Medicine and Long Life

Why do we have medicine?

The answer is obvious that a child can answer. It is to help people. To help them live long and healthy lives.

 

But does medicine help us live long?

Some medicines do, like some vaccines, and most interventions help people live slightly longer.

 

But people still die. In the last hundred years, we have only improved life expectancy at older age by 6 years. The great improvement in medicine has been in helping children survive childhood. And this was not just medicine it was because of public health. We made great progress in getting clean fresh water to communities and an efficient sewage system. Laws that protect the air we breathe, the hours worked, and age restrictions. It is these factors that have improved life the most rather than medicine.

 

For older people medicine performs invasive treatment like heart operations, setting bone fractures, and through medication like controlling blood pressure, cholesterol, and diabetes. These help some older people live slightly longer and in better health. But only slightly.

 

Two researchers examined what happens if we completely cure some chronic diseases.

Like a magician with their magic wand, they eliminate all diseases. This can only be done statistically. Kenneth Manton eliminated one disease at a time. By eliminating all of these killer diseases at 87 years of age, people live an additional 5.7 years for males and 6.5 years for females.

 

Another researcher eliminated one disease at a time and saw the effect this had on people’s lives. Again, they did this using statistics. Douglas G. Manuel reported that by eliminating cancer they predicted that one fifth of the years of life gained would be spent in poor health—and increased cost. This is because living longer results in these people getting dementia or other chronic disease such as atherosclerosis. On the other hand, eliminating musculoskeletal conditions would result in a year of good health for women and under half a year for men.

 

Many diseases are waiting for us in older age. The healthiest people on earth, like the Blue Zone people, one of which is in Okinawa, tend to live a long life. They only get sick for a few days before they die. There is no long period of sickness. In the end, it is best to be healthy as death comes quickly and our bodies seem to know how to shut down effectively when we are healthy.

 

We need to understand why our bodies are designed to shut down. We need to study aging not just specific diseases.

 

Then I return the question. Does medicine help people live long and healthy lives?

 

The answer might be that medicine allows us to believe we can change our nature. But as yet we do not understand “aging” enough to be able to change very much, but we all take what we can get right now.