The Fountain of (Very Creepy) Youth

I'm not sure that it's accurate to say that I was "watching" the Dr Oz show the other day. I mean, yeah, it was on the TV and I both saw the images from and heard the audio of that TV, but I was at the gym and was certainly not responsible for turning it on. But enough stalling.

This particular installment of Oz's program had the good doctor discussing Human Growth Hormone (HGH)'s use as an "anti-aging" treatment. His guests were a couple of doctors (one was opposed to prescribing HGH to adult patients for cosmetic reasons; the other one had a conscience) and several women who had been taking the drug to look and feel "younger." Oz can be prone to indulging woo and pseudo-medicine, but here he moderated the discussion impartially and seemed genuinely interested in his and the audience's learning. I wish he would have been a little more against the practice, but his conduct was professional here (unlike his irresponsible sensationalism about arsenic in apple juice).

The Francis Blog is nothing if not unprofessional, so I'm free to say that if you're taking (or prescribing) HGH simply so you or a patient can look "better," then you're very likely making a mistake. Take a step back and think about it: how unnatural and weird is it to give growth hormone to someone who stopped growing many years ago because that's what humans do? Do these people take Flintstone's chewables, too? I recognize there are some cases, such as children with developmental issues, where this treatment (the HGH, not the Flintstones) is appropriate. Trust me, none of the women on this show fit that bill.

Two of the characters were particularly appalling. One was the pro-HGH doctor. I took a minute to look very closely at this fellow, to see if I could literally see dollar signs in his eyes. His arguments for prescribing HGH to overweight women with too much money were so strained, so lame, that you got the sense that he didn't really believe them so much as that he was simply reluctant to give up his practice's cash cow.

The other was this horrible-looking woman who proudly boasted that she was 64 but looked 45. I was really hoping that someone would point out that she actually looked like a 64-year-old woman with a creepy stretched-out face, not a 45-year-old. It was so delusional, and no one called her on it. I half expected her to ask someone, "wanna know how I got these scars?" But she was so absolute, so unwavering in her belief that she was defying age and staying young, when she so clearly wasn't and wasn't.

And that's the shame of the whole "anti-aging" industry and concept. Unless you're traveling at relativistic speeds, and you're not, you age one second for every second that elapses, no matter how much weird shit you put in your body. I remember Suzanne Somers a while back talking about all of these hormones and medicines she takes as pills and injections (at least one of which in a place that, though I can't speak personally to it, seems like it would be unpleasant). You can't stop aging, no matter how credulous of an individual you may be. You can't fly, either. You can eat right and exercise and keep yourself as healthy as possible, to the extent that such shrewd behavior counts as anti-aging, but anything else is delusion.

Although some might differ, I don't consider myself old yet, but when I get there, I promise you I'll age with some dignity. No plastic surgery, no bullshit medicine, and, you're hearing it here first: no hair replacement of any kind. When you're bald, you're bald - just deal with it. I wonder if the anti-aging fad is a byproduct of many Americans' inability to deal with death, that maybe the way we cling to anything that can miraculously prolong our life in some mysterious chemical way mirrors the way so many of us harbor unreasonably wishful beliefs about an afterlife. Not this blogger.