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Lith-Maethor
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posted March 17, 2021 08:01 PM |
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...
JollyJoker said:
if current medicine is so great - why this big market for "ALTERNATIVE medicine"?
Short answer: Because people are idiots.
JollyJoker said:
"Medicine" is just a business - actually the biggest business in the world with the most money involved - and the most fraud.
Mostly when it comes to pharmaceuticals (globally) or in the States.
Coupled with the previous point, it answers your question.
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blizzardboy
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posted March 17, 2021 08:08 PM |
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There's a lot of reasons alternative medicine is a big industry. Sometimes 'alternative medicine' is simply medicine, but it's branded as alternative for marketing. If a person doesn't have coverage in the United States, they are often tempted to look towards whatever they can. Something they deem as easier.
Or it's attractive for other reasons. Homeopathy has become really big in Britain. My understanding is that with standard medicine, clinics can be pretty fabulously mediocre at connecting with people (a reason why female medical doctors are sometimes preferred over their male counterparts) whereas places that practice homeopathy can be extremely good at connecting with people and making them feel welcome and wanted, which makes it an attractive choice for a lot of people, especially for lonely people, which is an increasingly large demographic. Homeopathy itself is deception but it can still thrive in the right conditions.
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artu
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posted March 17, 2021 08:10 PM |
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@JJ
Medicine is doing much in terms of keeping you alive, till the age comes when medicine isnt doing much. The increase in the longetivity of life span isnt due to one thing, of course, such things almost never are. But if it were for me to guess, I’d say modern medicine has more to do with it than work accidents. Just think of the poorest countries, do people die because they have more accidents or due to lack of modern medicine. I mean, just think of the times that being cut on the finger with rusty iron could mean death from infection.
What to call aging is rather a matter of semantics, not that semantics doesnt matter but it’s like whether to call Pluto a planet or not, we know it’s there, we know what it consists of. I guess, beyond semantics, blizz has this notion that once they call it a disease, it will start to rain paychecks but I can hardly imagine that’s just a matter of what they call it. I wouldnt have been surprised if a century from now, average life span became 140 or something but I dont think some miracle drug will all turn us into the Higlander in a few decades.
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blizzardboy
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posted March 17, 2021 08:17 PM |
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artu said:
blizz has this notion that once they call it a disease, it will start to rain paychecks
It would at the very least give it a chance to gain the attention it deserves. Lobbying and activism plays a crucial part in what gets funded and what gets taken seriously.
Let's play a game. Don't use Google (or do, whatever). I'm going to name two types of cancer:
A) Breast Cancer
B) Prostate Cancer
Now here's my questions. Which one do you think kills more people? Next, which one do you think gets more money thrown at it? Which one has spammed you to death with activism and awareness?
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artu
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posted March 17, 2021 08:20 PM |
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I’d say prostate cancer kills more and since you came up with such a question, the other gets more funding. Not that I think this game can lead to anything conclusive about the other subject. 
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blizzardboy
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posted March 17, 2021 08:21 PM |
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artu said:
I’d say prostate cancer kills more and since you came up with such a question, the other gets more funding. Not that I think this game can lead to anything conclusive about the other subject.
It's because politics, public awareness, and medicine are all grossly out of synch with each other.
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artu
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posted March 17, 2021 08:25 PM |
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So was I correct?
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blizzardboy
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posted March 17, 2021 08:33 PM |
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artu said:
So was I correct?
Yeah, but lung cancer is even worse. It's the number one killer among cancers, and breast cancer gets over 20 times as much funding as lung cancer. It's inexcusable stupidity, but that level of stupidity is minor compared to the attention that developments in anti-aging receive.
A lot of this is politics, but doctors and scientists themselves can become a burden to society in this regard, since like anybody else, once they have funding in something, they have a one-track mind in doing whatever it takes to keep it. A lot of the best and brightest in genetics and medicine and biology want to work in an area like life extension, but since so few opportunities are available, they're instead forced to waste their talents elsewhere.
