Doctors are driving me crazy with their terrible theories. The latest one I read about was a UK medical professor who thinks the pandemic of diabetes is due to longer human life span.

That’s bad medicine, and bad math.

The term “life span” is usually a shortened version of “life expectancy at birth”, which has indeed risen from 35 for most of human existence to 70 or thereabouts in first world countries since the 19th century or so. That is mostly due to a huge reduction in infant mortality. Premodern humans were highly likely to die before the age of 15 months, for any number of reasons. If the average age of death is 35, then for every person who dies at age 1, someone else lives to be 69. #Math.

That’s plenty old enough to contract diabetes, if it were age-related.

Most of us who avoid fatal accidents and diseases will die in the age range of 70-80, which is feeling pretty young to me right now. Medical intervention or, better, great genes, can keep us going up to 125ish. Most scientists today believe that is the maximum human age, though that is not settled science.

Really, “settled science” is an oxymoron, though some scientific facts are more settled than others.

Meanwhile, medical science is in the midst of a huge paradigm shift based partly on its own error in identifying all microbes as either pathogenic or neutral, leading to our blanketing ourselves, our foods, our homes, our soil, and our water supplies in antibiotics and antibacterials from birth to death. Combined with our significant shift away from vegetables and fermented foods in our diets, as well as increases in Caesarian deliveries and formula feeding, we no longer develop robust microbiomes, leading to crippled immune systems, leading to a huge rise in noncommunicable diseases, including diabetes.

Much money was and is being made by treating NCDs, so there is huge resistance to accepting that lifestyle changes would work a lot better, at least for prevention. Sometimes I think we won’t make real progress on restoring our microbiomes, and therefore our health, until most current doctors die. Similarly, I fear we won’t make real progress on racism, sexism, and our other isms until all the ism-purveyors die. I’m not wishing people would die. I’m just noticing these entrenched beliefs may only be extinguished in that way.

The only people I sort of wish would die are those billionaires who plan to live until molecules dissociate, especially the ones who carry a button to alert the cryonics team in case of a medical emergency.

Yes, I am standing on my usual soapbox. I was hoping to talk about the microbiome on The Daily Show, but another middle-aged woman won the interview lottery.