For trained physicians, aging is often defined by the age-related diseases and disorders people experience as they grow older. In fact, aging is often portrayed as a disease that is amenable to treatment, just like any other elderly chronic diseases that physicians are trained to diagnose and treat. This is not an unexpected view of aging given the Western disease-oriented model of medical education. Examples of the conditions that anti-aging practitioners endeavor to treat or postpone include cardiovascular disease, cancer, sensory impairments, muscle and bone loss, loss of skin elasticity, and decline in sexual activity in elderly function.
By postponing or reducing the onset, risk, or severity of these diseases and disorders through a combination of diet, exercise older people, nutritional supplements anti aging, and hormone replacement, some clinicians in the anti-aging industry claim that they have stopped and even reverse aging in their patients. The treatments for these conditions, which are often preceded by a battery of tests intended to measure biological age, are then referred to as anti-aging medicine.
At one level, it is difficult to argue with the belief that aging has been modulated through this combination of tests and interventions given that many of the patients who make these changes in their lives often claim that they feel better. Indeed, reducing the risk of death—through early detection, careful monitoring through annual physicals, and behavior modification—has been possible for centuries. Ironically, science in a way supports the view that aging is a disease and that anti-aging interventions exist by suggesting that because an aging or death program cannot be built into our genes as a product of evolution, a biological loophole allows what we see and feel as “aging” to be inherently modifiable by our own actions. Thus, by lowering the risk of cardiovascular disease through preventive maintenance or by using pharmaceuticals, it may seem like aging has been delayed; the use of facial creams that reduce the appearance of wrinkled skin would appear to reverse aging; and interventions that increase muscle mass, reduce body fat, improve or restore sexual function, and increase bone density might appear to some as if the proverbial fountain of youth had been discovered.
The patients undergoing these anti-aging treatments may ask what difference it makes whether they are actually growing younger, reversing the biological process of aging, or living longer? If they feel better, what else matters? This may very well be the rationale that underlies much of the anti-aging industry today. Indeed, the difference between feeling better and modulating the biological process of aging accompanied by documented life extension is the foundational difference between the scientist’s and practitioner’s views of an anti-aging intervention.
