Dr. T to the Rescue

IT'S NOT ENOUGH TO BE YOUNG-MANY MEN ARE TRYING TO STAY VIRILE AND BUFF FOR AS LONG AS POSSIBLE. SOME MEDICAL DOCTORS, AND MORE THAN A FEW QUACKS, THINK HUMAN GROWTH HORMONE IS ONE OF THE ANSWERS

The cocktail party was held in a suite of rooms on the third floor of the Venetian, a hotel on the Las Vegas Strip. It was crowded with attendees from the 14th annual International Congress on Anti-Aging Medicine and Regen­erative Biomedical Technologies, hosted by A4M. the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine.

A gaunt man with a villains mustache was giving a PowerPoint slide show of dead rats. The word pome­granate appeared on-screen. He said, "Our pomegran­ate capsules are our best product." A man sitting cross-legged on the floor nodded and scribbled on a pad while the man using PowerPoint exclaimed about pomegranate juice's efficacy in prolonging life. Every­one else was standing around the suite, talking.

A handsome young man wearing wire-rimmed glasses talked about the health benefits of coenzyme 010. A tall massage therapist, whose motto is "Feel the heat," was talking loudly about her upcoming breast

reduction. The PowerPoint man glared at her and said. "If you'll just bear with me, I'll only be a minute.' He went back to his rats and pomegranate juice.

A round little Chinese woman was grazing at the hors d'oeuvres table as if this were her last meal. A handsome silver-haired ex-porn star said something to her. She snapped, "Where from? From Boston. What you think?" An Irish A4M lawyer in a muscle T-shirt was telling a journalist in a Hawaiian shirt that he didn't trust journalists. The lawyer had patches of hair missing from his scalp, which looked like a threadbare quilt.

A woman in a black spangled dress with dyed black hair and a manic bird's black eyes talked about her sexology practice in an indecipherable foreign accent. The ex-porn star and a man with a white beard nodded. When she left, a man with a reddish walrus mustache came over to the two men. He said. "She's crazy. Stay away from her." He eyed the ex-porn star and said. "You look great. I could give you something that would

maintain that look into your 80s." The man with the white beard said. "What about me?" The man with the reddish mustache laughed and said. "You're circling the drain." This mustached man is known as Dr. Testosterone. He has a clinic in a Victorian house in Michigan called the Man Cave, which is devoted "to all things male."

A young, skinny blonde in a too-short dress that barely covered her ass presented herself to the ex-porn star, the man with the white beard and Dr. Testosterone. She said, "My bags were searched at the airport. They took out

all my dildos."

Dr. T smiled and said. "Of course."

The girl said. "You missed the orgy last night. There were bodies strewn everywhere." She smiled lasciviously at the ex-porn star and added. "You gonna stay for tonight's orgy?"

When she left. Dr. T said. "You know, it is all about sex."

Dr. Testosterone, whose real name is John Crisler, D.O., was referring not only to this A4M conference but to all the anti-aging organizations and institutes throughout the world in more than 80 countries: the Society for Free Radical Biology and Medicine, the European Academy for Qual-

ity of Life and Longevity Medicine, the International Hor­mone Society. Cenegenics Medical Institute, the Longevity Institute, the Palm Springs Life Extension Institute. The word antiaging. it seems, is an umbrella term that covers a host of New Age and medical therapies that critics claim are quackery and true believers think are the cutting edge of modern medicine for the 21st century. But all that talk about extended old age and the quality of life is merely win­dow dressing that hides one of the antiaging movement's dirty little secrets. Crisler said that when the antiaging movement first started to promote its benefits, it listed an increased libido first. But people were put off by such a bla­tant appeal to sex. "So we listed all the other benefits first and put libido last." he said, "like it was an afterthought." He grinned, then added. "But it is all about sex."

The antiaging movement's other dirty little secret: It's not really about diet and exercise. It is about injecting human growth hormone and testosterone into patients or applying testosterone as a cream. The antiaging industry claims that as a body ages, it loses a good percentage of its HGH and testosterone, and the loss of these two vital hormones accelerates the aging process and leads to age-related diseases. Simply replenishing the body with HGH and testosterone, the antiaging movement claims, can not only stop the aging process, prevent diseases and improve appearance and the quality of life but also reverse the aging process entirely.

The term antiaging is a misnomer meant to foster the impression that the industry's raison d'etre is to medically treat the elderly in order to improve and extend their life. But most people do not use antiaging therapies to extend their life. They take HGH and testosterone to exchange fat for muscle, to grow hair and tighten skin. The antiaging industry is actually about cosmetics; it is the Botox of the 21st cen­tury. Its typical patient is a man in his late 30s or mid-40s who has always considered himself a player. He has already had a little Botox, a little work around the eyes, a little neck tightening, a little liposuction. Now he wants some muscles.

too. and thicker hair that doesn't look like the spring grass of hair plugs, and maybe a jolt of energy, a spring in his step and. of course, increased libido. He wants to be that captain of industry he has worked so hard to become, but with it he wants all the advantages of youth He wants it all Botox and plastic surgery made him look younger. Human growth hormone and testosterone make him be younger.

