Internet Guide to Anti‐Aging and Longevity

This short book is an addition to the series of Haworth Internet Medical Guides that already includes guides to travel health and food safety (by Elizabeth Connor) and cosmetic surgery for women and for men (by Sandra Wood). The thinking here, and in the series as a whole, is to provide a topical and one‐stop‐shop guide to internet sources on particular topics. So the reader gets referred to general health and “senior/citizen” web sites, as well as to many sites on diseases and aging (such as bone and joint conditions, hair and hearing and sight loss, incontinence and skin conditions), and what affects length of life (such as alcohol consumption, vitamin supplements and diet, fitness regimes and having pets, relationships and genetics, sexuality and sleep). Experimental and futuristic topics like cryogenics and gene therapy, herbal medicine and hormone therapy, as well as a short list of organizations and society and publications, and a glossary are also provided.

 For information professionals in the health and related fields, Elizabeth Connor has provided a useful – though uneven and ultimately transient – guide: it makes interesting reading, and alerts readers to web sites they may not already know about, but, in being just a list, not evaluating web sites for their reliability but simply including them because of what they are and for their apparent relevance, the work passes the buck to the reader – who them has to visit the site for him/herself and make up his/her mind. Connor's work is essentially a compilation of the kind that libraries and agencies providing information and advice and counselling services for and about older citizens and their health will probably already have put together for themselves. If it acts as a trigger and complement to this work, then fine, and if, by using the index for say “eye disorders” or “hormone replacement therapy”, the reader can trace his/her way to a group of related web sites, then fine. Even so, I have seen web sites, like many listed here, with richer hypertext links of their own. If ever there was a work that should be entirely online, this is it. It is also a work which offers most in an exclusively American (that is US) context. Visits to actual web sites reveals mixed blessings, too, with anything from perfunctory definitions – say, of glaucoma – to detailed information, at times angled so as to promote a product, a lifestyle, or a general health make‐over.

Another feature worth noting is its inclusion of web sites for different constituencies like practitioners and professionals on the one hand and patients and carers on the other. For some web sites the intended target is clear – like FirstGov for Consumers, the US government's web portal, Medline Plus from the National Library of Medicine, the AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) health guide, the Pfizer‐funded Infoaging.org web site of the American Federation for Aging Research, Human Growth Hormone (the American Academy of Anti‐Aging Medicine professional body promoting research into human aging), Genetics of Alzheimer's Disease web site (www.healingwell.com) (with doctor‐produced video webcasts), and web sites like www.wrongdiagnosis.com (for wrongly‐diagnosed age‐related macular degeneration, a site set up by patients). Some sites give non‐members only partial access, like that of the American Society on Aging at www.asaging.org. Some are connected with universities (like the Life Span Institute at the University of Kansas), some with government (like the National Institute on Aging at www.nih.gov/nia). In any one section, such as “herbal medicine”, you find consumer sites (like the NLM's consumer health resource on herbal medicine generally), sites developed from books and magazines (like HealthWorldOnline at www.healthy.net from James Fries's book Aging Well and www.prevention.com developed from the Rodale Press's Prevention magazine on fighting aging at critical stages throughout your life), and www.botanical.com (a site primarily to sell herbal products, claiming the fennel conveys longevity).

The section of the “effects on length of life” provides information on alcohol consumption and health (for instance, effects on memory and association with high‐density lipoproteins, with one on the drug resveratol, an anti‐oxidant found in grape‐skins believed to increase longevity by preventing blood clots). Other entries there tell of a New Zealand company that processes pine bark to produce anti‐oxidant capsules, where information argues how oxygen‐free radicals cause oxidative stress and how important favonoids are to prevent disease and mitigate the effects of aging. Connor notes how web sites here advise on low‐glycemic‐index fruit and vegetables, using food guide pyramids, what to eat to protect yourself against cancer, living a calorie‐sparse life, eating the Mediterranean diet, turning to Tai Chi for health, having lower blood pressure with pets, and dealing with the female libido when older. The closeness of some of the sites with popular magazine health advice, with its mix of motherly advice and mythology, is of interest (and some concern).

Underlying these entries, of course, are wider and deeper debates about the commodification of health information, above all on the internet, the reliability and authenticity of the information and advice, and how sticky web sites can be with interactive quizzes and other gimmicks. Other agendas are that the aging process itself can be resisted and/or delayed, that we are all living longer (except those of us who are not), that interest and self‐help groups can and should act to lobby in favour of preferential funding for particular types of health‐care (there are votes in it), and the increasing switch to online of hardcopy content (like Aging Today) in this area. For some readers, the cryogenics and stem cell research will be science fiction or serious alternatives, and for others, an increasingly‐informed (though how reliably?) consumer base for health care drives health care policy in (varyingly) good and bad directions. It is good to connect up such books as this guide with position documents from biomedical organizations, like Stirling (2006).

This guide is an all‐sorts kind of book which will please anyone who finds just the web site they have been looking for a long time. But for anything systematic or evaluative, it is a mixed affair. It reveals contemporary preoccupations in (above all US) health‐care for older people, a marketplace of voices (professionals, interest groups, consumers, researchers, commercial opportunists) and everything from mainstream to idiot‐fringe. If you want just a better insight into this world than you already have, the guide is worth buying for the library and/or personal and professional collection. For the client/patient, it is something to be used only eclectically, and for anyone well‐established in the health‐care field its American emphasis and being “just a list” makes it something you might think of getting but only if more substantial works have already been bought.