Baby boomers pay for six pack in a syringe

[T_i_B]

Source: Sunday Telegraph

With his six-pack stomach, bulging chest and bull-like shoulders, the muscleman in the newspaper advertisement displays the sort of rippling torso that adorns the cover of men's fitness journals. But there is one difference. From the neck up, Dr Jeffry S Life is a balding 67-year-old physician.

His physique is the product not of a computer touch-up but a controversial American "ageing management" technique, that often includes a cocktail of human growth hormones and testosterone.

Some 13,000 clients have so far spent thousands of dollars on a technique known as Cenegenics (from the Greek for "new beginning"). As post-war baby boomers enter their 60s, it promises to boost performance from the office to the gym to the bedroom.

However, unlike many other health fads, there is one reason why it may not prove popular. Cenegenics was the brainchild of Alan Mintz, a radiologist, whose own buffed body also used to be the best advertising for his business - until he died in June, aged 69, five years short of the average male American life expectancy. His death prompted internet speculation that he paid the ultimate price for using human growth hormones.


Read more: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/19/wmuscle119.xml

[Donnachaidh]

1. whatever happened to growing old gracefully?

"From the neck up, Dr Jeffry S Life is a balding 67-year-old physician."

Wonder when he starts going to a plastic surgeon to start working on that part of his anatomy? :eyes:

[no_hypocrisy]

2. I agree. This culture over the decades has been obsessed with eternal

youth and dependence upon medicine as the quick alternative for real and imagined maladies, such as "old age". A program of diet, exercise, stretching and stress reduction would offer a viable life during one's golden years. Evidence can be found in the small villages in Japan where men and women fish or farm past the age of 100.

[Deja Q]

3. Agreed. And some people lose their hair long before even 30...

We also wonder why our youths have a 'sense of entitlement' complex, especially as claimed by the media. Well look at the freakin' media, which is foisting the youth-centric "culture" everywhere.

It's rather like showing your 10 year old cousin how to use the garden hose and then whine when he uses it to douse you with water!

[Warpy]

4. Dunno, but most cosmetic surgery ends up looking grotesque

on down the line. The stooped and wizened granny lady with the huge, perky breasts and windswept if unlined face is a caricature of her younger self; the man with the Barbie doll hair implants and fake pecs would be her fitting companion had he not divorced her in favor of sniffing after appalled twentysomethings in a local college bar.

Needless to say, I've chosen to go cheerfully to pot, myself.

Of all the spectacles caused by human vanity, the constant chase after vanished youth has to be the most pathetic.

Hey, we already did that stuff. It's somebody else's turn, now. It's our turn to figure out how to get old the same way we were young: with style and joy and telling the disapproving church ladies of both sexes to go fuck themselves.

[krkaufman]

6. And WHY!!! would he need to be doing that?

You got a problem with "balding"?

[skids]

7. Dying is not a graceful process...

...many of these "life extension" gambits are trying to do exactly that... grow old gracefully, rather than lose their bladder control, become senile, and rely on their children for decades rather than a year or two. Maybe add a year or three, but mostly just to continue to live rather than vegitate.

While this particular one is dicey, and the grotesque fascination with "boner pills" is shameful, there are plenty of people working on using science to improve the quality of life during the latter years. And they should be praised, not mocked, for it. Our elders contain within them wisdom and history, even if it is a thin gruel in the boomer generation, and if they can live more enjoyably, independently, and effectively during their twilight years, everyone benefits.

[mantis49]

5. This belongs in GD, not LBN.