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Counterpoint: Bernie Sanders is just 2 years short of 80. He seems to be a vigorous man who had a temporary medical setback, then was restored to full health by

Counterpoint: Bernie Sanders is just 2 years short of 80. He seems to be a vigorous man who had a temporary medical setback, then was restored to full health by stent insertion.

melling 7y ago
Jimmy Carter was treated for brain cancer in his early 90’s. https://www.cancerresearch.org/join-the-cause/cancer-immunotherapy-month/30-facts/20 https://www.cancerresearch.org/join-the-cause/cancer-immunot... He’s still alive 4 years later.
- nosianu 7y ago
  So we are using extremely carefully selected individual examples now to come up with policies for everyone? Right then. And no, just because something works to "save (or extend) one life" does not mean it should be tried for everybody, because "hope". If you read the article - which says nothing surprising anyway - you balance your very few successes with lots and lots of bad cases. For some few to live longer a lot of people have to suffer more. Completely orthogonal, but since the path this thread took shows people care a lot (too much) about individual examples, I saw this more than once in my own family. My 94 year old grandmother broke here hip, surgery was ruled too dangerous, so she was driven back to her retirement home - where she only spent her last year, when care became too difficult at home - and spent the rest of her days just lying in her bad waiting to die. There was no good option left. That's just how it is near the end. I'm just saying this to show that I'm not talking about something that I only know from discussions such as this one. Also, both my grandmothers (who both made it into their nineties) had surgery in their 80s and both suffered significantly. Their brains were not the same afterwards. Anesthesia is not easy on the brain, even on top of any stress of the surgery itself on the body. There was a significant difference in mental abilities in both my grandmothers when comparing how they were before and after their surgeries (both had them for broken bones that occurred due to age related osteoporosis). And they both had pretty good starting points, others are much more frail at those ages.
  - Nahmag 7y ago
    Two years ago my dad (now 81) had a stroke. The hospital was trying to "let him die", so after a few days he rather left the hospital for an exam at a university he is studying (he passed it, but he had to pause the study for a year until he recovered from the stroke).
astura 7y ago
There's a difference between inserting a stent during a cardiac event as a treatment, which is what Bernie had done and routine stent insertion of stable patients, which is what I assume the gp was talking about.

Counterpoint: Bernie Sanders is just 2 years short of 80. He seems to be a vigorous man who had a temporary medical setback, then was restored to full health by stent insertion.

melling 7y ago

Jimmy Carter was treated for brain cancer in his early 90’s. https://www.cancerresearch.org/join-the-cause/cancer-immunotherapy-month/30-facts/20 https://www.cancerresearch.org/join-the-cause/cancer-immunot... He’s still alive 4 years later.

nosianu 7y ago
So we are using extremely carefully selected individual examples now to come up with policies for everyone? Right then. And no, just because something works to "save (or extend) one life" does not mean it should be tried for everybody, because "hope". If you read the article - which says nothing surprising anyway - you balance your very few successes with lots and lots of bad cases. For some few to live longer a lot of people have to suffer more. Completely orthogonal, but since the path this thread took shows people care a lot (too much) about individual examples, I saw this more than once in my own family. My 94 year old grandmother broke here hip, surgery was ruled too dangerous, so she was driven back to her retirement home - where she only spent her last year, when care became too difficult at home - and spent the rest of her days just lying in her bad waiting to die. There was no good option left. That's just how it is near the end. I'm just saying this to show that I'm not talking about something that I only know from discussions such as this one. Also, both my grandmothers (who both made it into their nineties) had surgery in their 80s and both suffered significantly. Their brains were not the same afterwards. Anesthesia is not easy on the brain, even on top of any stress of the surgery itself on the body. There was a significant difference in mental abilities in both my grandmothers when comparing how they were before and after their surgeries (both had them for broken bones that occurred due to age related osteoporosis). And they both had pretty good starting points, others are much more frail at those ages.
- Nahmag 7y ago
  Two years ago my dad (now 81) had a stroke. The hospital was trying to "let him die", so after a few days he rather left the hospital for an exam at a university he is studying (he passed it, but he had to pause the study for a year until he recovered from the stroke).

astura 7y ago

There's a difference between inserting a stent during a cardiac event as a treatment, which is what Bernie had done and routine stent insertion of stable patients, which is what I assume the gp was talking about.