The Fountain of Youth

You would think that the idea of a fountain of youth would have ended with Ponce` de Leon's failure to locate it in Florida, but every few years, someone comes up with an idea, a drug, or a gimmick which can assure people eternal youth.  A recent article entitled “Enzyme May be Fountain of Youth” has once again spurred interest.  Of course, the headline is only designed to grab peoples’ attention.  There is no secret to perpetual youth.  The researchers admit that findings “won’t make people any younger or allow them to live forever.”  By the time you finish reading the article you realize that the researchers are really not promising anything.

What they have found is that a cell divides about 70 times over a lifetime.  Each time it divides, the protective end of the chromosome, called a telomere, is shortened.  Eventually it is too short to protect the cell and the cell dies.  The researchers believe that by inserting a gene into the cell this shortening will not occur.

There are other substances, vitamins, herbs and “natural ingredients” that are supposed to keep you younger.  Most of it is just Madison Avenue hype.  No one is going to discover anything that will enable you to live forever.  We all know that.  What they are saying or should be saying is that these substances may enable you to live a better quality of life and perhaps even live a little longer.  But then that is nothing new.  We have known for years that doing the things necessary to be healthy will increase your chances of living a longer, more productive and healthier life.  You may not always have the stamina of an 18 year old but you will be better off than you would if you did not do those health enhancing things.

When it comes to chiropractic, we have to be the most honest people in the scientific community.  We do not offer a fountain of youth.  We do not promise cures for disease, we do not even promise that you will be healthy or live longer.  No one can make those kinds of promises.  What we can and do promise is that if we can correct the vertebral subluxations in your spine and keep them corrected as much of the time as possible that you will lead a healthier more productive life than you would if you were walking around with subluxations interfering with the proper function of your nerve system.  How much healthier? Sorry, we cannot even make a guess.  Perhaps it will be imperceptible.  Perhaps it will make all the difference in the world, more than anything else you do in your life.  We have no way of knowing.  But the fact that your body will work better is based upon logic and common sense.  Proper function depends upon the nerve system. If there is an interference in the nerve system, the organs and parts supplied by those nerves will not function as they were intended to.  If those parts are vital organs or if they produce necessary chemicals, then the entire body will be affected.  In fact, any breakdown of function anywhere in the body has a universal detrimental affect on the entire body, for each part of the body is dependent upon every other part and all parts contribute to the whole.  So while the Spanish explorer’s idea of a single fountain that would affect the whole body was non-existent, the fact is that what we do to our body both good and bad does affect the entire organism.

You will hear many claims for many products in the years to come, miracle cures, instant relief and fountains of youth.  For some there may even be seemingly dramatic results.  But for most of us, the thing to do is to realize there is no easy way to a full productive healthy life.  We can wander through life like a modern-day Ponce` de Leon looking for the magical elixir of life or we can recognize that a healthy fulfilling life depends on what we do in the way of taking care of our body and doing what is best for it.  The latter approach seems to me to be the one that makes the most sense.