Ep 409 – The Rogue Pharmacist: Why Healing Slows with Age

Ben, one of the things many clients notice as they get older is that cuts, irritation, even post-treatment recovery seems to take longer.

What's happening in the skin that causes healing to slow with age?

Oh, one, just one thing.

Aging sucks.

Yeah.

That's basically it.

That's-- aging is just everything slowing down.

You know, it's like any machine, eventually it slows down.

It's subject to the forces of entropy, not to mention toxicity, not to mention mutation, genetic mutations.

Everything just starts to break down.

One of the most important things is desiccation.

I'm-- my mom's ninety-three years old, and I'm always saying to my mom, "Mom, do you wanna be a raisin or do you wanna be a prune or a grape?" You know? "Do you wanna be a plum or do you wanna be a prune?" We desiccate, we dry out, and not only do we dry out, like, symptomatically, like your skin starts to get crepey and itchy and that kind of thing, but our biochemistry depends on hydration.

So you have to have enough water inside your body.

You have to be hydrated effectively for your biochemistry to, to, uh, to be facilitated, biochemical reactions to happen, for synthesis to occur, and for cleanup and autophagy and those kinds of things, and we, we dry out.

So on top of entropy, and, and as, um, Sir Isaac Newton said, the second or third law of thermodynamics, everything just breaks down.

That's part of life.

Um, on top of all that, we have this toxic environment, toxic food, toxic air, stress.

Everywhere you look, there's fear, right? And fear shuts down healing and shuts down growth and repair, and it, uh, encourages catabolism or breakdown.

So there's a whole bunch of forces that are arrayed against our continuous gr-- continuous youth.

And on top of all that, nature doesn't really want us reproducing after a certain point, right? So after s-- and it's really young when nature wants you to stop reproducing, like in your thirties or forties, basically.

So by the time you're in your thirties and forties, the body's, believe it or not, starting to shut down, and the shutdown process may take four or five decades, but it's gradual, and you start to notice it.

Um, and then as far as the hydration goes, it's not so much drinking water that counts.

You know how they say your body's seventy percent water?