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Comment by natrius | Hacker News Reader

Your dichotomy is a false one. Do you really think anyone's trying to keep frail old people alive just to count off more days? It seems clear that the goal is to eliminate diseases and decline, which would increase everyone's quality of life.

You're free to continue practicing the barbaric ritual of death if you want.

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> Do you really think anyone's trying to keep frail old people alive just to count off more days?

I think that's a pretty good description of what's going on in the last decade of a lot of people's lives. There's a huge bias toward high risk invasive procedures that have a high probability of leaving the patient debilitated even when the expected lifespan increase is fairly modest. Our penchant for hope in difficult circumstances leads to a lot of unnecessary suffering. There is plenty in modern medical practice to consider 'barbaric'. Skepticism with regard to the current crop of medical utopists is warranted, because assuredly current barbaric medical practices were developed and implemented, overwhelmingly, with the best of intentions.

There is a good technical reason for the present state of medicine for age-related disease, which is that it overwhelmingly addresses proximate causes rather than root causes. Near all treatments attempt to mess with the complex disease state in a late stage of its progression, or in some way compensate for loss of function by adjusting other processes into a higher state of activity. It is expensive, error-prone, and the gains are tiny. The underlying root causes continue to run forward unaddressed.

The research community has only just started the transition into treating root causes, which is to say the aging process itself, the accumulating forms of cell and tissue damage that are fundamental, not caused by anything other than the normal operation of metabolism. There are initiatives, some of which have reached the stage of clinical translation, but they are only a tiny fraction of the overall expenditure at present.

This will change over the next decade or two as the first results for fundamental damage repair (e.g. senescent cell clearance) become compelling enough and widely known enough to shift the entire field in the right direction.

Dr Dale Bredesen has published an article about a small study where he reversed(cured) Alzheimer in 9 out of 10 patients. The purists will say that a group of 10 is too small to draw any conslusion and mathematically speaking they are right. But the mistake that these people make is that they do not understand that Dr Dale Bredesen is on the right track and what is necessary to repeat the study with a larger group. There is a lot of lack of interest in promising treatments.

Anyway, Dr Dale Bredesen is now doing the second study but I have no idea when the results will be made public. Since the first study showed great results after 4 months of treatment, I am optimistic that it will be faily soon.

The treatment of Dr Dale Bredesen is very different from what the average reader may expect. It is not a medicine-based treatment, but a "general health optimization" treatment with 35 variables. In my opinion, the Alzheimer reversal treatment can be used to prevent Alzheimer, and I hope that in a number of years a study will find out if that is right.

> It seems clear that the goal is to eliminate diseases and decline, which would increase everyone's quality of life.

I mean, unless our population is growing—then the older people will be competing with the young!

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