WHO To Classify Aging As A Disease Opening Flood Gates For New Drugs

We have new pharmaceuticals being introduced every year for fictitious and
nonsensical diagnoses such as Mathematics Disorder, Intermittent
Explosive Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Orthorexia Nervosa
(healthy eating) and so many other inventions called diseases for the sole
purpose of selling more drugs. In what many critics are calling lunacy of
unimaginable proportions, The World Health Organization (WHO) now plans to
lay down the framework that will set the precedent for classifying aging, something
that should be embraced and celebrated, into a disease with elaborate protocols
expected to be finalized in 2018.

Most people in modern times have been somewhat unanimous that

wrinkles, grief and homosexuality are not diseases, although not if you ask
the WHO, all of the above may soon be classified as a disease given enough
time.

What is considered to be normal and what is considered to be diseased is

strongly influenced by historical context. Matters once considered to be
diseases are no longer classified as such. For example, when black slaves ran away
from plantations they were labeled to suffer from drapetomania and medical
treatment was used to try to “cure” them.

Similarly, masturbation was seen as a disease and treated with treatments such as
cutting away the clitoris or cauterizing it. Finally, homosexuality was considered a
disease as recently as 1974. In addition to the social and cultural influence on disease
definition, new scientific discoveries usually financed by pharmaceutical companies
lead to the revision of what is a disease and what is not. For example, fever was once
seen as a disease in its own right but the realization that different underlying causes
would lead to the appearance of fever changed its status from disease to symptom.

This is usually the type of thing we can write an entire satire piece on, because it is
so difficult to imagine that biological aging could be entered into the books
as a disease process.

In a paper recently published in Frontiers in Genetics, the puppeteer scientists at

Insilco Medicine are now highlighting the need for more granular and applied
classification of aging in the context of the 11th World Health Organization’s
(WHO) International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health
Problems (ICD-11) expected to be finalized in just over two years.

Aging A Disease?

The paper explores the evolution of disease classification practices and the progress
made since William Cullen’s seminal Nosolagae Methodicae synopsis published in
1769. It discusses some of the additions to the ICD-10 including some of the less
obvious conditions like obesity that may set the precedent for classifying
aging as a disease.

While there is clear disagreement among demographers, gerontologists and

biogerontologists on the subject, classification of aging as a disease is likely
to unite pharmaceutical conglomerates, scientists and medical practitioners
in an effort to create possibly dozen of new drugs for normal age-related
processes and label them as pathological to attract more resources to and
research.
In part, the report calls for creating a task force of scientists to more thoroughly
evaluate whether to provide a more granular and actionable classification of aging
as a disease in ICD-11.

The following statement puts this deranged thinking into context:

“Aging is a complex multifactorial process leading to loss of function and a

very broad spectrum of diseases. While the notion of whether aging itself is a
disease is usually disputed, classifying it as such will help shift the focus of
biomedicine from treatment to prevention. Classifying aging as a disease
with multiple ‘non-garbage’ ICD codes may help create business cases for
large pharmaceutical companies…considering the unprecedented increases
in life expectancy and the heavy burden of medical costs in the developed
countries, maintaining the human body in the disease-free youthful state for
as long as possible is not just an altruistic cause, but a pressing economic
necessity”, said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, CEO of Insilico Medicine, Inc.

Where Do We Draw The Line?

“The word disease seems to be as difficult to define as beauty, truth or love,
although the concept of disease lies at the heart of medicine,” said says Kari
Tikkinen, MD, PhD. But why is it that the medical community has no
hesitation in defining dozens of new diseases every year, most of which have
no scientific justification?

“Illness is always a social construct,” notes Dr. Nortin Hadler, professor of

medicine and microbiology/immunology at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, and author of the book “Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an
Overtreated America.”
“People have to agree — both people, in general, and those in the medical
community — that a life experience should not be labeled an illness,” Hadler
says. “For example, the Victorians medicalized orgasm, and we medicalize the
lack of it.”

The advent of genetic screening could eventually mean that apparently

healthy people will be labeled “sick” decades before an actual diagnosis.

UK genetics researchers say that genetic tests “could drive a new wave” of
medicalization. With the exception of a relatively small number of medical
conditions directly caused by a single defective gene, genetic screening cannot
predict whether a person will develop a disease, note David Melzer, of the
University of Cambridge, and Ron Zimmern, of Strangeways Research Laboratory in
Cambridge.

Childhood shyness and internet browsing could also soon be reclassified as

mental disorders under new guidelines in the the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders which experts say would eventually influence how we
think about them.Recent proposed changes to the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual (DSM), the bible of the psychiatric profession childhood temper tantrums,
teenage irritability and binge eating as psychiatric disorders.

Doctors are usually the most inclined to consider states of being as diseases.
Laypeople are the least inclined, and nurses and legislators are in between. The
willingness to pay for treatment from public funds is very strongly correlated with
the perception of disease (that is, whether people regard a particular state of being
as a disease) and that has likely factored into the decisions by top officials to label
aging as a disease.
Barbara Mintzes of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, argues
that prescription-drug advertising to consumers–currently allowed only in the US
and New Zealand–is helping to medicalize “normal human experience.” “Relatively
healthy people are targeted,” she writes, “because of the need for adequate returns
on costly advertising campaigns.”

Many of these advertising dollars, according to Mintzes, are spent on relatively new,
expensive drugs intended for long-term use in large groups of people, such as
medications for cholesterol, impotence and anxiety.

And now aging will soon be added to that list. Those who still think science has not
been hijacked by the highest bidder are completely delusional. Perhaps there will
soon be a new drug for them.

http://www.naturalblaze.com/2015/11/who-to-classify-aging-as-a-disease-opening-
flood-gates-for-new-drugs.html

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