Anything that we are good at treating doesn’t seem like an age related disease anymore, but we’re really clearing out the scourges if you look at historical cause of death statistics. We haven’t made any progress on Alzheimer’s, and have conquered yellow fever, consumption, diabetes, knee failure, glaucoma, smoking related lung cancer, prostate cancer, hookworm, environmental lead poisoning, environmental arsenic poisoning, black lung, breast cancer, and syphilis. So, if you know someone old and suffering, its probably alzheimers.
Most of the conditions you've mentioned there have exogenous causes (i.e. diseases or environmental toxins), and I question your inclusion of many of the ones that don't (who thinks we have "conquered" breast cancer??).
But we have made very little progress in staving off degenerative-type diseases. Even the primary degenerative disease you mention, knee failure, we cure largely with a wholesale replacement. That obviously isn't applicable to organs we can't just swap out.
Swapping out organs may be an option in the future. I'm getting a bioengineering degree so I can't work in organ engineering research. We're definitely not there yet, but there's a lot of interesting research happening in this area.
I agree. Rates of cancer and diabetes are up. We might have better treatments than in the past, but I though I even saw graphs showing that overall cancer fatalities rates are flat - a lower percentage of people die from it, but the increase in cases mostly offsets that (depends on the specific type).
One angle is that as we find cures for other diseases, cancer rates go up because we live long enough to get cancer.
The sum of all causes of death will very likely continue to be 100%...
> The sum of all causes of death will very likely continue to be 100%...
If not, we'll have a whole lot of new problems.
"Conquered" is a loaded term, but a 43% reduction in mortality since 1990 is nothing to sneeze at.
The 5 year survival rate for localized (early stage) breast cancer is 99%
Did we remove it as a cause of death? No. But the prognosis is much less dire by now than it was even a few decades ago.
Very few causes are ever completely "conquered", they just move down in relative relevance.
A huge part of that increase in 5 year survival rate is just earlier detection, though.
I fully acknowledge that we've made large strides in understanding and treating breast cancer, but in most cases, once it spreads it's still "game over", and so it is still an immensely fearful experience for people to go through. Contrast that with, for example, HIV. 35 years ago it was probably the scariest disease there was, considered a guaranteed death sentence. Now it is largely preventable with PrEP, and treatments are so good that it is a manageable condition with lifespans on par with HIV-negative people for most of those who diligently follow their treatments.
We have by no means conquered prostate cancer. It is still extremely deadly.
The average age of diagnosis is 67 and 95% of those men live as long as you would expect them to normally. It is certainly not cured, and treatment can be very disruptive and unpleasant, but it's definitely not "extremely deadly" with modern medical care.
Perhaps not but when it is aggressive, it is very deadly. They told my dad they were thinking he could have 10 years, he got three. Seems like when it stops responding to hormone suppression things can deteriorate quickly.
Even with Gleason score 10 (<1% of cases) most patients will survive more than 3 years. Median survival for score 9 (~10% of cases) is ~10 years. Unfortunately your father was an exception. Cancer is an awful, crippling disease and I'm sorry it took your father.
It makes up for that in being common though. The most common cancer in male non smokers and fifth leading cause of death worldwide (presumably amongst males https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6497009/)
Death statistics are not a good measure in this case. The large majority of prostate cancer is very slow growing and occurs late in life. The goal of treatment is not to cure- just to slow it down. Many of those deaths are nearly at the age they would have died anyway and had a full life because of the less-aggressive treatment. Most people will live another 15+ years.
That stands in stark contrast to lung cancer, which has a median survival time of ~15 months. Pancreatic cancer usually kills you in less than a year. Colon cancer is better, but still only ~6 years. Leukemia and Lymphoma can occur in middle age or even in early childhood, and rob an entire lifetime.
> live as long as you would expect them to
We also need to think about quality of life, which tends to go way down after you're diagnosed with one of these diseases
Prevention and delay is significantly better than management or even curing
For the majority treatment is pretty minor, which is reflected in all-cause mortality. Pill-based chemo is much more common now and patients do not need to relocate and isolate as much. Cancer is still terrifying, and in almost all other types of cancer people vastly underestimate the life impact of "survival". Young people with localized Hodgkin lymphoma have a ~90% chance that they will never have a recurrence, but the chemo (which is extremely well tolerated!) can still regularly be life-altering.
That said prostate cancer is most of the time not a big deal. Getting prostate cancer will still probably the most dangerous thing that ever happens to you (how many single events have a 5%+ mortality rate? besides birth) and should be treated incredibly seriously, but the odds are still good you'll be fine.
Not being extremely deadly is low bar since most of your life (with some luck) will be spent being old. I'd rather see my years being more than bearable.
You certainly will not live most of your life over the age of 67.
I know, I read that list and I was like "what?" Since when is even half of that stuff "conquered"?
I agree. To me, using the very strong word "conquered" implies that a condition or disease is eradicated, like smallpox. Or, at the very least that we have a reliable way to prevent it.
