THE CURRENT PARADIGM AND AGE-ASSOCIATED DISORDERS
The first of Thomas Kuhn’s three prerequisites for paradigm shift is dissatisfaction with the prevailing paradigm. A number of essays in this website discuss how the current aging paradigm is simply not an accurate depiction of reality. Other essays discuss why the current paradigm not only isn’t an accurate depiction of reality but, why, since it is inconsistent with the principles of natural selection, it’s impossible for it to be consistent with reality. Since a paradigm is the set of preconceptions that is assumed to represent reality, the fact that the current paradigm is inconsistent with reality is sufficient cause to be dissatisfied with it.
Infectious Disease Approach
Although using the infectious disease approach for age-associated degenerative diseases is misguided from a scientific standpoint, the approach has proven to be remarkably lucrative for the pharmaceutical industry. The pharmaceutical industry’s approach to developing pharmaceutical interventions intended to target age-associated degenerative diseases is discussed in the essay entitled “Pharmaceutical Interventions for Age-Associated Diseases.”
Risk Factors
In the absence of an identifiable actual cause for age-associated degenerative diseases, the concept of “risk factor” has been substituted. The indiscriminate use of that term, and the practice of equating risk factor to cause, has had unfortunate consequences. When dealing with infectious diseases, inherent in the concept of “cause” is the understanding that if the cause of the disease (the pertinent pathogen) is eliminated, the disease will either be prevented or cured. Most of the recognized environmental risk factors for age-associated degenerative diseases are factors that accelerate the rate at which intrinsic damage is inflicted upon the subject. Examples include smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, stress, obesity, etc. But we know that none of these factors are the root cause of age-associated degenerative diseases, because even if a subject neutralized or eliminated all such factors, there can be no assurance that the subject will be immune from those disorders.
Generally speaking, a risk factor for a particular ailment merely means that there is a statistical correlation between the factor and the ailment. The risk factor could be strongly connected to a cause of the ailment. For example, impure drinking water is a risk factor for a host of infectious diseases. That’s because the organisms that cause those diseases breed in and are transmitted to humans through the impure water. Thus eliminating that risk factor by purifying drinking water has a significant positive effect on preventing infectious diseases. Similarly, in the United States, reducing smoking and air pollution has had a positive effect on the incidence of a number of aging-associated degenerative diseases. Those risk factors are not necessarily the root cause of the degenerative diseases (because even one who is not exposed to those risk factors can develop the same disease), but the risk factors accelerate the rate at which the diseases manifest themselves.