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women’s health<br />
Aging Gracefully While Aging Safely<br />
Avoiding Risky Procedures and Empty Promises<br />
By Amy Kennard<br />
Raise your hand if you’ve looked in the mirror and tugged a little<br />
at those creases around your mouth, frowned at those frown<br />
lines, or widened those eyes to make the crows’ feet disappear.<br />
Who can relate to feeling that flash of heat that makes you want<br />
to tear your clothes off? Who here is constantly tired, yet can’t get<br />
a good night’s sleep to save her life?<br />
Welcome to aging, ladies. No doubt your ears perk up when you<br />
hear those anti-aging commercials promising a more youthful appearance,<br />
relief of menopausal symptoms, weight loss, or a better sex life.<br />
S. Jay Olshansky, Ph.D., a research associate at the Center on<br />
Aging at the University of Chicago, is about to rain on your parade.<br />
“Aging is a natural process, not a medical condition,” he says, “and<br />
there isn’t any therapy that can reverse or slow it down.”<br />
The problem is, the anti-aging market is quite the money maker for<br />
those offering to let you drink from the fountain of youth, yet some of the<br />
treatments they recommend can be harmful and even downright deadly.<br />
Anti-aging isn't a specialty that's recognized by the American<br />
Board of Medical Specialties; meaning doctors can't officially be<br />
board-certified in it, yet it has its own professional society, the American<br />
Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (A4M). Founded in 1992, A4M<br />
boasts some 24,000 members worldwide and offers a “certificate”<br />
in anti-aging medicine, available to any M.D., in any specialty.<br />
Endocrinologists, who specialize in hormones; and internists, or<br />
“integrative physicians,” who practice a holistic approach to health;<br />
along with OB-GYNs, who don’t actively promote their “anti-aging”<br />
miracles; are usually trained to treat a multitude of age-related issues.<br />
However, physicians of all specialties are getting in on the lucrative<br />
anti-aging industry with both physical and monetary consequences<br />
to their patients. The problem is, anti-aging doctors may be ill-trained<br />
to be diagnosing and treating what could be more serious underlying<br />
issues, and may even be harming their patients with trendy therapies.<br />
A Hormone Headache<br />
"The concept is that if you take a 60-year-old woman and duplicate<br />
the hormone environment from when she was 20, she'll feel like she's<br />
20," says Nanette Santoro, M.D., director of the Division of Reproductive<br />
Endocrinology & Infertility at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.<br />
Hormone therapy (HT), which encompasses estrogen as well as estrogen-progestin<br />
therapy, has been shown to effectively treat menopausal<br />
symptoms, but there are also some associated risks. It is imperative that<br />
Page 22 — Healthy Cells Magazine — Mid-Illinois <strong>Springfield</strong> / Decatur — September 2016
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