In this week’s newsletter

✅ Medicine's last psychological coping mechanism. ✅ Partial reprogramming reaches the clinic. ✅ Healthspan vs lifespan. ✅ Humanoid robots doing lab work. ✅ Executive medicine (and some better and cheaper alternatives). ✅ Vibe coding health apps. ✅ Rapamycin for cats. ✅ Aging as a software design flaw.

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Death apologism: Medicine's last psychological coping mechanism

We’re in the 21st century and there are still death apologists roaming the earth. Take this quote from a paper published in The Lancet a few years ago:

”Death and dying must be recognized as not only normal, but valuable”. And if that wasn’t enough, the paper also served up gems like ”it is healthy to die”. That’s peak deathism for you.

There are countless ways to dismantle these absurd and deeply irrational claims, but one of the best counterarguments comes from a recent commentary in The American Journal of Medicine.

Less than 200 years ago surgery was performed without anesthesia, sometimes in public. The patient, screaming in agony, had to be restrained to endure the pain. As medical historian Michael Brown writes, ”The physicians, and especially surgeons, have always had to learn some type of detachment (or dispassion to use the Early Modern term) in order to cope with the more revolting aspects of their art”.

In the 19th century anesthetics was available and had been for some time. But, to paraphrase The Lancet paper above, the medical community recognized surgery without it as not only normal, but valuable. It was considered healthy to be awake and suffer in horror. ”Pain in surgical operations is in a majority of cases even desirable, and its prevention or annihilation is for the most part hazardous to the patient”: this was not an uncommon opinion among surgeons at the time.

You can probably tell where the authors are going with this. They write: ”Modern medicine's seemingly paradoxical stance - simultaneously declaring death ’healthy’ while working tirelessly to prevent it - parallels the cognitive dissonance of some 19th century surgeons.”

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