Years ago, there was a famous experiment conducted involving a clearly-absurd image superimposed upon the lenses in one of those ET-looking binocular sight-seeing machines. Somewhat surprising was the response of many sight-seers to the fake "pink mountain": i.e., no response at all. They didn't see it!
And that, of course, was the point of the experiment: while we tend to assume that what we see is real, the reality is that perception happens higher up in the brain. The light striking our retina's is only the beginning of a perceptualizing pageant; what we consciously think that we see can be something quite different. Or, in this case, we often naturally ignore and erase images that make no sense to us.
IMHO there may be a pink mountain on the healthcare horizon.
A complete discussion of this troubling notion would require more statistical analysis (and more space) than I can give it here. But, the long and short of it is this: steady advances of technology invariably contribute to more and better products. And, as applied to health, that equates to most of us living longer better lives: doubtless, a happy outcome, right? Sadly, however, people living longer, consuming more (not to mention more expensive) treatments and tonics create a "new dimension" of problems onto itself. In other words, in a healthcare world already constrained by both cost and supply, higher per-capita consumption could create aggregate Access issues even more troublesome than ones that we do already see!
If there's a way out of this paradox it probably involves P4 (predictive, personalized, participative and preventive) medicine. But that's a topic for another day (and another post or comment)
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