Aging Is Not a Disease, It Is a Matter of Reserve

"Aging is not a disease" is used in two different ways.

One use means there is nothing to worry about — the tests show nothing, there is nothing to name, and in that case the statement is correct. The other use means that therefore there is nothing more to look into. The same sentence becomes an explanation in one place and a full stop in the other.

Saying it is not a disease is not the same as saying nothing is happening. What lies between the two is reserve.

A Disease Has a Place You Can Point To

When looking at a disease, the questions asked are usually fixed. Where is it? Since when?

Once these two are answered, what follows follows. You treat that place, and afterward you measure again to see what changed. This is the approach medicine has worked hard at for a long time, and a great many things have been cured this way.

Before the changes that age brings, that question does not get a clean answer. Ask where, and it is hard to name a single spot. The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency's own account of aging says as much. What changes with age, it states, is not a specific site but overall bodily function.

Whether it is the heart, the lungs, or the kidneys, if you follow each site that can be measured separately, most decline gradually from around age thirty. And the rate of that decline differs from person to person, and even within one person, from site to site. So even at the same age, how much is left where is arranged differently in each person.

Asked to name one place, you cannot — yet the day you live through is not what it used to be.

The Question Itself Changes

The approach of finding one place and treating it works when there is a place to point to. Being older is no reason to abandon this approach. If a test turns something up, that is where it is addressed.

But when the reserve in several places has declined together, this approach does not work as well. Pick one and treat it heavily, and the rest remain as they were — and getting through a day draws on all of the rest.

That does not mean there is nothing left to examine. One question changes into another.

What Remains Is Already Being Spent Somewhere

What remains after the decline does not simply sit there. The body does not save it up. Even at this moment, it is being spent somewhere.

When nights of frequent waking continue, morning comes with the work sleep is supposed to do left unfinished. If there is one pain that has dragged on, a day's worth goes first into enduring it. If the gap between meals runs long, that first goes into getting through the gap.

So the same person, living through what looks like the same kind of day, finds that in one season the day passes well enough, and in another the day is more than they can manage. They have not aged further in between. What has changed is where things are being spent first.

The share that age has claimed is fixed. But where the largest share is going right now is not decided by age alone. So the question shifts. Not where something has gone wrong, but what the reserve you have left is being spent on first. This connects to the idea that fatigue is the time to look after yourself.

Where to Look First

Growing older does not make disease step aside. Once age has already been given as the answer, it becomes easy to stop asking what lies behind it.

When you can name when it started. A change you can point to — since such-and-such a month, since such-and-such an event — is hard to explain by age alone. Aging comes slowly, but disease can come suddenly.

When energy and appetite decline. A great many things that cannot be known by listening alone, only by testing, cluster here.

For these two, being tested comes before being written off as age.

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In an aging body, the question itself has to change a little before an answer comes. What is the reserve you have left being spent on first?

"Aging is not a disease" can stand as it is. But when that statement is used as a full stop, what lies behind it goes unasked. How much reserve is left is hard to measure, but where it goes first can be seen within that person.

Written by Dr. Heo Ji-young (PhD in Korean Medicine Pathology, Kyung Hee University · former Research Professor of Herbology, Kyung Hee University)