had 2 different kinds of cancer, lymphoma and bladder. Chemo for the first. The second was caught by luck by an ultrasound for another problem and we caught it early enough for zero chemo. I'm still in my mid thirties.