Aging Naturally

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There are at present no effective antiaging medicines. Yet the field keeps expanding. Currently, popular practices include live-cell therapy (injecting the fetal cells of animals into human beings), caloric restriction (drastically limiting the number of calories a body takes in) and hormone therapy (to restore hormones to levels found in younger people).

Here is the crux of the difference between practitioners of antiaging medicine and more conventional colleagues: the former are using methods and making claims that the latter consider unsupported by scientific evidence. Most of those methods may be relatively harmless except to the bank accounts of clients; others may not.

Furthermore, I am dismayed by the emphasis on appearance in antiaging medicine. This is apparent not just in the use of senior bodybuilders as models of healthy aging but in the prominent inclusion of cosmetic surgery in the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine's conferences and publications. To my mind, all this represents attempts to deny or mask the outward signs of aging. It is nonacceptance of aging--one of the great obstacles to doing it gracefully.

If you are tempted by the promises of antiaging medicine, I would advise you to use it selectively. Always assess the potential for harm of any intervention. Then try to evaluate the evidence for any claimed benefits. Weigh potential benefits against possible risks, including exorbitant costs. Get second opinions from doctors who are not part of the antiaging enterprise. If you do decide to follow a special treatment regimen, set a time limit for judging whether it does you any good--say, three to six months. Then determine if it was worth the cost.

Before I leave this subject, I want to warn you that the promises you will hear from antiaging practitioners are going to become more extravagant in the coming years. A number of hard-core molecular biologists claim to have identified genetic mechanisms that control the aging process as well as ways of manipulating them. These researchers believe that the biological clock can be stopped or turned back, and as antiaging doctors learn about this work, they will use it to their advantage.

My bottom line for now is that these theoretical breakthroughs serve only as distractions from what's important--namely, learning to accept the inevitability of aging, understanding its challenges and promises, and knowing how to keep minds and bodies as healthy as possible while moving through life's successive stages.

To age gracefully means to let nature take its course while doing everything in our power to delay the onset of age-related disease. Or, in other words, to live as long and as well as possible, then have a rapid decline at the end of life.

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