American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine
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The American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (A4M) is a charitable 501(c)(3) medical society dedicated to the advancement of technology to detect, prevent, and treat aging related disease and to promote research into methods to retard and optimize the human aging process. The A4M is not recognized by the American Board of Medical Specialties, which currently recognizes 130 medical specialties in the US, but has tried to establish anti-aging medicine as a specialty. As of mid-2006 the organization has a membership of nearly 18,000 physicians, scientists and health professionals in 85 countries, and has certified 1,500 physicians in the specialty of anti-aging medicine. The Academy has trained over 30,000 new physicians in its hands-on scientific, clinical and academic programs, and today influences over 100,000 health professionals via its educational training programs, seminars, board certification programs, videos, website, textbooks, and outreach programs. A4M has brought a great deal of scientific attention to the problems of aging and what medicine can do to alleviate those problems.
[edit] History
The A4M was founded in Chicago in 1992 at a meeting of a dozen physicians organized by Dr. Ronald Klatz and Dr. Robert Goldman, both of whom are Doctors of Osteopathic medicine (D.O.s) and skilled promoters. In 1993 the A4M began organizing educational conferences that are currently attended by thousands of physicians annually and include exhibitors promoting a wide variety of remedies intended to reduce aging. A few years later, the A4M organized the American Board of Anti-Aging Medicine (ABAAM) offering anti-aging medicine as a specialty, and giving educational credits to those who attended the conferences (which include special workshops for physicians). The A4M also publishes textbooks of anti-aging medicine.
The New York Times has recently published an article which questions A4M's scientific foundations. Furthermore, researchers at the University of Illinois tagged A4M and its journal as desseminating misinformation and false claims (see http://www.newswise.com/p/articles/view/503478/). According to Bruce Carnes of the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, who commented on the The International Journal of Anti-Aging Medicine, a publication of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (A4M): "This alleged 'journal' is particularly misleading because it gives the false impression that it is a genuine scientific journal and that what is published in it is peer-reviewed.It is little more than an advertising vehicle for every conceivable anti-aging product."
Writes Leonard Hayflick of the University of California, San Francisco: "The International Journal of Anti-Aging Medicine is not a recognized scientific journal. What I find reprehensible about this 'journal' is that advertisers who publish in it can then claim there is scientific evidence to support their outrageous assertions by pointing to the publication in an alleged scientific journal." Hayflick is the former editor Experimental Gerontology.
In 2002, Olshansky, Hayflick, and Carnes published a position paper, endorsed by 51 scientists in the field of aging. They state: "no currently marketed intervention has yet been proved to slow, stop or reverse human aging...The entrepreneurs, physicians and other health care practitioners who make these claims are taking advantage of consumers who cannot easily distinguish between the hype and reality of interventions designed to influence the aging process and age-related diseases," said Olshansky.