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Corribus
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posted March 17, 2021 08:44 PM |
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Edited by Corribus at 21:03, 17 Mar 2021.
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The diseases for which there is better funding are those that have social movements built around them. Breast cancer awareness is as much women's right activism as it is disease activism, and it is one of the best PR campaigns in history. Other diseases, such as lung cancer, are associated with social stigma, which dampens enthusiasm for research funds allocation. This isn't a very complicated concept, and there's not some shadow conspiracy built around it.
Mortality and burden also don't tell the whole story. Should research funds allocation scale with mortality rate, total mortality, level of suffering, morbidity, lost-life years, treatability (low hanging fruit), or what? You are condensing a highly complex issue into a trite argument. And rather than looking for people to blame, it might be better to look at the system itself and see if there are ways we could improve it to ensure that some diseases don't get neglected.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5836059/
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artu
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posted March 17, 2021 09:07 PM |
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Edited by artu at 21:09, 17 Mar 2021.
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OhforfSake said:
blizzardboy said:
He said 'most people', as in more than 50%.
How did you understand the point of his post?
Edit: We understood this part identically "Average life expectancy was comparatively very low.", but that is only the basis for the conclusion. What is the conclusion which I am apparently misunderstanding?
Forfy, it is not a misconception caused by high infant mortality rate, people really lived shorter.
When JJ said aging is good for the species, he brought it up as an evolutionary trait and I added that in our natural state, aging as we know it seldomy existed anyway. So, it’s a “new thing” whether it’s good or bad for the species. But if we are to take the natural state as “the norm” then most of us here are living extra years anyway.
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Minion
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posted March 17, 2021 09:18 PM |
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Oh, excellent post by Corribus on the previous page. I think he hit perfectly right on the money more than once. 
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artu
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posted March 17, 2021 09:29 PM |
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Edited by artu at 21:30, 17 Mar 2021.
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OhforfSake said:
And I understand this part to mean very few people reached a high age (by which my guess is you meant 60+ since that was the number you used before), which I disagree with. I don't know what you mean by "our natural state" though.
But I already elaborated and replied to both. By “natural state” I meant before civilization, before the Neolithic age, hunter-gatherers.
What exactly do you disagree with after reading something like this (and keep in mind this is still “progressive” compared to pre-neolithic and this is the landholding minority, not the serfs and it is quite a prosperous time for England):
Longevity has increased steadily through history. Life expectancy at birth was a brief 25 years during the Roman Empire, it reached 33 years by the Middle Ages and raised up to 55 years in the early 1900s. In the Middle Ages, the average life span of males born in landholding families in England was 31.3 years and the biggest danger was surviving childhood. Once children reached the age of 10, their life expectancy was 32.2 years, and for those who survived to 25, the remaining life expectancy was 23.3 years. Such estimates reflected the life expectancy of adult males from the higher ranks of English society in the Middle Ages and were similar to that computed for monks of the Christ Church in Canterbury during the 15th century.
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JollyJoker
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posted March 17, 2021 09:32 PM |
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artu said:
@JJ
Medicine is doing much in terms of keeping you alive, till the age comes when medicine isnt doing much. The increase in the longetivity of life span isnt due to one thing, of course, such things almost never are. But if it were for me to guess, I’d say modern medicine has more to do with it than work accidents. Just think of the poorest countries, do people die because they have more accidents or due to lack of modern medicine. I mean, just think of the times that being cut on the finger with rusty iron could mean death from infection.
What to call aging is rather a matter of semantics, not that semantics doesnt matter but it’s like whether to call Pluto a planet or not, we know it’s there, we know what it consists of. I guess, beyond semantics, blizz has this notion that once they call it a disease, it will start to rain paychecks but I can hardly imagine that’s just a matter of what they call it. I wouldnt have been surprised if a century from now, average life span became 140 or something but I dont think some miracle drug will all turn us into the Higlander in a few decades.
