Paradigm shift
"It's time to give up trying to prolong your life"
Georgy Golovanov, Hi-tech+
American epidemiologist Jay Olshansky believes that it is time to move away from the traditional model focused on the treatment of the disease. It is necessary to pay attention to the process underlying the ailments – aging.
In the middle of the XIX century, residents of developed countries made a deal with the aging process – in exchange for an increase in life expectancy by 30 years, billions of people learned what old age is. Modern old people can catch not only the birth of their grandchildren, but also their maturity. However, they have to pay a high price for this – an increase in heart disease, cancer, strokes, Alzheimer's disease, osteoporosis, arthritis and everything related to age and aging.
If quality of life is more important than quantity, it seems that humanity has driven itself into a corner, says Jay Olshansky, an epidemiologist from University of Illinois.
"It's time to stop trying to prolong your life," he said. "Instead, we should focus on increasing health, not life expectancy."
In an era when billionaires like Peter Thiel are investing millions of dollars in finding ways to prolong life almost indefinitely, the idea that we already live too long seems a little radical, writes Atlantic.
Health and longevity are often confused. However, this is not the same thing: age brings diseases that doctors continue to treat as individual cases, not noticing the whole picture. But if people want to maintain their health, they should support it, starting from childhood. And the healthcare system needs to change in such a way as to shift more responsibility for the patient to the therapist, rather than specialist doctors. Accordingly, it is necessary to increase their wages.
Olshansky emphasized the advantage of disease prevention over treatment: a healthy diet, sleep and regular exercise help better than medications and therapy after the fact.
However, on one issue of nutrition, he spoke categorically negatively: "Everyone asks me about dietary supplements as some kind of magic elixir," the doctor said. "I will be frank: most people who take dietary supplements and think that they prolong their lives in this way simply produce expensive urine."
Some startups are already promising to slow down aging by affecting telomeres. However, a number of experts, including Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn, consider this approach to be pseudoscience.
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