You have probably heard about “anti-aging medicine” – most likely from someone trying to sell you something to make you younger. Does it really work? Can you live forever in the same shape as when you were 25 years old? It sounds like science fiction – it can’t possibly be true… can it?

Genuine anti-aging medicine is not about trying to live forever. It is about taking positive steps toward sustaining a better quality of life and looking after your body when you get older. It is part of “wellness medicine,” the science of understanding how to prevent disease as well as cure. Being “well,” as opposed to not being sick, is part of many ancient medical traditions, such as Chinese Chi-Gong and Indian Ayurveda, but it is a new idea in Western medicine which traditionally has dealt only with sick or injured patients.

Due to wellness medicine being so new in the West, and with money there to be made, there is a lot of hype. If you Google “anti aging medicine” you will get 13 million websites – most trying to sell you some type of product. Beware, there are no miracles out there, the biggest magic trick is often making your money disappear.

At the same time, there have been tremendous advances in our understanding of how the body works and ages. Some of these findings have led to new ways of testing your body’s systems, and in some cases treating effects of aging to help improve your life. Yet many doctors trained to believe that aging cannot be treated don’t know about these advances and dismiss the entire field of anti-aging as nonsense.

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Everywhere you look, someone is trying to help you look and feel younger. Health spas, gyms, nutritional supplements, dieticians, slimming centres, plastic surgery, botox, massage, electric vibrations, magnet therapy, herbs, crystals – there’s an entire array of promises out there to help you lower your bank account. This is a big, big business, and just like any other business, truth is often less important than marketing.

The more dramatic claims made by some with relation to specific drugs, combinations of vitamins and hormone therapies allows for a lot of misguided information and occasional outrageous claims. This is why you need to be careful. Likewise with many products, as competitors seek to lead the way in the market, they will make more and more exaggerated claims to get your attention. Everybody is trying to sell you something, and so they will tell you that what they have is unique and something you cannot get anywhere else. Most of these claims are pure hype.

How can you find the middle ground between the traditionalists who won’t believe anything, and the quacks trying to take your money? It’s a difficult subject to tackle.

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Western medicine has traditionally been about curing disease and injury – broken arms, heart attacks – situations where what’s wrong is obvious. If you have ever had the experience of not feeling well and a doctor telling you that there’s nothing wrong with you, then you understand the problems faced by anti-aging medicine. Many doctors view aging as natural and inevitable and not something to treat. We get old and we die. Since “aging” is not a “disease,” there is nothing to “cure,” and so some doctors dismiss anti-aging medicine as a pointless waste of money.

But how do you take care of your arm when it’s not broken? How do you take care of your heart so that you don’t have a heart attack? Preventative activities – medicine to help you not get sick, rather than medicine that helps you once you are sick – are relatively new in western medicine. Partly this is because of what it means to “prove” something.

Usually in medical science, when you want to prove that a drug or a surgical operation works, you try it on some patients with a disease and compare how they do with another group of patients who had the same disease, but had different treatments. This is called a “prospective case-controlled study” – “prospective” means you are looking for the outcome in the future, not in something that’s already happened; the “case” is the group of patients who had the therapy you are trying to prove; and the “control” is the other group of patients who had a different therapy. This is gold standard of proof in scientific medicine.

This is a difficult standard to reach for preventative therapies like anti-aging medicine. For one thing, in prevention there is nothing to cure, because no one is sick.

There are other standards of proof. Epidemiologic studies look at groups of people who look different medically and try to understand why. For example, why do Japanese people have higher incidence of stomach cancer? Or why do the French and Italians have less heart disease than Americans? Population studies follow a big group of people for a long time to see what happens to them. There are also studies done in laboratories, in test tubes and under microscopes and on animals and computer models. But for some, these are not “gold standard.”

Anti-aging science relies heavily on epidemiologic and population studies, lab and animal experiments, and computer modeling. These are complicated studies and require careful analysis. When understood correctly, the science can help people make proper informed decisions.

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