What can data from 1900 tell us about wellness in the 21st Century?

One of the most conceptually confusing things about the health care industry today is that there isn't a great deal of concerted effort to keep patients from getting sick but only to treat it once it is acute. As we know all too well, there are medications and treatments available to patients but a surprising lack of guidance to prevent you from becoming one. 

An interesting Statista data set for the year 1906 and 2019 highlights this particularly well. The following chart represents 4 common causes of death and their relatively frequency amongst the US population measured in both 1900 and 2019. In order to control for population size, both the 1900 and 2019 figures have been adjusted to per 100,000 people figures. 

As you can tell from the chart influenza (-94%) and accidents (-32%) have reduced sharply in the last century in large in part due to vaccination, safety legislation, and trauma treatment, but surprisingly heart disease (+18%) and cancer (+128%) have materially risen. 

In short, acute medical events like pandemic or accident related death have been slashed noticeably but longer term "lifestyle related" cause of death has seen a stark rise. My initial assumption was that restrictions on smoking and other cancer causing activity and 123 years of medical advancement would have either improved or held flat heart disease and cancer rates, but this could not be further from the truth. 

Of course this is not solely the fault of the health care system, as these causes of death tend to rise in lock step with increasing life expectancy but the trend is certainly eye opening. While progress will certainly continue in addressing trauma and disease there certainly seems to be growing opportunity to address lifestyle influenced mortality risks.

Today this is known as the "wellness" industry. But given its a tangle of information sources, unregulated supplementation, correlative animal testing, and goat yoga, understandably most Americans are confused and overwhelmed. To add to the confusions we have a growing number of tech enabled products, countless dieting schemes, and a myriad of newly popular eastern and western wellness practices. The "wellness" narrative today is simply a mess.

The intent of this and subsequent articles is to begin to sort out "wellness" for our reader base to empower individuals to drive their own wellness outcomes. To do so we aim to provide data, products, information & resources, as well as, strategies to help readers maximize their well being both physically and mentally.

While the industry itself is in the early stages, developments in data analytics, health hardware, and a general open-mindedness about future health solutions will have lasting impact on this nascent space and change the lives of countless people and we hope to distill and focus some of that content. To start, click here to learn more about the wellness hierarchy that I use to influence positive outcomes in my own life. 

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References: 

Elflein, John. “Leading Causes of Death in the U.S.: 1900 and 2019.” Statista, 2 Mar. 2021, https://www.statista.com/statistics/235703/major-causes-of-death-in-the-us/.