Longevity Medicine: Just Another Reincarnation of Diet and Exercise or Something Altogether Different?

New Year's Resolutions Right Around the Corner

That annual ritual is calling your name—set a goal and go achieve it!

Well…easier said than done. Three in 10 Americans create New Year's resolutions, and 80% believe they will follow through with them, but only 9% successfully achieve them over the course of the following year.¹ Unsurprisingly, improving health is consistently the most common type of resolution, with nearly 80% of resolution makers choosing diet, exercise, or another health-seeking intervention.¹

Alternative, Nontraditional, Unconventional, or Just More Evolved?

Wellness clinics and other practices, both above board (with board-certified and bona fide practitioners) and below board (with suspect procedures and products and a lack of credentials), have been tucked away in strip malls, repurposed houses in historic districts, and small office parks in gated community enclaves for many decades now. There has always been demand from patients who do not see success with conventional practices or who seek something more than a solution to a chief concern. The COVID-19 pandemic seemed to accelerate the already-building movement toward something different from the traditional health system, with direct primary care (subscription cash pay model) and solo practices eschewing the see-a-problem/solve-a-problem model in favor of a more panoramic view of health goals.

The trend of unplugging from the insurance health system–industrial complex has been building under the surface for a long time. It has simply struggled to go mainstream in the face of a $4 trillion industry that positions itself as having no alternative.

Integrative, Functional, and Longevity Medicine: Related but Different

What all 3 concepts have in common is that the practice type ends in “medicine.” There is something about the word medicine that communicates legitimacy, whether that is its connection with physicians or with medications that cure or ameliorate disease.

Integrative Medicine

Integrative medicine is just that: integrative. It combines conventional medicine with alternative and ancillary medicine strategies. Integrative medicine provides treatment plans, encounters, modalities, supplements, and therapies that are often not covered by insurance and may be unconventional.

Functional Medicine

Core to functional medicine is addressing causes rather than focusing treatment on symptoms or cascading. Patients who have a long-standing, unsuccessful diagnosis or treatment plan from conventional medical practices often find themselves working with functional medicine practitioners.

Longevity Medicine

Longevity medicine is focused on the long arc of prevention and treatment. The goal is to predict problems early and have an active plan to use diagnostics, therapies, and strategies to stay healthy and avoid morbidity associated with aging.

The Healthy Longevity Medicine Society describes it this way: “Longevity medicine is advanced personalized preventive medicine powered by deep biomarkers of aging and longevity and is a fast-emerging field. The field encompasses the likewise rapidly evolving areas of biogerontology, geroscience, and precision, preventive, and functional medicine.”²

Many interventions, treatments, and prevention modalities and strategies are not covered by insurance, but their practices are often conflated with concierge medicine because of the lengths that patients, relatively early in life, may go in order to push back morbidity associated with aging for as long as possible.

Not Your Parents’ Diet and Exercise Plan

Diet and exercise are probably the 2 most consistently cited drivers of health, wellness, and longevity in both peer-reviewed research and opinion-based periodicals. The type, dose, and composition of each are of much debate, but not one study finding has shown that moving off a conventional American diet of processed food and simple carbohydrates and getting regular movement with some cardiovascular and musculoskeletal involvement doesn’t produce some benefit. It is tried and true.

Longevity medicine personalizes diet and exercise and adds genetic traits, biomarkers, and sophisticated modeling techniques, often assisted by ratification intelligence. It is partly based on established evidence and partly based on emerging evidence to add science and legitimacy to its “guru” aura.

From Compressing Morbidity to Pushing Morbidity Outward Beyond Expected Mortality

James Fries, MD, introduced the scientific and medical community to the notion of compression of morbidity approximately half a century ago (1981). The thesis starts with the conclusion that the human species has an age capacity limit and, depending on the individual’s genetics, that limit generally ranges from 75 to 95 years. The societal goal should be to compress morbidity so that individuals can be as close to their biological limit as possible prior to sickness or disability.³

One of the goals of longevity medicine is to compress morbidity to its most outward edge for a given individual. However, it also wants to push the boundary beyond what Fries proved through epidemiological data as the natural human limits of life expectancy by using modern-day analysis of biomarkers, sophisticated scanning techniques and machines, precise and well-theorized supplement and therapeutics consumption and adoption, and a lot of managing diet and exercise, but in a personalized way based on data unique to the individual.

A Populist Movement, From Podcasters to Physician Personalities

Longevity medicine has gained attention through podcasts, such as The Joe Rogan Experience, and a recent 60 Minutes profile on the now widely followed practice and practices of Peter Attia, MD. Attia promotes longevity medicine as a way of conducting one’s life, going beyond diet and exercise to sleep hygiene, stress management, and a long battery of regular testing to optimize “health span.” People with interest, the means to act, and a healthy (and perhaps sometimes unhealthy) skepticism of conventional medicine are good candidates to engage a practitioner of longevity medicine.

The Role of Pharmacists and Pharmacy in Longevity Medicine

Unlike conventional medical practice, where pharmacists are always subordinate and fighting for increased scope of practice and expansion of autonomy, integrative, functional, and longevity medicine are more inclusive of other health care professionals, perhaps because so much of the economic sustainability of these practices does not rely on insurance coverage. Because insurance coverage is often the gatekeeper more than the aptitude, capability, and scope of a pharmacist’s ability, cash-pay practices in collaboration with physicians or other providers of conventional medicine have potential. Pharmacist involvement could include medication and supplement management (both to add preventive care as well as treat active disease processes) in combination with diet and exercise guidance and deprescribing services.

This is an emerging set of services and practices. Watch this space as it grows rapidly and evolves, and jump in if you have the passion and opportunity to help your patients avoid becoming patients for as long as possible.

About the Author

Troy Trygstad, PharmD, PhD, MBA, is the executive director of CPESN USA, a clinically integrated network of more than 3500 participating pharmacies. He received his PharmD and MBA degrees from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, and a PhD in pharmaceutical outcomes and policy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He recently served on the board of directors for the Pharmacy Quality Alliance and the American Pharmacists Association Foundation. He also proudly practiced in community pharmacies across North Carolina for 17 years.

REFERENCES

1. New Year’s resolutions statistics and trends. DriveResearch. November 18, 2024. Accessed November 26, 2025. https://www.driveresearch.com/market-research-company-blog/new-years-resolutions-statistics/

2. Healthy Longevity Medicine Society. Accessed November 26, 2025. https://hlms.co/

3. Fries JF. The compression of morbidity: 1983. Milbank Q. 2005;83(4):801-823. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0009-2005-00401.x