It all began in the mid-1980s with Dr. Daniel Rudman. an endocrinologist at the Medical College of Wisconsin, who

had spent a good part of his medical career developing HGH for short children. According to his wife and research partner. Inge Rudman, "When he felt he'd solved that problem, he noticed his parents were not aging well. They were in their 70s and weak, stooped, with shrunken muscles. Since he knew that children on HGH grew taller, increased their muscle size and were more out­going, he thought HGH might help his parents."

Rudman applied for National Institutes of Health funding for a study on HGH's benefits in treat­ing the frail elderly. He started his studies in 1983 and. according to

Inge, was the first to publish his findings on HGH in older patients. "The rest was history." she adds. "Unfortunately, he never helped his parents, who died before his study was published in The New England Journal of Medicine."

In that NEJM article. "The Effects of Human Growth Hormone in Men Over 60 Years Old." Rudman explains the groundwork for his study. He picked 21 healthy men between the ages of 61 and 83. Twelve received injections of biosyn-thetic HGH three times a week, and the other nine received nothing. After six months the HGH group had an 8.8 percent increase in muscle mass, a 14.4 percent decrease in fat. a 1.6 percent increase in bone density and a 7.1 percent increase in skin thickness. The non-HGH group experienced no changes. He writes in his conclusion that "diminished secretion of HGH is responsible in part for the decrease of lean body mass, [the increase in fat] and the thinning of the skin that occurs in old age... These structural changes have been considered unavoidable results of aging [but this study shows] that age-related changes in body composi­tion should be correctable in part by the administration of HGH." He added later in a TV interview. "We reversed 10 to 20 years of the aging process."

In his article Rudman also claims he expected "no adverse reactions to HGH." since "similar or larger doses have caused no undesired reactions in children or young adults." He did notice a slight spike in his HGH subjects' glucose, which hinted at possible diabetes, but that spike vanished once the men stopped taking the hormone. He did not, however, totally preclude the possibility that HGH therapies could be dangerous. He wondered what adverse side effects might be discovered in HGH patients once more elderly patients were studied. As a scientist, he realized that his studies were preliminary and not conclusive. His study group was too small and his six-month study period too short a time span. Still, he believed he had substantial proof that the "potential benefits of growth hormone merit continuing attention and investigation."

The antiaging industry didn't (continued on page 143)

DR. T

(continued from page 102) wait for those additional studies, appro­priating Rudman's instead and declaring it proof, lor all intents and purposes, that HGH was the fountain of youth. "My husband was shocked by what the anti-aging people did with his studies," Inge Rudman says. "He had no idea. He was flabbergasted by the attention, which he didn't demand and didn't enjoy"

In the early 1990s Robert Goldman and Ronald Klatz were searching for a big idea, which made them the perfect audience for Rudman's study. Goldman, a short, mus­cular, reticent man from a tough Brooklyn neighborhood, once had pretensions of becoming an Olympic athlete, though he won't say in what sport. Instead he has had to settle for those curious athletic achieve­ments that warrant mention only in the Guinness World Records book. He holds the record for most consecutive sit-ups (13,500) and most consecutive handstand push-ups (321). "I always wanted to see how far I could push the envelope," he says.

Klatz was not an athletic youth. He was a portly, brash, combative man who had always been interested in "futuristic science-fiction comic books, technology, the future of mankind, stuff like that," he says. At 18 he became the "youngest re­spiratory therapist in the country," partly because he was interested in health care and partly so he could be a caregiver to his father after his stroke. Klatz saw medicine as divided into three segments: infectious diseases, trauma and degenerative dis­eases related to aging. When he learned that 90 percent of all medical dollars are spent on degenerative disease, he decided to make that his specialty. That's when he and Goldman read Rudman's article in The Kilt' England Journal of Medicine. To say that a lightbulb turned on over both their craniums is an understatement. It was a nuclear glow of worldwide significance.

Two years later Klatz and Goldman founded A4M. They held their first anti-aging conference in 1993, attended by only a handful of doctors and delegates. Today they hold more than 30 conferences a year in locations across the globe: Bali, Bangkok, Melbourne, Kuala Lumpur, Bucharest, Istanbul, Zurich, Dubai, Caracas, London, Canciin and Las Vegas. At any given con­ference they can expect a good percentage of their 18,000 A4M delegates and 11,500 A4M-certified antiaging doctors to attend.

In fact, Goldman and Klatz make much of their money hosting antiaging conferences and certifying doctors as antiaging specialists, since the field is not recognized by the American Board of Medical Specialties. It costs from S900 to $ 1,800 to attend one of their conferences. A4M does not transcribe and distribute its conference lectures on paper; instead, each of a conference's 25 lectures are re­corded on CDs that sell for $99 to $149. Doctors who attend a convention and

want antiaging certification are charged a few thousand dollars for their degrees after they pass exams.

