Associate Professor Nathan Vytialingam
President, Malaysian Healthy Ageing Society
Organising Chairman, 1st World Congress on Healthy Ageing 2012
A Warm Welcome to the 1st World Congress on Healthy Ageing 2012 website
The Malaysian Healthy Ageing Society has undertaken the task of organizing the very first World Congress of Healthy Ageing on 19-22 March 2012 in Kuala Lumpur. The theme of this World Congress is “Evolution: Holistic Ageing in an Age of Change”.
As the world population ages in the coming decades of the new millennium, humankind faces the daunting challenge of improving quality of life for its senior citizens in an era of global economic turmoil. It is estimated that 2/3 of the world’s aged will reside in the most populous continent of Asia, majority of which will be living at or below poverty levels in their respective countries. . In Africa, where many of the younger generations have been lost to infectious diseases and war, the elderly face growing old alone and destitute. In wealthy Western nations, the demographic trends indicate that ever increasing costs of healthcare for the elderly will be borne by fewer and fewer working age adults and threaten to bankrupt nations from unsustainable public debt. Medical and technological advances appear to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, these promise almost miraculous cures for many of the ailments that have plagued us for millennia but on the other hand, burgeoning costs for such wonderful treatments threaten to drown public health expenditures in red ink and contribute to civil unrest across the globe.
Now, more than ever, the world needs to deal with the approaching healthcare crisis. We believe that promotion of healthy living and primary prevention of disease will accomplish the urgent need for a solution to this imminent global threat and that we need to be proactive in dealing with the coming crisis.
The 1st World Congress on Healthy Ageing 2012 is a global forum to address this important task. This congress will bring together internationally renowned experts in healthy ageing from conventional and complementary medicine to focus on addressing healthy ageing issues in the new millennium. We believe that healthy ageing is not solely a biological process, but is a complex experience involving also other domains of our human existence. Healthy ageing should also be approached from many aspects including societal/policy level approaches, physical, emotional & psychological as well as spiritual aspects. This world congress will focus on the question of healthy ageing from a holistic approach which will include debates on the current biological theoretical constructs of human ageing by the world’s foremost experts to empiric time-tested remedies from ancient civilizations which promote healthy living and address the spiritual-emotional-physical nexus that is often ignored in conventional medical approaches to disease. Also, we believe that the international experiences of the speakers will expose participants to the unique challenges and solutions dealing with healthy ageing in various regions of the world and inspire novel ways of dealing with seemingly intractable problems in other regions of the world.
It is with great pleasure that we announce the 1st World Congress in Healthy Ageing 2012. The congress is targeted to all conventional and complementary medical practitioners, allied health providers and others with interests in healthy ageing. We hope that this international convention will provide both valuable learning experience and a forum to interact with experts and other participants.
Please return to this website for further announcements on this coming 1st World Congress on Healthy Ageing 2012.
