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Leave it to Twitter to raise some interesting questions to ponder. One that came up in my stream recently:
Would you be dead or alive if there was no western medicine during your lifetime?
via @finitor via @iangogame
Having given it quite a bit of thought, I don't know. Before the age at which I can recall events vividly, I had an asthma attack that resulted in being taken to the hospital and given a mask with some meds (I only remember the mask because I got to take it home and we played doctor with it for years after). It was the one and only asthma incident in my life and I'm not sure if I would've died without modern medicine, but it seems to be the closest I ever came.
Actually, the closest I probably ever came to dying was caused by modern medicine. I inherited a lazy eye such that I had double vision until it was surgically corrected when I was five. During the surgery, my heart started beating irregularly and may have stopped for a brief period. After diagnostic testing post-surgery, the conclusion was that I had an adverse reaction to the anesthetic. While modern medicine allows me to see straight most of the time (when I'm really tired, my left eye has a tendency to drift off center to this day - sexy, I know), it also threatened my very existence.
The question also got me thinking about something I've pondered a bit in the past: how has modern medicine impacted gene frequencies within the population? I started contemplating this when a friend of mine was speculating on the reasons for the increased prevalence of allergies amongst children.
I've heard the hypotheses about the links between immunizations, cleanliness, etc. and allergies, but I've yet to be convinced and I'm sticking to my theory: more and more people with potentially fatal food allergies are surviving to reproduce (due to modern medicine) and, as a result, the prevalence of food allergies is increasing. My theory is that modern medicine is to some extent responsible for the rise in allergies. Modern medicine has essentially transformed traits that once greatly compromised a person's fitness into traits that are almost inconsequential from a Darwinian perspective.
Back in the day, if you were unknowingly allergic to peanuts as a child and ate a peanut you'd probably go into anaphylactic shock and die, such that the genes that contributed to the allergy would not propagate. Today, children with severe peanut allergies are more likely to survive allergic reactions (due to advances in modern medicine), learn to avoid peanuts, and live to reproduce. And, the gene(s) responsible for the allergy are more likely to be passed on to the next generation. And so on, with the frequency of the gene(s) and the number of people with the allergy increasing with every subsequent generation.
Just some more food for thought.
