Considering what a huge percentage of modern US health ailments are self inflicted through lifestyle, it's hard to imagine future generations wouldn't look at our cars and our big macs with the same patronizing quaint view as we would healing with burning sticks.
The modern person who sticks to a healthy lifestyle while still having modern medicine for emergencies and misfortunes will surely live better than just about anyone in the past, but, that person is not the actual average. The average person nowadays has their health dragged down by modern lifestyle problems so much, that I'm not sure if they're better off than someone in the past[1], even with modern medicine
[1]: Cherry picking a pretty recent past, though. For example, the obesity epidemic was way less in full swing in 1970, but we already had modern sanitation, antibiotics, and vaccines by then, which eliminated the lions' share of illness. Once you go back before vaccines, it's a mixed bag. Still hard to say though, the diabetes epidemic is getting almost as bad as polio once was and trend lines keep pointing upwards.
Leukemia and certain cancers were often a death sentence as recently as 1990. Now the survival rate over five years is like 65%+
You can cherry pick a lot of data, but in general the trend line of lifespan and health outcomes has improved the modern average person’s life significantly.
The average person also was pretty likely to die in a motor vehicle accident in 1970, so much so that in CDC reports would just name the accident section “Motor Vehicle Accidents”
I don’t disagree that the public health response to things like obesity are mostly societal issues and lifestyle induced, nor a major problem, but I would still rather live today with unfettered access to knowledge on how to even approach these health issues, than live in the past.
Human populations can survive just fine with low/minimal growth and average life expectancy of 30 or so for thousands of years, just like all other animal species, we aren’t that different after all.. You don’t need basically any access to medical treatments for that.
Ah yes, but what if that same population had access to modern medicine that can basically make them infertile on demand, because babies are such a drag and, still a bit controversial today, gender feels like something that should be easily changed. Suddenly cure for cancer doesn't seem to matter much on a grand timescales.
We have a bit of runway to figure out artificial wombs with 8 billion of us alive today.
