“The idea was to build a society like we have for all the other disciplines in medicine,” says Evelyne Bischof, a professor of medicine at Shanghai University of Medicine and Health Sciences and the inaugural vice president of the society. She has previously spearheaded educational efforts with Zhavoronkov and others, co-developing a formal course on longevity medicine for doctors. At the ARDD meeting, Bischof announced their course had just received continuing medical education (CME) accreditation from the American Medical Association.
“Longevity medicine is crystallizing as a discipline,” says Andrea Maier, an internal medicine specialist and geriatrician at National University of Singapore who is serving as the society’s inaugural president. One thing that’s not yet clear, several experts told me, is whether longevity will come to be established as a sub-discipline of geriatrics or internal medicine or whether it will become a separate medical specialty unto itself.
“Whichever way it goes,” Maier says, “it’s happening.”