ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the extent to which anti-ageing can be described in terms of 'regimes of hope', discussing the implications for lay persons and users of anti-ageing products and services and highlighting potentially problematic consequences. It explores professional discourse of anti-ageing medicine in Germany, and provides the qualitative content analysis of narrative interviews and focus groups conducted with users of anti-ageing products and services in Germany. The chapter analyses and compares how perceptions of and attitudes towards the future and future health in anti-ageing medical expert discourse are taken up, modified, and problematized in everyday practices. It focuses on an attitude termed as 'medical optimism', since it is primarily concerned with the problem of raising and maintaining hope in the face of an uncertain future. Anti-ageing medicine describes itself as a discrete discipline implementing medical and biogerontological methods and findings for the early diagnosis, prevention, treatment, and/or reversal of age-related changes, disorders and diseases.
