Health Issues

Health has been a thought, these past few months, on my mind. We have personally faced the ugly face of bad health this past year. This has got me thinking why there seems to be a prevalence of "incurable" diseases in the world today. Was it always like this in the past.

I believe humankinds' war against disease has always been part of our history. We have always tried to conquer the germs. But so far I would say that the battle is far from won (by either side). For every germ and disease that is conquered there seems to be a more challenging disease ahead.

I think there are two types of diseases. One is caused by humankinds fight with the germs. AIDs, Influenza, Cancer (Maybe) fall into this category. Here the war is against another living organism which can mutate rather rapidly defeating our various treatment options. It is really a survival of the fitest kind of struggle. For this war sometimes humans have the upper hand and some times the viruses. Here we are dependent on the scientific brains to come up various vaccines to protect us against these.

The other type of disease is what are called chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes etc. Here the battle I feel is with ourselves. I feel that these diseases represent what is a gap in technological evoluation and the human evolution. Human ingenuity has significantly improved our lives. For example transportation has significantly improved travel but has also reduced physical exercise for humans. The inability of the human body to cope with these technological advances especially the pace of these advances I feel has resulted in chronic diseases. We can definitely improve our chances of fighting these diseases by maintaining a level of physical activity and healthy diet to over come the gap between this pace of technological advance and the pace of evolution.