The average length of life now is somewhere around 75 years right?
Which is crazy when you consider the dramatic increase that this
number represents in the amount of knowledge and technology that
medicine has experienced in the last 30 years. The problem is that we
get people to live longer and we find out the next major factor that
is limiting the length of our life. At this moment that limiting
factor is cancer and our lack of definitive cancer treatment.

It isn't that we don't understand cancer very well--because we do. We
know that it goes back to errors that occur in our DNA in one cell
most of the time that enable that cell to break out of the normal and
healthy limitations of growth and connectivity to other cells. This
rogue cell than goes and reeks havoc by invading areas critical to
life and destroying them by disrupting the form and therefore the
function of whatever organ they have invaded. It also isn't that we
don't have any knowledge of cancer treatment -- because we do. We have
drugs that will go in and (as selectively as possible) take out the
cells that can't otherwise be controlled. We also use physics to our
best ability with radiological oncology and gamma knife surgeries. We
now can find cancer much sooner and treat it more definitively.

The problem is that cancer is bigger than we can handle right now and
is able to evade human's abilities to control it. We can't cure the
most aggressive forms, we can't detect the most subtle cases, and our
cancer treatment is much much too crude. The treatments are
necessarily toxic to the cancer but we haven't gotten good at making
it selective so that the body doesn't take a serious hit. Maybe the
largest part of cancer treatment that we fail on is prevention.

We as American's and as humans more generally have a lot of bad habits
and have set up our world to rely on too many things that are
extremely hazardous to the environment and to our health. We smoke too
much while knowing full well that it is assaulting our lungs, we eat
too much fat knowing that it gives us cancer of the colon and the
breast, we work and live in air that we have made toxic to breathe,
etc. Yes we are really our own limiting factor, not cancer, not our
lack of good cancer treatment. I wonder if we will ever wake up and
stop blaming doctors for not being good enough and start to take
responsibility for our actions.

http://www.dontplayplay.com/html/horoscope/20060925/7885.html