I'm reading The House of God and it's pretty much exactly the Lewis Thomas contrarian take on medicine.
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Samuel Shem isn’t anti-treatment in all cases. He loves surgery — because surgery often *just works.* Nothing *just works* on dementia.
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“Gomer” is a rude word for a geriatric, demented, often institutionalized patient with multiple illnesses. But whatever you call them, the reality is that they’re not going to get *well*.
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It’s the job of those who care for them (doctors, nurses, aides, family, etc) to be kind and make their lives bearable without burning out.
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It’s the job of medical and biological researchers to figure out how to keep people from getting into that screwed-up state to begin with.
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I'm interested to know how responsive to effort the problem of stopping aging is. If we could add just 30 or so years to healthspan, there would almost certainly be a social recognition that the problem is solvable and huge extra money would flow in. But a model ..
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.. I have in my mind is that the problem might go from impossible to easy at some point in the future based on other tech, so actually aging is almost completely unresponsive to any currently feasible amount of effort. ???
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