The Wall Street Journal has an article this morning titled "Latino Aging Stumps Experts".Why Hispanics such as Mr. de Leon—often poor, uneducated and without health insurance—live long and strong has long confounded health professionals, scholars and other experts. This week, the first official life-expectancy data released for U.S. Hispanics shows they outlive whites by 2.5 years and blacks by almost eight years.
The life expectancy for Hispanics is nearly 81 years, compared with 78 years for whites and almost 73 for blacks. As a whole, people in the U.S. can expect to live 77.7 years, according to the report from the Centers for Disease Control.
"The findings can imply the Hispanic population is healthier overall" than whites and blacks despite its low socio-economic status, said Elizabeth Arias, lead author of the report...
While there is no conclusive explanation for Latino longevity, possible factors are related to migration, culture and lifestyle....
Another theory holds that U.S. Hispanics live longer than whites and blacks because they are more likely to eat a healthy diet, get exercise and belong to a supportive social network.
I'm not sure what "experts" are stumped by this kind of result, although it does fly in the face of two popular myths
- that the USA has some kind of superior health care, compared to other countries,and
- that technology and high-tech medicine and surgery are more important than social factors
These myths, narratives, and mental models have a profound impact on our social policies and generally, in my mind, cause us to misallocate a huge portion of our national wealth down pathways that yield no actual benefits, while simultaneously depriving us of the needed solutions. This is, in other words, almost the classic definition of "quack medicine", and a bad, bad, bad thing to let continue unchallenged.
I highlighted the section of "social support network" because it is the factor that allows people to eat and exercise correctly. It is highly unlikely that things go the other way, i.e., that eating and exercise cause us to join social support networks. It is very likely that having a community ethic and support network provides that key thing, the thing we don't even have a word for in common English, which allows people to endure pain, overcome adversity, and hold the course (hold the faith?) when the going gets rough.
Hispanics are not the only group that shows such an advantage. Another dramatic example is the Church of Latter Day Saints ("Mormons"). Here's their data to consider when picking your next health-care insurance plan. There are more authoritative sources than this weblink, but it was fast and they show the same data:
Life expectancy among LDS and Non-LDS in Utah
| Ray M. Merrill | |||||||||||||
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| http://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol10/3/ | |||||||||||||
Abstract: (excepts)
This paper compares life expectancy between members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or Mormons) and non-LDS in Utah.
Complete life table estimates were derived using conventional methods and cross-sectional data for white males and females fr1994-1998.
Life expectancy was 77.3 for LDS males, 70.0 for non-LDS males, 82.2 for LDS females, and 76.4 for non-LDS females....
In short, and this is supported by other studes, LDS males live on average 7.3 YEARS longer than the rest of us.although differential tobacco use explains some of the higher life expectancy in LDS, it only accounts for about 1.5 years of the 7.3 year difference for males and 1.2 years of the 5.8 year difference for females. Higher life expectancy experienced among LDS not explained by tobacco-related deaths may be due to factors associated with religious activity in general, such as better physical health, better social support, and healthier lifestyle behaviors. Religious activity may also have an independent protective effect against mortality.
Surpisingly, (to those stuck in the insurance myth), this is not due to health insurance or high tech medicine. General statistics on the population are given here.
Again, part of the result is "explained" by substantially better health habits, such as rejecting smoking and drinking -- and, again, the deeper explanation of how people are able to resist the marketing pressures encouraging drinking and smoking gets back to the factors of social support and a shared ethic or religion that provides such strength to stick to those behaviors in a larger culture that has enormous pressure to behave more poorly.
A good book to read that presents much more in the way of solid academic support for these types of findings is the book by Dean Ornish, M.D., titled Love and Survival - 8 Pathways to Intimacy and Health. That link has a substantial portion of the book readable on-line for free.
This book also is available on Amazon for under $12 new and for as little as one cent ! used, plus shipping. It's well worth the price.
From the preface of the book:
Smoking, diet, and exercise affect a wide variety of illnesses, but no one has shown that quitting smoking, exercising, or changing diet can double the length of survival in women with metastatic breast cancer, whereas the enhanced love and intimacy provided by weekly group support sessions has been shown to do just that...That legacy thinking of the medical establishment is one reason that the Institute of Medicine's latest report on health care in the US is recommending that nurses, not doctors, lead the way into the new health care era -- because, in my somewhat sharp words, they understand long-term chronic care, home care, and the "rest of people's lives" when they are not in those brief moments a "patient" in a "hospital" or "health care setting" where "providers" will provide "health care" to them in a 12 minute burst, for as little as $200 a pop, provided they have the right insurance company.
Love and intimacy are at a root of what makes us sick and what makes us well, what causes sadness and what brings happiness, what makes us suffer and what leads to healing. If a new drug had the same impact, virtually every doctor in the country would be recommending it to their patients. If would be malpractice not to prescribe it -- yet, with few exceptions, we doctors do not learn much about the healing power of love, intimacy, and transformation in our medical training. Rather, these ideas are often ignored or even denigrated.
I leave this discussion of the myths around health care, and what really matters, with a few longer-term perspectives on the issue.
Regarding the enormous power of mental models and the grip the high-tech med-surg-pharmacy industry has on our thinking:
"If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities." (Voltaire)
"If they can get you to ask the wrong questions, then they don't have to worry about the answers" (Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow).
And a view of health "science" is coming back to at last, from several thousand years ago:
"A joyful heart is good medicine,
but a broken spirit dries up the bones." (Bible, Book of Proverbs, 17:22)
"The spirit of a man can endure his sickness,
But a broken spirit, who can bear?" (Bible, Book of Proverbs, 18:14).
"Every man's way is right in his own eyes,
But the Lord weighs the hearts." (Bible, Proverbs, 21:2)
"He how shuts his ear to the cry of the poor
Will also cry himself and not be answered" (Proverbs, 21:13)
It seems amazing, doesn't it, if technology is so powerful, that we, surrounded by technology and 20 years of higher education, are just now coming to understand what was written several thousand years ago!
I'll close with a quote from T.S. Eliot in Little Gidding
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our expWe shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
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