10.(0-3) Physician's Notebooks 10 - Longevity/Cancer/Death

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Update 20 Septr 2021.

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Healthy Longevity, Cure Cancer, Delay Death and Speed the Dying Process

10.(0-3) Physician's Notebooks 10 - Longevity/Can...

This section is the one you may scroll down on here. It contains 1. Healthy Longevity, 2. Technology of Keeping Alive, and 3. Fear of Death.  Use search & find or Scroll down from here for text.

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10.4 Amok Time - What If Your World Goes Crazy?

10.5 Deaths to Avoid - Natural Catastrophe

10.6 Atheism and Healthy Longevity

10.7 Becoming Aware You Want To Live Long

10.(8-9) Voluntary Death/Suicide

10.10 Why Seek Healthy Longevity?

10.11 Long Healthy Life - a Prescription

10.12 Say You Get Cancer? What to do?

10.13 Cancer Full On

10.(14-15) Cancer Prevention/Treatment Continues

10.16 Secrets of Good Breast Cancer Survival

10-17 Leukemia - Living Life on Your mFeet Not on Y...

10.18 Deathwatches

• 10.19 Cousin Dan - A Study in Nonagenarian Living...

• 10.20 How to Avoid Being Murdered - Advice that ...

• 10.21 The Experimental Life in its 9th Decade      10.22 Other Lives - Deathwatches

HL: Healthy Longevity – Definition:  Healthy Longevity, or HL, Living past age 80 on one's feet, with humor, energy, and joie de vivre (“joy of life”), i.e., "wits and wit."  Actually, putting a number (80) where Healthy Longevity starts gives too much emphasis to living long over livindg healthily and happily. An 81-year-old who just barely totters around, who can add one and one and get two, and who can tell the joke about the traveling salesman and the farmer`s daughter is less indicative of healthy longevity than the 70-year-old who can read a book a month with understanding on any subject.  But, for the sake of statistics we`ll keep age 80 in our definition of HL.

The outer limit of human life is age 120. This is based on our present human experience and further suggested by experiments with paramecia (one-celled swimming animals) whose generational limit (number of generations before one clone dies out) is the equivalent of 120 human years of life. 

  The age 113/114 is a reasonably good goal because it computes to c.1-million-hour life and has been attained, making the hour a micro-decimal life unit and a possibility today.  But, presently, there is limiting living space. (Moon & Mars colonization could change this.) 

If average lifespan extended to age 120, the world population would increase, mostly with ill, old people. 

 Notebooks gives advice for each reader to benefit by living long and, once the genetic lifespan program is exhausted, for dying quick without suffering, and society may benefit too. In future, perhaps, the principles of Healthy Longevity will be taught from childhood, and Society structured to assist it. Now, we depend on good luck to get to age 65 without having life shortened or worsened by sickness and accident. Notebooks gives information to get the most health out of whatever lifespan is fated for each reader. And the lucky ones who pass age 80 in health will be a test group to show what can be done. 

Why stay alive?  Of course, before old age, we take it for granted.  But at age 88 now, if you asked me, I`d say I stay alive looking forward to my next eating experience. Otherwise old age has brought me aches and dysfunctions and worries.  This is the personal approach. The societal approach is that a population of centenarians who are as brilliant at age 80 as they were at age 30 could be a tremendous boon to mankind.  Just think if a brilliant writer like Thoreau who died at age 49 could be giving us his brilliant insights at age 100; or if Einstein, whose mental powers had waned by age 60 due to his severe arteriosclerosis could have retained his 30-year-old brain to age 100.  We’d have had TOE (The Theory of Everything) that science has unsuccessfully pursued these last 100 years. A generation of geniuses instead of goofuses as we have today.

10.2: Technology of Keeping Alive

 If Society were motivated, it could aim to keep people alive healthily, enjoyably to age 120: by a controlled clean environment to prevent infection, by giving anti-aging hormone and by assuring good nutrition.      

Heart, lung or liver failure could be bypassed by transplant, and kidney failure by dialysis while waiting for transplant. Many defective functions could be repaired using tissue patch or artificial prostheses, and the degenerative process could be slowed or reversed by better nutrition and blood cleansing.
  For now, this is not government health policy. Still, as experiment, it would be worthwhile and within reach of a medical university to find the practical limit of human longevity and the spin-offs and problems of achieving an average healthy lifespan, assuming it to be 120 years. 

 To have intellectually gifted persons live 120 years, each with healthy body and mind functioning well, up till the end, might become a source of discovery, invention and advancement of science and wisdom. Given a continuing healthy functioning body with minimal degenerative change and with maximal computer assist, the educated person should get smarter as she or he gets older because of accumulated, acquired knowledge. The ideal research lab might be a plastic bubble colony on the Moon because low gravity is less work for heart and protects bone and muscle and because we could control the environment to be germ-free, pollution-free, radiation-minimized, and also make weather equable and the sun never shine unless we wish it.

10.3: Fear of Death

Infants and toddlers, unaware, can't fear it. Pre-teens become aware but most don't accept dying as personal possibility. At 30 one has or will soon see a parent die, or may have offspring that would be badly affected by one's own death. Then one fears dying, and this peaks in the 40s. After 60, aging gradually lowers the fear. By the 80s (myself now), many survivors no longer fear death. After 80, for a person in poor health, life may be joyless because of the pain and infirmity of old age. But for a person in good health, life may be no worse than when younger. Best appreciation of a life requires successful self-psychoanalysis. If you are that rare one who has kept healthy and achieved successful psychoanalysis, who is accessing the deep physical and intellectual pleasures, who is accomplishing important, interesting, unfinished work, and is connected to person(s) who depend(s) on you; then you will have strong reason to try to live on well, with caution, but also not fearing to do what needs to be done and ready for death at any time. Here is my ideal healthy longevity. Such persons are the Lucky Ones.

