| Anti-aging medicine has emerged over the past twenty five years with the explicit goal of biomedicoscientifically intervening into aging. Anti-aging practitioners treat patients in their clinics with a wide array of anti-aging strategies: nutrition, exercise, supplements and hormone therapies (human growth hormone being the most contentious). Anti-aging researchers search for ways to intervene into the aging process, having to first grapple with the unsettledness of what that process might entail. Interventions into aging have been dubbed by many detractors as a linkage between aging and disease. This dissertation, drawing from more than six years of ethnographic interviews, participant observation in clinics and conferences, and a review of pertinent literature, argues that practitioners do not conceptualize their work in this way. Instead, anti-aging proponents generally eschew this linkage arguing that aging is not a disease but that it is not inevitable and thus subject to scientific scrutiny and biomedical intervention. The meaning of aging, nature, and the role that biomedicoscience plays in shaping and responding to these conceptions is explicitly at stake. Anti-aging medicine raises a number of critical issues: access to care, the mandate of biomedical treatment, how we think of ourselves in relation to our life-cycles and time, how we construct nature and its categorical power. I argue that the notions of process and event underlie these issues. By thinking of aging as a process, its naturalness becomes less significant. By avoiding the construction of disease, anti-aging practitioners bypass the inherent politics that herald fears of medicalization. Nature is not completely irrelevant here, however. Instead of relating to nature as a kind of sanctuary in which biomedical intervention is constructed as hubristic at best, anti-aging proponents argue that nature is more significant in the human drive to overcome biological constraints. Thus, it is more natural to pursue anti-aging medicine than to regard aging as natural and do little beyond attend to its "associated" diseases such as Alzheimer's Disease. This dissertation attends to anti-aging proponents' attempts to make sense of these seeming contradictions and ultimately argues that the ever-expanding catalog of scientific possibilities render inadequate our current vocabularies. |