Goldman and Klatz, both 51, are the Scrooge and Marley of the antiaging move­ment. They are experts at making money by credentialing doctors in their chosen medical field, despite their own suspect credentials. In fact, they didn't get their medical degrees until 1998, six years after they founded A4M, and those degrees are dubious at best. Goldman and Klatz claim they received their osteopathic medical de­grees from the Gentral American Health Sciences University in Belize two years after the school opened. They explain that they got their degrees so quickly because they had done a lot of clinical work outside of Belize. The American Medical Association refuses to recognize those degrees, and in 2000 the Illinois Department of Profes­sional Regulation fined Klatz and Gold­man $5,000 each for claiming to be M.D.s and prohibited them from using those letters after their names in that state. Yet in all the A4M literature, Klatz and Gold­man have M.D. and D.O. after their names because, as Goldman once claimed, they are recognized as doctors on the island of St. Vincent. Both men are given to gran­diose proclamations. "You can always tell the pioneers by the arrows in their back," Goldman says. And Klatz has repeated nu­merous times, "I expect to live to be 150."

Dr. Thomas Perls, an associate pro­fessor of medicine at Boston University Medical School, is the Simon Legree of the antiaging movement. Klatz has al­ready sued him once for defamation. (The suit was settled out of court, and neither party will discuss it.) When I talk to Perls before going to the A4M confer-

ence in Las Vegas, he practically foams at the mouth with indignation at the anti-aging movement. He calls it hucksterism, quackery—an organization of snake-oil salesmen. I ask him to tell me what he really feels. He says, "I wouldn't trust anything anyone in the antiaging move­ment said." (Dr. T says of Perls, "He's the quack. He's been ignoring thousands of studies in hormone replacement for years. He's just trying to make a name for himself with his stuff on TV.")

Perls claims the antiaging movement's doctors don't operate like mainstream doctors. "They have no clinical trials to support their claims," he says. "There is a substantial concern that growth-hormone therapies can promote the growth of dor­mant cancer cells. As we get older, our bodies' decrease in growth hormones is nature's way of keeping those cancer cells dormant." He adds that "maybe there will be a role for HGH in the future, but it's too soon to tell. It's a lazy way out to take it to look younger. It all smacks of the Mafia and RICO stuff."

Dr. Mary Lee Vance, an aging special­ist at the University of Virginia Medical Center, is not as rabid as Perls. She admits that if the claims for HGH therapy were proven someday, she might take HGH too. But she tells me that the way the anti­aging industry currently prescribes HGH is "wrong, immoral, probably illegal, and it could be harmful." Vance says there are medically approved reasons for prescrib­ing HGH to patients who are severely growth-hormone deficient, but many of the reasons antiaging doctors prescribe HGH are not medically approved. "HGH doesn't affect libido, for example," she says. "Testosterone docs."

A few years ago the National Institutes of Health called hormone-replacement therapy hot news but then added that the "reality is no one has yet to show that supplements of these hormones prevent frailty or add years to people's lives.... They can also cause harmful side effects."

The medical term for HGH is somatotro-pin. It's an anabolic protein secreted bv the anterior pituitary gland that stimu­lates growth and cell production in hu­mans, causing the body to build up tissue, muscles, skin, bone, organs and the heart. Somatotropin secretion is at its highest during puberty, and it decreases rapidly after the age of 30. (The same is true of testosterone.) A deficiency of somatotropin in children can lead to dwarfism, and in adults it leads to extreme and premature frailty, diabetes and reduced sexual func­tion. An excess of somatotropin, however, can lead to a host of dangerous and some­times fatal conditions. The crux of the debate concerning the efficacy of HGH therapies hinges on what exactly makes up an HGH deficiency in adults. The antiaging movement takes a liberal view of what the word deficiency means, while the mainstream medical community is much more conservative. All adults are deficient in HGH in relation to the amounts they had as children, teens and young adults, but the mainstream medical community claims this is a normal deficiency brought on by the nature of aging.

In an experiment with rats, those given growth hormone tended to be bigger, more muscular and more active than rats with hormone deficiencies, but the bigger rats died sooner (they were also dumber), which has led many mainstream doctors to claim growth-hormone therapies are merely cos­metic. They simply mask aging, with no benefits and with potentially dangerous side effects. As proof they point to the fact that in­creased muscle size in rats receiving growth hormone brought no increase in strength, and to another study in which a dying dog was given growth hormone, frolicked like a puppy for a few days and then died.

