More Dr. Weil and the Lie Down and Die School of Thought

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I've talked about Dr. Weil's current advertising blitz and his aging apologism fairly recently. The topic seems worthy of more discussion, in light of position statements like this:

Weil calls anti-aging advocates "false prophets who are putting out a message that aging is reversible or that we can stop it."
"I think those are very wrong ideas," he says during a recent interview at his Vail ranch, about 30 miles southeast of Tucson. "Aging is a universal natural process, and I think if you set yourself up in opposition to it, you're in a very wrong relationship with nature."

Anthrax is completely natural too, but I'm sure Dr. Weil isn't so accepting of that - or maybe he would be if modern science didn't have it under control. Living in caves and dying at age twenty due to parasites and disease is also absolutely the natural human condition - everything from shaped sticks and controlled fire onwards is not. Arguments to nature are a very bad way to support any point of view in this modern age, and especially points of view that advocate the avoidable suffering and death of billions of people over the course of future decades.

We cannot presently make major inroads in the fight against age-related degeneration; there is no such thing as a proven therapy prevent or repair age-related damage and thus extend healthy life span by decades. Yet. (Although it is certainly the case that you can make decades of difference one way or another to your eventual life span through choice of life style and preventative health strategies). Dr. Weil is in a position in which it benefits his bottom line to claim that anti-aging medicine is impossible, since his business is competing with the reputable and less reputable arms of the anti-aging industry. However, he also benefits from completely ignoring or disparaging the growing scientific consensus that aging is reversible and can be defeated in the future - he's selling to customers in the here and now and certainly wouldn't thrive if they all donated that same money to real healthy life extension research or the Mprize for anti-aging research.

So don't listen to the Dr. Weils of the world. They may be well-meaning, but they're still trying to get you to give up, lie down and die rather than seize the endless possibilities offered by the future of healthy life extension medicine.

Technorati tags: aging, anti-aging, life extension