dagblog - Comments for "The secret of longer lives for men"

"what was Alexander the

EmmaZahn — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 05:48:28 +0000

In reply to There are a lot of other

"what was Alexander the Great's real cause of death?"

Babylonian swamp fever?

That's what I remember from high-school history class. :D

At the bottom of 60% of the

ocean-kat — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 04:03:32 +0000

In reply to The secret of longer lives for men

At the bottom of 60% of the pages I visit there's a picture of a guy that makes Schwarzenegger look like a wimp. Its an ad telling me I can increase my over 50 testosterone level to what it was when I was 25. I assume that picture is what I'd look like if only I'd buy whatever they're selling. Funny though, I was a skinny runt when I was 25 and had all that massive high levels of testosterone. Considering how ubiquitous that ad is I don't think castration is gonna catch on no matter how much longer it might make you live.

There are a lot of other

artappraiser — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 03:17:28 +0000

In reply to I can think of a much more

There are a lot of other plausible explanations & problems with the study, some, including yours, were raised in the article I read on the study a few days ago.

I can't find the exact one, but these should suffice:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/09/study-castration-adds-...

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/09/25/161746488/korean-eunuchs-live...

It's actually a main problem of the field of history: when you find a nice, pretty complete archive somewheres, you can spend a lot of time looking for patterns in it, and find out some neat stuff, but generally it's folly to start getting any illusions that you are getting at "the whole story.."

Maybe not oddly, because good ones have good detective skills, but I have found that a lot of medical doctors are often big fans of the hobby of trying to diagnose long-dead historical figures and other historical health issues. Years ago when I had a teeny studio on the upper west side in Manhattan, on recycling day I used to sometimes pick up stacks of medical journals discarded by the many doctors' offices around. One of the main journals (like JAMA) had a regular column doing just that which ran in the front pages (maybe it still exists, I don't known) which impressed me like: "here's your fun stuff before you have to start cracking on your homework." It would be something like "what was Alexander the Great's real cause of death?"

I can think of a much more

EmmaZahn — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 21:53:29 +0000

In reply to The secret of longer lives for men

I can think of a much more plausible explanation for the findings.

The life of privilege obtained through their sacrifice. Why else would they or their families do that?