Ashkenazi women often have genetic mutations that cause them to get breast cancer and the cancer prognosis is much worse than average. This cannot be addressed by diet or lifestyle. However, genomic sequencing detected common patterns that can be tested for, and with that information, women can make informed choices about treatment or other actions, ideally well before they ever have a malignant tumor.
I won't disagree that we could do a lot better overall with large-scale changes in diet and lifestyle. But it still would leave a lot of people dying of heart disease and cancer as well as infectious diseases.
Those x-ray machines and MRI machines make a huge difference for people with internal injuries as well. No amount of diet and lifestyle will heal a shattered bone.
All the comments I make on Hacker News are done in good faith and assume good will on the part of the person I'm replying to. If you really think I misread, please rewrite what you wrote; as far as I can tell, I read and interpreted it clearly. It's best if you come out and say things directly, while your statement's thesis isn't entirely clear, but I read it as:
Flies directly in the face of study after study after study that says: diet and lifestyle are major factors in all deadly diseases. <- yes, this is true. However, it's not a useful statement when criticizing medicine based on technology. Even if everybody in the world had a "perfect" diet and lifestyle, it wouldn't address the majority of diseases at a very large scale.
Probably driven by modern tech, completely inadvertently, because x-ray machines and MRIs and such demand that the patient go to the clinic or hospital rather than the doctor going to the patient's home. <- OK, not sure what to say about this other than, it's an unfair comparison; there's plenty of in-home care and in-home doctors can't resolve a wide range of issues at a person's house. It also brings risk to the doctor, as well as causing them to spend their day travelling around.
Star Trek's Dr. McCoy and his tricorder was a dream of tech that you could carry in the proverbial little black bag. We aren't there and have forgotten a lot of important principles in the process of pursuing shiny tech. <- actually, doctors and medical researchers, for all that they pursue shiny tech, still mostly have a good appreciation for "important principles". For example, I watched my surgeon count the sponges that they took out of my spouse after surgery, to make sure they hadn't left any in (this was a surprisingly common problem with surgeries). They don't try to make a "sponge detector machine". That's just one example out of millions; if you've followed doctors on Rounds, you'll see that most of what they do isn't technology.
But it's generally a bad idea to critique any of that. Gets one nothing but hatred. <- I explicitly wrote my comment to be friendly, fact-based, and make my thesis as clear as possible. If you're going around pointing out that "medical basics that we've known for a while matter", nobody is going to agree with you. But if you attack doctors/medical researchers the way you do, you instance cause people to interpret you as somebody to argue with.
Ashkenazi women often have genetic mutations that cause them to get breast cancer and the cancer prognosis is much worse than average. This cannot be addressed by diet or lifestyle. However, genomic sequencing detected common patterns that can be tested for, and with that information, women can make informed choices about treatment or other actions, ideally well before they ever have a malignant tumor.
I won't disagree that we could do a lot better overall with large-scale changes in diet and lifestyle. But it still would leave a lot of people dying of heart disease and cancer as well as infectious diseases.
Those x-ray machines and MRI machines make a huge difference for people with internal injuries as well. No amount of diet and lifestyle will heal a shattered bone.