Dare To Be 100: Most Important Medical Article

I have previously expressed my appreciation of the JAMA 1993 paper “Actual Causes of Death in the US”, written by Mike McGinnis and Bill Foege. The paper is central in the course that I that I am now giving at the Santa Barbara City College called “the Science of Longevity.” My main PowerPoint represents data from Steve Schroeder’s Shattuck paper printed in the New England Journal that makes the same point. In it Steve concludes that 15% of the causes of death are due to genes, 19% from social circumstance, 10% from healthcare, 5% from environmental exposure, but 55% from personal behavior. This is precisely the point made by Mike and Bill’s earlier paper, health behavior is the dominant causal agency in human health. Such a dogmatic claim is made with scant note by Modern Medicine.