As we age, things go wrong.

Chaos mathematics teaches us that any tiny change in the initial conditions from which a reiterative process develops and cycles can lead to great differences in the final outcome. The homeostatic mechanisms that mark life are wonderful and complex but can never 100% compensate for every emergent property to which the complex cycling processes of life might give rise. In particular, if such emergent properties do not influence procreation and child-rearing to the point of such offspring reaching their own full procreative maturity, then such properties can cause health problems later and it isn’t possible to evolve mechanisms to combat such problems.

So, as we age, many various things start to go wrong, and Mother Nature can’t help us fix them.

Because so many different processes make up the journey we call ageing, there cannot be a single treatment by which all such processes could ever be addressed.

Take face-lifting, for example.

There is the notion out there that a face-lift fixes an old face. It is a notion plastic surgeons seem generally happy enough to allow to circulate, as it promotes the plastic surgeon’s craft, yet it is a notion wholly flawed, for whilst a facelift can compensate, imprecisely, for one aspect of the ageing face, it cannot correct a myriad of other processes all contributing to an aged appearance.

So many things go wrong as we age – our correct response can be nothing other than identifying and ameliorating as many such processes as we can, in concert and in proportion, directed as far as possible to reversing such processes.

and because ageing is necessarily chaotic, strategies must be individualised to address each feature hierarchically for each individual patient, delivering the highest aesthetic yield for dollar spent and biological risk taken.

In managing the results of the chaos of ageing, no one treatment, be it “wrinkle injection”or face cream or face-lift procedure, can ever really do the trick.

We need to do lots of little tricks