Anti Ageing Medicine

I've just returned from Chicago where the weather was absolutely beautiful. You don't often get to say that about the weather in Chicago. I was there to attend the Bioidentical Hormone Replacement Symposium to learn more about this important aspect of anti aging medicine.

Plastic surgery has traditionally been concerned with people's appearance and not how they age or how they feel as they get older. Plastic surgeons, typically coming from a general surgery background, have been more concerned with the technical aspects of surgical rejuvenation and less with the physiological aspects of aging and their effects oh how we look over time and how we feel as we age. Traditional internal medicine has fared no better in responding to patient's desires to optimize their health to age in the least destructive way possible. Most internists are geared to treat illnesses with commercially available pharmaceuticals and do not endeavor to improve the health of their patients through the optimization of their hormones or the addition of additives that may be missing from the typical diet.

The time has come for us as plastic surgeons to learn how we can integrate age regenerative medicine in to our practices to better serve our patients desires not just to look better but to live a longer, healthier life while feeling better. This doesn't mean converting to an internal medicine type of practice, but it does mean learning the basics of bio-identical hormone replacement along with the addition of vitamins and neutraceuticals to our pre and post operative regimens to treat the entire patient. The trick will be separating fact from fiction in the new and rapidly changing field of medicine while basing all of our treatments on sound scientific principles.

Dr. Jabs