My plea is to keep life-extension therapies far from the market until all the conditions are in place to solve the problems of cost and making sure that the path is clear to extending healthy life, not decrepitude. This should include an enthusiastic, positive attitude towards life instead of weariness and depression.
Can you give more specific examples of what life-extension therapies you would want kept off the market?
As an example, let’s say your plea is granted, and you are put in charge of a currently non existent “Longevity International For Eternity” Bureau, and you get to approve, ban, cancel or delay any or all treatments as you see fit. It’s a lifetime appointment and you don’t have to worry about popularity if you don’t want to, but you can if you want. Can you give more information about what you would do?
What I would do is close to what a certain fairly mainstream set of health care reformers would like to do. It would involve reducing much spending in the last three months of life when a terminal condition exists, it would involve taking age into account in allocating donated organs. It would involve drug companies showing that a proposed new drug is more effective (or otherwise significantly superior to) existing medications, not just that it is effective. Although this is not an idea I have seen elsewhere, I might also take an “end-to-end” approach to medical research, wanting to see a sort of “business plan” that shows enough benefit to enough patients to justify costs. Any life extension treatments would be considered using the same set of criteria. Giving frail, confused 85-year-olds another ten years of the same kind of life would not qualify as a positive outcome.
Can you give more specific examples of what life-extension therapies you would want kept off the market?
As an example, let’s say your plea is granted, and you are put in charge of a currently non existent “Longevity International For Eternity” Bureau, and you get to approve, ban, cancel or delay any or all treatments as you see fit. It’s a lifetime appointment and you don’t have to worry about popularity if you don’t want to, but you can if you want. Can you give more information about what you would do?
What I would do is close to what a certain fairly mainstream set of health care reformers would like to do. It would involve reducing much spending in the last three months of life when a terminal condition exists, it would involve taking age into account in allocating donated organs. It would involve drug companies showing that a proposed new drug is more effective (or otherwise significantly superior to) existing medications, not just that it is effective. Although this is not an idea I have seen elsewhere, I might also take an “end-to-end” approach to medical research, wanting to see a sort of “business plan” that shows enough benefit to enough patients to justify costs. Any life extension treatments would be considered using the same set of criteria. Giving frail, confused 85-year-olds another ten years of the same kind of life would not qualify as a positive outcome.
I’d like to add interest into hearing a proposed criteria in how various propositions are assessed.