Diabetes and Its Awful Toll Quietly Emerge as a Crisis - New York Times: "'How bad is the diabetes epidemic?' asked Frank Vinicor, associate director for public health practice at the Centers for Disease Control. 'There are several ways of telling. One might be how many different occurrences in a 24-hour period of time, between when you wake up in the morning and when you go to sleep. So, 4,100 people diagnosed with diabetes, 230 amputations in people with diabetes, 120 people who enter end-stage kidney disease programs and 55 people who go blind.
'That's going to happen every day, on the weekends and on the Fourth of July,' he said. 'That's diabetes.'"
A revealing portrait of the damage diabetes causes daily in the U.S.
I am reading Dr. Weil's book Healthy Aging in which he describes the powerful effect of diet on health and particularly the scourge of diabetes and other systemic diseases.
Upon reading this NY Times piece...an excellent piece of journalism...I am struck with the intensity not only of the disease, but of the cry of medical professionals for a solution.
On a philosophical note, the more knowledge we gain about the diseases that wrack this mortal body, the greater the perceived need to do something. Yet, if we could flash into existence miraculous cures for these diseases that cause death, think of the host of other problems a greatly extended life would create.
Weil's position is a sensible one. In his analysis and recommendations of diet and lifestyle, he does not seek to extend life, rather to 'compress morbidity,' i.e., live as healthy as possible, but die relatively quickly after a full and healthy life, avoiding spending our last years in painful, debilitating and costly treatment for all manner of preventable ailments.
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