I think that you are very wrong here. In the poorest countries people die because a lack of EVERYTHING including (healthy) food, education and whatnot. They die because they are poor, not because they lack medicine. They wouldn't need much of it if they weren't poor.
It's not MEDICINE that does much in terms of keeping people alive. People have always been given birth, and let's face it, if something goes wrong with a birth and medicine helps, we are in accident territory.
But if you get sick - if you get a disease that won't go away because the immune system is helpless or not strong enough, or actually the problem, or if it's a genetical defect and so on, medicine is more like medicinemen of old are dancing around the patients and make encouraging noises.
If it's something that cannot be cured by simply removing something (like the appendix or the gall bladder), don't get your hopes up that medicine will help you. It won't.
And since talk is about cancer - same principle: as long as the tumor can be removed AND hasn't metastasized, you have relatively good chances. If it has OR can't you are screwed.
In short, medicine has so much improved within the last 100 years - mainly in the surgery and due to the help of modern technics, machines and devices.
Curing deseases? Auto-immune stuff?
Let me edit this: Take away the following three things and see what is left of medicine:
1) antibiotics (might prove kinda fatal in the not so far away future, but still, a sound discovery
2) Synthetic insulin
3) Cortisone (Prednisolon)
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artu
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posted March 17, 2021 09:45 PM |
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Edited by artu at 23:47, 17 Mar 2021.
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Poor according to modern standards, yes, but their lack of wealth was the norm in the past anyway. Depending on the climate, some people went through winters by only eating bread. Also, when you are poor, if we are not talking about a very severe drought or something similar, you dont usually directly starve to death, it’s just that inadequate nurture makes you weaker and you get sick easier, which is, in terms of mortality, still interlinked with having access to medicine, antibiotics, vaccines etc. You really take modern medicine for granted. Here, the first sentence of the article Corribus linked (it’s a good article, btw):
With the advent of vaccines, antibiotics, hygiene, and food safety, the toll of infectious diseases on human lives has decreased substantially. Pathogens are no longer the major cause of death, disability, and suffering in both the developed world and many developing countries.
To your edit: Why should I take antibiotics away? That’s like saying “take away processors and see what’s left of the digital revolution.”
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blizzardboy
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posted March 17, 2021 09:49 PM |
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Well, I guess you could also say education because without education there isn't going to be an expansive healthcare system. In that sense even transportation plays a large role in lifespan because a poor transportation system will impact availability of hospitals and clinics. But when all of that other stuff is achieved, the medicine itself is essential.
As far as the US goes, there's an advanced medical infrastructure but we don't have a good safety net, so for many that means less preventative medicine and more emergency situations, which are usually extraordinarily more costly than the preventative option. The weak safety net also contributes to high suicide because people panic and feel like they can't escape from a certain life situation. All that will cut into the life expectancy, especially in the lower class. In the US you have Asian Americans, who have a higher life expectancy than the life expectancy of Japan (which is the highest in the world) and then on the bottom rung you have demographics dying off in their early 70s, and these are the demographics with large gaps in access to medical care.
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artu
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posted March 17, 2021 09:59 PM |
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OhforfSake said:
But you also used the term natural state in connection with 150 years ago.
Anyway I disagree with the idea that we can derive something meaningful about maximum life span about single individuals based on life expectancy for the entire human population.
No, I said EVEN 150 years ago, most people didnt hit 60, which is true even if they didnt die an infant and which actually, if you look at the context of my sentence meant “you dont even have to go back to times as distant as “the natural state” to see how irrelevant was aging as we know it, as a social phenomenon to them. Were there people who got old, yes, but it was kind a like seeing your 105th birthday in these times, it was not common and you were considered very lucky. And just like we dont have social norms or economic budgets revolving around seeing 105, they didnt have them about seeing 80.
