It´s no direct "kill", still:
Dear Lord, I know some billion people are hard working yet still can´t afford enough food or water. Please, please, please: Let this be a problem, which can be easily solved by a good teacher. I don´t want poverty to be a money-problem. I mean, if that´d be the case, I would still keep my money, I wouldn´t change my behaviour, but I´d feel bad about it. So nothing would change, except me feeling bad. As you are a good lord, you sure don´t want that, right? - Oh, and please: These people are waiting for this good teacher for some decades now. Would you ask Santa if he could give him a lift?
Hej, yeah, living healthy only a decade longer is no sexy longterminst inifinite-live cause ;-)
Still. I recently stumbled over an small article in the New Scientist. As I had to make most calculations myself and ended saying, that humankind could increase their healthy lifespan by years, even by a decade - I´m happy to see, that others came to the same conclusions.
Here is the Link: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2307510-cutting-down-meat-and-dairy-could-help-you-live-up-to-a-decade-longer/
Best wishes and stay healthy!
Thx for commenting. I have to agree with you and disagree somewhat with my earlier comment. (#placebo). Actually placebo-effects are fine and if a placebo helps people: Great!
And yes, getting a specific treatment effect + the placebo-effect is better (and more like in real life), than getting no treatment at all.
Please don´t get me wrong. I do not like the research from strongminds for the above mentioned reasons (I am sure nobody got me wrong on this). And for some other reasons. But that does mean, that their therapy-work is bad or inefficient. Even if they overestimate their effects by a factor of 4 (it might be 20, it might be 2 - I just made those numbers up) it would still be very valuable work.
They did not have a placebo-receiving control group. For example some kind of unstructured talking-group etc. Ideally an intervention known as „useless“ but sounding plausible. So we do not know, which effects are due to regression to the middle, social desirable answers etc. This is basically enough to make their research rather useless. And proper control groups are common for quiete a while.
No „real“ evaluation of the results. Only depending on what their patients said, but not checking, if this is correct (children going to school more often…). Not even for a subgroup.
They had the impression, that patients answered in a social desirable way - and adressed that problem completely inadequate. Arguing social desirable answers would happen only at the end of the treatment, but not near the end of the treatment. ?! So they simply took near-end numbers for granted. ?!
If their depression treatment is as good as they claim, then it is magnitudes better, than ALL common treatments in high-income countries. And much cheaper. And faster. And with less specialized instuctors… ?! And did they invent something new? Nope. They took an already existing treatment - and now it works SO much better? This seems implausible to me.
As far as I know SoGive is reviewing strongminds research. They should be able to back (or reject) my comments here.
Thx for sharing! Interesting calculation. I did one by myself (with perplexity) and landed at costs of roundabout 500000 Euros per avoided death (50 DALYs). But i can‘t remember all my assumptions which i put in there. One Killer/argument might be: potassium salt and and anti-blood-pressure medication might be some kind of substitutes. So that more potassium salt might sometimes simply lead to less medication instesd of lowering the risk? My inspiration for doing my back-on-the-envelope-calculation where: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26234940-100-how-to-easily-satisfy-your-salt-cravings-without-damaging-your-health/ The article is behind a paywall, but i will send you a working link. Thx for this calculation!