A few weeks ago the longevity scientist Matt Kaeberlein recorded a reaction video calling my report on David Sinclair "sensationalist." He suggested that I was a bad journalist who doesn't understand the science and am just in it for the clicks. I generally don’t think of myself in that way. Indeed it took me almost a month to research and write my Sinclair video and I was careful to check my facts.
I think the real reason that Kaeberlein was upset with me is that I am skeptical of many, if not most, of the claims that the entire field of longevity medicine brings to the table. I’m not convinced that aging is actually a disease. I don’t believe that the best way to understand human health is through the lens of poorly researched biomarkers. I think that just because some drugs do well in animal studies that we won’t know how they work in humans until we actually test those compounds in humans.
That said, I do believe that Kaeberlein, who runs the youtube channel Optispan, is a serious scientist who is trying to push the boundaries of medicine in an optimistic direction. After all, just because he can’t yet prove that the interventions he is following work, doesn’t mean that pursuing anti-aging isn’t a laudable goal.
A lot of this ultimately comes down to philosophical questions about what a disease is in the first place, and what counts as evidence in a medical context. Are we looking for medical treatments that a proven to alieveate the symptoms of disease, or medicines that predict and treat disease before it ever materializes? While the second option sounds pretty good, how do you know if a medicine works if you never felt a symptom?
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