Posted by Isidore Goodfellow in Miscellaneous | 0 Comments
Is Your Occupation Shortening Your Life?
There are so many realities held to be true by many of us. However, when we start inquiring, we are obliged to revisit our previous convictions about what we knew. Today, let’s talk occupations in life. For example, I thought that doctors and nurses were lucky because they knew more about the human body and diseases. They knew better than many of us what kind of medication they could take when they were sick. The following article suggests that it may not be the case.
Lion of the Blogosphere, Life expectancy by occupation-This should be an interesting topic for study, but surprisingly, searching the internet revealed practically no useful studies in this area, except studies showing that higher-status occupations have higher life expectancy than lower-status occupations, but that’s just another way of stating that people with more education have higher life expectancy than people with less education, and people with higher incomes have higher life expectancy than people with lower incomes. This doesn’t necessarily say what’s driving the higher life expectancy.
I came across this article at the European Working Conditions Observatory, and finally found some intriguing information from a mortality rate study from Switzerland (which is not exactly the same thing as life expectancy).
You would think that medical doctors should have the lowest mortality rate, because they would know better than anyone how to self-diagnose their problems and obtain the best medical care. But that’s actually not the case. Three professions had lower mortality rates than medical doctors:
Clergy/Religious professionals: 59.8
Accountants: 61.6
Teaching, education: 62.5
Medical doctors: 63.2
Machine operators, auxiliary technical occupations: 74.8
Architects, engineers: 75.7
Construction and building construction labourers: 148.3
Occupations in forestry: 148.6
So if you want a long life, don’t become a lumberjack! Get a desk job. And if you are religious, then you should become a member of the clergy. (Unless you believe that the only true religion is Catholicism, because priests aren’t allowed to marry, and other studies show that marriage increases life expectancy, so Catholic priests probably have lower life expectancy than other clergy and religious professionals.)