Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity
Introduction
Author gave up medicine when he realised as a cancer specialist, that he was only delaying the inevitable and not curing them. But later he realised, that we can actually put a stop to the source, i.e., our lifestyle, which mostly is the cause for the diseases we get.
Long game, from fast death to slow death
Longetivity is not just how long we live but also the quality with which we live.
Most of the times when we are admitted to hospital it’s too late and at the point where little could be done. The only good way is to change the source, the lifestyle. For example, the major reduction in people stopping smoking over last decade has eliminated so many problems.
Emotional health is also very important, as it alone as decimate whatever things we have been maintaining physically.
Rethinking medicine for the age of chronic disease
Author says resistance to change and innovation at his place, for usual medical procedures, which made him what to quit.
It’s about the risk and reward factor, risk is more readily taken in other professions like banking finance but in Medicine, more emotional than analytical emphasis is put.
There was an age old saying which got morphed to - Do no harm, which became the motto for surgeons. Which doesn’t really make sense, coming from the old times, because they would follow more harmful procedures like blood letting, drilling holes into skulls for headache , using mercury which is super toxic, etc
It is not saying that we should look for riskiest but short term harm might not mean long term harm. One example shared from author experience, was a patient who would have died in the elevator ride to operation room where the surgery could have been done in a sterile fashion. But there was a very high chance that he would have died if kept that long, so author had to operate him in the elevator itself , which did pose a huge risk but then again saved him. Sometimes doing nothing is the riskiest choice.
Risk should be not straight up avoided but rather to be analysed to work with.
Most chronic diseases cure isn’t readily solvable like cancer, etc and they are in the body for a long time before they trigger and is too late to be saved most of the times.
Advancement to technology is also playing an important role in diagnosis and prevention of many diseases. Lot of gadgets which help patients to monitor their body health markers. Even when we go for tests, most are static which tell average data for example blood glucose where we fast and do tests to get an avg value for last 90 days vs use of devices which monitors blood glucose levels in real time, helping with much better diagnosis, taking a feedback driven approach.
Most medicine procedures, diagnosis etc right now are on data which is taking average on a huge set of people, and applying the medicine based on that. The new technological advances are helping view each patient as a unique individual and not just treating everybody as the same.
We should start focusing on our quality of life (health span) for helping against diseases. Most medicine classes don’t really talk about things like how to maintain our physical and cognitive skills as we age, etc - like exercise, having enough sleep, nutritional benefits.