Age has become a diagnosis meant to be treated, not a time of your life to enjoy living. More medicines, more specialists, more tests, more fear. We have transformed age itself into a disease as we measure and "fix'" everything we can find, a windfall for the medical industrial complex, but a tragedy for the trusting souls who are tossed into the medical fire. Alan and Andy use data and their collective 75 years of experience to show how errant this approach is. Slow medicine, a focus on function and symptoms, a leap away from tests and specialization are the ingredients of successful aging. We talk about all of this and how patients can get back on track, even if the medical system will likely continue to steamroll its older victims. In addition to our own book, Return to Healing, we highlight some other books that have explored the issue of slow medicine and the medicalization of aging:

• Byock, The Best Care Possible
• Sweet, Slow Medicine
• Lazris, Curing Medicare
• Hadler, Rethinking Aging
• McCullough, My Mother, Your Mother

It's important to know that your later years need not be spent chasing numbers and falling prey to the fearmongering of specialists and drug company propaganda. Work with your primary care doctor and let the medical system back off and help you to live well and long.

We grapple with the question many people ask: how do we age well, live longer, live better? That is why many people go to the doctor, why they check their numbers and take medicines, why they buy that apple watch to monitor nearly everything! But as we discuss, none of that is the ticket to longevity. And is longevity the only barometer of aging success? We argue it is not.

We discuss that how long you live healthy and independent is, to most people, even more important than how long you live. Independence, mental acuity, the ability to engage in activities and be with people important to you is part of what we call quality of life, and how long you can maintain that is crucial. Our country does the worst in the world on that score. While we have among the lowest longevity of industrialized countries, we have even a lower health-gevity, how long you can remain healthy.

Taking a medical path to wellness when you are old is often a way to make things worse. We discuss why this is the case, and what's really important including your social interactions, your family, your diet, your mobility, and your happiness. Drugs don't fix any of that, lowering your cholesterol and blood pressure can make those worse without helping you live a day longer, but paving a path towards wellness through your own devices is always the best way to go. There is science behind this, and a lot of experience, and we'll lay it all out.

AI in such mediums as Google, Chat GPT, and Claude is becoming a device through which doctors and patients can make diagnoses, prescribe treatments, and distill symptoms down to diseases. If you are dizzy, what can be causing it, is it an emergency, how do you fix it? What if you are having chest pain? Are all your medicines necessary, can there be interactions? In some ways AI can answer simple questions, but like most protocols and many doctors, it will typically suggest a conservative approach with more tests and visits, sometimes a trip to the hospital, because it cannot fully understand you as a person and the nuances of how your symptoms may not be diagnosable through the algorithms and the large studies it can access. Primary care providers who know you well, who know the data well, who understand how to apply that data to you and how your symptoms may not fit in protocolized boxes, are far more likely to find the right diagnosis in conjunction with you. That's something a computer or protocol or even physician-held calculator can't do. This is why good primary care is not replaceable with AI. We run through several examples of this and show where AI is useful and where it can be lacking.