Two Sides of Frailty:Vulnerability, Compensation, and a Consciousness-Centered Medicine ofAging

Aging medicine typically centers the body and treats consciousness as peripheral. This book reverses that order: a human being is a conscious life embodied in physiology, so the body's systems matter because they sustain the awareness, relationship, and agency that make a life someone's own. Frailty is where this reordering becomes clinically urgent. Signs like slow gait, fatigue, fear of falling, and dependence are usually read as pure deficit. This book argues each is a single, unified event of vulnerability and compensation together: the organism's attempt to remain safely in the world under reduced reserve. The clinical task is to ask what a sign is trying to preserve and what would restore a healthier trajectory at the least cost to the person. The book introduces Wellspan, the span of life in which a person retains enough coherence and connection for life to remain their own, and second mortality, the loss of the conscious person before the death of the body. It then applies this framework to movement, behavioral therapy, environment, family, clinical decision-making, and artificial intelligence, arguing each should widen a person's world rather than quietly replace their authorship of it. A closing ethics of the dignity of risk insists that care's purpose is not a perfectly managed life, but the preservation of one that remains someone's own.

 © Yabluchanskiy A., Iabluchanskyi M.