It has been proven that excessive HGH in humans can cause acromegaly. or gigantism. Acromegaly thickens the bones of the feet, hands, jaw and forehead, pro­ducing a Neanderthal look. It has also been proven that excessive HGH causes enlargement of the organs, especially the heart, which can be dangerous and some­times fatal. This condition usually occurs in athletes who have taken massive doses of HGH to enhance their performance. HGH has been the supplement of choice for athletes since the mid-1980s because the antidoping community has yet to Ibr-mulate a usable test to detect it. Shortly before he died of brain cancer, in 1991, former NFL star Lyle Alzado claimed he had taken HGH for 16 weeks. Flor­ence Griffith Joyner, the darling of the track world in the 1990s and an Olympic

medal winner, never tested positive for illegal drugs during her career, yet she died in 1998 at the age of 38 from a brain abnormality. Flo-Jo had the visible signs of acromegaly and the facial hair of a tes­tosterone user when she died. Apparently she never heeded the warnings passed along by those who took steroids in the 1990s: "Athletes with excessive HGH rarely live past 60."

In 1981 the pharmaceutical company Genentech discovered the recombinant UNA of HGH in a laboratory. The FDA approved it for treating dwarflsm in children, and 1 1 years later it was ap­proved for treating healthy children

considered abnor­mally short. By 1996 nearly half" of all the HGH in use was being prescribed to short, healthy chil­dren under the premise that short children grow to be short adults who are less happy and successful than tall adults. Shortness had become a kind of disease.

By then most of the big pharmaceu­tical companies had patented their own versions of Genen-tech's HGH, and prescribing HGH had become a big business—but not big enough for Big Pharma. Growth-hormone therapies for children cost be­tween $20,000 and $30,000 a year and were covered by in­surance companies, but Big Pharma sought new "dis­eases" for which it could market HGH, which had cost it

hundreds of millions of dollars to discover.

Alter the NEJM published Rudman's study about using HGH as a therapy for old-age frailty, Big Pharma, along with Goldman and Klatz, perked up. Almost simultaneously they all found a new dis­ease for HGH to treat: aging, a "disease" that has never been recognized by the mainstream medical community, which is why to this day insurance companies re­fuse to cover HGH therapies for it.

Rudman died of a pulmonary em-bolus in 1994, at the age of 67, after having only glimpsed what the anti-aging industry was doing with his HGH study. Before he died Rudman pleaded that people understand HGH "is not

a fountain of youth." The NEJAf saw how the antiaging industry was using Rudman's studies, however, and was horrified. It didn't distance itself from Rudman's studies, but it did distance itself from how the antiaging industry was using them. In 2003 Vance wrote an article in the NEJM that claimed the "long-term effect of HGH could be potentially harmful with regard to the risk of cancer." She added that people who believed HGH was a magic bullet that "retards or reverses" aging were "whistling in the wind."

I flew to Las Vegas to attend the six-day A4M antiaging convention and spent those six days interviewing doctors, pa­tients and delegates about their antiaging

therapies. I wanted to learn for myself exactly what tune they were whistling.

On the morning of my lirst day at A4M, I sat in the lobby where the convention's lectures and workshops were held and watched delegates and doctors register. They were a diverse lot: Euro types with Freudian beards and strange clothes; Birkenstock types with lull beards and ponytails; women who looked like YVic-cans (or maybe Morticia Addams), with black headbands, black-rimmed eyes and long black cloaks; older bald muscle-men with jutting jaws and the angry de­meanor of Marine drill instructors who

hadn't had a platoon in years; women in their 20s wearing low-slung miniskirts and jeans that exposed their navel rings; older women with taut, shiny facial skin, stretched-back eyes and trout lips, who looked as if they had been preserved in aspic. I saw a Japanese person of inde­terminate sex who kept smoothing back his or her upswept, pomaded hair.

Three old scholarly-looking men, dressed identically in navy blazers, sat hunched over on a bench, perusing through bifocals the A4M program of lectures. I studied my program too and marked off certain lectures. "Breaking News for Doctors, Clinics and Pharmacies: The Latest Legal Ins' and 'Outs' of HGH and Testosterone Replacement Therapy,"

by Rick Collins, Esq., J.D. "How to Open a Successful Anti-Aging Practice—The New Cash-Only Spe­cialty of Anti-Aging Medicine." "Testos­terone Replacement Therapy: A Recipe for Success," by John Crisler. DO. "Hor­mone Balance to In­timacy Health [i.e., sex] and Quality of Life," by Thierry Hertoghe.

That afternoon I took a cab to the Cenegenics Medical Institute on the out­skirts of the Las Vegas desert. Cenegenics bills itself as the largest antiaging in­stitute in the world, with branches in Las Vegas; Boca Raton, Florida; Charleston, South Carolina; and Tokyo, Hong Kong and Seoul. Asians, it seems, are very pas­sionate about the antiaging movement.

Cenegenics was founded in 1997 by Alan Mint/., a

Chicago-area radiologist and amateur bodybuilder. He won the 1996 Amateur Athletic Union Mr. Illinois bodybuilding contest in the Grand Masters division at the age of 60. His Cenegenics brochures feature photographs of him in bodybuild­ing poses, alongside pictures ol other doctor-bodybuilders such as 67-year-old JeHry Life, a Cenegeni' ¦ physician; Mitch­ell Wagner, a 44-year-old orthopedic sur­geon; and Bob Jones, 76, who "keeps company with a 33-year-old."

