I'm reading The House of God and it's pretty much exactly the Lewis Thomas contrarian take on medicine.
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Lots of modern medicine doesn't actually work; the stuff that does work (like vaccines) is cheap and doctors will spend little time on it; most doctor time and medical cost is spent on managing chronic diseases of aging that we cannot cure.
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Caring for the chronically/permanently ill is still important but it's depressing as hell and often more about kindness and low-tech caretaking than "cure."
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You could read this in a fatalist sense — “we need to accept illness and death as a reality and be kind to each other instead of obsessing over fancy medical technologies” — but that’s not my takeaway.
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My takeaway is that, once you admit that current medicine really can’t help a lot of people, that’s a really strong argument for inventing medicine that can.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin
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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Replying to @RokoMijicUK @s_r_constantin
.. 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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Replying to @RokoMijicUK
I think it’s probably easy, it’s just hugely under-researched.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin
this is in the top 2 most important questions in the world. What makes you think it's easy now? We know enough now to say almost for certain that the cost of a 30 year healthspan extension (i.e. 50=20, 80=50) any time before, say 1980 was ∞
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Obvious “overview” experiments (drug screens for life extension in animals) are rarely done and when they are done they show abundant positive results. 30% life extension in mice has been achieved by multiple methods. “Omics” longitudinal & comparative studies of aging are new.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin
30% life extension for a simple drug has a "too good to be true" feel to it, though obviously hard for me to be sure as a non-biologist Somebody found a sophisticated way to poison mice or give them some deficiency and then cure it?
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Replying to @RokoMijicUK
Gene modifications. Lots of “dwarf” (growth hormone deficient) mammals are long lived, for instance.
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