The wonderful thing about modern medicine is that so many of these complaints that used to signify old age and decline can be coped with.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
There's nothing wrong with making the best of one's declining years, but what does annoy me is the fatalism. Now that we're seriously in range of finding therapies that actually work against ageing, this apathy, of course, becomes an enormous part of the problem.
The way the elderly are treated, and in some cases warehoused and medicated, rather than nurtured and listened to, is distressing.
Modern medicine has presented us with a Faustian bargain: Our aging bodies can bankrupt our children and grandchildren. We have run into the 'law of diminishing returns' in health care, where we are often doing more and more, with higher and higher technology, at more and more cost, for less and less benefit.
Pharmaceuticals have become an increasingly important part of modern medicine, and our seniors shouldn't have to worry about whether they can afford the medicines they need to stay healthy and maintain their independence.
Medicines are only fit for old people.
'Aging' has been bad ever since we figured out it led to dying.
The fact that doctors tend to treat people as individuals, guided by the need to ensure patient confidentiality, can reinforce this pattern of seeing the changes and challenges aging brings on through our heads and our bodies, rather than as a shared experience.
Most people look at ageing as a disease. They do. They have prescriptions and places where you go to eradicate it.
Old age is not a disease - it is strength and survivorship, triumph over all kinds of vicissitudes and disappointments, trials and illnesses.
Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn't organized to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.