Over truffled mushroom canapes and lemongrass-ginger infusion tea, I asked Dr. Athasit Amornthanomchoke, an anti-ageing and preventive medicine doctor, practising at the RAKxa Integrative Wellness Retreat in Bangkok, if he saw a lot of male customers and what was the most common reason for their visit.
Without hesitation, he said, “Erectile dysfunction.”
The mostly-women crowd, gathered for the retreat’s private event held at the Artyzen hotel in Singapore for media and customers, giggled.
“Men are concerned about their sexual health but it’s often the precursor to future medical problems, so it’s good to recognise it early,” added the doctor, who’s been practising anti-ageing medicine for the last 15 years and is now studying sexual health.
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Women, meanwhile, are mostly concerned about the “change in life” brought on by menopause, said Dr Athasit, who is also studying and practising regenerative medicine to slow down the degeneration process in our bodies.
In this video on the RAKXA LinkedIn page, he says, “We use a combination of nutrition, hormones and detox treatments to slow down ageing” and that “70-80 percent of his customers respond well to these treatments”.
Anti-ageing, as a branch of medicine, has been around a long time. More than a decade ago, I was called in to develop media content for a global anti-ageing conference in Singapore. Over the three years it was held, I learnt all about anti-ageing medicines, to fight the ageing process, not that it has done me any good for all the attention I paid to it.
My most vivid memory was of an 80-year-old doctor who did 100 push-ups on stage and told us he took about 60 supplements a day, which sounded too much work for me.
I was young enough to be arrogant back then.
Today, the term anti-ageing is not used much anymore because it suggests that ageing is a process we fight against. Today, the terms, wellness, longevity, regenerative, are preferred because, well, the experts say we should embrace it actively and proactively.
It’s definitely a mega, global trend among the wealthy who, I guess, have more to lose literally. Retreats like RAKxa, a joint venture between VitalLife, the preventive medicine arm of one of Bangkok’s leading hospitals, Bumrungrad, and MK Real Estate, don’t come cheap.
You pay for the convenience, comfort and peace of mind of being in a fully integrated retreat with Western and traditional healing in one spot. You stay in a luxury villa and emerge only for your meals, exercises (if you are so inclined) and treatments. RAKxa has taken its brand abroad, running the spa at The St Regis in Aspen, and in Castelfalfi in Tuscany, Italy.
There’s big money in it.
McKinsey estimates the global consumer wellness market at $1.8 trillion. Its latest Future Wellness research reports that the wellness market in the US has reached $480 billion, growing at 5 to 10 percent per year. “Eighty-two percent of US consumers now consider wellness a top or important priority in their everyday lives, which is similar to what consumers in the United Kingdom and China report (73 percent and 87 percent, respectively).”
With ageing societies across the world, and in Asia where the newly minted want to live as healthily and as long as possible, this market can only get bigger.
Big money and big names are also coming into the sector. Life coach and self-help guru Tony Robbins is teaming up with Sam Nazarian, the name behind brands such as the Delano and the Mondrian, on a new luxury chain of hotels and wellness centres that focus on preventive medicine, longevity and wellness, according to this report in New York Times.
The new brand is called the Estate, and the investors, which include the singer Marc Anthony, plan to open 15 luxury hotels and residences, along with 10 longevity centers in major markets, by 2030.
Their intention is “to take technology out of the walls of the doctor’s office and embed it into the hospitality experience”.
Then comes along a new study by researchers at Edith Cowan University in Australia that says travel itself can keep you young.
This report quotes scientists as saying that the positive experiences associated with trips – the social interactions, mental stimulation, physical activity and healthy cuisines – can delay the aging process.
In the Edith Cowan study, the experts wanted to find out how positive travel experiences help maintain the human body’s “low entropy,” or gradual decline. “Tourism isn’t just about leisure and recreation,” said Fangli Hu, the study’s principal researcher. “It also plays an important role in individual health and public health.”
Veteran hotelier Chip Conley, who has been writing a fair bit about this subject on his LinkedIn, calls it “longevity travel” and notes the emergence of ‘longevity resorts’. Citing “the social science of longevity based upon Yale’s Becca Levy’s research”, he says, “If you shift your mindset on aging from a negative to a positive in midlife, you gain 7.5 years of additional life, which is more efficacious than any trendy biohacking procedure”.
So, to quote Dr Spock from Star Trek, “Live long and prosper.”