Worth adding to the list are osteoporosis, secondary infection, hearing loss, macular degeneration (need more advancement here), hypothyroidism, chronic kidney, acute consequences of heart disease/ stroke prevention.
Not all of the solutions can be called "cures" but a solution nonetheless is better than nothing and calling it "old age, shit out of luck."
Parkinson's fairly frequent too.
> and have conquered yellow fever, consumption, diabetes, knee failure, glaucoma, smoking related lung cancer, prostate cancer, hookworm, environmental lead poisoning, environmental arsenic poisoning, black lung, breast cancer, and syphilis.
What's your definition of "conquered"? In the US breast cancer is the most common type of cancer, and together with lung cancers account for ~500k cases each year. 100k of those people will die within 5 years.
Now we created new issues to replace the old. Microplastic, PFAS, antibiotic resistance, obesity, etc.
And my knees want to have a word with your assessment :).
I also wouldn't count prostate cancer on the "conquered" group, as recent news about the great Scott Adams reminds us.
Scott Adams, the Holocaust-denying, vaccine-denying and anti-diversity, equality and and inclusion, cartoonist?
He's a flawed human. But his masterpiece, Dilbert, is a gift to humanity. I hope the legacy of his masterpiece will last much longer than that of any BS views he has.
Wikipedia says DEI seeks to "promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people". That sounds great.
If only it actually worked that way instead of being code for favoritism for a few demographic groups, ignoring many other people who are excluded, and actively discriminating against straight white men.
Scott Adams is right to challenge it.
Edit: Disney exec admits on hidden camera "Certainly, there have been times where, 'there's no way we're hiring a white male for this'"
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/watch-disney-exec-...
For anyone who saw the flagged comment: I found this: Scott Adams has questioned the methodology behind the figure of 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, suggesting it may not be as well-documented as commonly believed. However, he does not outright deny that the Holocaust occurred, stating that "no reasonable person doubts that the Holocaust happened."
He has a lot of weird anti establishment takes. For example, that evolution isn't real [1]
I'm not 100% on the reasons. Seems like he simply has a lot of hubris.
[1] https://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/03/fos...
> that evolution isn't real
That's another misrepresentation. In that link he says "To be fair, there’s still plenty of evidence for evolution."
It sounds like he's a skeptic who demands proof of the things we're not supposed to question. That's a good thing.
But some people don't like it and misrepresent his words to try to discredit him.
Edit: I agree that Adams is not a scientist and doesn't understand how science works. That article gets an F in my book. Nonetheless, suggesting that asking questions is the same as claiming something "isn't real" is, itself, an anti-scientific view.
I don't know about fossils, but a lot of current scientific thinking probably is still wrong. We recently had a big scientific revolution when genetic sequencing revealed that much of the thinking at that time was wrong.
Also, it's absurd to interpret his comedic exaggerations literally.
> I was having a hard time with the idea that some goober in tan pants would dig up a bone fragment in Africa and know it was his own (great X 1,000) grandmother.
...
> But personally, I’m cautious about any theory that keeps the same conclusion regardless of how many times the evidence for it changes. There was a time when the seemingly straight line of fossil evidence was the primary foundation for the theory. Now it seems that that straight line was like Little Billy from Family Circus finding his way home from the playground
This where he's simply wrong and misunderstands what paleontologists and biology experts have always said.
No serious expert in the field has dug up an australopithecus specimen and said "See, here is my great grandmother!". It's absurd to think that. Adams has likely seen the march of progress and thought "Oh, this is what the experts think happened". But that's simply not true and never has been.
Evolution simply posits gradual change over generations. A result of that is a messy family tree with a lot of dead "branches".
But further, the concept of "species" has always been a messy one. A prime example of this is the fact that Neanderthals breed with the Denisovans and some of their offspring have survived to today. 2 different species closely related enough that they could have viable offspring. That makes for a messy tree.
This is an obvious fact to any biologist and isn't the least bit outside of what the theory of evolution predicts. Again, the only real prediction of evolution is that speciation happens gradually as a result of changes in generations. It doesn't predict "straight lines" like Adams asserts, it never has. Nor does it exclude the possibility for the same features to evolve multiple times. It never has.
So, when he goes out of his way to write an article "fossils are bullshit" what exactly do you think he's trying to communicate? He doesn't outright deny evolution is a thing, but he does explicitly voice doubts about evolution being a solid theory.
Now, that doesn't mean that we aren't constantly learning new things from new fossils. That's the nature of science. Adams being concerned that new data updates a theory is a severe misunderstanding of exactly how scientific research works.
There's no much difference between the two positions, and the former is very much a lead-in to the latter.
Denial of facts usually starts with reasonable-sounding inquiry into the details, which makes nuanced discussion of data very hard. Asking if the real number was maybe 5.75 million puts you in company with deniers.
