I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Terry Grossman this past weekend at Convergence08. Grossman, along with Ray Kurzweil, co-authored the book Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever in 2005.
He is currently working on a follow-up titled, Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Longer. In 2000 Grossman penned the book, The Baby Boomers’ Guide to Living Forever.
Dr. Grossman is also the founder and medical director of The Grossman Wellness Center. When asked what he does for a living, Grossman replies, “I treat the condition of aging.”
Indeed, like a number of other forward-thinkers, he has come to see aging as a disease, as something that can be cured. It has only one purpose, he declares, “to destroy our health and result in our death.” He notes that aging is a unique disease in that it afflicts 100% of us and has thus far proved to be 100% fatal.
He enourages his patients, most of whom are looking to reduce their “biological age,” to think about weight and diet, genomics testing, screening for inflammation, methylation, coronary heart disease and cancer, detoxification, and maintaining proper hormone levels. In addition, Grossman advises his clients to keep themselves intellectually stimulated, take supplements, work to reduce their stress levels, and exercise.
Simply put, he believes that it’s possible to make a significant impact on human longevity by lifestyle choices alone. Grossman believes we need to rewrite our outdated stone age code. “Our ancestors were well suited to a world of scarcity,” he says, “while we are in a world of abundance.” Consequently, the first thing we can do about impacting on our longevity is to look at our food choices.
Along with Kurzweil, Grossman helped to launch the Ray and Terry’s brand of longevity products. Their overriding philosophy is that the “leading causes of death – heart disease, cancer, stroke, respiratory disease, kidney disease, liver disease, and diabetes – do not appear out of the blue. They are the end result of processes that are decades in the making.” The Ray & Terry products are a way to address longstanding imbalances in the metabolic processes that can lead to disease.
Ultimately, Terry Grossman’s goal is to help people reprogram their biochemistry. Given the potential for more substantive life extending interventions in the future, Grossman wants his patients to work with the best tools and knowledge available today. The hope is that people, particularly those middle-aged and older, will be able to live long enough to reap the benefits of the next stage of life extension, which will involve more profound use of biotechnologies.
And once this stage is surpassed, and we enter into the era of the molecular machine, we will likely find ourselves endowed with indefinite lifespans.
Thanks to visionaries like Dr. Grossman, some of us may actually get there.
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Further reading: Eight tips to dramatically improve your chances of living forever
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