Comment by saalweachter
2 years ago
Eh, you gotta be careful with One Weird Trick medicine.
Once you get past painfully obvious problems, everything not currently easily fixed by modern medicine tends to be "well it's really complicated" sets of problems; there's not one Cancer, your blood pressure can be elevated for many reasons, syndromes like chronic fatigue are almost certainly a mix of dozens of problems binned together by common symptoms but will have different causes and treatments.
Anyone saying they have one treatment to fix dozens of problems is a huckster, and trying to come up with a medical Theory of Everything to explain large swaths of disease is your origin story for how you become a huckster.
The difference between panaceas and this is that the idea for extending life isn't to add something, but not to fuck an essential part of life.
If you think of life as the careful coordination of millions of parts, then there will be a million of things that if you fuck up you will die.
Which is the model that matches acceleration of death rates as we age.
The reduction of death rates which is not due to panaceas but to fixing specific causes of death, one by one, yes.
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