From sick care to healthspan: educating the longevity physician for health maintenance and health promotion.

Abstract

This paper focuses specifically on the education and upskilling of medical doctors, proposing how longevity-related competencies can be incorporated first through continuing medical education (CME) pathways and, eventually, into formal medical curricula. As longevity medicine evolves from research into clinical practice, education has emerged as its defining challenge. While the science of ageing advances rapidly, most physicians remain unprepared to translate biological, technological, and preventive insights into responsible medical care. Emerging foundational fields such as biogerontology, which investigates the biological mechanisms of ageing across organisms, and its clinically oriented derivative geroscience, have created new expectations for translational capacity in healthcare. This paper extends previous conceptual work by outlining potential educational domains, proposing a structured education, and outlining a pedagogical and accreditation model for incorporating longevity-related competencies into medical training pathways. The framework integrates geroscience, digital diagnostics, and healthspan-oriented care within established medical education and quality assurance standards. By exploring potential pathways from postgraduate to continuing education, longevity medicine may contribute to more coherent and evidence-aligned practice. Education may represent one enabling factor in efforts to shift, where feasible, from predominantly reactive care toward more proactive approaches to health maintenance.