Has aging ever been considered healthy?

The current research topic inquires: “Should we treat aging as a disease?” Yet, in this inquiry, the question “Can aging be considered a disease?” is secondary, while the more primary question really must be “Is aging treatable?” Paradoxically, the answer given to the second question largely determines the answer to the first. The perceived unchangeable, and hence untreatable, nature of aging is the root cause for many subsequent rationalizations, even to the point of claiming the desirability of aging-derived suffering and death. This is a well recognized psychological phenomenon sometimes referred to as “apologism” (Gruman, 1966) or even “deathism,” a ramification of the “sour grapes syndrome,” vilifying something that we think we cannot attain, while accepting as “good” or “healthy” something that we believe is inevitable for us (such as degenerative aging). Yet, I argue that, historically, medical tradition has always recognized the morbid character of aging and endeavored to fight it. The rationalizations of aging as “natural,” “justified,” or “healthy” could never entirely prevail. An example of this recognition can be found as early as “On Old Age” (De Senectute) by Cicero (106-43 BCE). It was written at a time when average life-expectancy reached about 30 years, when even survival to old age was a rare occasion. Consistently with the “apologetic” tradition, De Senectute presents a picture of old age that not only endeavors to “wipe away all the disagreeables of old age” but even to present it as “luxurious and delightful too” (Cicero, 1900). Cicero even directly stated the reason to consider aging and death from aging as attractive, namely, the impossibility to oppose them: “But those who look for all happiness from within can never think anything bad which nature makes inevitable.” Yet, Cicero’s common sense would not allow him to completely block out of mind the decay and suffering caused by old age, neither to completely deny the human ability to greatly retard this decay through proper care of the body and mind. Hence alongside the call for ultimate philosophical resignation with aging and death, there is still a practical call to “fight” the infirmities and feebleness produced by aging: