We Have Never Had Better Medicine — So Why Are We Getting Sicker?

We are living in an extraordinary age of medicine. Heart surgery, organ transplantation, advanced cancer treatment, genomic medicine and artificial intelligence are achieving things that would have seemed impossible only a few decades ago.

Yet there is a strange contradiction. As medicine becomes more advanced, many of us seem to be taking our health more for granted.

Our priorities appear to have shifted from health–wealth–life to wealth–life–health. Work, money and daily commitments come first, while health is often pushed to the bottom of the list. Perhaps, consciously or unconsciously, we believe that if something goes wrong, modern medicine will fix it.

The numbers tell a different story. According to the World Health Organization, non communicable diseases—including heart disease, cancer, diabetes and chronic respiratory disease—cause around three-quarters of deaths worldwide. Smoking, unhealthy diets, physical inactivity and harmful alcohol use are among the major modifiable risk factors.

Even wealth does not guarantee health. In 2022, around 2.5 billion adults worldwide were overweight, including more than 890 million living with obesity. At the same time, more than 80% of premature deaths from non communicable diseases occur in low- and middle-income countries. The challenges may differ between rich and poorer countries, but no society can simply spend its way to good health.

Perhaps we have also made healthy living unnecessarily complicated. We are constantly told which diet to follow, which exercise to do, what supplements to take and how to“ detox”.

For most of us, the basics remain surprisingly simple: walk regularly, eat sensibly, sleep adequately, maintain a healthy weight, avoid smoking, limit alcohol, and take appropriate vaccinations and screening.

Of course, not every disease is preventable. Genetics, ageing, infections, environment and chance matter enormously. This is exactly where modern medicine should continue pushing boundaries—better cancer treatments, organ transplantation, genomic research, artificial intelligence and treatments for diseases we still cannot cure.

But perhaps we need to rethink our relationship with medicine.

Modern medicine should help us fix what we can not prevent—not become an excuse to neglect what we can.

As we use science to explore the human genome, artificial intelligence and even the universe beyond our planet, perhaps one of our greatest responsibilities is much closer to home: to look after the health we already have.

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