Healthy Aging, A Lifelong Guide to Physical and Spiritual Well Being

He wonders why people who so admire the complexity, depth and mellowness in a well-aged whisky, wine or antique would view their own aging so differently. …. “I think that healthy aging begins with acceptance of the aging process and the realization that everything ages,” he says….”There is value to be gained in the experience of aging and I think the denial of aging, whether through use of anti-aging medicine or cosmetic surgery or taking anti-aging supplements, all of that is an obstacle to the acceptance of aging.” …Instead, Weil wants us to separate the notion of getting old from age-related diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancer and neurodegenerative diseases. “Its these that really make old age miserable,” he says. But for Weil, aging and disease are not synonymous. People can live to a ripe old age without becoming infirm, he assets. But it will require a paradigm shift from the medical model of treatment to a preventative model of healing. Weil says western society has not begun to come to grips with the coming bulge of baby boomers as senior citizens, with all the inherent medical costs associated with age-related disease. The implications are enormous unless people learn to prevent such ailments. He hopes his new book will teach people how to live a long, healthy life followed by a short decline into death. He calls it “compressed morbidity” or squeezing the time of illness and decline into as small a space as possible with a rapid decline at the end. “That is what we'd all like and I think it is definitely possible,” he says.

Dr. Andrew Weil, “Healthy Aging, A Lifelong Guide to Physical and Spiritual Well Being”…from The Vancouver Sun article by Karen Gram, April 25, 2005