Cenegenics, it seems, is about looking buff and having sex with a lot of young women. A 45-year-old patient of Mintz's crowed that he now has "a big-lime libi­do." Still, like most people in the antiaging

industry, Mintz likes to gloss over the muscle and libido gains from his thera­pies with a patina of health benefits. He claims his therapies have eliminated the symptoms of Parkinson's disease in one patient and allowed another paralyzed patient to move his toes.

Mintz has been profiled in GQ and on Today, 60 Minutes and Geraldo. What he does not promote in those profiles is the cost of his therapies, upwards of $12,000 a year for a typical patient. (Mary Lee Vance says of Mintz, "He's a good sales­man.") A typical patient visits Cenegenics for a day and is subjected to a battery of tests: hopscotching on a floor pad to mea­sure agility, a little light weight lifting to gauge muscle tone, a blood test and a few other tests. At the end of the day Mintz writes out his therapies, which usually in­clude HGH, testosterone, vitamins, sup­plements and a workout routine, and the patient is sent home to await the arrival of his medications in the mail. Mintz won't see that patient again, though the patient can consult with him over the phone.

I met Mintz after a brief tour of his facilities, which are housed in a faux Greek neoclassical building that looked like a small Parthenon. He sat behind his desk in his office, surrounded by pho­tographs of his children and grandchil­dren and many antiaging certificates. I

asked him a question. "Not yet!" he said. "Here, take this." He handed me a sheaf of papers: articles on HGH accompanied by scientific-looking graphs and symbols. I started leading the first article.

"Don't do that!" he shouted. "Don't look until I tell you to!" I glanced down at the papers. "Behave!" he shouted. I felt like a first-grader. "Now. Cenegenics is more about aesthetics than longevity," he began. "We call it age management. Our goal is the highest possible quality of life and sexual function and then a quick death of a heart attack at 94. We don't make outrageous claims about longevity like Klatz. Look at him. He's fat! A4M has no proof people can live much beyond 100. There's no way you can affect aging at a cellular level. That Frenchwoman who lived to 122—she was just one! What's that tell you? Cenegenics is about a productive older population, the quality of life. Ener­gy, sexual function, cognitive issues. Okay, now you can look at page one."

While Mintz read from the papers in front of him, ranting and raving like a mad scientist about how HGH and testos­terone therapies are misunderstood by the mainstream medical community, 1 stared at him. He was a strange-looking man. His thinning hair could not conceal the hear­ing aid behind his ear. (He said cryptically, "I'm 95 percent functional.") He wore

glasses with Coke-bottle lenses that mag­nified his froglike eyes. When I described them to Vance later, she wondered if they were a sign of hyperthyroidism. His skin was a bluish red and his swollen lips a strange blue. He was physically fit. except for his stomach. It was distended but not with fat. It was like a hard barrel, similar to the distended bellies of starving babies in Darf'ur—possibly a sign of acromegaly from loo much HGH, Vance told me.

"Are you paying attention?" Mint/ shouted at me. I nodded. (Vance also told me hyperactivity was another sign of excessive HGH.) Mintz went on and on and on about IGF-I. somatic growth metabolic dysfunction and apoptosis. and how no medical studies have found any proof that HGH causes cancer or diabe­tes. "None!" he shouted. "Kids have been using it for 50 years! What do you want? That's a bullshit response that it hasn't been studied enough. Not one single kid got cancer." He explained, "Insurance companies don't want to pay for HGH therapies because they say it may cause cancer. That way they don't have to pay."

Growing up, Mintz was a fat Jewish kid in Chicago. He described his father as the worst Jewish businessman ever, "the only Jewish businessman to go broke owning a liquor store." In his 20s Mintz visited Isra­el, got dysentery, lost about 50 pounds and

became a health-and-fitness nut. He ran marathons to keep his weight down. Then in 1990, after reading Rudman's study in the NEJM. he began to take HGH.

When Mintz's monologue finally ran its course, I asked him if I could inter­view one of his patients. He gave me the name and number of Richard Weisman, an exotic-car dealer at the Forum, a high-end shopping center in Caesars Palace. I thanked Mintz for his lecture. He stood up and shook my hand, his big belly hanging over his belt. He said. "My greatest gift as a doctor is to give people a better quality of life and then a quick end."

The following morning 1 had break­fast in the Venetian's Grand Luxe Cafe with Belgian antiaging doctor Thierry Hertoghe, president of the World Soci­ety of Anti-Aging Medicine and author of The Hormone Handbook. Hertoghe was boyishly handsome and looked much younger than his 49 years. He wore a peach summer sports coat, a lime-green shirt, a patterned peach tie and peach slacks. He seemed dressed for an outing on a luxury yacht floating down the Nile in a Hercule Poirot novel. Hertoghe be­gan his medical career as a psychiatrist, then branched off into endocrinology. In the late 1980s he began treating de­pression patients with hormone therapy. "At first it was controversial," he told me. "The majority in Europe was suspicious of it." By 1995 he was prescribing HGH for depression, symptoms of fatigue, sex­ual problems and longevity. "They say in the Bible that 120 years is the limit, but it's never been proven. I believe we can live to 200, maybe 500 years. I have been taking HGH since the age of 30. It got rid of my saggy cheeks. My fat is down seven percent. There were no negatives."

