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We will all get old and die. What do you want to do about it?
By AngryToxicologist | May 24, 2007
I read a great article a couple of weeks ago but have been holding onto it until some day I’m too busy to research another post. That day has arrived and I’m pretty excited to share it because it’s probably the best thing I’ve read in a couple of years. The article is a piece in The New Yorker about aging and how it should be changing medicine, but sadly really isn’t. I know this may not sound like the most riveting read, but give it a couple of paragraphs till you get to the gerintologist; you’ll love it. Here are some general thoughts about it that have been banging around my head for years and now I’ve finally read something that can put a lot of them together. Here’s a few of them:
1) Aging (and dying) is inevitable. It’s not fun. Depending on the system, somewhere between age 19 and 30 your body starts going south. In fact, throughout most of time we only lived to an average age of 30, so this wasn’t really a problem. As the article says, in some ways we are freaks, living 2 or more times as long as all our ancestors have. The great medical miracle decreased childhood mortality and extended our lives into the 70s, 80s, 90s, and even 100s. This medical miracle has created a lot of elderly that we never had to care for in the past.
2) Because of the numerous unpleasant things that happen as we age, we like to imagine it’s not there. This denial is detrimental, however, to our enjoying our later years as much as we can. And when we do try to deal with it, we look for the magic cures and consult books like “Ageless” which are mostly a mass of denial wrapped in some scientificy language.
2) Because medicine and commerce follow our needs and desires, they are focused primarily, and almost exclusively, upon prolonging our lives, or curing a specific disease. We often hear about how bad a disease is by the fact that it’s the #1 killer or X # of people died from this every year. But if we all have to die of something, what will replace the #1 killer if we cure it? Is that making life better?
In my opinion, heart disease research is vastly overfunded; we know somewhat how to control it and prevention methods for early heart disease are well known. Hearts will fail eventually so it will always be with us, and the decrease in quality of life isn’t as drastic as with other end of life diseases. When I get to the end I’d rather have a heart attack than cancer or a stroke, anyway. So shouldn’t we be spending more money on childhood and lifelong diseases or quality of life in the elderly (that would include things like alzheimer’s) as opposed to the huge sums we spend on end of life diseases?
3) Thinking about how to improve quality of life isn’t just hard, it’s boring and it doesn’t make anyone any money. Pills make money, and pusing the boundries of science is exciting. Training doctors on how to assess elderly patients for their fall-probability, nutritional and social/mental status is boring and largely thankless (see the article for why general practitioners aren’t very good at it and the studies backing that up).
Well, I hope you don’t find that too depressing, but it’s the state of things. Hopefully we can all start to see the need to deal with end of life and quality of life issues as medical issues instead of simply trying to stave off 4 disease processes at once and hoping it works when you know it really won’t. It can be done and it’s being done in so many places, it just needs to be expanded; the stories of Jean Gavrilles and Felix Silverstone are realistic and full of hope at the same time.
Topics: Aging |
May 25th, 2007 at 10:57 am
The Mail in this weeks (5/28) New Yorker points out a problem with your statement that “When we do try to deal with [aging], we look for the magic cures and consult books like “Ageless” which are mostly a mass of denial wrapped in some scientificy language.”
“Ageless” maybe facile, but according to the two MDs responding to the NYer article, many of the diseases of aging are at least exacerbated by adverse life style choices (poor diet, lack of exercise, lack of social interaction, smoking). According to these guys, the complicating nature of these poor lifestyle changes are scientifically established. While it may not be easy to glamorous to address these problems, the advantages of a healthy life style obviously include better quality of life in old age.
May 25th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
I’m not sure but I think we’re agreeing. What you point out is exactly why we need good geriatrics centers so that people can get advice about life style choices from competant sources, not from sham health experts and improve their quality of life..
May 25th, 2007 at 6:08 pm
Great post! Thanks for the heads up on the excellent New Yorker article. With my 79 yo MIL across the Atlantic in England, aging has very much been on my mind lately.
June 4th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
Thank you for your interesting comments!
I thought perhaps you may also find this related post and a subsequent discussion interesting to you:
Longevity Science: The Way We Age
http://longevity-science.blogspot.com/2007/04/way-we-age.html
June 5th, 2007 at 9:47 pm
Great article. Only problem I have with anything in it is the assumption that we live drastically longer than our ancestors. I am an amateur genealogist, and the average “lifespan” in my family (not counting murder victims or suicides) for the past 400 years is 68 for men, 84 for women. One of the females lived from 1756 to 1871, and survived the American Civil War in northern Mississippi or middle Tennessee after age 100. My brother recently commented on the miracles of modern medical technology after visiting my 87-year-old grandmother in a nursing home, then realized that aside from severe osteoporosis from sitting around (and memory problems), there is nothing wrong with her- no heart problem, no cancer, nothing. She’s not on any meds. The geriatric care in the article sounds like exactly what a lot of people need at an earlier age from their GPs- simple advice to make life better, and honest warnings about dangers in their lifestyle. Good post.
November 27th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
the bible tells us why we get old and die ,its all there and its the truth ,, look it up but GOD never intended it to be that way! its no mystery
February 4th, 2008 at 6:48 pm
My Uncle just died from cancer last week, and I reflected that; the longer we live, the shorter it seems to be…great post.
March 13th, 2008 at 10:27 am
Few people have ever died around the age of 30. You were thinking of average life expectancy, which was indeed around 30 simply because infant mortality was so high.
March 14th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
I would guess that looking at genealogy charts won’t tell you a lot about average lifespan unless you’re looking for the average lifespan of a particular family.
Also, in a more general sense, low lifespan is a bad thing, possibly so bad, that there would be no offspring to make any comments about their families short average lifespan on internet blogs.
May 27th, 2008 at 4:05 am
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