What RFK Jr. Gets Wrong About Chronic Disease

[Greenbeard]

A conservative commentator makes an important point: as with so many things many are now rebelling against, the prevalence of chronic conditions to a large extent is a symptom of us being victims of our own success. Where once we died from ailments, we now live with them, often for many years.

Hard not to view the sudden DOGE/MAGA/Trump war on biomedical research and the health care system in general through this lens.

What RFK Jr. Gets Wrong About Chronic Disease

RFK also claimed, “We spent zero on chronic disease during the Kennedy administration. Today we spend $4.3 trillion a year.” The first statistic is clearly false (cancer and heart disease existed in the early 1960s); and much of the second can be explained by increased longevity.

Chronic disease is often a price of medical success and of aging. Improved treatment has turned the most serious medical conditions, such as heart disease, into things that people live with for years instead of dying quickly—and cheaply. Consider: age-adjusted deaths from heart disease fell by 67 percent from 1970 to 2018, while those from strokes declined by 75 percent. Deaths from prostate, colorectal, lung, and stomach cancers have all been halved since 1990.

The more medicine advances, the more work it has to do. Tissues, glands, and bones degenerate over time, and the effectiveness of medical care diminishes with age. The longer medical progress helps people live into old age, the more drawn out the period of bodily decline will be, with intractable and hard-to-cure conditions figuring more prominently.

This burden of chronic disease falls largely on the elderly. Relative to adults aged 35 to 50, those over 80 are nine times more likely to have cancer, ten times more likely to have diabetes, 18 times more likely to have COPD, and 47 times more likely to have a stroke. Whereas Alzheimer’s disease afflicts only 2 percent of those aged 65 to 74, it touches 43 percent of those 85 and older.

Environmental toxins and unhealthy lifestyles can certainly precipitate bodily decay, but they are they are not the main reason for the rising cost of chronic illness. Increased spending on the treatment of chronic medical conditions is the product of a wealthier society with greater longevity. It’s an unpleasant problem, but it beats the alternative.

Elsewhere, though, his instincts lead him astray. Kennedy told Congress, “I was raised in a time when we did not have a chronic disease epidemic,” and suggested that, since his uncle’s presidency, the proportion of children with chronic illnesses had surged from 2 percent to 66 percent.

These seemingly alarming statistics owe much to greatly broadened definitions and increases in the diagnosis of food allergies and behavioral health conditions that no one was tracking when JFK was in the White House. In reality, child health has improved dramatically, and the rate of mortality per 100,000 children has declined from 68.6 in 1962 to 24.9 in 2018.

 

[ataraxia]

It’s true. Ditto for biomedical science, science in general, and having a functional, competent government. Maybe it’s necessary for each generation to keep going back and FAFOing with these things to learn their value for themselves.

 

[Greenbeard]

It’s true. Ditto for biomedical science, science in general, and having a functional, competent government. Maybe it’s necessary for each generation to keep going back and FAFOing with these things to learn their value for themselves.

One of the problems with MAHA is that it’s a total fraud. E.g.,

As RFK Jr. Champions Chronic Disease Prevention, Key Research Is Cut

Two significant programs that invested in research on diabetes, dementia, obesity and kidney disease have ended since the start of the Trump administration.

www.nytimes.com

How Kennedy’s cuts to HHS could curb ‘MAHA’ agenda

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Department of Government Efficiency are reshaping the U.S. health care system, starting with deep cuts to the agencies Kenned…

thehill.com

Trump EPA seeks to gut state chemical bans, raising toxic exposure risks

A plan under the Trump administration to rewrite U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chemical risk evaluations could wipe out hundreds of state-level bans on hazardous substances like PFAS, exposing Americans to higher levels of toxic chemicals in everyday products.Tom Perkins reports for The...

www.ehn.org

 

[jaeger19]

I recall a conversation I had with an elderly patient this year. He is now 100.years old as as clear mentally as can be. We were talking about growing up in the 1920,s and 1930,s and he mentioned how when he reached his tenth birthday , he remembers thinking “ hey I might live”.
I said “ what are you talking about”.
And he brought up how many children he grew up with or knew who didn’t live until their 10th birthday.

He remembered two brothers who died from poisoning from eating poisonous roots. They were hungry from not having much food and they ate some plants around the river.
Children who died of measles. Whooping cough( his own sister) , polio.
Kids who died in accidents working in fields .

 

[element94]

It’s true. Ditto for biomedical science, science in general, and having a functional, competent government. Maybe it’s necessary for each generation to keep going back and FAFOing with these things to learn their value for themselves.

Enough is enough. Why keep spending all that money on research and implementation when it could go to another billionaire's mega home, or mega yacht? Enough of the greater good./s

 

[Pyrite]

I recall a conversation I had with an elderly patient this year. He is now 100.years old as as clear mentally as can be. We were talking about growing up in the 1920,s and 1930,s and he mentioned how when he reached his tenth birthday , he remembers thinking “ hey I might live”.
I said “ what are you talking about”.
And he brought up how many children he grew up with or knew who didn’t live until their 10th birthday.

He remembered two brothers who died from poisoning from eating poisonous roots. They were hungry from not having much food and they ate some plants around the river.
Children who died of measles. Whooping cough( his own sister) , polio.
Kids who died in accidents working in fields .

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/04/22/whooping-cough-pertussis-cases-rise/

,,,Whooping cough cases are soaring in the United States, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as the Trump administration’s cuts to federal health agencies and funding destabilize programs that monitor disease and promote vaccination.

The U.S. has tallied 8,077 cases of whooping cough in 2025, compared with 3,847 cases in the same period last year, the CDC’s data shows. The bacterial illness, formally known as pertussis, spreads easily and is especially dangerous for infants.

Two babies in Louisiana have died of whooping cough in the past six months, while the CDC confirmed this year that a 5-year-old in Washington state died of the disease in November — the state’s first pertussis death since 2011. Two other deaths have been reported in Idaho and North Dakota, according to the British Medical Journal.

In 2024, the number of whooping cough cases in the U.S. climbed to the highest level in a decade. The latest figures show the disease’s spread continues to accelerate — and indicates that the country is backsliding in keeping children from dying of preventable diseases, said Paul Offit, an infectious-diseases physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who directs its vaccine education center....

“You’re already now seeing children die [of whooping cough] in states where you haven’t had a child death in years,” Offit said. “For the same reasons we’re going backward with measles, we’re going backward with pertussis.”...

 

[BirdinHand]

Those who won’t learn from history sure do seem inclined to repeat it, don’t they

 

[KingLeo]

He gets EVERYTHING wrong.