Aging In The 21st Century

Steve Kroft Reports On The New Field Of Anti-Aging Medicine

(CBS) 
Cenegenics has a network of more than 100 affiliated doctors in the United States and joint ventures in Tokyo, Seoul and Hong Kong.

Mintz says his roster of patients includes movie stars, Las Vegas entertainers, CEOs, and the president of a foreign country, some of whom pay as much as $1,000 a month for the treatment.

How much has his business grown?

"Well, start with zero nine years ago and it'll do $20 million this year," Mintz says. "It's a very good practice."

Mintz doesn't have to deal with insurance or programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

"We don't ever wanna talk to Medicare and Medicaid," he says, laughing.

"This is like the good old days?" Kroft asked.

"Like the good old days," Mintz replied.

It's a fact not lost on many doctors, most of whom are less forthcoming than Mintz.

The American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, which Mintz has disassociated himself from, recently held a convention. When it held its first gathering back in 1993, 30 physicians were in attendance; today it boasts 17,000 members in 85 countries and claims the numbers are doubling every two years. Some estimate the market for anti-aging products at $30 billion to $50 billion a year.

The academy was not eager to share this success story and declined 60 Minutes' request to attend. But 60 Minutes went anyway, with a hidden camera.

The academy's reluctance to have 60 Minutes' cameras present may have had something to do with the presence of exhibitors peddling human growth hormone. HGH is a prescription drug with narrowly defined uses that is supposed to be strictly controlled.

Just six weeks earlier, an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association warned doctors and health care professionals that the "distribution or marketing of growth hormone to treat aging or aging-related conditions is illegal," punishable by up to "… five years in prison. …" But that didn’t stop one pharmacist from marketing his company's own specially-made growth hormone product to anti-aging doctors.

"We called a few people, paid some money for an attorney to give us an opinion. Everybody said we couldn't do it, that we should not do it and could not do it," the pharmacist told us.

"So, that's why we started doing it," the pharmacists added, laughing.

The pharmacist told 60 Minutes that what he was doing was perfectly legal, and that he never gives out growth hormone without a valid prescription from a doctor.