As 77 million baby boomers approach retirement, the relatively new field of anti-aging is racing to keep up with them. Anti-aging medicine goes way beyond Botox, Retin-A face creams, and medical spas that offer plastic surgery and laser-based cosmetic procedures. In fact, only a small portion of what these new medicine men and women do is aimed at making patients look younger. Instead, anti-aging doctors seek to turn back the internal hands of time by prescribing megadoses of supplements that they believe prevent the body’s organs from deteriorating and dying. In addition to hotly disputed biologic drugs such as human growth hormone (HGH), there’s an alphabet soup of supplements that includes DHEA, antioxidant vitamins C and E, glucosamine, Omega-3, and more. Women have been consumers of hormone replacement therapies for decades. Now men are also being primed to view middle age in terms of male menopause, sometimes called andropause. That’s one reason more patients than ever are starting to gobble up the anti-aging promise.
Judges’ Comments: This hard-hitting expose takes readers behind the curtain of the anti-aging industry and profiteers. The reporter deftly unravels the seductive claims of anti-aging products, highlighted by a groundbreaking report involving a pharmaceutical whistleblower. This topic has been explored before, but rarely as well or as effectively as this article.Weintraub runs down every lead, and follows every line of research, on the topics she explores, connecting the dots for readers to reach some interesting, and troubling, bottom-line conclusions.