“I don’t believe medical discoveries are doing much to advance human life. As fast as we create ways to extend it we are inventing ways to shorten it.”
– Christian Barnard
Rightly said, Medicine as a whole right from the times of Aristotle has been advancing and has its fair share of controversies. Among them one of it is whether it has advanced the general condition of living or rather decreased it.
Granted that the average life expectancy has increased as a whole increased from about 30 years during 1900 to approx 70 years now but what we are concerned over here is the quality of life which should not be confused with the concept of standard of living, which is based primarily on income. Instead, standard indicators of the quality of life include not only wealth and employment, but also the built environment, physical and mental health, education, recreation and leisure time, and social belonging. As expected the quality of life is much harder to be measured. Among, the indexes used to measure it are emotional well being and life evaluation. On the basis of these indexes these it can be firmly argue that the increase in life expectancy has not been met with concurrent increase in quality in life. And most of the people will agree to live a life which is well lived albeit short.
Increasing your quality of life is easily said than done and I am sure today’s so called ‘cutting edge’ medicine is doing nothing in this respect rather it ends being financially and sometimes an emotionally draining experience. From this perspective we need to shift our focus from pursuing herculean tasks of eradicating diseases to approaching healthcare problems with a more holistic approach taking into consideration various factors such as economic, social, cultural and sometimes even spiritual dimensions.
Musings of a Cardiologist 
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