OCR Text |
Show PROLONGING LIFE. Saying It would be possible to add five, ten or moro years to the average aver-age lives of policyholders by having them examined medically every five years, Dr. Burnslde Foster, editor of the St. Paul Medical Journal, before the Association of Life Insurance presidents, pres-idents, urged the advisability of life Insurance companies adopting such a plan. The suggestion will be considered consid-ered by the association's life extension exten-sion committee, which is alreaJy busy with the proposal of Prof. Irving Fisher Fish-er of Yale university, to have the life Insurance companies expend money in a campaign of health education. Dr. Foster claims that the medical examinations he proposes would Indicate Indi-cate the beginning of unsuspected diseases dis-eases which would thus be discovered in time to effect cures, or to have their progress materially arrested. Such examinations would be free to policyholders policy-holders and Dr. Foster said that tho expense- to the companies would be trivial. "Modern medicine has. above all, two chief alms, the prevention of disease dis-ease and the recognition of Its earliest ear-liest signs in the individual." said Dr. Foster, In today's address. "In both of these alms the business of life Insurance In-surance has an Immense Interest, since the nearer we approach to their accomplishment, the more wo add to human longevity. Prof. Fisher's recent re-cent plea for concerted action on the part of life, Insurance companies to lend their financial aid to the cause of preventive medicine is one which meets with my hearty sympathy and approval. "Preventive medicine becomes more nearly an exact science all the time and while its possibilities are far from being realized, this is not bo-cause bo-cause of Its own inexactness or shortcomings, short-comings, but because the people have not yet awakened to the fact that those diseases which cause the greatest great-est number of deaths and the greatest amount of suffering are actually preventable, pre-ventable, If money enough is spent to "prevent them. The only way to enlist en-list all the people actively in the crusade cru-sade against preventable disease Is to present the subject as an economic one, which it surely is, and one which appeals directly to their pocket-books. I am glad that life insurance companies compan-ies are beginning to be interested in it from this point of view. Its study 'will prove profitable to them and will afford a most valuable object lesson to the people. There Is probably not a physician who has not many times in his experience exper-ience detected, while examining a patient pa-tient for some other purpose, the early signs of 6nme beginning organic disease, dis-ease, of which the patient had no suspicion. sus-picion. In such cases the early recognition recog-nition of the first evidence of the disease dis-ease has enabled the physician to so order the life of his patient as to prevent pre-vent the further progress of the disease, dis-ease, if It Is a curable one, or to retard its progress and to enable the patient to live much longer than he would have lived had the disease not been detected de-tected until lafer. "Many persons die of kidney dls- ease, of tuberculosis, of cancer, of diabetes, dia-betes, of heart disease, and of other diseases every year, and many millions of dollars are paid by the life Insurance Insur-ance companies Nvhlch have Issued policies on the lives of these persons, who were sound when the policies were Issued, and who might have lived much longer and paid many more annual an-nual premiums If the diseases which caused their deaths had been recognized recog-nized and properly treated In their earliest ear-liest stages. Thee are the very diseases dis-eases which figure most largely in mortality mor-tality tables." |