Frailty from aging is about to be christened as an official diagnosis. An article in the Boston Globe describes how researchers are giving hope to a condition that seemed hopeless—at least according to this article’s version of reality.

Frailty as a diagnosis is likely to have a life like metabolic syndrome: a collection of symptoms that leads to treatment with drugs. Like metabolic syndrome, you will be officially frail if you experience three of five symptoms: weight loss, decreased daily activity, muscle weakness, exhaustion, and slow walking speed. If you have two, then you’ll be at risk of being frail.

How odd. But that’s how the conventional thought process works: we have to have a diagnosis so we can do something. And the “something” is usually pharmaceuticals or invasive surgery.

Although the endpoint for the article describes how Merck is developing drugs to combat muscle weakness and how ACE inhibitors are being studied for the same purpose, a good deal of space in the middle of the article is devoted to a method that is already known to work: exercise. The NIH is even throwing research money at the effects of exercise on frailty.

The Globe article quotes one researcher as identifying the root causes of frailty as low hormones, malnutrition, anemia, and chronic inflammation. Another researcher describes muscle weakness as the result of malnutrition caused by a “vicious cycle” of illness, medication, and environmental assaults. And other researchers are described as firing up experiments with testosterone in men as a way to restore strength. Why aren’t they studying the effects of testosterone in women?

Oh, but here’s the trick. The researchers are concerned about testosterone causing blood clots. That’s a dead giveaway that they’re testing patented testosterone, not bioidentical testosterone. Patented testosterone does not match the hormone produced by your body. It doesn’t work. We’ve known that it causes problems for a long time. On the other hand, we do know that bioidentical testosterone works very well without side effects. But so far as I can tell, bioidentical testosterone won’t be in these studies. This whole project seems to be one step forward and two steps back.

One of the most irksome things about the Globe article and the research projects it describes is the utter ignorance of researchers and practitioners who, for quite some time, have been looking at how to counter the effects of aging as we grow older. Low hormones? We know how to deal with that with bioidentical hormone supplementation. Malnutrition? We know how to provide a nutrient-rich diet that includes nutrient supplementation. Anemia? Typically it’s a product of malnutrition and hormone imbalance. Chronic inflammation? Again solved by the right nutrients or by the proper treatment of an inflammatory condition like diabetes or heart disease—both treatable with nutrients. And exercise.

We don’t need another made-up disease that doctors can throw drugs at. We already know when someone is frail. We don’t need a diagnosis. We need to help each other age well—using the knowledge we already have about nutrient and hormone balance.

Related resources are available on the Aging page.