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Corribus
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posted March 17, 2021 10:14 PM |
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Edited by Corribus at 22:16, 17 Mar 2021.
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You guys might as well look at real life expectancy data. There are data before 1900 available.
Keep in mind life expectancy does not reflect the distribution about the mean, and the distribution is not normal.
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artu
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posted March 17, 2021 10:18 PM |
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Edited by artu at 22:18, 17 Mar 2021.
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@Forfy
By that if you mean, “life expactancy is misinterpreted because of high infant mortality rate, it is a misconception, once they were off the hook as a kid, most people got old,” which was your original objection, I presented to you, they didnt. As I mentioned earlier, you can find an old cemetery and see for yourself.
If you mean “no, they did have social norms which revolved around considering living 60+ as a casual thing,” then I’ll have to ask you what on earth are you basing your quite extraordinary claim on? If you look at most traditional folklore, aging enough to have white beard etc is usually associated with things like having super natural powers, extraordinary wisdom, being a wizard, dervish, god’s beloved servant etc.
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JollyJoker
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posted March 17, 2021 10:38 PM |
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artu said:
Poor according to modern standards, yes, but their lack of wealth was the norm in the past anyway. Depending on the climate, some people went through winters by only eating bread. Also, when you are poor, if we are not talking about a very severe drout or something similar, you dont usually directly starve to death, it’s just that inadequate nurture makes you weaker and you get sick easier, which is, in terms of mortality, still interlinked with having access to medicine, antibiotics, vaccines etc. You really take modern medicine for granted. Here, the first sentence of the article Corribus linked (it’s a good article, btw):
Sorry, artu: nonsense. If you are poor, you don't have access to medicine either, because you can't pay for it. Medicine you are in need of just because you are poor in the first place.
Quote:
With the advent of vaccines, antibiotics, hygiene, and food safety, the toll of infectious diseases on human lives has decreased substantially. Pathogens are no longer the major cause of death, disability, and suffering in both the developed world and many developing countries.Hygiene isn't a modern invention, more like a RE-invention. Hygiene has as much to do with medicine than building shelters that don't crash down on you when you sleep in them.
Quote:
To your edit: Why should I take antibiotics away? That’s like saying “take away processors and see what’s left of the digital revolution.”
Because it helps realizing that there are not many really important medical achievements. But even with them, if you leave out synthetic insulin, both antibiotics and cortison have very strong (negative) side effects. For example, antibiotics kill more than just the bacteria they are supposed to. Cortison, on the other hand...
In any case John Hopkins says, 2.675 million people have died from corona within a year. Medicine isn't looking that impressive to me.
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artu
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posted March 17, 2021 11:10 PM |
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Edited by artu at 00:25, 18 Mar 2021.
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@JJ
That’s a very strange line of reasoning:
Argument: Modern medicine had crucial impact on average life expectancy
Objection: No, it didn’t.
Argument: Well, look at the poorest countries with less access to modern medicine and how it affects their mortality rates.
Objection: They cant have access because they are poor in the first place.
How is why they cant have access relevant to the effects. If somebody came up with a magic pill that made us live 500 years but it was really expensive, so poorer regions had the same life expectancy, yet in rich ones, it skyrocketed, you would still say that the pill had crucial impact on life expectancy as long as it is reachable. Modern medicine is quite reachable in general and becoming more and more so, gradually everywhere. So when we compare life expectancy from the paleolithic or medieval times to today, modern medicine is an important, crucial parameter. It’s certainly more of a parameter than work accidents or stress. (One can even argue stress is more of an issue of our modern times.) As I already said, I dont think you can dissect the impacts of good nutrition and modern medicine when it comes to this, they are interlinked and both are crucial.
And of course hygiene also has a lot to do with modern developments such as having a proper sewer system, access to clean water, dysinfectants etc, which also all have a lot to do with being less exposed to pathogens and bacteria.
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This thread is pages long: 
