The Zoomer Philosophy Volume 3

By Moses Znaimer

Media mogul Moses Znaimer is leading the movement of a new attitude towards age and aging. In this 3rd volume of his Zoomer ("Boomer with Zip") Philosophy series, Znaimer addresses head-on those topics familiar to the Boomer generation including the generation war, stereotypes of older people, and the use of cosmetic enhancements to look younger while advocating for the celebration of aging.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zoomer Books
• Release date: Apr 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301716869

Book preview

WE SAW,

WE HEARD,

WE CHEWED

ANTIQUIORI TE SALUTANT

I have always thought it would be a blessing if each person could be blind and deaf for a few days during his early adult life. Darkness would make him appreciate sight; silence would teach him the joys of sound.

—Helen Keller

I CAN UNDERSTAND why Helen Keller, the famous author and activist who lost both her sight and hearing in infancy, might have wished temporary blindness and deafness on young adults when she made the above statement, in the early 1900s. But at that point in history, older adults didn’t need to have similar infirmities thrust upon them as lessons; they were naturally prone to them by dint of aging. Because of a range of age-related ailments, to live into the 70s near the turn of the 20th century was to run a substantial risk of varying degrees of blindness and deafness. Of course, the loss of either of these two prime faculties could be devastating. As Lewis Mumford, historian and philosopher of technology and science, once noted: A day spent without sight or sound of beauty … is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life.

There’s another faculty that in its absence used also to be often fatal to human life, so I’m adding chewing (which enables eating properly and surviving), along with seeing and hearing to the pantheon of critical physical functions. In respect to all three, we’re far luckier today than our forebears were. Considering the relatively new developments that now preserve our sight and hearing and, yes, our ability to chew, it’s not too far a stretch to say that we live in an age of miracles.

A. SIGHT There are several serious ocular conditions that can occur as we age – glaucoma, macular degeneration, retinopathy brought on by diabetes or high blood pressure – but, by far, the most common is the cataract. While cataracts occur in only five per cent of people under the age of 65, by 75 the figure reaches a dizzying 50 per cent. A cataract (the word comes from the Greek katarhaktes meaning waterfall) is a clouding of the eye’s lens, which, left untreated, can cause myopia, colour blindness and, ultimately, blindness itself. In much of the undeveloped world today, cataracts are still the leading cause of blindness. In the Rich World, on the other hand, cataracts are today routinely removed in a relatively quick out-patient procedure, with only a tiny incidence of complications.

The first breakthrough in cataract treatment came in 1748, courtesy of a French physician named Jacques Daviel. Dislodging and removing of clouded cataracts had actually been going on since the sixth century BC, involving procedures like couching (about which it’s probably more merciful not to go into here), but suffice it to say that they were performed with a hooked needle and a bronze straw (and without anesthetic). More important, the cataract extractions up to Daviel’s time involved removing the lens capsule along with the lens, which allowed foreign particles to fall into the back of the eye and cause inflammation. Daviel’s innovation, which came to be known as Extracapsular Cataract Extraction (ECCE), allowed for the removal of the lens without the capsule, the majority of which remained intact in the eye.

The second innovation didn’t come along till two centuries later, in 1949. Up to this point, after the clouded lens had been removed, nothing was inserted in its place, and patients had to wear classic Coke bottle-thick glasses to correct the lens-less eye’s erratic focus. But Harold Ridley, a British ophthalmologist, who had treated Second World War fighter pilots whose windshields had shattered in dogfights, noticed that it was possible to leave some of the glass fragments in his patients’ eyes without incurring further damage. Using the same windshield material, he created the first artificial intraocular lens, starting an instant industry and liberating cataract patients from their Coke bottle specs.

The third eureka moment, and the one considered the final step into the modern era of cataract treatment, was the introduction in 1967 of phacoemulsification by a New York ophthalmologist named Charles Kelman. Intrigued by his dentist’s ultrasonic drilling tools, Kelman hatched the idea of using ultrasonic waves to emulsify – or break up – the cataract lens into tiny pieces, so it could be removed through progressively smaller incisions. This dramatically reduced both the hospital time and pain involved. It’s sobering to think that, in the early 20th century, the great French artist Claude Monet, had resisted then-onerous cataract surgery for more than 10 years before finally undergoing it at the age of 83 – after which his visual acuity was restored and his paintings bloomed again with vivid colour. By contrast, today, he could have the same thing done in an afternoon.

B. SOUND Hearing starts to deteriorate on average in our mid-40s. It’s no surprise, then, that there are about 28 million hard-of-hearing people in the U.S. today and close to 2.8 million in Canada. What is a surprise is that although the majority could be helped by them, only about 20 per cent, in both countries, actually have