We like to believe that we’re living in a time of high technology. And, in many ways, we are. Medicine is more sophisticated today than it ever was in the past. In the early days, treatments dealt mainly with communicable diseases. The goal was to find drugs, antibiotics and vaccines that would prevent harmful pathogens from damaging the body and causing disease.
This process worked and today, there is hardly any tuberculosis, polio or tetanus – diseases that once ravaged people’s lives. However, the disease didn’t go away. Instead, it simply changed form. Now the problem isn’t infectious agents (with some notable exceptions). Instead, it’s the consequence of the body itself breaking down.
Today’s Drugs Mask Symptoms
If you have heart disease, your doctor will put you on statins. If you have high blood pressure, you’ll need to take beta blockers. If you have diabetes, you’ll get regular insulin injections. The list goes on and on.
Unfortunately, these treatments aren’t the same as antibiotics. They don’t cure diseases. Instead, they help people better manage the symptoms of disease. Sometimes they don’t work at all and may even cause harm, as any defective drugs and devices attorney will readily point out.
Medicine Needs To Address Aging
The reason for this comes down to the root causes of most diseases in advanced countries. The problem is that the drugs don’t deal with the underlying causes of disease: the aging process itself. It is incredibly rare for somebody under the age of 30 to drop dead of a heart attack, no matter what they eat. They could be drinking ghee all day long and it wouldn’t matter because their bodies can cope with the damage.
As people get older, though, their capacity to resist harm from the environment diminishes. Their cells stop functioning correctly, and eventually disease takes hold.
The current approach to medicine attempts to deal with diseases individually, one by one. However, this approach is an endless game of whack-a-mole. Even if there is a cure for cancer tomorrow, life expectancy will hardly change at all. That’s because if cancer doesn’t get you, something else will.
The trick here is to address the cause of all major chronic diseases: aging. If you can keep the body young, then diseases probably won’t emerge (or at least, not in the same way as they do now).
Researchers are switching from trying to find cures for individual diseases towards looking for ways to rejuvenate the body from the inside out.