Mainstream docs join anti-aging bandwagon
For thousands of years, magicians, alchemists, even a few fringe medical practitioners have fueled an unbounded optimism that we can blunt the ravages of time, stay younger for longer, maybe even defeat death itself. Their pitches have usually hinged on some drug, food or device — everything from electricity to yogurt to surgically installing the gonads of animals into our own bodies — that will slow or reverse the aging process. Every decade or so, “anti-aging” promoters grasp onto news coming out of research labs and trumpet those developments as the answer we have all been awaiting.
Lately, the buzzwords are “nano,” which refers to the science of the ultra small (a nanometer is one millionth of a millimeter), and stem cells. One “nano” face cream, for example, promises to stave off wrinkles with “nano-encapsulated technology” into which the makers have “packed microscopic bundles of Prodew, a nourishing skin humectant.” A dietary supplement advertised as “The World’s FIRST Stem Cell Enhancer,” promises to “Rebuild, Renew, Rejuvenate” — giving you more stem cells and keeping your organs healthy — if you take the blue-green algae capsules. The claims are based on wispy science and hype.
But while the cycle remains the same, something new is happening in the world of anti-aging. Mainstream doctors who once wanted nothing to do with the naturopaths, osteopaths and others who first populated modern anti-aging, and whom they often considered glorified carnival barkers, are buying in, signing up for “certification” as anti-aging practitioners and offering patients the promise of youth and rejuvenation through such treatments as human growth hormone, testosterone, special diet and exercise regimens, antioxidants and hundreds of other supplements.
“It is mushrooming,” says Dr. Elliot Snyder, an emergency room physician based in Northern California who follows the movement closely by frequently attending anti-aging meetings and talking to friends in the field. He also uses some of its techniques himself. Besides exercising five days a week and following a strict low-fat diet that includes lots of fruits, vegetables and wild salmon but no white flour or red meat, he takes supplements ranging from thiamin and biotin to DHEA, DMAE, colostrum, arginine, carnitine and omega-3 fatty acids — about 50 pills per day. He is 64 but looks a decade younger.
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