At Ikare, we often hear people say they don’t need help with their Health, they have it covered. There are a couple of versions to their story:
- they’re practicing physical activity (running, hiking, trail, swimming, you name it!)
- they’re taking care of their diet (vegetarian, keto, paleo, low-carb, etc.). Another very close variation of this story is where they take some vitamins or supplements.
- their primary care doctor run a series of exams, only to discover everything’s ok (or full body scan, or blood lab, etc.).
- other possible variations of “Do It Yourself” approaches.
All the above are valuable in themselves, and all the people with such a preventative mindset are miles ahead of the ones who look the other way and hope for the better when it comes to their long-term health. However, I usually think of taking care of one’s longevity just as I think of going to the fitness club. Let’s see why these different approaches are sub-optimal:
- Preventative Medicine is not only about physical activity, or only about diet, or only about vitamins and supplements, etc. it is about all of this at the same time. Taking care of 1 aspect is way better than doing nothing, but way worse than encompassing all of these aspects (and many others, sleep, mental health and balance, stress, etc…) at the same time. When you go to the gym, you don’t work only your pecs, or your triceps. Well, when you improve your longevity you can’t focus on only 1 aspect neither.
- Preventative Medicine is a discipline which is complex, and evolves at a breakneck pace. Keeping up with the last discoveries, the last studies, the last experiments and practices is almost impossible, unless you spend your life exploring the field (Bryan Johnson style 🙂 ). Usually, if you want to do it seriously, either you’re already a professional athlete and you know your craft and you do it alone, either you’re just a “normal person” and practice it under the guidance of a coach. If you don’t get help, you could get hurt, you gould overtrain, or you could just waste your time with no tangible results. Well in Longevity it’s the same, if you want to do it seriously, you need guidance, “the devil is in the details” as they say.
- your “primary care” doctor is not a Longevity Doctor. I’m oversimplifying a bit, but most likely, your doctor has been trained all his life to look at symptoms, and then run a series of exams, and then prescribe medication accordingly. In other words, he has been trained to practice Reactive/Curative Medicine, but Longevity is about Preventative Medicine. Most of the time, your primary care doctor will diagnose you as healthy, which may be totally true at the time of the examination, but may not be true anymore in the near future. However, your doctor will not take this evolution into consideration, until it is too late. He will also prescribe the most standard list of exams, which will not explore all the necessary dimensions of your health. For example, he may investigate only your cardiovascular health for example, and leave you with the impression that you’re in good health. But what about your immune system? Or your body composition? Or your VO2max? Or your glucose profile (spikes, variability, average)? Incomplete exams can only lead to incomplete conclusions.
Make no mistake, taking care of your Longevity is a complex endeavour. Either you turn into a “biohacker”, invest a considerable amount of time and effort into it and do it seriously. Either you do it approximatively (and get very approximative results also, maybe benefiting from the placebo effect, where you think you’re taking care of your health, and you get some positive results from it just by believing it). Either you get professional help, such as the one we offer on Ikare.ai.