Joy Kong, MDRegenerative Medicine Physician, Educator, and Entrepreneur

How to Expand Your Healthspan

4 Mar 2025 · 1 min

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A short talk by Joy Kong, MD framing gerontology and longevity around the value of time: how much lifetime someone has and how much of it will be healthy. The speaker emphasizes that health is the most important form of capital (citing Steve Jobs and Thomas Edison) and gives a personal anecdote from estate-planning work observing wealthy but often unhealthy older adults. The central claim is that expanding healthspan (more healthy years) is crucial because time is limited.

Chapters

So gerontology for people who don't know what that word means, is it a study of aging? Yes, yes exactly. Longevity. What I'm talking about here is the value of time and that is time is really probably the most important thing that we have. In other words, how much time do we have available in this lifetime? How healthy are we? How much of that time is going to be in a health situation versus in an unhealthy situation. Steve Jobs had made statements that how precious time is and Thomas Edison long ago always liked this quote from him where he says the only capital that's important basically is our health. That is so true because I was doing a lot of estate planning as a tax attorney. I would be working with people had a lot of money and they didn't have a lot of time left though or they were rather unhealthy as is unfortunately typical for Americans in their 70s and 80s. So time is critical.