Just how bad are we at treating age-related diseases?
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7 Comments
mattmaroon
TLDR: very bad.
cyanydeez
Its good to know the same forces making software terrible are at work in the pharma business
QuadmasterXLII
Anything that we are good at treating doesn’t seem like an age related disease anymore, but we’re really clearing out the scourges if you look at historical cause of death statistics. We haven’t made any progress on Alzheimer’s, and have conquered yellow fever, consumption, diabetes, knee failure, glaucoma, smoking related lung cancer, prostate cancer, hookworm, environmental lead poisoning, environmental arsenic poisoning, black lung, breast cancer, and syphilis. So, if you know someone old and suffering, its probably alzheimers.
bentt
We are bad at most things that are complex and require behavior change. Maybe our best victory in recent years has been the vilification of tobacco. It didn't get any less physically pleasurable to smoke, but the combination of political, social, economic, and medical pressure has turned the tide.
It takes a lot.
Larrikin
Whatever happened to those blood transplants people were getting from younger people? Logically it made sense, but I'm guessing after further study it didn't pan out? Or was it just a trend that didn't get any follow up?
jmward01
I like this article, but it, like a lot of things in medicine, seems to focus on the wrong question. It isn't about disease x, it is about quantity and quality of life. I thought the part about Geographic atrophy drugs really emphasized this well. The drugs do -something- but have no impact on quality of life. I really want drug trials to focus on these two things and not proxies like 'lesion growth' which doesn't appear to have a meaningful impact on quality of life. If quality and quantity of life are improving then we can say that we are improving medicine otherwise we are just increasing medicine or worse, medicine is hurting as quality of life drops due to medical procedures that provide no real benefit but have real cost.
Theodores
The non-communicable chronic diseases are what my parents new, when they were still alive.
Recently I had to get my late father's paperwork in order and this meant going through lots of medical stuff. There was also paperwork regarding my mum, it was IPF that got her.
I also had to take a sack full of pills down to the chemist to get disposed of. This is in the UK where we have the NHS. The NHS would prefer to have people in good health whereas I suspect that the private healthcare system of the USA prefers to have people in bad health and medically dependent. It is just a different business model.
What surprised me about the NHS paperwork was how much of it was focused on lifestyle choices, so that means living a physically active life and eating certain foods.
My dad did the doctor visits and the pills but he did not do the lifestyle recommendations. He would behave like a tired toddler if you put fruit and vegetables on his plate. He was also heavily car dependent, as if any other mode of transport was not 'manly' enough for him. We had concerns for other road users with his driving but we could not get him to take the train, never mind walk as far as the nearest shop, five minutes away.
Alcohol was another cause for concern. Although never drunk, he would drink every day. He would have it with his greasy food, thinking he was eating like a king.
I know diet and nutrition is controversial, however, the NHS were wanting him to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, and there were forms so that he could fill in how many grains, nuts, seeds, potatoes, vegetables and pieces of fruit he was eating. He wasn't eating any of those things, he was on the saturated fats, which invariably come from animal products. There were no checkboxes on the form for meat, cheese or processed foods, which is no surprise since there is no fibre in any of this stuff. There aren't any antioxidants either.
The NHS prefers lifestyle interventions rather than pills. This varies by doctor, but, this is the general idea.
Age related diseases are not due to age, in this day and age. They are down to poor lifestyle choices, cancer and all. Forget genetics too, sure, some people win the lottery, and others lose the cancer lottery. But the more you know then the more you realise that no amount of pills, procedures and testing will spare anyone from blocked arteries due to saturated fats with side portions of bad cholesterol.
It is the same with alcohol. If we treated pensioners as if they were under age, to ban them from obtaining alcohol, then there would be a lot of miserable pensioners but they would be living a lot longer. Same with processed food and animal products, if we banned pensioners from such things then they would be miserable but live out to be a hundred years old.
Face to face with my dad's NHS paperwork made me realise that I knew what I was reading all along. For decades we have known what gives you the non-communicable chronic diseases. We have also known that it is fibre and phytonutrients from whole foods that enable your body to protect itself against things such as inflammation.
Looking for cures is grift. There is no cure or treatment for those that spend hours a day consuming toxins whilst they pretend they are living like a king just because they are eating heavily marketed animal products that are sold as 'good for protein'. With health and longevity, you can't have your cake full of transfats and eat it.