Longevity Medicine
Longevity Medicine - An Overview
Longevity Medicine
Date: Tuesday, 21st May 2024, 6:30pm
Cost: Free
We understand the need to learn more before committing to a consultation. With this in mind, this webinar provides an introduction to longevity medicine.
Hosted by Dr Harpal Bains, founder and medical director of Harpal Clinic, explore the relevance of longevity medicine to the average person, find out if it is right for you and if you should consider exploring this fascinating new area of medicine compared to what is accessible within our current conventional medical system.
Ask questions and get a complimentary 10-minute 1-2-1 mini consultation with Dr Bains.
As a society we are living longer than ever before – it’s not unusual to live to 90 years of age, whereas 100 years ago, the average lifespan was much shorter.
Here at Harpal Clinic, we can utilise personalised longevity medicine to ensure you feel vital as you age. We have three distinct consultation pathways for longevity medicine. Our Longevity Medicine Membership (Tier 1-3), Focussed consultation or Comprehensive consultation. If you opt for our membership each of the tiers include varying amounts of doctor consultations, lab tests, serum tests, physical tests, support from our health coach, nutritionist consultations, and other great benefits. To view details of our longevity membership tiers, simply click the button below.
We are living longer, but in doing so we are also subjected to the negative impact of that. Our bodies get stiffer, slower, less able to fight off illnesses, and suffer from general wear and tear. Our skin starts to sag and develop lines, our eyesight deteriorates as does our hearing. Even our appetite for food and sleep goes down. Inevitably, many of us end up spending our later years with a lower quality of life and an acceptance that it will only get worse if we’re lucky, or illnesses, in care homes, or being taken care of. But does it have to be this way? Can we live longer and live better?
Dr Harpal Bains says: “Longevity medicine is growing in popularity. We are at a point where people are sick of being sick, of having no answers, of non-stop band-aiding with medications that then cause side effects, which require other meds to counteract said side effects. It’s a never ending vicious cycle.”
“Everybody is familiar with the concept of paying into a ‘financial’ pension pot so we have enough money to see us through when we get older. To cover the cost of healthcare, a decent lifestyle and any emergencies that life throws at us, including end of life care. But for some reason, the thought of investing in a ‘health’ pension pot doesn’t seem to sit well with many people. Many talk about ageing gracefully, except that I don’t really see arthritis and poor vision as being very graceful. Perhaps they mean that it is graceful to simply accept what is to come and not fight it. But we now have the technology to manage many aspects of it. This is only the start and this area of healthcare is going to explode. Why not be at the very forefront of a completely new way of living during our later years? Why not shift our later years and move the dial on what is considered middle age? Why wait for someone else – the GPs, the NHS, the government or traditional private healthcare insurance to decide what your future should look like, when that decision is in your hands?”
Longevity medicine is a preventative approach to slowing ageing. A lot of the time we see patients who are still healthy and want to maintain this as they age without losing their energy and vitality. They can see what has happened to their parents, what is happening to the world around them and they don’t want to sit around and wait for the same things to happen to them.
Longevity medicine is looking ahead to the future and asking what you can do today to maintain good health, because you know you may live to 90+ and want a good quality of life as you age.
Ageing is a natural process that affects all systems in the body. As we get older we become more vulnerable to illnesses, and of course, we see a decline in our bodies in how they look and how they function.
In a very simplistic way of thinking of it, ageing is simply an increase in the things that should not be in the body and a decrease in the things that should be there. Therefore to reverse or slow down ageing, it stands to reason that we simply need to flip that equation. Scientists all over the world are working on finding ways to do that as it is naturally way more complicated than that. Let’s take a look at the good and the bad:
Bad stuff that should not be there:
Good stuff that should be there:
Naturally, the above is an oversimplification but this is a huge subject and those who are interested can really focus on reading and listening to podcasts by some eminent scientists on this subject matter. Many factors like chronic stress (whether you admit it or not), inflammation (caused by food, alcohol, smoking, environmental toxin) and chronic infections which decreases immunity over time can wear down your body’s ability to repair and regenerate. This translates into ageing and all the common signs of it.
We can certainly decrease the effects of ageing. By addressing the stressors and contributing to the benefactors, it makes sense that we can slow down degeneration at a cellular level.
This is what longevity medicine is about – decreasing the things that contribute to ageing and increasing the things that repair and regenerate.
The sooner you can start to do this, the better.
At Harpal Clinic we offer a range of longevity testing and treatments that can be combined as part of your individual treatment plan, depending on your own goals and needs.
Screening is a vital part of our longevity medicine membership. It allows us to get a detailed picture of your healthspan and accurately calculate your biological age.
While it’s not possible to completely avoid health issues, our screening can pinpoint potential problems early on, allowing us to not only proactively address them to reduce their impact, but to also improve your healthspan and quality of life.
View the testing for each of our three memberships here.
There are also many things you can do at home to support your longevity. Adopting just a few of the lifestyle changes below can make a difference. These include:
There are clinics offering functional medicine and clinics offering hormones that are disease-led. But we are one of very few that offer a wellness-led health optimisation approach and combine both these disciplines to offer comprehensive, personalised preventative treatment.
In creating a longevity protocol we first uncover what’s in your body that is speeding the rate of wear and tear. This is where diagnostic testing comes in. It’s an exceptionally important part of longevity medicine. We look at hormones, sugar parameters, cholesterol parameters, see if the body is holding toxins, uncover latent viruses, review gut function and much more. We also recommend epigenetic testing to tell us what your biological age currently is (which can be a good comparison point further down the line) so that we know if the interventions you are making is making a difference.
Once we have a clear idea of the factors that are most heavily influencing your body and health, we can put into place a bespoke longevity plan to help you feel vital as you age.
Longevity is a complex field and as such, we offer a three tier membership system. We have structured the service to best reflect the latest research, tests available, and best practices in the UK.
Longevity, as its name suggests, will and should take a more considered effort and hence, a longer time. We plan it so that you get the latest research, protocols and testing as the years go by.
View the details of what is included in each tier and compare our three longevity medicine consultations + memberships on our Fees page.
