Longevity & prevention

“I am well. I would like to stay that way, and I would like some data.”

The fastest-growing category in this market, and the one with the widest gap between the good and the ridiculous.

How long it takes

Seven to fourteen nights at a clinic — the diagnostics alone take several days. For the Blue Zone route, ten nights and a hire car.

Programmes

3 on this site

What is going on

The honest version

At the serious end this is preventive medicine with a hotel attached: several days of genuine diagnostics — bloods, imaging, body composition, cardiovascular and metabolic assessment — read by physicians, followed by a programme built on the results and a protocol for the years afterwards. That is a real product and it is priced accordingly.

At the other end it is a supplement drip and a cryotherapy chamber, sold on the word itself. The test is simple and worth applying: does the programme measure you before it prescribes, and does it measure you again at the end? If not, it is a spa.

The other honest route into this is not a clinic at all. The places where people demonstrably live longest — Okinawa, Nicoya — are not selling anything, and going to look at how they actually eat and move is a cheaper and more durable education than most protocols.

Before you book anything. Extensive screening in well people is not an unqualified good: it produces incidental findings, false positives and downstream investigations that carry their own risks, and reasonable doctors disagree about how much of it is worthwhile. Ask what happens to an abnormal result and who follows it up. Be sceptical of anything infused, injected or sold in a bottle at the end — the evidence for most of it is thin, and the evidence for sleep, strength training and not drinking is not.

How long it takes. Seven to fourteen nights at a clinic — the diagnostics alone take several days. For the Blue Zone route, ten nights and a hire car.

What actually helps

What actually helps, and why

Longevity
Full diagnostic work-up read by physicians, with the programme written from the results rather than chosen from a brochure. The distinction between this and a spa is the laboratory.
The Mayr cure
The metabolic and digestive half of the same argument, at a fraction of the price, with laboratory work at both ends.
Ayurveda
Rasayana is a preventive tradition rather than a curative one and has been for two thousand years. Taken annually, which is how its own culture uses it.

Expectations

What a programme for this actually does to your fortnight

The commonest complaint after a wellness stay is not that it failed — it is that it was not what the guest pictured. This block is here to remove that.

Several days of diagnostics before anything is prescribed.
Numbers at the start and numbers at the end, with a physician who explains both.
A protocol for the year, and the assumption you will come back.
A great deal of unglamorous advice about sleep, muscle mass and alcohol, which is where the evidence actually is.
No promises about lifespan, from anybody serious.

Curated by hand