What about me, right now at age 88 years and 9 months? I do not actively seek death - I still have enjoyments, mainly eating and seeing my accomplishments - but I am bored because long stretches of a day I have little to do, and I have aches in the bones and joints. In the last 15 years I have achieved most of my goals and I have no family members who depend on my continued existence. But I do have worries about becoming incapacitated or, perhaps, even disgracing myself by bad behavior  in old age.
    However, for the moment I am continuing, happily, a program to achieve maximal healthy longevity and I cannot afford being incapacitated by an old age stroke, a loss of ability to walk (I am close to that and need a wheelchair assist.) or loss of use my hands or a brain deficit. So, as long as I can remain active and energetic, I am satisfied to stay alive but if a sudden event suggested the end of that phase I would choose not to call 911 in the hope I could have clean, sudden death. And I would no longer be interested in surviving cancer if it needed radical, disabling treatments.

Notes for Seminar (To readers: this below was preparation for 26 Oct. 2019 Seminar at the Kokusai Bunka Kaikan in Tokyo.  What is Seminar?  Best is "meeting for discussion". It differs from "lecture" in that the audience is expected to participate, i.e., everyone is audience. Today we concentrate on my experience. I`ve spent 30 years studying and living Healthy Longevity. But I do not mean to present myself as a model. I have many bad habits. I am at age 86 (2 years ago), without a social life, with children who at best ignore me. But I do have one thing that most persons don`t.  At age 86, I am still standing; and, more importantly, I have my wits and wit in full quota from my mental peak. Age number 86 means little!  Almost everyone today lives into their 80s.  Age 86 and still standin` (like Elton) means a little more than “little” but still no big deal.  But 86 with all one`s wits!  That is something to crow about.  And it did not just happen due to luck; I worked at it and now in Seminar I shall tell you how. (Written 2 years ago.)

  But first I do not want to be arrogant and claim that What I did for Healthy Life is the reason I still have healthy Life.  What I am presenting is a longitudinal view --- one person`s life experience. And it is experimental: I have done dangerous stuff and watched the result. For example, I tried taking opioids and they worked for me in terms of relieving me of the paranoias of life that make for too much unhappiness and failure.  It is only one small example. The things I have done that appear to have worked, if not already confirmed in horizontal studies (a study of a cohort of same age persons) need to be tested statistically for evidence before I can claim I succeeded and advise others to do it my way.

So this is not an `I did it my way discussion`; it`s an `I experimented and now let us confirm my results in long range horizontal studies of causes and effects`.

   OK, what are the factors I find to promote my healthy longevity?  (Not necessarily in order of importance.)

Avoiding and erasing what I call the paranoias of life: the lingering anxieties most of us have in the corners of our minds that prevent us from feeling happy, that obstruct our good thinking, that cause our mistakes in life: anxieties about health (What does that pain mean?), about finances (the IRS), about social relationships (Does she love me?) etc.  

Here, first of all one needs is a good self psychoanalysis (assistance is OK but not required and may be unhelpful).  For that you need to read my chapter 9.33 on psychoanalysis.

Use of opioids and other drugs intelligently (Very controversial and problematic); again, see my chapter on recreational drugs

Attention of Vision and Hearing.  Story of my cataract surgeries.  Importance of good hearing to avoid accident; earwax removal

MVA --- driver and pedestrian.   Would-be centenarians do better without becoming drivers.  Also pay attention to your driver.  Then your pedestrian activity --- Attention, Alertness, No Drugs.

Occupying Self with Good Hobbies and Leisure Activities --- “Good” meaning not a danger to you or others, not overly expensive.  Jigsaw puzzles are a useful, good time passer at home.  Stamp collecting for old age.

Monitors of Good Health: Blood tests, BP, resting HR and EKG Holter (24-hour normal life) monitors, EEG, Ultrasound of upper abdomen, Scopies by decade. Of course for women Pap smear.

Medical Care: a good GP, a good health insurance milieu.

Numbers Game:  LDL 60 or less, Resting HR between 55 and 70, systolic BP 110 to 140, diastolic BP 50 to 80s, blood glucose normal range.

Hormone Levels (Controversial and possibly problematic): For men Testosterone; for women E2, for everyone PTH and Thyroid

I noted my BPH in 1980 at age 47. I am motivated against the TUR surgery because I feared it might stop sex so I got a urethra-dilating cystoscopy once a year for 6 yrs. My purpose of these cystoscopies, in which a finger-thick hollow metal tube is inserted into and up the penis and through the prostate opening into the bladder was to stretch and widen the narrowed prostate canal to reduce the narrowing and keep my urine flowing. I also got rectal ultrasound test of my prostate to check cancer and measure the size and consistency of prostate. My prostate shrank after the stretching and my symptom became less, and here I am at 88 still standin’ without TUR. I tolerate a slow-to-start urine stream, especially at night after sleep and after certain medications. (But it is worsening and a bit unpleasant.) Also, I have leaky urine. This leaky urine is not a peeing in pants; it is an un-felt slow leak and it is lessened by frequently emptying my bladder by pressing my fist or open hand into my low abdomen just above pubic bone while I sit to pee. Also it can be an almost uncontrollable, wanting to pee when the bladder is nearly filled to capacity.

Note this is one of a number of experimental techniques meant to foster Healthy Longevity (See Notebooks 10  on Healthy Longevity) and in my case, at least, it seems to have worked well. It is a longitudinal  experiment, i.e., a single life study, that needs to be proved out by a horizontal experiment, i.e., a cohort of same age with comparison between a cystoscopy group nd a control no cystoscopy group.

 End of Section. To read next, click 10.4 Amok Time - What If Your World Goes Crazy?