Hertoghe said the typical HGH user is "more intelligent than normal, a striven goal oriented. When I run on the tread­mill, I run with a book to learn German. Activities invigorate me. HGH gives you insight, and it makes you calmer, too. Like with my wife: She's very fearful, so I have to be a leveling influence for the children. If I don't take HGH, I have anxiety, and I can't afford that." I told him 1 try to control my anxiety through an act of will. He smiled at me. "I am not a hero like you," he said. "Your effort to control your stress is admirable, but it prevents you from doing other things. When you have an HGH deficiency, you're polluted by parasitic emotions. As for me, 1 will lake HGH for the rest of my life. I'd like to live at least 130 years." I asked him how old his father lived to be. He said, "He died at the age of 62."

That afternoon I walked across the Strip to the Forum to see Richard Weisman. At 45, he had unnaturally black hair and a round face with chipmunk-like cheeks, a

pronounced jawline and a thick neck. He told me that as an adolescent in Queens he was fat but grew out of it in his teens. I asked him what his aspirations were as a teenager. He gave me an enigmatic smile and said, "I wanted to grow up and be an international playboy."

Weisman moved to Las Vegas from south Florida in 2004 to open his exotic-car business. After a year or so he put on weight. "I hadn't worked out in years," he said. In Vegas he had become a short, plump man; he had always thought of himself as a player and had grown fear­ful of what he was becoming. "I was overweight, tired, with no libido," he said. "A friend told me about HGH and Cenegenics, so I did some research. It was all positive. The only negative was a fear of the unknown. So I did it."

He didn't begin to notice changes until after 90 days. "I lost weight and gained muscle and energy, and I was horny all the time. I went from having a 45-year-old's libido to having a 25-year-old's. I felt younger, that I was getting back my youthful potential. I could run around with my kids and stay up all night drinking. It changed my temper­ament, too. I didn't get as hot anymore. HGH breeds confidence."

Weisman said the only downside to HGH was it caused problems in his mar­riage. He chased his wife around the bedroom so often, "bothering her every night," that she got sick of it. He saved his marriage by getting his wife on HGH, which increased her libido to match his own. "Now there's no problem," he said. Then he got his 70-year-old father to take HGH and noticed he began to have more energy as well.

Weisman and most other HGH users don't talk much about longevity, unlike Klatz. who claims he'll live to be 150. "Longevity in my family is not spectacu­lar," Weisman said. "Both my grandfa­thers died in their 60s. I have three young kids. I'll be 57 when my son is 15. I want to be able to throw- a football with him. That's why I'll stay on HGH for the rest of my life or as long as I can afford it."

Weisman's motivations for taking HGH are not much different from those of most HGH users I interviewed or read about: vanity and vitality. One A4M delegate who used to work in the high-fashion industry told me that "most fashion models are on HGH. I) allows them to eat and party and still keep their weight down. You can see it in their faces, that chiseled look." Philly Brom-berg, 57, said, "Vanity took me to Cene­genics." Dr. Cecilia Tregan, 50, said she wanted to look 30. A pugnacious man of 74 said he wanted to reclaim the vigor of his youth, when "if you annoyed me, I'd punch you in the nose." The wife of a rock star said she went on HGH because she was afraid of losing her husband to younger groupies.

Dr. Adrienne Denese is an antiaging

specialist in New York City. She is vague about her age, sometimes admitting to being in her 40s, sometimes admitting to 50. She never got married because, she says, "I couldn't bother with mar­riage, relationships. I'm a true worka­holic." Denese started taking HGH to circumvent the aging process and im­mediately noticed profound increases in her memory, stamina and muscles. "I'm an anomaly," she says. "I look at least 10 years younger than 50. I mean 40."

Denese says her patients are gener­ally 40- to 50-year-old men with high-pressure jobs on Wall Street who want to get rid of their bellies and regain their energy. Some of her other clients are celebrities, rock stars or designers, but not athletes. "1 send athletes home," she says. "Athletes take high doses of HGH when they're young and already have high levels."

According to Denese, the jury is still out on what the downside of HGH may be, but that doesn't worry her. She's not concerned with a long life span. "The quality of my life is so superior," she says, "I'll take the good with the bad. I think it's irresponsible to say someone is going to live 120 years." If HGH is adminis­tered in the proper doses, she adds, there should be no negative side effects. When I ask her what the proper doses are, she says, "250 to 300." I ask, 250 to 300 what? Exasperated, she replies, "I don't recall right now. I'll have to look it up."

Two days into the conference, I sat in a large hall tilled with A4M delegates and listened to a lecture by Klatz and Gold­man. Goldman introduced Klatz as "the guru of antiaging medicine," as he was described by Business Week.

