Pharmarketing & the paradox of longevity

  By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc / LMMiami.com

• Humans have never lived for so long, yet we’ve never been so sick.
• How come?
• Lemme ‘splain.
• Life expectancy in industrialized countries is in the eight-decade range.
• Some nations such Spain, Italy and Japan, to name a few, have even passed that mark.
• Problem is, being alive is one thing, being healthy is another.
• What the statistic does not show is that an awful lot of the elderly still alive are barely so.
• In a quasi-comatose state of crippled incontinence.
• Popping pills by the dozens to keep countless conditions and diseases at bay.
• Tethered to this world by a costly, labor intensive infrastructure of 24/7 medical care.
• Granted, modern medicine develops new ways to combat illness and death pretty much every hour.
• Then again, the quality of life of an 80-year old dude dealing with, say, Parkinson’s disease is quite challenging.
• Science and its little buddy the pharmaceutical industry -or is it the other way round?- have made great progress battling lots of degenerative &/or neurologic illnesses preying on the elderly: Alzheimer’s and other dementias, stroke, etc.
• But a cure for these maladies is not on the horizon.
• Please don’t think I am surreptitiously advocating for euthanasia here.
• Quite the contrary.
• We must find new and improved ways of tending to our elderly with dignity.
• And efficiently.
• It is an opportunity too.
• It is a fast-growing industry.
• For one thing, geriatric nursing seems to be one of the few jobs that artificial intelligence and automatization will not pulverize.
• Needless to say, for our Big Pharma pals longevity will be the gift that keeps on giving.
• Pharmarketing is a HUGE opportunity.
• Which begs for the question: who’s gonna foot the bill?
• Will the workforce be productive enough to fund the ballooning size of our pension and healthcare systems?
• Who knows.
• Now let me harken back to the stat I mentioned a few paragraphs above about Spain, Italy & Japan: there seems to be causality or at least correlation between longevity and tight knit families.
• See, Spain, Italy & Japan don’t seem to be countries where people are particularly health obsessed.
• If you ask me, the nations showing longer life expectancy might be those where the elderly remain in the picture, literally and figuratively.
• They are not shipped away to hospices & residences, as is common in AngloProtestant nations.
• As I pointed out in past columns: here’s a territory in which we Latinos have experience and leadership.
• Multigenerational households might be the only way to handle the barrage of meds, treatments, healthcare equipment, chores & bills coming our way.
• Hey you, put the little phone down and help Grandma change her diapers.
• Or did you expect for the government to send a nurse to do it while you upload moronic selfies to Instagram?
• A blessing in disguise.
• Longevity might knock some sense into the new generations.