Your hospital stay is only 60% as likely

[Fluidic Kimbo]

Before I begin, I need to make the point that death is an inevitability for all of us. No matter how prudent you are with health and safety, and no matter how well you eat and exercise, your body is literally programmed to die -- it gradually slows down and eventually stops the automatic process of repairing itself, and each internal system begins to fail, one after the other, until you die. We call this the ageing process, but even if you die of old age, you still get a specific 'Cause Of Death' on your death certificate something like "Pneumonia secondary to progressive lung disease".

So when I say you're only 60.8% as likely to be hospitalised... please take it in the context of realising that we all die eventually and we know that we're all gonna be hospitalised toward the end (apart from drop-deaders and sleep-diers of course).

The second point I want to make is about Cause and Effect. A basic example of cause and effect would be "I jumped off a really tall wall and broke my ankle when I landed" (Cause = Jumping from a height, Effect = Breaking your ankle). Now it's possible to have a situation where something is not the cause, but nonetheless if it wasn't there or if it hadn't happened, then the effect would never have come to be. A basic example would be going to the grocery store to buy a carton of milk and getting shot in a robbery at the grocery store and dying. In this scenario, the effect is "to be shot dead", and while it wouldn't be correct to say that the cause was "going to the grocery store", it is accurate to point out that the effect never would have happened if you hadn't gone to the grocery store. Although the cause quite obviously is that a person robbing the shop shot you.

So when I say something like "Stop drinking alcohol and you're 90% less likely to get cancer", I don't directly mean that 90% of cancers are caused by alcohol. What I mean here is that if you stop drinking alcohol altogether, it will have a knock on effect in your life in many different ways, and that you'll end up being 90% less likely to get cancer.

So anyway I read a statistic today that approximately 32% of hospital admissions are attributed to smoking. I saw another statistic today that approximately 7.2% of all hospital admissions are attributed to alcohol.

Now I am very much over-simplifying things here, but if you add those two figures together then you get 39.2% -- which means that hospital admission rates could be reduced to 60.8% of what they currently are if everyone stopped drinking and smoking. (Yes I realise I'm over-simplifying things to an extreme here).

About 12 years ago when I had stopped drinking for the first time, I tried to garner as much information as I could on the medical benefits of not drinking alcohol throughout your 20's, 30's, 40's, 50's, and so on until you die. It took quite a lot of digging, and now twelve years later I can't even find the original source, but I came to the following conclusion:

"For every cancer diagnosis that takes place in a doctor's office, 90% of those diagnoses would never have been given out if the person had never drunk alcohol"

Now I know there are classic examples that fly in the face of all this:
(1) Winston Churchill smoked 10 cigars per day and lived to be 90
(2) I think we all know a friend of a friend who didn't drink, ran marathons, did yoga 2 or 3 times a week, and still needed to go in for a triple bypass at 34 and dropped dead at 39.

I'm on a good run at the moment... I managed to go a 45-day sun holiday without drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes, and I hope I keep this up. I'm under no illusions though -- I know I could drop dead today just like anyone else, but I reckon if I continue this streak then I might have a half-decent chance of still going for 5km runs when I'm in my 80's.

By the way I think every country should have euthanasia if your life is reduced to shit in the final weeks. I wouldn't be keen on hanging around if I had a stroke at 87 and couldn't get out of bed or go to the toilet by myself. I realise that other people have a different mindset though and like to cling onto life til the bitter end (I had a distant cousin who was dying of cancer and he chose to go out fighting and so he continued all treatments right to the very end). I accept that some people are put together this way but it's not for me -- I'd rather expedite my transition to the other side.

A gentleman in his 60's in my church died last week. He had had Covid. He was put on a ventilator once, and then he recovered and was taken off it, but then his condition declined again and he needed to go back on the ventilator. He rejected the ventilator the second time (i.e. he chose not to go back on it), and he died a day or two later. Obviously I've never been in the exact situation myself but I'm probably the guy who will reject treatment and just slip away. Other people wanna go out swinging. I don't think this has an effect on where we all transition to after death, though.