I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Terry Grossman this past weekend at Convergence08.Grossman, along with Ray Kurzweil, co-authored the book Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever in 2005. He is currently working on a follow-up titled, Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Longer. In 2000 Grossman penned the book, The Baby Boomers' Guide to Living Forever.
Dr. Grossman is also the founder and medical director of The Grossman Wellness Center. When asked what he does for a living, Grossman replies, "I treat the condition of aging."
Indeed, like a number of other forward-thinkers, he has come to see aging as a disease, as something that can be cured. It has only one purpose, he declares, "to destroy our health and result in our death." He notes that aging is a unique disease in that it afflicts 100% of us and has thus far proved to be 100% fatal.
He enourages his patients, most of whom are looking to reduce their "biological age," to think about weight and diet, genomics testing, screening for inflammation, methylation, coronary heart disease and cancer, detoxification, and maintaining proper hormone levels. In addition, Grossman advises his clients to keep themselves intellectually stimulated, take supplements, work to reduce their stress levels, and exercise.
Simply put, he believes that it's possible to make a significant impact on human longevity by lifestyle choices alone. Grossman believes we need to rewrite our outdated stone age code. "Our ancestors were well suited to a world of scarcity," he says, "while we are in a world of abundance." Consequently, the first thing we can do about impacting on our longevity is to look at our food choices.
Along with Kurzweil, Grossman helped to launch the Ray and Terry's brand of longevity products. Their overriding philosophy is that the "leading causes of death – heart disease, cancer, stroke, respiratory disease, kidney disease, liver disease, and diabetes – do not appear out of the blue. They are the end result of processes that are decades in the making." The Ray & Terry products are a way to address longstanding imbalances in the metabolic processes that can lead to disease.
Ultimately, Terry Grossman's goal is to help people reprogram their biochemistry. Given the potential for more substantive life extending interventions in the future, Grossman wants his patients to work with the best tools and knowledge available today. The hope is that people, particularly those middle-aged and older, will be able to live long enough to reap the benefits of the next stage of life extension, which will involve more profound use of biotechnologies.
And once this stage is surpassed, and we enter into the era of the molecular machine, we will likely find ourselves endowed with indefinite lifespans.
Thanks to visionaries like Dr. Grossman, some of us may actually get there.
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Further reading: Eight tips to dramatically improve your chances of living forever
4 comments:
Yes,
It's those working in the longevity/medical fields that really deserve our highest respect.
The immediate threats to our well-being are heart disease, cancer, stroke etc and transhumanists should take immediate actions to nullify these nasties, or they won't be around long enough to do any of the other grand projects.
Health is something too many take for granted, you don't realize what you've got until its gone. I'm perhaps more acutely aware of this fact than most, my health has never been good.
Some good old fashioned hacking needs to be applied here, we need plaque busters to clean out the heart and arteries, and tumor busters to block cancer. We need them urgently. Ideally these would be in the form of preventative pills that can be taken orally.
Life expectancy in the western world is increasing for a variety of reasons.
However, were you be lucky enough to live beyond 80 you would have a 20% chance of having some form of dementia (in the UK at least). Even if the body continues to function the mind seems to have worn itself out. Mental health should not be left out of the discussion.
However, were you be lucky enough to live beyond 80 you would have a 20% chance of having some form of dementia (in the UK at least). Even if the body continues to function the mind seems to have worn itself out. Mental health should not be left out of the discussion.
Maintaining brain health and function is a vital part of the struggle to defeat aging. It will be harder to develop technology to keep the brain permanently young than to do the same for other organs, simply because the brain is so complex. But as the article notes, there are already things we can do. Keep active and mentally stimulated (cut down on TV and read more), and stay physically healthy -- it all improves your odds.
And there are some promising developments "in the pipeline" -- see de Grey's Ending Aging on Alzheimer's treatments, for example.
Skeptic magazine published an article a couple years ago which presents reasons for considering Grossman a quack:
PDF scan
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