Not to mention the incredible predictions from medical researchers.
Where's the cure for cancer? Where's the cure for diabetes? Heart disease? Hell, they're just now passing around the (new?) concept that a hi-carbo diet is _bad_ for you! Organized medicine still doesn't know it's ass from a hole in the ground.
We're all gonna die like everyone else does today: organized medicine isn't going to save us. The only question is, how much of our earned income are we willing to pass to those charlatans before we die.
Live forever? Hah! Not with those clowns in charge!
Cancer treatment has made huge progress in the last decade. The survival rates are way up from what they have been and many types of cancer are basically curable as long as you notice it before it ate through every organ in your body. We haven't "cured cancer", because cancer is not a single disease. It is not even caused by a common set of factors.
In the history of medicine, we have seen the following development:
1) We first learned how to deal with purely physical trauma types of problem - bandaging, splinting etc.
2) we then learned how to do pain relief (opium, aspirine)
3) we then learned how to deal with external microbes (antibiotics)
4) we are just starting to learn how to deal with viruses, which requires understanding their DNA. I would not be surprised to see viruses under control in the next 10 years or so, as gene sequencing / analysis gets better.
Now the thing about 3 and 4 is that they're relatively independant of the genotype/phenotype of the person being treated. You can take the same medication and apply it to anyone suffering those types of disease, and it will work.
What's remaining is the admittedly large class of diseases that are mostly caused by a person's own genotype/phenotype. Here we're talking about heart disease, immune system diseases, cancer. It is not likely that we will be able to find a one-size-fits-all solution to these diseases, which means that we won't be able to knock them over until we gain the capacity to manufacture a medication for an individual.
Still, with the ever-increasing CPU capability that we have at the moment, it doesn't seem inconceivable that these types of drugs will be available in 40 years or so, at which point it starts to become interesting to try and figure out just how we are going to die. At that point we will presumably have the necessary control over cell reproduction to allow the regeneration of tissue etc. For example, at the moment we think aging is linked to the loss of telomeres. Imagine taking a single heart muscle cell, and replacing all of the lost telomeres through genetic manipulation, and then re-inserting the heart cell into a patient. If aging theory is correct, this one cell will eventually (on the timeframe of decades) come to to dominate the number of cells in the heart, as non-modified cell lines will die out due to the loss of telomeres during reproduction. No more heart attacks.
Now, I've just plucked that 40 year figure out of the air, it might be 100 years, or 200 years, which of course would probably be too late for most of us. But the thing is that it is useless to compare the rate of medical advances of the past with what we're expecting to see in the future. Future development is going to be based on a very fine-grained understanding of life processes, whereas that has just not been possible up until very recently.
