Trying to cure "old age" is futile. How about extending youth instead?
Thanks to all the kind words and suggestions I have received regarding my decrepitude. I suspect that much of it is inevitable and after spending a lot of money (and that of the insurance company) they will tell me to get over it. I am aging, or as the above cartoon puts it, "dying of time exposure."
How long you live is something of a crapshoot. You can eat right, exercise, not drink or smoke, and, as some wags put it, "die anyway." I wrote before how my cardiologist told me that unless I "changed my lifestyle" I would regret it by age 70. On the other hand, his "lifestyle" included riding racing bikes on narrow, shoulder-less roads or on busy highways in a retirement community where many drivers are over 80 or 90 and some legally blind. He fell off his bike and broke a rib and punctured a lung. That is a lifestyle choice to be sure. Sad, too, because we have 25 miles of bike paths here, and nary a Buick on any one of them.
Genetics has a lot to do with it, to be sure. Lifestyle choices also are important and I am not trivializing them - far from it, as we shall see. Environment has a lot to do as well. Mental health has a big part to play. Economic status comes into play as well.
For example, my father's parents had dramatically different life spans. His Dad died before I was born, of lung cancer. Meanwhile, Grandma, who smoked and had a cocktail every evening, lived to be in her mid-80s. It may be the laws of probability at play, or perhaps Grandpa was exposed to asbestos. Back then, lung cancer was lung cancer, and we didn't distinguish it from mesothelioma.
When you get older, you start to fall apart - and spend more time visiting doctors, taking pills and having procedures done. Medicare kicks in and they find a lot wrong with you all of a sudden. Supposedly, 1/3 of all Medicare costs occur in the last year of life - or is it the last month? I forget.
Seems to me we are extending the worst and most expensive part of life. Why not start at the beginning? If people want to live longer, intervention begins there. Stem cell research is taking off as these early cells can take on any cell form and reproduce easily. Even ordinary cells regenerate fast when you are young. I remember when I was five years old, putting a band-aid on a cut and the next day the cut was gone, leaving perfectly smooth skin with no scars. Today? A simple bug bite festers for weeks or months before it finally heals, leaving a nasty scar in its wake.
By age 60, the body starts shutting down. By the 80s, the end game is pretty much foregone. Trying to "save" an older person with decades of injuries, arthritis, brain damage, organ damage, brittle bones, and so forth, seems kind of futile - and probably one reason average life expectancy hasn't really gone up in recent years (and gone down in some!). You can't "fix" a broken-down car with frame rot and a seized engine, you can only replace it. On the other hand, if you garage a brand-new car and drive it carefully and take care of it, it can go for decades with minimal intervention or wear.
Maybe we need to spend more time and money on the first part of life - extending .youth as long as possible, rather than the futile task of extending old age - a painful task at that. It just seems that once puberty sets in, the death clock starts ticking - accelerating with each passing decade. And oddly enough, as life expectancy has decreased by a couple of years in the USA, at the same time the age of menarche - the age of puberty - has decreased by the same number of years.
I for one would have welcomed an extra decade of childhood, as opposed to an extra decade of decrepitude, old age, pain, and illness. Maybe the medical industry is looking at this all wrong.
Just a thought!
