A study by the Women’s Health Institute indicates that hormone therapy does a whole lot more harm than good. A five year study has indicated that common forms of hormone therapy increase a woman’s risk of breast cancer, heart disease, strokes and blood clots by significant margins.

This bothers me on a number of levels. I know people who are getting hormone treatment at this moment. They’re considering stopping, but they’ve already done it for a year.

This is also a treatment for cancer. FOR cancer… and it might cause it?

How long has the average U.S. life expectancy been around 72 years? Since then, have we actually improved anything, or are we just mucking around?

Alot of the stuff I took for cancer had the side effect of...Cancer.

I also had some stuff that stopped the replication of DNA while on the meds, and some of it gave me the drug induced hepatitis, that's where you have the symptoms of hep but don't have hep.

Actually, the US l.e is extending, and while it's slowing down, the quality of life is improving. With some of the new drugs derived from the human henome project coming down the pipe, things will get better and cheaper.

As for things like cancer treatments, things are WAY easier for my type of cancer, ALL, than it was 22 years ago. Same for lymphantic cancer and testicular cancer.

My old Boss and I consider ourselves O.G cancer survivors.

Part of the problem is that as a society, we've convinced ourself that there is such a thing as Perfect Health, and it's just a matter of finding the Perfect Treatment(s) to produce it.

Whereas in reality, all drugs have various effects, some good, some bad, and your choices are usually among those that do the good things you want without too many identified bad things happening, too.

You can no more have perfect health than a house can be in perfect condition. Even if it looks all good to the human eye today, the paint is still peeling, the carpet still wearing, the water heater getting gunky, the furnace wearing out, and the pipes getting root intrusions. All we can do is keep trying to patch things up faster than entropy wears 'em down.

Just an actuarial note (sorry, it's my job)... the vast majority of the recent (last few centiries) expansion of life expectancy comes due to better survival in years 0-25, not in years 70+. The math is fairly clear... let one person who was going to die at 5 live to 60 or 70 and you help the average a lot more than adding 10 years of life to someone already at or near the average age of death.

Life expectance is, really, not a very useful number because of the over-weighting low age deaths have... It tells you little to nothing of the distribution of deaths within the range of possibilities. A life expectancy of 70 could mean 1/2 die at birth and 1/2 die at 140... Which, for the half that survived, would be much superior to today's above-70 life expectancy.

More telling, IMO, is the fact that, based on experience between 1980 to 2002, the American Academy of Actuaries has decided to move the higest age they study mortality for from 100 (where it had been since the early 1900s) to 120. This means a statistically significant number of people are now living beyond age 100. This suggests very significant advances in geriatric medicine.

Wow Jack is deep

Heh.

This I've know from various mailing lists for many years now, but yeah, you're right :)

Here's a note on perfect diets. Inneresting.