In a dark business suit, Klatz wel­comed the delegates from more than 90 countries who had "come together to enhance the quality of the human life span." He looked as if he could use some life enhancement himself. He had a jowly face with the up-slanting eyes of a man who either has had a too-taut face-lift or is a younger relative of for­mer Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev. He also had a big, soft belly.

Klatz parodied his favorite author, Dr. Seuss: "The golden years have come at last; the golden years can kiss my ass." The audience laughed. He said the human life span was expanding not because of (he medical community but in spite of it. This is the antiaging movement's mantra. The mainstream medical community treats diseases; the antiaging movement prevents diseases. Then Klatz used a PowerPoint slide show to display the average life spans in different countries. Andorra had the longest average life span, at 83. The U.S. was 48th, with citizens having an average life span of 77. Then he asked, "What is your life span worth to you?

Remember, aging is 100 percent fatal." More laughter. Then he concluded, "Thank you for making it possible for me to enjoy my 120th birthday in the near future." I wondered what hap­pened to his expectations of 150.

Klatz introduced his partner by read­ing off a list of Goldman's Guinness world records. Goldman took the microphone and began talking about "merging the field of sports medicine with antiaging medicine." He showed slides of body­builders in their 70s and 80s and of the 104-year-old 100-meter champion, who was a champion because "everyone else his age is dead." More laughter. Gold­man said, "I'm just a dumb jock trying to go through walls." He finished his talk by saying that Sophia Loren at 72 is going to "pose for a magazine wearing only earrings." His audience clapped and cheered.

After their lecture I went up to Klatz and Goldman's suite to interview them. We sat across from each other on sofas.

"A4M is an umbrella," said Goldman. "It's the next generation of sports medi­cine." I asked him if he had ever taken

drugs to improve his sports performance. "I never took steroids or hormones," he said. "I'll probably take them someday."

Klatz seemed annoyed at the tack our conversation was taking. He shifted the conversation to his favorite topic, hu­man longevity. "In the next 15 years the antiaging movement will change reli­gion, science, politics, work. People will be able to have a second career at 75 if they can live to 150. They can live two or three life spans. Parallel life spans. They might be a minstrel in their first 20 years and travel the world before they go to college.' He leaned toward me and said seriously, "Nobody has broached that subject in the mainstream media yet. You can be the first. It could make your career." I nodded gratefully.

Early that evening I stopped in at the "Anti-Aging Is the New Cash-Only Spe­cialty" lecture, given by pharmacist John Grasela and antiaging doctor Ron Rolhenberg. Grasela had the slanting eyes and still-fresh scars behind the ears of a man who'd had a recent face-lift, and

both he and Rothenberg had the reddish glow of HGH users. Grasela spoke first about marketing an antiaging practice. He said if doctors buy quantities of HGH for SI85, they can charge their patients $300 or even $350 for it. though "$350 is pushing it," he said. "But the nice thing is Costco and Walgreen's don't have it, so you can pretty much charge what you want. Patients can't shop around."

Rothenberg, a little man with strange chestnut hair and a colorful Hawaiian shirt, reminded doctors to tell patients that this therapy is not covered by their insurance and that even if patients say they feel great without HGH. they should be told that doctors can keep them feeling that way with HGH. I left before the lecture was over and went upstairs to the suite where the cocktail party was being held.

The skinny blonde with the too-short dress was pressed close to the ex-porn star, looking up into his eyes. The man with the villain's mustache had finished his lecture on pomegranate capsules and was having a cocktail. The Chinese woman from Boston was still grazing at the hors d'oeuvres table. The lawyer in the muscle T-shirt was talking to a very buxom, very short woman who looked like Maria Bar-tiromo. 1 was talking to John Crisler, the infamous Dr. Testosterone.

Crisler said that as a kid he was a "sci­ence nut" who at 15 built an electron mi­croscope. Then he went to college for a "little bit" but dropped out to wander for 20 years. He worked on an assembly line for Oldsmobile, sold insurance door-to-door, painted houses, was a prison guard and then went back to college in his 30s. He got his doctor's degree in osteopathy at Michigan State. Most antiaging doctors are osteopaths, he said, because "osteo­paths are more holistic and open-minded than the mainstream." As an osteopath Crisler worked on a lot of athletes, which brought him in contact with testoster­one. This became his specialty in his 40s, when he developed the Crisler protocol, a weekly injection of testosterone and human chorionic gonadotrophin. "It worked magic on my patients and made me famous in my field overnight," he said. Crisler doesn't prescribe anything he doesn't take first himself. He works with other physicians who prescribe him testosterone, say, as a treatment strategy to develop his protocols.

