Category Archives: Health

Health, Philosophy, Science And Society

The Secret Of Immortality

4 Comments

From a jellyfish?

[Update a few minutes later]

I posted this without reading it all, because it’s a long. But I found this telling:

Even some of Kubota’s peers are cautious when speaking about potential medical applications in Turritopsis research. “It is difficult to foresee how much and how fast . . . Turritopsis dohrnii can be useful to fight diseases,” Stefano Piraino, a colleague of Ferdinando Boero’s, told me in an e-mail. “Increasing human longevity has no meaning, it is ecological nonsense. What we may expect and work on is to improve the quality of life in our final stages.”

My emphasis. This is a religious belief, not a scientific one.

[Update a few minutes later]

Related: life extension through gene therapy:

Mice treated at the age of one lived longer by 24% on average, and those treated at the age of two, by 13%. The therapy, furthermore, produced an appreciable improvement in the animals’ health, delaying the onset of age-­‐related diseases — like osteoporosis and insulin resistance — and achieving improved readings on aging indicators like neuromuscular coordination.

The gene therapy consisted of treating the animals with a DNA-­modified virus, the viral genes having been replaced by those of the telomerase enzyme, with a key role in aging. Telomerase repairs the extreme ends or tips of chromosomes, known as telomeres, and in doing so slows the cell’s and therefore the body’s biological clock. When the animal is infected, the virus acts as a vehicle depositing the telomerase gene in the cells.

This study “shows that it is possible to develop a telomerase-­based anti-­aging gene therapy without increasing the incidence of cancer,” the authors affirm. “Aged organisms accumulate damage in their DNA due to telomere shortening, [this study] finds that a gene therapy based on telomerase production can repair or delay this kind of damage,” they add.

It’s from May, but I don’t recall seeing it.

[Update a while later]

Must be early-onset Alzheimers. I posted about it at the time.

Business, Economics, Health, Political Commentary

ObamaCare: Still Unpopular

34 Comments

…and still a mess:

It’s a situation no one anticipated when the Affordable Care Act was written. The law assumed states would create and operate their own exchanges, and set aside billions in grants for that purpose.

Why did the law assume that? Because, as Ramesh Ponnuru wrote back in October, “The law’s supporters . . . expected the health-care law to become more popular over time.” T’was ever thus, for blind optimism is Obamacare’s founding principle: If people understand it, they’ll like it; if Obama makes just one more speech about it, they’ll like it; if Congress passes it, they’ll like it; if HHS spends millions of dollars promoting it, they’ll like it; if the states are forced to implement it, they’ll like it. And so on and so forth. And yet…

This is why federalism was invented.

Culinary, Health, Media Criticism

The “Perfect Health Diet”

11 Comments

A new book at Amazon, a variant of paleo, though it allows potatoes and white rice.

It seems to have a lot of good reviews. Here’s another one from an Instapundit reader:

Chalk me and my family up as big fans and beneficiaries of the PHD. It’s been life-altering, literally, for myself and my two daughters.

Given the success of the PHD and other similar diets (like the Paleo Diet and the Primal Blueprint), it’s very likely that most of our chronic health issues in the United States are the result of malnutrition: following the USDA’s dietary guidelines seem to reliably lead to human malnutrition.

Malthus may have been right, although not in the way he thought.

One day people will look back on the late twentieth century nutrition advice in the same manner we view bleeding by leeches. Except the latter will be more respectable.

Business, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Oklahoma Doctors Versus ObamaCare

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People paying for their own medical procedures, at a fixed price. What a concept.

When I had my hernia repair a couple months ago, I actually shopped around, not just for doctors, but for surgery facilities and anesthesiologist. They all coordinated after I made my choices, but I made the decision who would do it and where, and I saved a lot of money over what an insurance company would have paid. The fundamental problem with health care in this country is the complete market disconnect created by employer-provided plans.

Business, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Cost Of ObamaCare

12 Comments

It will be $1.79/hour/employee:

These changes are spelled out in the 2,572-page law, but many more changes will be imposed by regulations yet to be written. The Obama administration is adding federal workers at a rapid pace to churn out and enforce new rules. The government’s own projections say the cost of health-care administration — bureaucrats telling doctors and patients what to do — will soar from $29 billion when President Obama was first elected to $71 billion by 2020, some $40 billion dollars a year more in bureaucracy.

What a shame: That’s enough money to buy private health plans for fully half of all Americans who are now uninsured because they can’t afford it.

Don’t be silly. That wouldn’t grow Leviathan, and give the government control over our lives.

That crashing sound you hear is people being dropped from coverage, and having their hours reduced, in some cases to zero.