FARK.com: (7484737) The good news: You have a good chance at living longer than ever before in human history. The bad news: You'll probably be living longer with a crippling, painful disease

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		The good news: You have a good chance at living longer than ever before in human history. The bad news: You'll probably be living longer with a crippling, painful disease (azfamily.com)		5
		More: Scary, chronic illnesses, human history, demographic transformation, Doctors Without Borders, Tropical Medicine, malnutrition, polio, hearing loss

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3343 clicks; posted to Main » on 13 Dec 2012 at 5:09 PM | Favorite | share:

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ReapTheChaos		2012-12-13 05:20:25 PM

3 votes:

My take on this has always been this, whats the point of living longer if you're bedridden in some nursing home for the last 15 years of your life.

Kind of reminds me of some of these medications you see advertised on TV, most of them, the side effects sound ten times worse than what they're supposed to be helping. You may very well have helped your high blood pressure, but now you have blurred vision, headaches, dizziness, nausea, leg cramps, night sweats, constipation and your dick stopped working.

Gyrfalcon		2012-12-13 10:05:14 PM

2 votes:

If you live long enough, you die. What a shocker.

No, the real shocker is that all these diseases we're getting now? Yeah, we didn't used to get them because we didn't live long enough TO get them. People didn't used to die of cancer and heart disease, because those take a while to develop and when the life expectancy was about 50, nobody lived long enough to develop fatal colon cancer or terminal heart disease. Now that humans live into their 70's, amazingly, we can develop fatal tumors in our ass.

The other thing is that we've eliminated the killers that used to mask chronic diseases. In the Olden Days--and in 3d world countries today--people died of pneumonia and dysentery, which are quite astonishingly symptoms of...heart disease and cancer. Imagine that. If your heart doesn't work, your lungs fill up with fluid and you die. If your internal organs are riddled with tumors, your bowels are often the first place it shows up, and you die. Well, nowadays, we can treat pneumonia and diarrhea, so people live long enough for the other, chronic disease to kill them.

So it's not that we're more disease-ridden than before, just that by living longer and NOT dying of the curable diseases that used to kill us, we have to die of things that take a while to develop and aren't curable. Which is a good thing, because if nobody ever died, where would we all live?

ciberido		2012-12-13 06:32:29 PM

2 votes:

Logan's way ahead of you.
www.mybaycity.com

Happy Carrousel, everyone!

MayoSlather		2012-12-13 06:50:34 PM

1 votes:

ReapTheChaos: My take on this has always been this, whats the point of living longer if you're bedridden in some nursing home for the last 15 years of your life.

Kind of reminds me of some of these medications you see advertised on TV, most of them, the side effects sound ten times worse than what they're supposed to be helping. You may very well have helped your high blood pressure, but now you have blurred vision, headaches, dizziness, nausea, leg cramps, night sweats, constipation and your dick stopped working.

That's my perspective. Live fully and live well, but don't simply live to get to the oldest age you can because that isn't necessarily the best quality of life. Who really wants to eat dull tasting food for years without drugs, alcohol, sugar or adventures taken simply to die an old crusty person hopped up on pain medication while everyone you cared about is dead. No thanks.