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The Mainstream Approach to Medical Research Must Change


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#1 reason

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Posted 10 August 2015 - 12:44 PM


At a recent conference appearance, scientist-advocate Aubrey de Grey of the SENS Research Foundation made a point that I think bears repeating. The mainstream approach to medical science is to screen for drug compounds that produce beneficial alterations in cellular mechanisms observed in late stage disease. This almost entirely focuses on proximate causes of harm in a diseased, dysfunctional metabolism, far removed from the root causes that created the medical condition in the first place. It thus produces therapies that do little good in the grand scheme of things since they don't address the real cause of disease. They are rather efforts to make a badly damaged system limp along a little longer with patches and compensations, which is always expensive and doomed to failure, whether we are talking about a mechanical device or a human being.

This strategy for medical research and development must change radically if we are to see meaningful progress towards prevention and cure of age-related disease. It must be replaced with something more like de Grey's SENS programs, in which carefully designed therapies repair specific forms of cell and tissue damage to achieve rejuvenation. The form of these therapies is already known in great detail; it is clear what must be built. Some are already under development, such as senescent cell clearance and allotopic expression of mitochondrial genes. This is the future of medicine, not continuing to mine the natural world in the hope of finding compounds that do marginally more good than harm, and can at best only slightly slow down the aging process.

de Grey attributed the gains in longevity over the last century to one primary factor - the reduction of infectious diseases. With infectious diseases largely gone in the developed world, he said we need to turn our attention to the main cause of death. "There's almost one thing that kills everybody now in the developed world. It's the accumulation of these various types of molecular and cellular damage that the body does to itself as a side effect of just being alive at all." According to his research and theories, that molecular and cellular damage can be repaired with new regenerative medicines, including stem cell therapies, gene therapies, drugs and vaccines.

de Grey challenged the wisdom of modern pharmaceutical research leading to really expensive drugs that delay diseases by very short periods of time. "We will not cure cancer this way. We will not cure Alzheimer's this way." The incentive structure for modern pharmaceuticals perpetuates this because "it can be done reasonably quickly, sold for a lot of money and because people are desperate for anything."

"I think it's really important to understand that the relationship between quality of life and quantity of life is not as most people think about it. Today most people think about those two things as some kind of trade off, and that makes sense today because there are many things we like doing that are not very good for us. But we are talking about a world in which quality will confer quantity, in which you will live longer because you are living better. That's the critical thing here."

Link: http://www.geekwire....s-its-possible/


View the full article at FightAging
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#2 Multivitz

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Posted 24 January 2016 - 05:29 PM

Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) is the term coined by British biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey for the diverse range of regenerative medical therapies, either planned or currently in development, for the periodical repair of all age-related damage to human tissue with the ultimate purpose of maintaining a state of negligible senescence in the patient, thereby postponing age-associated disease for as long as the therapies are reapplied.


Yeah but. The human body is self correcting.
Everything is good in moderation, what are you on about.
Any synthetic external interference doesn't work long term, it lacks the finess and grace found all around in the outdoors.
All whats happening with SENS can be seen in this Wiki extract above. It says reapplied therapies, and diverse medical therapies. First one would have to define wether medical and its working through mechanisms, had wholistic benefits to the body. Secound, why would someone need therapies reapplied? Is the patients lifestyle wrong? Is that therapy not harmonistic to other biological systems? How does the patient's mind effect their health, through Peptides, Synaptic Amino acids, illogical attitudes?
Would the illogical attitude of a health organisation effect the patients it's treating?
When you answer YES to the questions, you have attained the freedom of mind nessecary to start looking after yourself. Everyone else should be furnished with the truth from as early as possible.
When you see the word ' quality ', it is offen used to sell something, it implies something you got already isn't good enough. Gratitude of life these days is in low supply, there's nothing more rewarding that thanking your own body for the feelings it gives you when your diet fulfills lifes shortcommings. I thank you, but first I thank my body for being here.

Edited by Multivitz, 24 January 2016 - 05:30 PM.

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