Should We Consider Aging a Disease?

#1

Rethinking human “enhancement” in an era of sick-care.

If a person lives to be 100 years old, they are almost certain to develop cancer. Indeed, 96 percent of all cancers occur in patients aged 35 and older. This means that cancers are often not a deviation from “the normal functioning path of the organism”—and yet we treat them as abnormal. Human aging is not yet widely considered a disease, but can be perceived as the primary cause of suffering in our century. Scientifically, aging can be understood as the source of all the leading causes of death in 2022, including COVID-19—around 90 percentof all US deaths from the virus were patients over 60.

Economically, the gradual decay of our unprecedentedly long-lived populations costs the US nearly half its federal budget every year.

Read the full paper:

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#2

No…but when you are trying to get the medical community that is diseased based in their problem solving to buy into it, then Yes. Once we look at aging through the optics of a disease process, it then creates solutions. If you look at it as a “normal” process then you don’t go through an approach to treat, slow down or enhance. Another extreme question, Is Life a disease? Hopefully, AI will not come to that conclusion.

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