Wife and I are currently reading/listening to “How Not To Die”, a book about how to adjust your diet so as to reduce your risk of developing any of several diseases. Some of the chapter titles:
How not to die from heart disease
How not to die from lung diseases
How not to die from brain diseases
How not to die from digestive cancers
How not to die from infections
How not to die from diabetes
How not to die from high blood pressure
How not to die from liver diseases
How not to die from blood cancers
How not to die from kidney disease
How not to die from breast cancer
How not to die from suicidal depression
How not to die from prostate cancer
How not to die from Parkinson’s disease
How not to die from iatrogenic causes
In addition to taking care of one’s own health, modern medicine is continually developing treatments and cures for a wide array of diseases that reduce quantity and quality of life.
So what’s the end game? Humans don’t appear to enjoy negligible senescence, which means that despite our best efforts, each of us will eventually die. If doctors were magically able to achieve the goal of eliminating all of the above diseases, how would we be expected to die? Whatever those remaining causes are, should we/they be trying to eliminate those as well? Would it be considered a terribly tragedy that we keep losing people to ****, even though all of those people were at least 130 years old?
As a teenager I was enamored with John Robbins’s Diet for a New America, a book that made a political, environmental, moral, and health case for vegetarianism. I found it very persuasive–until I went to see Robbins speak.
He talked about the health benefits of vegetarianism, and said, with a beatific smile, something like,
Sometimes people ask me, “John, if vegetarians aren’t dying of colon cancer, or heart disease, or strokes, what are they dying of?” And the answer is: nothing!
I found that so creepy and dumb that I started questioning everything else he said. It was a pivotal moment in my political growth.
Well, let’s see… There’s still a lot of cancers that aren’t ruled out on that list. Skin, testicular/ovarian, thyroid, bone… So that’s still an option.
Nothing on there addresses injury at all, which becomes a bigger risk as you get older. Slipping in the shower or on ice and hitting your head, tripping over something, just plain losing your balance… Plus, of course, injuries from various sorts of violence.
Suicidal depression is the only mental health issue on the list, but it doesn’t mention Alzheimer’s or general mental decline that comes with aging. You could still decline to the point that you neglect basic self-care. I’ve heard that a significant number of “deaths by old age” are folks just forgetting to eat.
Fair point. But I presume that medical researchers will keep chipping away at all of these other maladies. The whole thing just got me to wondering about when researchers will say “that’s enough” and stop looking for treatments/cures for whatever it is that’s still killing people.
It wouldn’t surprise me if we ran into new issues. If we solve many of the issues that lead to aging now and start living for hundreds of years, we might find that, say, heavy metal accumulation becomes a big problem at the age of 500.
Why would we ever do that? Live forever or die trying, I say.
I read and enjoy that book, but yeah. I have asked myself before what is this obsession with avoiding death. But avoiding cancer I can definitely see, it sounds awful. I would rather avoid years and years of being sick. That seems like a better motive to me.
Although risk of death per year does not seem to increase appreciably anymore once you’ve reached 105. It’s just that it’s already quite high at that point…
As for what will kill you, in the end, it’s probably going to be some kind of cancer. There’s always a nonzero risk of the right mutations (well, the wrong ones, I suppose) co-occurring and slipping by whatever mitigation mechanisms are in place, so it’s just a question of when, not if.
Although probably, some form of environmental hazard will get you before that. I mean, that’s kinda why we’re aging in the first place: gene mutations leading to decrepitude after the age where we’re statistically expected to have died due to environmental factors (predation, accidents, natural disasters, stray pianos falling from above…), and thus wouldn’t contribute to the next generation anyway, won’t further decrease fitness, and so, accumulate.
I’m hoping my body listens to my brain when it says that I’m content with the ride I’ve had and I’m ready to head for the nearest exit. It’s like Disneyland. I don’t want to spend my last years lingering in the gift shops on Main Street USA long after the rides have shut down, just to stave off the end of my visit.
I’d expect that any serious extension of human lifespans would carry with it an increase in the time when we’re robust and healthy, too. In the Disney analogy, the rides would still be running.
In fact, that’s mostly what advances in geriatrics have consisted of, so far: If you avoid violence and accidents, people today still live for about the same span as we have for all of recorded history. But nowadays, many of us can hope to remain hale and hearty almost right up to the end, instead of spending decades in decrepitude.
I once read that even if you could totally eliminate all health problems, including aging, most people would die within a couple of hundred years because statistically everyone would have some kind of fatal accident or violent encounter within that period.
If you want the ultimate end game, it’s going to be continual steady progress between preventing/curing disease and the development of biotechnology to repair or replace everything that breaks or senesces. And biotechnology will surely become far more than just doing repairs, we’ll be enhancing and modifying from conception. And when we can replace our brains to run our minds on a synthetic computational substrate, the game changes completely because we can ditch our original bodies entirely in favor of the synthetic or the virtual.
This reminds me of when I was younger and snarkier. If someone wanted to get my political or financial support for some health related cause by saying, “X is the #1 cause of death for population N,” I would respond “okay, what would you prefer to be the #1 cause of death?”
Something is always the #1 cause of death. It’s a dumb justification and a worthless argument. Come up with something else.
I’m not sure what you think the point is to this snarky response. Whatever is currently killing the most people is surely a reasonable starting point in prioritizing how to extend/improve life, even if it may not tell the whole story.