Why one prominent doctor (Dr. Ezekial Emmanuel) says, "I hope to die at 75"

[MADem]

188. I'll bet you'll change your mind when you hit your mid-sixties.

As for HFCS, we can avoid that--and nowadays, most of us know better--"NO HFCS" is a selling point at the grocery store, nowadays. Buy organic, read the label. Easy. Get a dog to go with those cats, and walk it every day. Exercise and smart eating (not too much) is key, and that is a lesson that Michelle Obama has been trying to push. It'll take a few more years before it sinks in, but it's starting to sink in, already.

The medical industry is certainly a piece of the problem when it comes to care, but the other piece is cheap so-and-sos who think they'll never get sick and don't want to pay in to a communal health care experience. People think that "universal health care" is the answer, that "single payer" will solve everything -- but they should go live in UK and see what it really is about. Shit is EXPENSIVE. Go into the stores, look at the prices, and if you think "dollars" you say "Well, that's not a bad price." Then you realize that the price is in POUNDS, and that's 1.60 to 2.00, dollar to pound, depending on the exchange rate. When everything costs nearly double, it's no bargain. And that is all VAT, and that VAT is there to help pay for the health care people get. Imagine waking up tomorrow and paying one and a half to two times the price for, well, pretty much everything, and not having a salary that compensates for those rises in prices. That's the real reason why we don't have it here--people just don't want to pay for it.

And in truth, they ration care under National Health, too. That's why children with spastic cerebral palsy go from UK to St. Louis, MO, by the HUNDREDS, at a cost of 40-60K pounds (not dollars) a pop for surgery and follow up, for SDR treatment. The parents hold fundraisers and charity walks to raise the money, because the operation used to be completely unavailable in UK, and they've only started doing it in the past year or two, and even now it's a long, long process to get approved (the younger, the better, is how that op works) so the parents prefer to raise the cash themselves and get the state-of-the-art procedure in USA (it's an older method they use in UK).

I do agree that Big Pharma likes to solve every problem with a pill, and the unholy marriage between doctors and Big Pharma needs to stop. Doctors are dealers who push pills for the pharmaceutical industry, and they are rewarded with trips and prizes for pushing that shit. That's just wrong, and IMO, unethical. For example, instead of giving someone a fancy new pill for their type 2 diabetes, they need to give them the shitty old cheap generic pill, and a prescription to Move Their Ass at the G-Y-M and a consult with a dietitian. That'll do more good than any fancy drugs.

Still and all, advances in medicine continue. They're curing diseases that were death sentences when I was your age. Taking a chunk of someone's liver and putting it in someone else's body wasn't possible when I lost a relative to liver disease. Even things as "ho-hum" as kidney transplants used to be highly risky/odds are you'll die type evolutions. When they start seriously growing body parts in the lab (like they're doing now, with ears, with skin, with trachea, etc) using the patient's own DNA, that will be a huge game-changer.


And as for "being alone at age forty with a buncha cats"--you might want to take some advice and good cheer from someone who knew how to live-give this a listen, you'll enjoy it: