Longevity tourism is on the rise. It could be coming for you next.

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I’m in a cramped examination room at a clinic in Panama City. The lights are dim, and calming classical music plays from built-in speakers. A nurse has injected a dose of stem cells into Kenneth Scott through an IV in his arm; earlier, those same stem cells had been extracted from Scott’s body so they could be “activated.” Now Scott leans his head back as a laser passes back and forth over his neck. “Tiempo,” the nurse says, sitting next to him. A doctor switches the focus of the laser in his hand to the right side of Scott’s head, telling me that the beam guides the stem cells to where they’re “needed most.” Scott hopes this shuttling around of his stem cells, a procedure that costs patients $10,000, will rejuvenate his 82-year-old body and ward off the effects of aging.

Scott is a slight man, of short stature, and boasts a generous shock of white hair. That morning, when I had arrived at the clinic, he greeted me in an airy button-down shirt, shorts, and sandals, bouncing with childlike energy, eager to show me the many machines, medicines, and methods he employs in his attempt to turn back time. Until recently, he lived in Florida, where he ran a successful real estate business. Now he’s turned the majority of his focus toward extending his life as long as possible, and he thinks the procedures he gets in Panama are the key. As we talk, he reels off the benefits of the stem cell treatments, as well as facts from studies he’s read, but he struggles to catch my questions. (He does not wear a hearing aid and believes that wearing one would further damage his hearing.) Later, when I ask stem cell scientists about the treatment I watched Scott receive, they dispute almost every step of the process. For example, when it comes to the type of stem cells that the clinic claims it injected into Scott, most doubt that they even exist at all.

No matter: The Xtend clinic, where I met up with Scott, is one of many locations across the world that American and Canadian tourists visit to pursue experimental, unproven treatments they hope will buy them a little extra time on this planet. These facilities are found in countries with looser medical regulations than you encounter in the United States and Europe. They’re also often in gorgeous locales, so visitors can combine unregulated therapies with a stay at a luxury hotel and days spent on white-sand beaches.

The treatments on offer at Xtend and elsewhere have an air of science and spirituality to them—they are discussed at longevity conferences, biohacking meetups, and even immortalist churches. As the author of a book about the modern pursuit for immortality, I’ve watched longevity tourism surge in popularity in recent years. And as rumors circulate that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s secretary of health and human services, is a fan of the kinds of treatments on offer at the clinics, they don’t merely reflect the way the ultra-wealthy combine their longevity hobby with travel. These facilities may, people like Scott hope, offer a glimpse at the future of American health care. Scott doesn’t have time to wait, though. During my days in Panama with him, I saw up close just how far he’d gone in his devotion to this alluring—but very questionable—kind of medicine.

The seeds of Scott’s journey into offshore medical treatments can be traced to about 2002, when he began to experiment with fasting as a way to prevent persistent sinus infections. It actually worked—fasting allowed him to gradually introduce foods back into his diet, revealing a straightforward gluten intolerance, a condition that, indeed, can be linked to nasal issues. From there, he looked further into unconventional approaches to staying well and, drawing inspiration from the 1980s bestseller Life Extension: A Practical Scientific Approach by Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw, started a health regimen that gradually became more complex.

But it wasn’t until the fall of 2022, during a layover at Miami airport, that things really accelerated. As he hauled his carry-on to his gate, Scott, then 79, found he had to take several breaks. He was, he realized, weakening physically. Scott decided he didn’t just want to survive beyond 80; he wanted to be able to live life at the same pace that had seen him bounce from one career to another, from the Air Force to real estate to biotech. He wanted to be able to look after himself. And as a wealthy man immune to many of the struggles of other financial demographics, he wanted to continue avoiding quotidian struggles. “The reality is that, on average, after the age of 80, 5 percent of your peer group die every year,” Scott told me. “Well, I’m not part of that.” (Five percent is actually a conservative estimate: That’s the case for an 80-year-old man. By 85, according to the Social Security Administration, it’s more like 10 percent. Death comes quickly.)

Soon after the carry-on incident, Scott saw an advert for an experimental gene therapy from a biotech startup called Minicircle and quickly signed up. Minicircle is based in the libertarian stronghold of Próspera, a small charter city on the island of Roatán, off the coast of Honduras, with its own laws and regulatory frameworks. The ad sought people who would travel to the Caribbean to pay for a gene therapy known as FST-344.

The treatment, which is not approved for use in the United States, retails from Minicircle at $25,000 per shot. It promises to help boost the body’s production of follistatin, a protein that controls what other proteins can bind to our cells. For example, follistatin effectively releases the hand brake on muscle development by blocking myostatin, the protein that normally keeps it in check. There is some limited data suggesting that gene-therapy-boosted follistatin levels can have a positive effect on muscle mass and bone density in rodents. That’s enough that any attempts to boost follistatin production by athletes are considered gene doping by organizations like the World Anti-Doping Agency. The co-founders of Minicircle claim that they developed their FST-344 treatment in a garage and trialed the concoction on mice first before injecting themselves. “It worked pretty well,” Mac Davis, one of the founders, who is also an ordained Buddhist monk, told me on a video call. “I put on over 9 pounds of muscle in seven weeks after taking the therapy, despite not changing my workout or my diet.”

At the clinic in Próspera, doctors administered a simple one-time injection into Scott’s abdomen, monitored him for a day to check for adverse effects, then discharged him. He was thrilled with the results, which he was told would last a year: “I was part of, I think, maybe the first 50 people or so to get this treatment,” Scott recalled. “Two months later, I was running. And I run now every day. Most days. And so, you know, these kinds of therapies, we’ve just got to get them to people.”

Scott is not the only fan of FST-344. Sam Altman, of OpenAI, was an early funder of Minicircle, sold on the idea after hearing about early results. The famed—and infamous—biohacker Bryan Johnson has tried Minicircle’s FST-344 himself. Afterward, he released a YouTube video, titled “I Edited My DNA on a Secret Island (to Live Forever),” in which he says, in typical understated YouTube terms, that the treatment could “change the future of humanity.” It’s now offered in clinics in Mexico, the Bahamas, Panama, and Honduras.

The appeal to longevity seekers is apparent: Muscle mass and bone density are significantly affected by aging, so reversing those losses—to the extent that FST-344 is able to do so—would certainly make a person feel younger. But the promise for people like Scott is that FST-344 might also lower epigenetic age (a real thing, though not a useful marker of all that much on its own). Leigh Turner, a professor and executive director of the bioethics program at the University of California, Irvine, tracks direct-to-consumer therapies and medical tourism offerings. He believes that any claims that FST-344 can lower biological age, improve longevity, or extend life are “100 percent marketing hype.” Turner told me: “I don’t think there’s any science or substance behind it. It’s a marketing pitch.” For what it’s worth, the Longevity Protocols website, which offers guidance on various longevity regimens, describes gene therapies involving follistatin as having a “preliminary” level of evidence and being high risk, with potential side effects including elevated cholesterol and too much muscle growth.

To make their treatments available in the United States, pharmaceutical and biotech companies need more than some thought-provoking data and the willingness of patients to be guinea pigs; they must receive Food and Drug Administration approval. And to get that, they have to demonstrate in clinical trials that their product is both safe to use and effective in treating one or more conditions. A drug also needs to be proven to work better than a placebo. That is, it needs to be shown that the effects of the drug are not just in people’s heads. The process takes many years and costs millions of dollars. The FDA wants companies “to do it slowly and carefully and make sure that those safety guardrails are in place so that when something is approved, they can stand behind the safety around it,” explained Emily Powell, Precision Genomics scientific lead at Parkview Health, a hospital network in Indiana.

Powell represents the view of most of the country’s biotech, pharmaceutical, and health care providers, who see the FDA rules over drug development as crucial protections against potentially unsafe drugs reaching patients. But on the other side of that debate, some believe that agency approval, which requires huge amounts of cash, makes drug development near impossible for smaller companies—and keeps experimental treatments out of the hands of patients willing to try them out, risks aside. The FDA also requires that a drug be tested for its ability to treat a named ailment rather than something more general like “aging.” So, instead of pursuing the traditional approval route, Minicircle sought to fast-track FST-344 by offering it in countries with more lenient medical regulations. “We’re not trying to make one or two medical cures or treatments for specific diseases. We’re trying to develop a whole new way of approaching the world,” Davis said. “And it’s happening through longevity medical tourism.”

Despite doubts about their effectiveness, Minicircle’s gene therapy and others like it are available at an increasing number of clinics across the world. Martin Chitwood, an 81-year-old retired lawyer, regularly travels south of the border from his home in San Diego, to Mexico, seeking treatments unavailable in the U.S. He’d also visited Próspera, the libertarian charter city, in the past and was happy to offer tips on which locale was better: “I would say if you were looking for a medical vacation, medical tourism, where you go on vacation for two weeks and you have a couple of treatments when you’re there, Roatán’s probably not the place you want to go. It’s a business trip,” Chitwood told me. San José del Cabo, a coastal city in Mexico, is more convenient and better equipped for tourism. “There are high-level clinics in San José del Cabo,” he said.

In November 2025, he flew there to visit the Stemaid Institute, a clinic specializing in stem cell treatments but offering a menu of therapies not available in the States. While in Cabo, Chitwood also took in the beaches, spas, and restaurants. On this particular occasion, doctors gave him two shots: a dose of follistatin gene therapy similar to the shot Scott took in Roatán, and a klotho gene therapy, one of the newest and most talked-about treatments in longevity circles. Klotho is a protein named after one of the three Fates from Greek mythology, who spun the thread of life. Increased levels of klotho are thought to combat inflammation and improve cognition, and therapies to boost its production are being developed in the U.S. to target specific neurodegenerative ailments, such as Lou Gehrig’s disease. In theory, the gene therapy works by introducing extra copies of the KL gene into the body’s cells so they make more klotho protein. But it’s firmly experimental: The FDA has approved no klotho gene therapies to date, and in fact, at the time of this writing, no research into klotho therapy has even reached the stage of formal human clinical trials. A review paper from a few years ago describes klotho protein as a “potential therapeutic target.” (This is a familiar pattern in the longevity space: A promising therapy yields encouraging results for a specific disease in animal models—and the longevity community seizes on it, extrapolating overly optimistic conclusions and occasionally piling headlong into experimental treatments.)

Before deciding to pursue an offshore treatment, Chitwood consults his fellow longevity enthusiasts. In mostly online communities, like-minded individuals discuss the latest research papers, weigh the pros and cons of therapies, and share their findings from the interventions they choose. Chitwood is an active member of these groups, as is Scott. In email listservs, longevity startup founders join enthusiasts to debate matters from young-blood transfusions to the latest popular supplements. Subject lines include “Recognizing the need for fasting,” “Mice blood age affects Alzheimer’s brain changes,” and “A casual hypothesis about epigenetics.” Occasionally, conversations stray into topics such as vaccine safety and can get heated. When community members aren’t arguing, the vibe is generally extremely supportive and fraternal. As many of the participants are older, there’s a shared concern for both the urgency and difficulty of their mission to live longer.

In-person events include monthly meetings at the Church of Perpetual Life (a congregation for people seeking immortality), groups such as People Unlimited, a community of immortality seekers, and the annual conference RAADFest—RAAD stands for “the Revolution Against Aging and Death.” At these events, speakers sell ideas and products to crowds of, largely, older men. (Scott, for his part, says he eschews the inbox-clogging listservs in favor of participating in the movement as a speaker.) While most engage in the debate and perhaps take a supplement or two, others graduate to more extreme options—and further levels of involvement. Most of the more dedicated participants I’ve spoken to had suffered a sudden, and often early, confrontation with death, the loss of either a relative or a friend, and that experience set them on a path to defeat mortality. Still others are simply looking for a way to extend the comfortable lives they’ve built. The community itself also appeals. Much of the thinking, despite being rooted in science (of some kind, to some extent), often takes leaps of faith akin more to a religion or spirituality.

Since his trip to Roatán in 2022, Scott has become a familiar speaker at conferences and flies to events across the world to discuss his journey into longevity treatments. After FST-344, he sought out more procedures that could take his pursuit of longevity to the next level. His son Adrian happened to live in Panama and connected him to the Xtend clinic, run by Javier Bernard, a doctor, and Edgar Gassan, a former systems engineer. (Adrian, an actor and a staunch libertarian, told me over a meal at a Panama restaurant, as belly dancers gyrated distractingly around the table, that he approved of his father’s longevity pursuits, although I got the impression that they weren’t particularly important to him.) By the time Scott discovered Xtend, he was already an influential player in the longevity space. Xtend subsequently added FST-344 to its list of offerings. For making these kinds of introductions, Scott is listed on the Xtend website as a “senior business advisor” and gets treatments at a reduced price. The clinic’s other services include electromagnetic pulse therapy (according to the providers, using magnetic energy to repair and energize cells), ozone therapy (combining blood with the toxic gas ozone), hormone optimization therapy (a selection of treatments aiming to “restore hormone balance and promote longevity”), and brain photobiomodulation therapy (applying infrared light to the brain). As with klotho therapy, some of these offerings do have data behind them when it comes to treating specific conditions. Partaking in them is not without risk—ozone therapy, for example, has the potential side effect of something called an air embolism, which can lead to a stroke or heart attack. For Scott, it doesn’t matter that Xtend’s treatments can fall outside the realm of sanctioned medicine. Experimenting on himself is working, as far as he’s concerned: “I think anybody who knows me has seen improvements,” Scott told me.

On a tour of the facility, which is packed with expensive-looking machinery, Gassan explained the philosophy behind the clinic. In his view, conventional medicine treats the body as discrete pieces, but it’s better to envision it as one system, where everything works in concert. Gassan isn’t just involved in the philosophy of the clinic, however—he works with patients as well. For example, in an offering known as live blood analysis, Gassan examines a patient’s cells under a microscope, looking for patterns within them. “Because I’m not a medical doctor, I won’t use it for diagnosis purposes. I will just ask, like, ‘Oh, I see liver strain. Oh, do you drink too much?’ ” Scott recalled Gassan telling him that he could see his Lyme disease under the microscope. (This is a claim that raises many questions. Scott says he has had the disease twice and was treated for it once but asserts—contrary to medical experts—that once it’s in your system, it never leaves, and Gassan was able to spot it.) When I relayed the live-blood-analysis process to Turner, the UC–Irvine professor, he was skeptical. “It sounds a little bit like palm reading to me,” he said, “just with a scientific cast to it.” For his part, Gassan admitted that live blood analysis is considered pseudoscience in some countries.

Before I met up with Scott, he received preparatory treatments ahead of his stem cell therapy, including an IV drip, which delivers a compound “just to settle the blood down a little bit, make it a little less acidic,” he explained. Nurses then gave him a mix of two peptides: BPC-157 and TB-500, thought to combat inflammation and aid tissue regeneration, among other things. Both are popular in the biohacking community, but neither is FDA-approved, and there is no clinical evidence suggesting they are safe or effective, according to a recent article in Global RPH, a guide to drug therapy for clinicians. When it comes to peptide injections generally, “the gap between the hype and the evidence is staggering,” Lucy McBride, a primary care doctor, recently wrote in her newsletter Are You Okay? She added: “We have no long-term safety data. None!”

The day of Scott’s stem cell treatment, a nurse first extracted 80 cc of his blood, which was spun down to produce platelet-rich plasma; after that, red blood cells were removed, leaving concentrated plasma proteins. Next, Bernard used a Strachan-Ovokaitys Node Generator laser to “activate” the very small embryonic-like stem cells in the blood.

The laser, invented by Todd Ovokaitys, who is listed on the Xtend website as an “international consultant,” allegedly triggers VSELs, which are said to offer regenerative capabilities and have greater access to organs due to their diminutive size.

The SONG laser is not FDA-approved. An article on the Xtend website celebrates the regulator granting the device a designation to evaluate its utility in treating progeria, a disease that causes children to age prematurely. However, the designation does not require proof that the device works, and applications must merely state that they are being used to study a rare disease affecting children. There is no evidence of any further submissions to the FDA regarding the laser.

Do VSELs even exist? Signs point to no. The idea that such cells could exist was first proposed in 2006 by Mariusz Ratajczak, a professor at the University of Louisville. In theory, they exist within our bodies and can transform into any type of cell, therefore repairing things that are broken; manipulating them could—again, in theory—boost the regenerative capabilities of the human body. But in August 2013, a group of researchers, led by Irving Weissman of the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at Stanford University, published a paper questioning the legitimacy of Ratajczak’s claim. The scientists attempted to replicate Ratajczak’s results but found they couldn’t. “These results provide a failure to confirm the existence of pluripotent VSELs,” the paper read.

More doubts followed. In an article in the journal Cell Stem Cell, one of the leading voices in stem cell research, George Daley, gave a damning verdict on the work attempting to prove the existence of VSELs. “This rigorous approach just hasn’t been taken with VSELs. I find the work mystifying and lacking in rigor,” he said. There are five clinical trials related to VSELs listed in the U.S. government’s records; four of them have been withdrawn, and another has passed its completion date, but no update has been provided in more than two years.

Unperturbed by the apparent lack of evidence supporting VSEL therapies or the SONG laser device, Scott pays thousands of dollars to receive the treatment every few months. The part where the laser guides the VSELs around Scott’s body is perhaps the most dubious of a procedure littered with doubt. “That sounds like a lot of the marketing bullshit that I tend to come across,” said Turner, who characterized the treatment as “stem cells as magical thinking.” Scott believes that the body itself can direct the stem cells, regardless of the laser, and claims that they regenerate and repair parts of his body affected by age.

Other enthusiasts are also not put off, and with the 82-year-old as my guide, I attempted to discover just how much further down the longevity rabbit hole a person could go.

The day after Scott’s stem cell treatment, we left Panama City. Scott drove, navigating the busy streets of the country’s capital until we reached the Bridge of the Americas, where colossal cargo ships loomed on the horizon out to sea, waiting their turn to enter the Panama Canal. After an hour on a freeway passing through suburban towns of countless rows of identical worker housing, we turned onto a more rustic road, headed into the country’s mountainous region. On our journey, I noticed a group of giant birds circling high above the car. I asked Scott if he knew what species they were, and he told me they were probably buzzards, of which there were many types in the country.

In 2025 Scott moved to Panama permanently, seeking easier access to his treatments at Xtend, as well as cheaper services, warmer weather, and better living conditions for his wife, Christine, who was suffering from poor health, and who also receives treatment through Xtend. (Unlike her husband, Christine Scott is not an avatar for the clinic: In a YouTube video, Kenneth Scott speaks glowingly of the treatment that both of them have received, though it features just him.) They bought a house in El Valle de Anton, a beautiful town known for exotic wildlife, breathtaking treks, and fresh mountain air. At their home, a large one-story villa off a dirt road leading to the town’s main street, Scott introduces me to a lifestyle designed to promote wellness.

In the kitchen, dozens of supplement bottles line the countertop, each promising a different type of nutritional benefit. Scott follows an almost entirely vegan diet, shuns processed foods, and prefers to fast in the mornings. He avoids bottled water due to microplastics and has set up an elaborate system to catch rainwater from the house roof. Each time a downpour begins, Scott strips down to the waist, grabs a large glass jug, and runs out to one of three drainpipes to collect enough water to last the week.

It’s easy to see why Scott chose Panama as a base. His new setting is peaceful, aside from occasional thunderclaps rolling through the valley during the rainy season, and the wildlife. In the mornings, Christine eagerly awaits the brightly colored, highly vocal birds swooping into their garden, whooping their greetings before flying off into the junglelike foliage. As we talk, on occasion the screeching call of a toucan pierces the quiet, and miles above, the same giant black birds hover menacingly in groups, surveying everything below.

In Panama, Scott can pursue his own medical agenda without fear of government intervention, something he believes is holding back breakthroughs in the longevity space. “The biggest problem we have on a lot of this stuff is governmental regulation. And that’s why I get out of the United States or Canada or the U.K. or Europe, because those environments generally don’t let me do what I want,” he tells me. “Well, to me, that’s an infringement on my rights, my freedom. And so one of the nice things about Panama is we don’t have nearly that kind of problem.”

Scott shows me the preparation required to set up his and Christine’s peptide injections for the week, which have been recommended by the Xtend clinic. He pulls out a box with several vials inside, some a mix of the two peptides he has received at the clinic and others containing just a single peptide. The phrase Not for Human Use is written across the top of the labels. (The peptides are intended only for animal testing or test tube research.) He buys the drugs as a powder, mixes them with a saline solution, then carefully measures out the correct doses in syringes and places them in a separate box, ready for use. If Scott is trying to slow down aging, Christine is dealing with something more: During the time I was at their home, it was clear she was struggling with short-term memory loss, and that Scott was concerned for her health. Scott claims that the injections have lifted Christine’s mood and improved her general well-being.

Often, what people need as they experience the illnesses that come with aging is help from an experienced doctor who works off clinical guidelines validated by years of research, though Scott vehemently disagrees with this view. His distrust of governments also extends to regular medicine. During a conversation about modern health systems, he claimed that there were no doctors, medicine, or vaccines when he was growing up in Scotland during the 1940s. “If somebody got chickenpox, we had chickenpox parties so that all the kids could get chicken pox,” he recalled. “Because it was known through experience that if these diseases were acquired as a child, they recovered pretty quickly. And there was no long-term damage. Whereas people who got chickenpox as adults suffered quite badly.” (The chickenpox-party argument has been a mainstay of anti-vaccine movements for many years and underplays the potential damage infection can cause children, including hospitalization, scarring, and even death.)

