{"id":77696,"date":"2018-04-10T20:33:53","date_gmt":"2018-04-11T03:33:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/04\/your-body-is-a-teeming-battleground"},"modified":"2018-04-10T20:33:53","modified_gmt":"2018-04-11T03:33:53","slug":"your-body-is-a-teeming-battleground","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/04\/your-body-is-a-teeming-battleground","title":{"rendered":"Your Body Is a Teeming Battleground"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s time to rethink the quest to control aging, death, and disease\u2014and the fear of mortality that fuels it.<\/p>\n

I went to medical school, at least in part, to get to know death and perhaps to make my peace with it. So did many of my doctor friends, as I would find out. One day\u2014usually when you\u2019re young, though sometimes later\u2014the thought hits you: You really are going to die. That moment is shocking, frightening, terrible. You try to pretend it hasn\u2019t happened (it\u2019s only a thought, after all), and you go about your business, worrying about this or that, until the day you put your hand to your neck\u2014in the shower, say\u2014and \u2026 What is that?<\/i> Those hard lumps that you know, at first touch, should not be there? But there they are, and they mean death. Your death, and you can\u2019t pretend anymore.<\/p>\n

I never wanted to be surprised that way, and I thought that if I became a doctor and saw a lot of death, I might get used to it; it wouldn\u2019t surprise me, and I could learn to live with it. My strategy worked pretty well. Over the decades, from all my patients, I learned that I would be well until I got sick and that although I could do some things to delay the inevitable a bit, whatever control I had was limited. I learned that I had to live as if I would die tomorrow and at the same time as if I would live forever. Meanwhile, I watched as what had been called \u201cmedical care\u201d\u2014that is, treating the sick\u2014turned into \u201chealth care,\u201d<\/a> keeping people healthy, at an ever-rising cost.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s time to rethink the quest to control aging, death, and disease\u2014and the fear of mortality that fuels it. I went to medical school, at least in part, to get to know death and perhaps to make my peace with it. So did many of my doctor friends, as I would find out. One day\u2014usually [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,43,269],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-business","category-life-extension"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77696\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}