At his Man Cave in Michigan Crisler treats mostly men in their 40s. "TAT— tired all the time," he said, "with the 'usta' syndrome—talking about all the things they usta do. They've lost their edge. They look at girls in I'l.wisov and wish they could have them. It's sex that brings them to me. They'll tell me they're tired, and then when their hands are on the doorknob they'll say, 'By the way, doc....' Sometimes their wives bring them in. One guy hadn't had sex with his wife in a year. I rubbed a little testosterone on his

arms at 2:30 i'.m. and by 6:30 he and his wife were having sex." (Mary Lee Vance says this is impossible: "It takes a day or two for testosterone to work.")

A few days later I sat in a Florida restau­rant with Victor Shabanah, an Kgyptian-born doctor who had attended the conference. "Most of my patients complain of low sex drive," he said. "Sometimes their drive is not bad, but their performance needs help. They go to a mainstream doc­tor, and he says, 'You're getting old.' That's rubbish. Then they come to see me. They can't discuss it with their wife or friends, but when their libido is low they get de­pressed. Your manhood is the biggest thing in your life. Sometimes the wife asks, 'What's wrong with me? He's not turned

on by me.' 1 hey either settle for less sex or go out and fool around. I have a city councilman in his mid-40s who was going crazy because his wife was screw­ing around."

Shabanah says he doesn't treat men who want to be Su­perman, with big muscles. "I treat people whojust want to be normal again," he said. "I based my practice on health, not cosmetics."

The waitress brought our bill. Shabanah paid it, but he had no inten­tion of leaving until he got something off his chest. After a moment he blurted out his distaste for A4M. "A4M accred­its antiaging doc­tors," he said, "but it's a fraud. The de­grees aren't worth a shit and aren't accredited by any recognized medical board. Klatz and

Goldman are brutal, money-grabbing men. It's all about money with them. Something's wrong with them. You can't get reports of the meetings on paper. You have to buy the CDs, which are always defective. I sent my CDs back and never saw my money again. I have no use for people like Klatz. Look at him! He's fat, with a gut! What kind of advertisement is he for the antiaging movement? He should take HGH! He is like Scrooge, except Scrooge got the lesson. Those two will never get the lesson until they die." Shabanah calmed himself for a mo­ment, then said, "I see so much suffering in men. My main mission in life is to do something for them."

The problem with the antiaging movement is that its huge umbrella covers not only the quacks and quick-buck scammers but also sincere men like Shabanah and Crisler, doctors who truly believe their purpose is to im­prove the quality of life for men and women through HGH and testosterone therapies. Everyone in the antiaging movement, it seems, gets painted with the same brush as far as the mainstream medical community is concerned.

During the weeks leading up to the A4M conference and a few days after it, I had been trying to find Inge Rudman, Dan­iel Rudman's widow. Finally I found a

telephone number for her in California and tailed. A tremulous voice answered the phone. I asked if 1 could talk to her about her husband. She was silent for a moment and then said, "How do I know this isn't some kind of identity theft?" I told her she could check my credentials on my website. I hung up, waited 20 minutes, then called her back. She was more relaxed, so I asked her to tell me about her husband.

"Oh, Dan was interested in every­thing," she said. "Reading, classical mu­sic, baseball, tennis. Tennis was the love of his life. He went to Boston Latin, then Yale and Yale Medical School. I met him in 1952 when he was a resident at

Brooklyn Jewish hospital. He was about five-foot-eight and wore glasses, but he was very handsome, a great guy. But he was shy at parties," she sighed. "He had no money, and he was not a fast worker. It took him two years to marry me. I wasn't able to prod him if he didn't want to do something. After we married we set up an apartment on 168th Street across from Columbia-Presbyterian Medi­cal Center. As a doctor Dan was always thinking how he could contribute. He made young doctors aware that there was more to people than their disease. He'd ask the doctors, 'How many chil­dren does that patient have? What does he do for work?' He tried to make a hu­man being out of the patient in a bed

having blood work. "Dan was happiest when doing his re­search. That's why that NEJM article on HGH made him so happy." Inge went silent for a moment. When she began talking again her voice was flat, with­out inflection, almost cold. "Dan wasn't aware of the anti-aging movement before he died. It would have been awful for him to see how they were mis­using his studies. Do you know that Klatz and Goldman of A4M asked me to accept an award for Dan posthumously at one of their con­ventions in 1995? I didn't realize what I was getting into. I sat there, listening to speakers talk about how HGH did this and that. They showed slides of pic­tures taken out of magazines of people with beautiful bodies.

Then one of them said, 'If Dr. Rudman had taken HGH, he'd be alive today.'" Inge's voice broke, and she began to sob softly. I waited for her to compose her­self—a 78-year-old widow talking about her beloved husband to a stranger over the telephone. Finally she said. "I realized it was all a charlatan thing. I disassociated myself from them and tried desperately to stop these people. But it was too late."

After I got oil the phone with Inge Rud­man, I realized why she was concerned about my being an identity-theft scam-mer. She and her husband had already been the victims of idcnlilv theli once.

Some claim HGH can reverse aging by 10 to 20 years.

The jury is still out on what

the downside of HGH may

be. If HGH is administered

in the proper doses, says one

doctor, there should be no

negative side effects.