Perhaps Scott’s most controversial opinion concerns the treatment of cancer. He told me that if he were to be diagnosed with cancer, he would turn to starvation as a cure. Powell, the geneticist in Indiana, is a cancer biologist by training and has heard similar claims before. She says that studies in mice have shown that starvation enhances the animal’s tolerance to chemotherapy doses but can’t cure the disease outright. “You’re going to probably starve the person to death before you starve the cancer to death,” she said.

When I challenged Scott on this belief, he seemed unbothered. “It may not be something that works for all people, for all cancers, no,” he said. “I don’t know. I haven’t studied it. I just know that if I were to be diagnosed with cancer, which I think would be highly unlikely, that’s what I would do.”

Despite the misgivings of the scientific community, longevity enthusiasts like Scott and Chitwood are always on the lookout for the next therapy to try. Scott has his eye on mitochondrial transplantation, in which healthy mitochondria, the cell’s minute, energy-producing structures, are transferred into cells to—theoretically—restore their ability to generate power and survive. He has even launched his own foundation, a Panama-based entity from which he hopes to offer a “rejuvenation cocktail,” a gene therapy that boosts follistatin, klotho, and SIRT1, another protein said to bolster longevity.

Chitwood has invested in a company working on epigenetic reprogramming, a process that aims to restore cells to a youthful state by pulling a specific combination of genetic levers. He believes there is a way to offer experimental treatments such as these through state-level versions of the right-to-try law, which was passed in Trump’s first term and gives terminally ill patients the option to experiment with untested therapies. Chitwood is targeting legal loopholes in Montana, though he was vague about the particulars. “I think there is a path to where we’re going to be able to have treatments approved in the United States,” he said.

Trump’s reelection and the appointment of Kennedy as HHS secretary have bolstered the hopes of longevity enthusiasts pushing for greater access to treatments and therapies in the U.S. RFK Jr. has said he has taken antiaging therapies and has previously spoken about the need to accelerate the availability of stem cell therapies nationally. In October 2024, he criticized the FDA’s “war on public health” through “aggressive suppression of … stem cells.” In a June 2025 podcast appearance, he admitted he had received an experimental stem cell therapy at an offshore clinic. He pledged to fix the FDA’s “bias” against stem cell treatments, hyperbaric chambers, and peptides, among others. These hopes were further boosted when the libertarian antiaging advocate Jim O’Neill was appointed as the deputy secretary of health and human services in summer 2025 (a position he left in February; he has since been nominated by Trump to be director of the National Science Foundation). O’Neill is a former CEO of SENS, one of the first major organizations to fund entrepreneurial and academic projects targeting aging and age-related diseases—though Science magazine, in an article about his NSF nomination, calls him “a stranger to the research community.”

Davis, the Minicircle co-founder, has seen evidence that over the past 13 months, the FDA has “fast-tracked 12 different new sarcopenia therapies.” Sarcopenia is a form of muscular dystrophy associated with aging and is a popular condition for biotech companies that harbor greater goals of reversing or slowing aging to target. “The FDA has a lot of control over the market by identifying what is priority, what is important, what is allowed to move faster in the review process than other things, and sarcopenia was never allowed to move faster,” he said.

For most Americans, these shifts are coming at a time when the basics of health care and scientific research are being threatened—funding for cancer research slashed, evidence-based vaccine recommendations rolled back, and insurance premiums spiking. But for longevity enthusiasts, the developments under the Trump administration are a welcome sign that the world is coming around to their way of thinking, that they might finally be able to access their playground of treatments closer to home. Until the day regulations change, the ever-growing groups of longevity enthusiasts will seek out clinics across the world. “There’s a demand, and it’s growing,” Scott insisted. For longevity seekers like Scott and Chitwood, the reasons behind their pursuit is simple: They see the way older people deteriorate, and they want to ensure they avoid that fate. “I’m doing stuff now that I did when I was in my 20s,” Scott told me. “And if I can keep doing that, I’ll be good.”

For how long will that be true for Scott? After two days in El Valle de Anton, I returned to Panama City on my own. As the car came to a standstill at a junction, I spotted one of the giant black birds that seemed to have followed me around Panama, perched imperiously on the side of the road. The creature’s enormous stature, dark body, and light gray head made me wonder whether it was a buzzard after all. I finally looked up the species: It was a gallinazo, also known as a black vulture, and as much as we might ignore them, they’d been circling the whole time.