The Age of Intention: Inside the New Logic of Longevity Medicine

After three decades in reconstructive and plastic surgery, a field you still practise in today, you founded a longevity clinic in 2023. What prompted that shift?

These fields sit naturally together. But when you are changing structural tissue, removing skin or adding volume, you are treating the physical manifestations of ageing. You are not treating the cause. We age from the time we are born, and that is a cellular process. The big shift in my mind was understanding that ageing is biological, not chronological. You have your passport age and then you have your true age. There are tests that can tell us that – telomere length, DNA methylation, things like this. They give us an indication of where you actually are. Understanding this process, and knowing how to intervene, is where the medicine of the future is heading.

There is still a lot of noise around longevity right now without proper definition.

I think we need to redefine the word “longevity”. What is healthy longevity medicine? Everybody talks about longevity, but we don’t want to sit in a wheelchair for ten years, regardless of how long we live. We want to reach 95 or 100 and still be active, running, moving and doing the things we want to do. And what I see now is that people who have access to everything they want in this world – don’t want another car, holiday or house. They want to live longer, better. But there are no established standard operating procedures for taking a patient through that journey because each one of us is different. That is why there is so much confusion in the market. This needs to be broken down. This is personalized medicine.

What was your approach to structuring this process?

When we started AEON Clinic, my idea was first to understand the subject myself. Being a surgeon or a doctor does not automatically mean you understand regenerative principles. In fact, I would say with a degree of confidence that most doctors still don’t understand regenerative medicine, because they are trained to look at disease through the lens of traditional medicine.

So we asked: what do we need to measure to get a snapshot of a patient’s health? That question shaped the way we work today. We look at epigenetic profiling. We look at the genetic profile. We look at hormones. We look at gut health and the gut microbiome. We look at metabolic health.

“One of the big changes now is that we say: we don’t have to accept age. We just have to alter the biological process. And we can do that by guiding people through a process of reducing inflammation”

Once we’ve looked at all of these, we get a snapshot: where are you actually sitting healthwise? What is coming in the next two years? What is already there, producing symptoms you may not even recognise yet – sleep disturbance, brain fog, fatigue, joint pain, all the things we usually attribute to ageing. But no. One of the big changes now is that we say: we don’t have to accept age. We just have to alter the biological process. And we can do that by guiding people through a process of reducing inflammation.

Traditional medicine doesn’t work this way.

Traditional medicine, what we call medicine 2.0, looks largely at symptoms. You have high blood pressure, you take a tablet. You have cholesterol, you take a tablet. You have diabetes, you take insulin – which is, by the way, the world’s most commonly used peptide. Taking it a big step further with cancer, we are effectively using chemotherapy, immunotherapy, radiotherapy. We are carpet bombing. We are not precision bombing. But today, the tools already exist to study the biology of a specific cancer and the biology of a specific patient – and then target the abnormal cells without damaging the whole system. We were doing what we could based on our previous understanding. Now our understanding has changed, and so will future therapy.

Why is inflammation so central to the conversation about ageing today?

Because in the end, inflammation is what kills you. And the genomic instability that arises from inflammation – which causes cancer – is exactly the same as what causes ageing. So when people talk about tumor markers, inflammatory markers, we’re all talking in the same territory. There are congenital cancers, yes – but these are exceptional. What causes genomic instability? Epigenetics. And we’ve understood now that epigenetics –  in other words, your lifestyle and environment –  is 75% of the game. When they did the Human Genome Project, spent three billion dollars back in 2003, we thought we’d done something amazing. We now realize that was just a little piece of the puzzle. It’s your epigenetics that matters most. How do you live? Your sleep, your stress levels, your diet, your exercise, open spaces that give you peace of mind. All of these things determine which genes are going to be read.

Can you explain that a bit more?

Imagine your genetic code is a book. Which page is being read depends on you. If you have a gene for cancer, you don’t need to read that page if your lifestyle is good. What is being transcribed is your internal milieu, or the environment inside your body. How many toxins, heavy metals, microplastics, all the rubbish we eat because we often don’t get good food anymore. Alcohol – one of the major causes of inflammation – is probably the most legal poison in the world. We need to remove all of that and put a patient on an anti-inflammatory journey.

That may involve hyperbaric oxygen, ozone plasmapheresis, photodynamic therapies, different IV drips such as glutathione or high-dose vitamin C, and lifestyle change. What we do is try to build the process, and constantly re-measure biological markers to see: are they improving? Are they static? Or are they going down? We can modify treatments, and eventually feed that into an AI system that becomes a doctor’s assistant – you feed the data, it tells you the most likely outcomes for this patient. That’s where next generation medicine lies.

What about biohacking trends – cold plunges, intermittent fasting, VO2 max, wearables. Is that all valid?

