Garrison’s longevity work focuses largely on women’s health, in particular on .
“This kind of wellness or cosmetics conditions are everyone’s problem,” Jia said. But “the entire healthcare system is not designed to solve that problem; it’s designed to solve that real sick person who is dying.”
Since then, Jia has broadened Musely’s scope to include resources and treatments for proactive health and longevity.
Kumar went on to ask the panelists what they think about the recent “explosion in testing” in the longevity space—how people are getting all kinds of tests and scans to, they claim, optimize living longer and better. Garrison said that, where there is evidence for the test, it’s a great option. But that is not always the case.
“I think we can all acknowledge that there’s a little bit of a credibility issue in the longevity space, and a lot of the products that are marketed are either poorly supported by evidence or outright pseudoscience,” Garrison said. “For women, the amount of information and marketing that comes at us these days is crazy. And part of the problem is that it’s very hard as a consumer, as someone who’s not a scientist or a doctor, to really make the call between, ‘Is this real or not?’”
Sinclair expressed concerns that what people used to consider to be “fringe” behaviors, such as injecting oneself with peptides or taking drugs that have not yet been proven to be effective in humans, is becoming more common.
“I wonder where we’re going to go,” he said. “But I do applaud the fact that people do have the right, with their doctors … to try something if there’s nothing else that works, and there’s no seemingly bad downside.”
“I thought that five years ago, in my opinion, the regulations were so strict that even people who were suffering or dying couldn’t get medicines,” he continued. “That was too extreme in my view, but we’ve gone with the other extreme.”