I couldn’t bear to live to 125. So why DO I gulp down five pills a day to stave off the inevitable? TOM UTLEY

THE most terrifying prediction I’ve read in a long while is that within a few decades, medical science will have found a cure for old age and death. So haunted by this nightmare have I become that I think about it every morning, as I tuck into a chemical breakfast — courtesy of the 70-year-old NHS (happy birthday!) — consisting of five different drugs, all intended in one way or another to prolong my life.

If I’ve got this right, one is designed to arrest the deterioration of my kidney function, another to shrink my prostate gland, the third to lower my blood pressure and the fourth and fifth to protect my digestive system, skin and bones from the toxic effects of the pills I take for my kidneys.

As someone who had visited the doctor on average only once every decade since the Sixties, I used to sneer at contemporaries who seemed to spend half their lives in the GP’s surgery or the outpatients’ department, and the other half at the chemist, presenting repeat prescriptions.

To me, it seemed daft and wholly unnecessary for the NHS to spend more than £15 billion a year on medicines, with 43 per cent of men and 50 per cent of women taking at least one prescribed drug in any given week (and these are the official figures for 2013; they’ll be higher now).

Hypochondriacs one and all, I thought — and no wonder the health service was perennially beset by financial difficulties.

If there was anything seriously wrong with these people, an aspirin would put most of them right. Otherwise they could rely, as I always had, on the magic of the human immune system to restore them to full health.

Ah, but that was before this January when, as regular readers will know, my wife insisted I should consult the doctor about a strange rash that had appeared on my legs and a swelling of my feet and ankles.

Torture

Since then, I’ve become one of those I used to mock.

All year, I’ve been a regular visitor at King’s College Hospital in South London, where I’ve been passed from one specialist department to another — each finding something new wrong with me and prescribing more drugs to cure it.

It has come to the point where I’m slightly dreading going through customs on my summer holiday next month, carrying a suitcase laden with pills that must surely attract suspicion.

Now, I must be extremely careful what I write, because only a reckless fool would risk annoying medical professionals who at any moment could insert microscopic cameras into organs where no camera has any business to venture ( though in fairness, I should repeat that my cystoscopy was not half as agonising as the medieval torture I’d feared).

So let me say at once that I have the highest possible regard for the consultants and nurses who have looked after me with extreme kindness, courtesy and confidence-inspiring professionalism.

If I had to complain about my treatment — and even this makes me feel a bit churlish — I would gripe only about the hospital’s computerised appointments system, which has twice booked me in at the wrong time and once summoned me, at considerable inconvenience to my employers and myself, for tests I’d already had. It’s the bureaucracy that’s hopeless, not the front-line staff.

But the thought that preys most heavily on my mind is this: I wonder if we’re right to go on assuming blithely that it’s a selfevidently Good Thing for doctors to go on striving to prolong our lives for as long as they possibly can.

On this page yesterday, in his brilliant analysis of the NHS, the historian Dominic Sandbrook drew attention to a survey by four influential think-tanks, commissioned by the BBC to mark the service’s 70th anniversary. This found that Britain performs worse than the developed world’s average in treating eight out of the 12 most common causes of death.

The study also concluded that of the world’s 18 richest countries, ours was the third-worst performer on ‘the overall rate at which people die when successful medical care could have saved their lives’.

Mr Sandbrook commented drily: ‘In other words, the NHS may be good at some things. But it is not very good at keeping people alive. I don’t know about you, but I consider that something of a priority.’

My question is, how much longer we should go on thinking that the acid test of a health service is how long it manages to keep patients alive? To put it bluntly, does anyone actually want to live for ever? Is longevity the be-all and end-all (or rather, the never-end-all) of human existence?

It’s a question that brings me back to the frightening thought with which I began — that doctors may be well on their way to finding a cure for death. I came across this first in Yuval Noah Harari’s best- seller Sapiens (a book I’ve mentioned so often in this column that you may be forgiven for thinking it’s the only one I’ve ever read).

Since then, I’ve tracked down a fascinating interview in which Harari expands on his prediction that within 50 or perhaps 100 years, death will become optional — for the rich, at least.

As the Israeli-born historian puts it, we’re going through a ‘huge revolution’ in human thinking. ‘Throughout history,’ he says, ‘old age and death were always treated as metaphysical problems, as something that the gods decreed, as something fundamental to what defines humans, what defines the human condition and reality.

‘Even a few years ago, very few doctors or scientists would seriously say that they are trying to overcome old age and death. They would say: no, I am trying to overcome this particular disease, whether it’s tuberculosis or cancer or Alzheimer’s. Defeating disease and death, this is nonsense, this is science fiction.’

But scientists no longer think like that, he says. ‘People never die because the Angel of Death comes, they die because their heart stops pumping, or because an artery is clogged or because cancerous cells are spreading in the liver or somewhere.

‘These are technical problems — and in essence they should have some technical solution. And this way of thinking is now becoming dominant in scientific circles, and also among the ultra-rich who have come to understand that, for the first time in history, if I’m rich enough, maybe I don’t have to die.’

I don’t know about you, but this is a thought that chills me to the bone.

Scary

Until I read Sapiens, I’d always gone along with the late, great A. J. P Taylor when he said the first lesson of history was that we’re all going to die. But what if he was wrong, and Harari is right?

The idea of lingering in this vale of tears for ever would be quite scary enough even if our society treated its elderly decently.

As it is, families shunt their old folk off into an institutional care system that simply can’t cope.

Meanwhile, the NHS — which has already helped increase average male lifespans from 65 to 79 — goes on feeding us ever more sophisticated drugs to prolong our lives. It’s not what I’d call joined-up government.

For the avoidance of doubt, I am most emphatically not advocating euthanasia.

It’s just that if I’m destined for eternal life, I’d rather spend it in heavenly bliss than here on Earth, dribbling in a care home, watching endless editions of Pointless.

Yet I go on taking the pills, in the hope and belief that they’ll give me more time — and reserving my right to accept all the new treatments as they come along. Not very rational, I grant you. So don’t ask me the ideal age to die — 90, 100, 125? — or the ideal proportion of our national income we should spend on the NHS. As usual, I have no answers, but only questions that politicians and scientists have avoided asking for too long.

All I will say is that with every new medical breakthrough, the day comes closer when they’ll need definitive answers.

I hate to sound morbid (blame it on the side- effects of those pills), but I pray to God I’ll be dead by then.