Hawking benefited a great deal from being a university professor with grad students to cater to his every whim in pursuit of advanced degrees. When I was in the hospital for pneumonia I got great care from student nurses because I agreed to let let them train on my case. When they gave me shots or anything else considered ‘medical practice’, they had an instructor nurse and the nurse assigned to my room supervising. There is nothing like student slaves.
The for-profit health system in the US doesn’t want to provide the staffing to deal with long-term/nursing home patients. The management of insurance companies won’t pay for it, and you hit the cap quickly.
]]>That’s the society we are, though. If it’s viewed you can’t contribute to society… well. It’s like the old mule that’s put down in the back pasture once no longer able to pull a plow. Except we are the mules.
]]>A US hospital has more bookkeepers than RNs. It really is sad.
]]>So yeah, Stephen Hawking lived fifty years longer than he would have in the United States thanks to the National Health Service.
]]>My Mother was diagnosed with stage 4 renal failure and had a dialysis port installed in 2005. She died in 2014 having never used the port. Every case is different, no matter what the disease. I have a cousin with MND in her 70s. Her sister died of the same disease just after high school. There are a lot of variables, but access to health care is a big indicator of life span.
The problem is determining the root cause of these diseases. Until we can figure that out we can’t figure out how to cure them.
]]>My sister died of ALS (AKA Motor Neuron disease) 18 months ago and she had top notch insurance for she worked for a world famous medical firm. They paid for everything, including her 5 figure salary until she passed. She donated her body to UC Irvine in the (forlorn) hope it may do someone some good.
The point of all this is to say Hawkins long term survival, 55 years from diagnoses to death, as opposed to my sisters 3 years survival, wasn’t due to the medical care each received. I hope both await my arrival at the eschaton.
]]>He wasn’t just an astrophysicist & mathematician, he was a teacher in the real sense of the word. He was featured on the Simpsons, appeared on The Big Bang Theory & Star Trek – The Next Generation, he was able to interest people in science even more than Carl Sagan.
]]>