Longevity is becoming big business, but the science, standards and clinical practices needed to guide the field are still catching up.
Longevity medicine is having a moment. Biological age tests, epigenetic clocks, peptide protocols, microbiome panels and increasingly elaborate health packages are no longer confined to the fringes of medicine. They are showing up in clinics, gyms, hotels and wellness programs around the world. But there is a problem hiding underneath all that momentum: what, exactly, counts as longevity medicine?
The latest episode of Longevity.Technology UNLOCKED, in which host Phil Newman speaks with Joanna Bensz, founder of the International Institute of Longevity and Longevity Academy, explores an industry growing faster than its standards.
Bensz has watched the sector evolve from a niche idea into a global commercial opportunity. And that success, she suggests, has created a new challenge.
“Everyone is trying to talk about longevity,” she says, “even if they’re not really doing anything that increase the health span or lifespan.”
The word itself has become a marketing category. Longevity creams and shampoos are now part of the landscape, alongside increasingly sophisticated medical interventions. The result is a field where genuinely useful preventive medicine can sit uncomfortably close to products and services that have simply borrowed longevity’s vocabulary. For Bensz, the answer is not to slow the sector down. It is to give it a stronger foundation.
The difficulty is partly structural. Traditional healthcare is largely designed around treating illness. Longevity medicine is trying to intervene earlier, when someone may not consider themselves a patient at all. That changes what a clinic needs to measure, how doctors are trained and even how success should be defined.
Bensz argues that longevity clinics need to start with fundamentals rather than jumping straight to the newest intervention. She compares the approach to maintaining a car: there is little point finding a way to make the vehicle accelerate faster if you have not checked whether the engine is working properly.
The analogy is particularly relevant to the peptide boom. Peptides may have potential applications across health and aging. Still, their growing popularity has also exposed the gap between what consumers can access and what clinicians are formally trained or permitted to prescribe.
“We really need to talk first about preventive health,” Bensz says. “If you don’t regulate your cholesterol or high blood pressure and then start with peptides, this is also not a solution.”
It is a simple point. Longevity medicine can easily become an exercise in optimization before basic health has been addressed. The most sophisticated intervention is not necessarily the most appropriate one. That raises another uncomfortable question: are today’s doctors equipped for a medical field built around biological aging rather than disease?
Bensz’s Longevity Academy began as an internal training program for clinicians. It has since expanded to external doctors and licensing partners, with a focus on connecting emerging longevity science to the practical realities of running a clinic. The goal is not simply to teach practitioners which tests or devices exist. It is to teach them how the pieces fit together.
“How to connect hormones with biological ages, how to interconnect different hallmarks of aging, and also how to give the right recommendations,” Bensz explains.
A longevity clinic equipped with every fashionable diagnostic tool is not necessarily practicing good longevity medicine. The value lies in understanding what a measurement means, what it does not mean, and what should happen next. It also means accepting that medicine alone cannot drive lasting change. Bensz describes a model involving doctors alongside nutritionists, psychologists, coaches, sleep experts and trainers.
“A doctor will be very important in those important moments that you do checkups,” she says. “But then in the meantime, when you talk about sleep, about behavior change, about also self-confidence and trauma therapies, I mean you would talk to very different actors.”
In other words, longevity may eventually look less like a conventional clinic and more like a network of expertise surrounding the individual.
Perhaps the most striking statistic in the conversation comes when Bensz estimates how many businesses calling themselves longevity clinics are actually delivering what she would consider a comprehensive longevity service. Her answer: roughly 20%. Even that figure comes with caveats. There is still no universally accepted definition of a longevity clinic, and standards vary significantly between countries. Some jurisdictions permit interventions that others do not. Even within the US, the regulatory landscape is far from uniform. That makes standardization less like writing a rulebook and more like trying to build the tracks while the train is already moving.
Bensz believes the sector needs shared protocols, stronger clinical education, and collaboration among practitioners, regulators, scientific organizations, and other stakeholders. Her annual Roundtable of Longevity Clinics is intended to bring those groups into the same conversation, to document emerging best practices rather than pretend that the field has already reached consensus.
Crucially, she does not argue that longevity should become synonymous with medicine. Sports centers, workplaces, hotels, restaurants and even the built environment can influence how people age. For someone unwilling to walk into a doctor’s office for extensive testing, a gym may be a far more approachable entry point into healthier living. That broader definition may ultimately be longevity’s greatest strength – provided the medical claims remain grounded.
The next stage of the field may therefore be about deciding which interventions belong together, who should deliver them, and what evidence should be required before they become standard practice. As Bensz puts it, “longevity is really about taking responsibility for your life.” The industry now has a responsibility of its own: to make sure that the growing promise of longer, healthier lives is built on something sturdier than a compelling label.
Listen to Longevity.Technology UNLOCKED every Monday for conversations with the researchers, clinicians and innovators redefining healthy ageing. Find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube, and catch our weekly news roundup every Friday.
The 2026 Roundtable of Longevity Clinics takes place from 17–18 October at The Buck Institute for Research on Aging, Novato, California. For more information or to book your spot, please CLICK HERE.