Biohacking is all good. Interval training, intermittent fasting – they work because, in simple terms, what does not kill you can make you stronger. Your genes start transcribing survival proteins. But the problem is that nobody is really making sense of it. Everything may be good in isolation, but how do you put the pieces together into one coherent argument for health? VO2 max, muscle mass – super important. Inflammatory markers – super important. Cardiac markers, sleep, all of it matters. But you have to have a system.

I’m sure you’ve tried many of these on yourself. What does your personal protocol look like?

Honestly, if I told you I was an exemplary model of health, I’d be lying. I eat what I want. But the basics: I exercise. I’ve always been an athlete. Semi-professional squash destroyed my knees, so I’ve had to deal with osteoarthritis early on – stem cells, class-four lasers, exosomes into the joints. They’re much better now. I sleep well. I put my head on the pillow, I sleep. And I breathe. Even during complicated surgery, I notice my breathing goes shallow, I feel stress in my neck – I stop. I say, wait. Breathe, hold, release, at least fifteen times, then go back. Because breathing improves your heart rate variability and everything changes. You get vagal stimulation and you relax.

For peptides, I use copper – GHK-Cu – both on the face and subcutaneously. Sometimes ipamorelin. BPC-157, because it reduces muscle fatigue. And honestly? I don’t feel remarkably different. If I told you I feel fantastic, that would be dishonest. But I don’t feel like I’m going down. I’m holding my own. And I only started all of this three years ago, at an age where I should be going downhill fast. I’m 67, but my biological age is measured at 53. So I know something is happening that I’m doing right.

Stem cell treatments have become increasingly popular, with many people now travelling to places like Colombia for large stem cell infusions. In your view, do they actually help people?

There’s a big myth that you can just go and get stem cells and you’re going to be perfect. Firstly, the quality of the cells – are you taking from yourself or from somebody else? I take from umbilical cord cells, and I’ve been doing that for three years now. But the point is: if you plant a seed in infertile soil, it’s not going to grow. A stem cell is a seed. You have to plant it in an anti-inflammatory environment – which is your body. Only then can you expect to see benefit. People say, ‘I went somewhere, had 200 million stem cells, and now I feel amazing.’ But that’s unlikely. You need to address the internal environment first, then layer the treatments on top.

AEON is inside Atlantis The Royal. How does that actually work logistically for someone flying in for a week or two from overseas and who wants treatment?

We do a lot of Zoom consultations before they arrive. We work with lab partners globally – some tests go to Copenhagen, some to Germany but mainly, we work with Unilabs. So we tell patients to do these tests in advance. If you can’t, we’ll do some when you arrive. Once we have results, we can design a protocol that can be executed in as short as a week. Sometimes we defer it three or four months because some people’s inflammation doesn’t go down fast.

Most of our clients are actually residents of the UAE – but many spend significant time between Dubai and somewhere else. The ultra-high-net-worth demographic never sits in one place. They spend enough time here to do their treatments, and we have a medical concierge to monitor them when they’re overseas. We just launched our own wearable devices, including a ring and a Whoop-style tracker, since today’s clients are very data-driven and want to see numbers. We are going to present them at the Next Generation Medicine Conference 2026 in Atlantis the Royal this November.

Longevity at present seems to be only for the ultra-wealthy?

That’s a misconception. Yes, right now it’s positioned at the high end because we’re at the beginning of a new era. But think about the first car. The people who bought it were ultra-high-net-worth. Does that mean it wasn’t democratized? Of course it was. Medicine 3.0 is going to arrive, and much sooner than you think. Insurance companies will eventually be forced to change – governments are spending eight trillion dollars on age-related disease right now. Imagine if that money went elsewhere. Dubai just created the Dubai Longevity Authority, and that’s a very major step. It’s a recognition by our dynamic leadership that this is where future health is going.

You recently spoke about the body’s ability to heal itself. How far do you think that capacity can realistically go?

When you get a cut, it heals. Natural killer cells destroy cancer cells. We have an internal capability to take away senescent (old) cells, to heal wounds and fight bacteria. But this whole armamentarium is weakened by ageing, inflammation and senescence. What we need to do is reverse that. Our bodies are fantastic machines. We just need to make sure they run properly.

What do people who come to longevity medicine fundamentally not understand?

The understanding is limited. That would be my honest answer. Even doctors don’t really understand it yet. The high achievers – and they are the ones who come in – are often high-risk patients. They have stress, pressure, a lifestyle that often carries hidden costs, and they don’t know where to start. They have worked enormously hard, achieved everything, and then they arrive and they are lost. But they want to participate in their own health, want to know, want to be involved. That is exactly why this service needs to exist. Longevity medicine gives them a structure. Once they participate, they become much better – because when these people understand something, they commit. They go all in. And that’s where they start seeing the results.