Advances in medical science are not prolonging life, they are extending death.
That’s the bold and refreshing conclusion to Lucinda Holdforth’s barnstorming new book.
Furthermore, we have a medical model where, ‘ethical failure and moral cowardice meet economic self-interest.’
Holdforth is an Australian and her book is not available in the UK, but apart from some comments about compulsory voting, almost all of what she writes also applies here.
You’ll search in vain for high-profile British think tanks or politicians prepared to state the ugly truths that she delivers with such panache.
Lucinda, here are some of the horrors of the British system:
When you get over 50, you will be sent, unsolicited, a bowel testing kit, which you’re supposed to return with stool samples.
We have an NHS which is a worship programme for the retired. It’s their social life. They spend hours retelling elaborate stories about the progress ailments. They live just for the next appointment, expecting hip operations and knee operations in their 80s – for free.
Over time they slip into the delusion that their mission is to live forever.
And, as you mention, the doctors are doing their best to make that possible, even though the quality of life: the loneliness, the inactivity and the burdens they put on their children and carers become ever heavier.
The NHS was created to provide basic relief from suffering to the very poor. If you suggest that William Beveridge might be appalled by his legacy if he could see it today, you will be told you’re vile and disgusting.
Do you want an American system here?
Last month, the TV celebrity Jeremy Clarkson, announced he had aggressive prostrate cancer to boost ratings for his latest Amazon Prime series.
Given that he’s made a career out of grossly insensitive comments, it’s fair to say that some of us welcomed this, as long as he really was dying.
But it turns out that it was just a way of getting attention and garnering sympathy.
He’s now in remission, whatever that means.
A few days later he popped up with another dubious character, our former Prime Minster David Cameron, to share their diagnoses and to ‘raise awareness’ about getting tested.
As experienced PR experts, they know how to boost their image: by endorsing a cause nobody dares to criticise.
Doubtless they’ll soon be claiming to have ‘saved thousands of lives’.
(Another important linguistic point, nobody ever ‘saves a life’, they just ‘postpone a death’.)
That’s the British state of affairs.
But, Lucinda, you’re right to point out, there’s another perspective on all this:
‘There’s money to be made in all those pointless procedures’, clinicians are ‘reluctant to admit their cancers are not curable’ and there plenty of examples of oncologists performing, ‘new forms of physical torture’ on both the elderly and those with terminal illnesses.
The elderly restrict the lives of the young if they require medical care because of dementia or other conditions.
People complain about Elon Musk’s endorsement of transhumanism, but for millions of people who grew up in the 60s and 70s, the motor car is a bodily appendage – something they cannot bear to have removed, even if they become a danger to themselves and others.
Owners of family businesses (looking at you Rupert Murdoch) hold on for so long that they damage the value of the empire they leave behind.
The old dominate voluntary organisations which have important roles to play in society, but they resist change.
They hang on in academia, the professions and in politics thus disrupting succession plans and blocking more dynamic ideas.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg could have left the US Supreme Court and allowed a Democrat President to replace her, but her reluctance to let go, meant that a Republican nominee got in and thus she sabotaged her own legacy.
Is the author being cruel and mean? I don’t think so. Her observations are the fruit of the experience of looking after elderly parents and her own encounters with doctors.
Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a similar book a few years ago about how, having been through cancer treatment, she had drawn the line. She would reject further interventions.
The tedium of sitting in waiting rooms and going through traumatic procedures wasn’t worth it.
There are many political judgements that I would disagree with in the book, but what’s admirable is Holdforth’s honesty and lack of sentimentality.
Family get-togethers are pretty miserable at the best of times without new scenarios of five generations getting together for a Christmas dinner, where safeguarding measures are introduced.
And pity the ever fewer younger family members who have to shoulder all the responsibilities of cooking and caring!
There’s a chapter on how scientific progress only tends to take place when the experts from a previous generation die out and the prejudices of the past no longer apply.
The example is a doctor who discovered a new treatment for ulcers, but was shunned. Only after he infected himself and then used his own cure as evidence did he begin to get attention. After years of derision, he got the Nobel Prize.
The idea of a pure scientific method applying to the evaluation of research is just untrue.
The strongest signal I picked up from the book is how we must now make way for the young.
Earlier this year I organised a Carnival of Alternative Politics in Bournemouth. I approached the politicians, the think tanks and the academics to speak, but none were interested.
Instead I focused on getting young people to talk about their problems. It was then I noticed how you never hear distinctive voices under 35 in the mainstream media. You don’t here them articulating their own problems, you get older people minimising them.
Holdforth points out what they must do.
They must refuse to sacrifice their own future for the benefit of Boomers who want to order society in a way that gives them the best chance of living forever in comfort. (The young paid a heavy price during the COVID lockdowns, for example.)
The great Renaissance teachers said that the most important spiritual task in life was to learn how to die. The post-Second-World-War generation has failed spectacularly to do this.
As the quotation at the front of the book says:
It’s fair to say that 80% of the world’s problems involve old men having on, who are afraid of death and insignificance, and they won’t let go.
Barack Obama, London 25 September 2025
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