On the state of healthcare around the world, three charts…
Over the last century, life expectancy at birth has more than doubled across the globe, largely thanks to innovations and discoveries in various medical fields around sanitation, vaccines, and preventative healthcare. Yet, while the average life expectancy for humans has increased significantly on a global scale, there’s still a noticeable gap in average life expectancies between different countries… (more)
The health of nations is shaped by many interconnected factors, from healthcare system quality to lifestyle and diet. Although challenging to quantify, a common metric for assessing a population’s overall health is average life expectancy. Other important indicators include child mortality rates and access to food and sanitation. These factors collectively provide a clearer understanding of what contributes to a nation’s health, which in turn is shown to correlate with GDP, individual spending, labor productivity. This graphic shows the healthiest countries across the world’s major economies, based on analysis from Ray Dalio’s Great Powers Index 2024… (more)
If a country’s average doctor visits are high, it could be easy to assume the population isn’t healthy. At the same time not going enough may seem like there’s an accessibility issue. As with most sociological data, the devil is in the details. And differences in payment systems, insurance plans, and how healthcare is delivered all play a part into why going to the doctor is more common or not. This chart tracks the number of in-person doctor visits per year by country. Data is sourced from the OECD, as of 2021, or the latest year available… (more)
* Virgil
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As we contemplate care, we might send revealing birthday greetings to Leopold Auenbrugger; he was born on this date in 1722. A physician, he devised the diagnostic technique of percussion (the art of striking a surface part of the body with short, sharp taps to diagnose the condition of the parts beneath the sound)– by which he could estimate the amount of fluid in a patient’s chest and the size of his/her heart.
Auenbrugger was simply applying an approach he’d learned as boy, tapping his father’s wine casks to determine how full they were. After seven years of clinical investigation, he published the method in Inventum Novum (1761), though his technique did not gain recognition and acceptance until years after his death. When a translator republished the work in French (1808) the method gained acceptance around the world, and through time (to the present) as a fundamental diagnostic procedure… for which Auenbrugger is considered one of the fathers of modern medicine.
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