Mainstream docs join anti-aging bandwagon

These days, many anti-aging promoters, seeking to shed the flim-flam image, are ratcheting down the rhetoric. They have begun using terms like “age management” and “healthy aging” that imply realistic goals and give important, if commonsense, advice.

Most anti-aging doctors tell patients what we already know: Exercise. Lose weight. Lower our blood pressure. Don’t smoke. “I do not see this as the basis for a new practice specialty,” argues Relman, the professor emeritus at Harvard.

But a good anti-aging doctor, says Snyder, is more like a devoted personal mountain guide. Rather than cramming sick patients into quickie appointments, he or she will “push you into exercise, get you to join a club, get a personal trainer, a nutritionist to create a full diet to follow and not just for weight loss. They’ll direct you to certain supplements, antioxidants, watch the glucose curve to see if you are borderline diabetic. If you go to a regular doctor he will not be as proactive. He’ll wait for an event to happen, then treat it. That is what I do in ER medicine.”

That kind of preventive care is what Orange County, Calif., entrepreneur and long-time anti-aging advocate David Kekich, 65, says he gets from his anti-aging doctor. Though he did try testosterone therapy for a short time, he was unable to continue because it aggravated pain from a spinal cord injury. Instead, Kekich and his physician have built a program of rigorous exercise; a low-fat diet with abundant fresh fruits and vegetables, little red meat and no sugar or processed flour; regular blood testing; and aggressive supplementation — up to 60 tablets per day.

“I see my doctor about once a year,” Kekich reports. “He fine-tunes things. Regular doctors could not even come close. When I have gone to them they tell me I am crazy and should not even look at these things and that I should wait until I have a problem. But to me that is closing the barn door after the horse is gone. Most doctors are mechanics. They fix things. To me, prevention is the name of the game.”

Filling a gap
Mainstream medicine may look askance at anti-aging practices, but it has adopted its elements. Sterling centers such as Princeton, Stanford, the Cleveland Clinic, Northwestern University, Duke University and others have established “executive health” programs where the wealthy undergo similar day-long evaluations, and testing costing thousands of dollars.

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The fact that the wealthy are willing to pay so much, and that doctors are catering to them, is more a comment on the health care system we have built, says Northwestern's Zoloth, than on the validity of anti-aging medicine.

Relman agrees that anti-aging medicine is stepping into the growing gap between the public and faith in the health care system. “It is unfortunate but understandable given the sad facts about the current state of medical care in this country,” he says. “Without a strong base of primary care, you cannot have an effective health care system. It breaks down into specialized and unconnected procedures and tests and gets more and more disorganized and unsatisfactory, and that is what is happening in America today.”

Though it may fill the gap, much of the anti-aging agenda is still based more on hope than evidence. “We do worry that there could be bad effects 20 or 30 years from now,” admits Jurow, referring mainly to hormones.

In the world of anti-aging, though, which sees us all moving closer to death with every passing minute, hope outweighs proof. “We don’t have time to wait half a century to find out if something is really going to work!” Goldman says.

Brian Alexander, a frequent contributor to msnbc.com, is the author of "Rapture: A Raucous Tour of Cloning, Transhumanism, and the New Era of Immortality" and “America Unzipped: In Search of Sex and Satisfaction."

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