A reminder that (a) we have a lot of work to do in the engineering of longer, healthier lives, and (b) a lot of people just don't get it:

BABY Boomers are suffering a national delusion about ageing and expect government to deliver the good times when they are old.

They hold unrealistic expectations about health and lifestyle into old age and have little notion of how much it will cost and how to pay for it ... And they indulge in an "extraordinary conflation" of alternative remedies and western traditional medicines.

By "just don't get it" I mean that most people don't understand the true range of what is actually possible. Decades of relentless focus diets, skincare, wrinkles and supplements means that most people see "anti-aging science" as something from Revlon, or that nothing more is possible beyond adding a couple of years of health through diet and the next overhyped pill or fad. On the other side of the fence, the old-school drug pipeline and mainstream research targeting age-related disease is development forced into a regulatory straightjacket by unaccountable government employees who have declared they will not approve any therapy aimed at aging. It is largely run under the philosophy of patching up damage after the fact rather than preventing it or repairing it.

Most people don't see beyond the sorry state of what is, to visualize the cost of missing out on what is not.

Never mind the inability to tell the difference between the way the world actually works - the benefits and results of the scientific method - and the fantasy being pushed by any number of sellers in the "anti-aging" marketplace. Never mind the spread of the foolish idea that anything good comes from the centralization of government power and abrogation of personal responsibility for your own future health and longevity. The article goes on to illustrate exactly what happens in socialized medical systems: the inevitable rationing and the old thrown under the bus first of all:

She said in some overseas countries governments have already introduced rationing of operations. "There are rules that you cannot get a kidney transplant if you are over 75, for instance on the public health. You cannot get a hip replacement if you are over 80,' she said.

In some countries governments rationed radical health care for older people.

"In Australia we haven't done this, but we have long hospital waiting lists. If you are on the public hospital system and you want a knee transplant you could wait three years. In fact, people are going to need to pay for their own health, if they want that level of health provision," she said.

But the first quote of this post really does encapsulate a whole world of willful ignorance driving headlong for an entirely avoidable cliff. Until many more people understand that vastly more is possible than the narrow world of supplements and a few extra years of health, that we could be mere decades away from biotechnology capable of repairing the cellular and molecular damage that makes up aging, then progress towards that goal will remain slow.

That's an ugly reality: so much is possible, so little in the way of resources is being directed to see it through. We can either delude ourselves that things will get better on their own, or get out there and do something about it.

Technorati tags: anti-aging, advocacy, libertarian, life extension

Posted by Reason at June 19, 2007 9:16 PM | TrackBack (0)