> So, if you know someone old and suffering, its probably alzheimers.
Thats very far from reality, I presume you don't know many old people or speak to them about their ailments?
It could just be genetic luck, and the privelege that most people I interact with have access to the best treatment for diseases that have treatments, but around me the worst suffering is mostly alzheimers, striking in the late 70s to 80s.
You're right that there is far more to it than Alzheimers. Still, Quadmaster has half a point. It's probably not consumption (tuberculosis), or hookworm. It's much less likely than it was to be black lung. Even smoking is decreasing, though it will take another generation for that to show up in the old people.
So we're making progress. But we don't see it, because that becomes the new normal, and we see all these remaining things that cause problems for old people.
TB killed 1.25 million in 2023 and the WHO considers it the world’s leading cause of death from a single infectious agent, outpaced only temporarily by COVID.
It's safe to say that they were speaking from the perspective of developed countries where the mortality rate of TB is roughly 0.2 per 100,000. Which makes the case that we know how to make it statistically insignificant, but the infrastructure to apply that knowledge is not perfectly distributed.
> we know how to make it statistically insignificant
TB is weird. We do indeed know how to actively manage it (e.g. screen people regularly and treat detected cases), but countries like the US don’t do that. Nonetheless TB does not cause much disease in the US.
Every time I’ve tried to figure out why this is, I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that no one really knows. Maybe it’s the general lack of malnutrition?
TB is a bacteria and people in developed countries generally get treated when they have symptoms of infections. But underdeveloped countries don't have the resources for that, so infections are just "powered through". In addition, a lot of it comes down to resources we take for granted, like sanitation, running water, soap, population density, etc. We have cleaner air, cleaner water, and are more conscious about spreading diseases because we are wealthier.
> they were speaking from the perspective of developed countries
But that's just creatively selecting the data that supports the point. You can do that with everything else. We solved a lot of things "in the lab" or "in mice".
Did you know that we conquered Alzheimer's? It's safe to say I mean in countries like Guinea-Bissau, Somalia or Chad with under 100 cases per 100k people.
> Still, Quadmaster has half a point. It's probably not consumption (tuberculosis), or hookworm. It's much less likely than it was to be black lung.
But that's not because we got better at treating hookworm or black lung. The big ideas there are "wear shoes" and "don't work as a miner". You don't have to treat a problem you never have.
(Wikipedia: "There is no cure or discovered treatments for pneumoconiosis.")
Most of the things you listed aren't aging related
“Aging related” just means we don’t know what causes it, and yes we are much better at treating things when we know their cause. For example, right now parkinsons is aging related and we can’t do a thing about it, but there is increasing evidence that it is caused by some pollutant or toxin. If we find the toxin, then parkinsons will stop being age related. Mesothelioma is a historical case of this: for 100 years it was an untreatable aging related disease, it’s now obviously not an aging related disease, and the treatment is don’t breath asbestos.
you forgot HIV/AIDS. we have the tools to basically snuff it out in 60-80 years if every male was on prep
I think there’s a good chance we snuff it out in 80 years even if they aren’t. Actual cures seem to be on the horizon.
Why would every male need to be on prep?
To prevent HIV so then we abolish it. Like how we got rid of Polio and such.
PrEP just happens to actually work here, but I guess condoms could too. But historically that's not gonna happen.
It's probably not worth the effort, though. But we can, and do, eradicate diseases via preventative mechanisms. Which is astounding.
Look at how hard it has been to eradicate diseases that only require a couple of doses of a vaccine. How feasible do you think it would be to provide daily prep to every male in the world? Even in developed countries with free vaccinations we are suffering from measles outbreaks in 2025.
For diseases like measles, it's entirely due to human stupidity and society's unwillingness to oppose the stupidity and take the public health steps necessary to eradicate the disease. I agree with you. We're never going to complete any global public health project that relies on uninformed (or misinformed) people making voluntary decisions.
Most free countries have decided that freedom includes people having a right to be stupid, at least up to a point. And we've had several generations now raised on the "my body my choice" mantra so reversing course will take some time.
Are those really developed countries? A decent free public school education is a requirement for a nation to be considered developed.
>> Even in developed countries with free vaccinations we are suffering from measles outbreaks in 2025.
> Are those really developed countries? A decent free public school education is a requirement for a nation to be considered developed.
Here's some data:
Sources:In 2025 1, 2,755 measles cases (2,429 confirmed, 326 probable) and 0 rubella cases have been reported in Canada. [0] Education in Canada is for the most part provided publicly, funded and overseen by federal, provincial, and local governments. [1] Medicare is a term that refers to Canada's publicly funded health care system. Instead of having a single national plan, we have 13 provincial and territorial health care insurance plans. Under this system, all Canadian residents have reasonable access to medically necessary hospital and physician services without paying out-of-pocket. [2][0] https://health-infobase.canada.ca/measles-rubella/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Canada
[2] https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/canada-healt...
You are welcome.