Maggie's Farm

> Should We Consider Aging a Disease?

Yes.

Tucking this into a reply, because the anti-spam kept blowing it up:

The author is wrong about several things, amount them:

> If a person lives to be 100 years old, they are almost certain
> to develop cancer. Indeed, 96 percent of all cancers occur in
> patients aged 35 and older. This means that cancers are often
> not a deviation from “the normal functioning path of
> the organism”—and yet we treat them as abnormal.

This is a very correct lie. It is so correct, and so much a lie that either the author knows it's a lie, or integrated constituent parts of the lie so deeply that they are unexamined and then combined to make the lie.

Cancer is not a single thing, there are more than 100 different kinds of cancer, and they are broken down in a variety of ways depending on where they come from.

The one thing that all cancers have in common is that *a mutation happens*. Something causes a change in the DNA of a cell, and at replication time this change is insufficient to trigger the bodies immune system, but sufficient to cause uncontrolled reproduction.

As the author notes, cancer is a disease, primarily, of longevity. Mostly because it takes time for these transcription errors to develop and to get big enough to hit the knee where it goes non-linear. (yes, this is overly simplistic, and ignores some genetic cancers)

A 1cm diameter cancer--which is probably about the current limit of detection via imaging, "liquid biopsies" can show positive for smaller amounts, but this isn't reliable--is about a billion cells. Anything that size or smaller can suddenly get noticed by the immune system and killed off *before any symptoms present*.

So this is, in a sense "normal", since 1 out of X cells will have mutation errors, some of those mutation errors will evade the immune system, and some of them will evade the immune system and grow exponentially.

But arguing that this is "normal" AND SO WE SHOULD ACCEPT IT is crap.

In the middle ages, so the legend goes (I haven't verified it,but it's close enough for this) one of the biggest killers was TOOTH DECAY. People would get a "bad" tooth, the gum or root would get infected and they would die because of that. In the middle ages this was "normal", and it is at least as natural a problem as is cancer. It was also something that would affect "older" (for middle ages values of that) more than younger.

Hell, deaths from infection were also "normal" and "natural". Cholera for example.

Does that mean that we shouldn't have developed the discipline of dentistry and reasonable sanitation practices?

Hell no.

"Aging" is not a disease, it's something that happens by not dying, but a there's a bunch of other things that tend to happen more to people who are older that are diseases.

And you can and should figure out how to mitigate them--diet, exercise, medicine, surgery, etc. because there is enough suffering in the world, and while you can't get rid of it, reducing it is the right thing to do.