Healthcare is a demanding field, and this blog frequently discusses the problems and difficulties we all face. Between disease process, insurance process, and hospital process, sometimes it seems like the medical walls are closing in. But is that really the truth of our vocation?

Between 1991 and 2014, cancer deaths in the US dropped by 25%. According to the NIH, much of this is attributable to a research-driven viewpoint shift. That is, we’ve been letting go of a general organ-system perspective in favor of a deeper understanding of the causes and actions of cancer at a molecular level. For example, pembrolizumab is one of a family of drugs that assist the patient’s immune system in targeting cancer cells.¹ In 1991, we could only have dreamed of such miracles.

As impressive as the 25% improvement is, other clinical battles are moving in the right direction even more quickly, such as maternal mortality, for random example. The CDC reported maternal mortality in 2021 as 32.9 deaths per 100,000 live births.² In 2022, that figure had dropped to 22.3 deaths per 100,000, and in 2023, it fell again to 18.6.³ Keep in mind that’s over a 3-year period, rather than the 23 years required for the improvement in cancer mortality.

But if that was only 3 years, then what about longer period? Have we really taken that much ground, or do we simply cherry-pick small statistical samples to make ourselves feel better?

Okay, let’s flip that last stat on its head and expand it beyond statistical anomaly: infant mortality (instead of maternal) and across an entire century (instead of 3 years)

In 1915, infant mortality in the US stood at 101 deaths per 1000 live births. That number has steadily decreased until, 100 years later (2015), the number had dropped to 5.09 deaths per 1000 live births.⁴

Let’s be clear. That’s a drop from more than 10% mortality to 0.5%. And it only happened because of unremitting effort from generations of researchers and clinicians like you. It’s easy to lose sight of how sweeping our collective goals really are; and it can be hard to see improvement when the scale of time is longer than our careers, longer even than our lifetimes—especially when things go wrong in our workday, as they always will in a field as complex as medicine.

Losing a battle every now and then is the cost of winning a war.

But rest assured, we are winning.

Our babies have a twenty-fold better chance of surviving infancy than they did a hundred years ago. So keep fighting, because no matter how exhausted and frustrated you may deservedly feel, your fight is going better than it seems.

We are winning this war.

You are winning.

So from all of us at Transonic, thank you for everything you do.

             Transonic Systems, Inc.

                                   The Measure of Better Results

References:

1. https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/nih-turning-discovery-into-health/our-biggest-health-challenges/cancer
2. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/maternal-mortality/2021/maternal-mortality-rates-2021.htm
3. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/maternal-mortality/2023/Estat-maternal-mortality.pdf
4. http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4838a2.htm