Beside the system, not inside it
Cory Goldberg is a plastic surgeon in Toronto — founder of FORM Face + Body, former head of plastic surgery at Trillium Health Partners, and a lecturer at the University of Toronto. The “basic-science background” is real: alongside his surgical residency he earned a master’s in biomedical engineering. And he is one of the clearest structural thinkers we met. He is fascinated by a pattern he sees in Canada: an unusually large biohacking and spiritual-longevity community — saunas, cold plunges, protocols — sitting alongside a research and clinical world that barely engages with any of it.
His explanation is regulatory. Canada’s single-payer public healthcare system is tightly controlled and slow to adopt anything new, and the research funding is prohibitive. So the technology reaches people not through clinicians or scientists but through individuals and companies — the population builds it from the ground up, because the institutions won’t.
From there he makes the argument that anchors his page. Regulatory frameworks are built for sick care: you wait until someone is ill, then offer a treatment they are effectively obliged to accept, because the alternative is staying sick. Longevity is the opposite — proactive, preventative, chosen. The person, not the disease, carries the responsibility. And existing frameworks, he says, simply do not recognise that difference.
His conclusion is contrarian and considered: longevity medicine should not try to grow inside public healthcare systems. They are too entrenched, too old, too slow. It should develop beside them, and integrate later. Trying to build it within, he says plainly, is not feasible.
And then, asked what he would tell a young person, he sets all of that aside. “The world is a school. We are all students and teachers at the same time.” His actual longevity advice is not a protocol: love more, hate less — which he calls, without irony, the biggest determinant of longevity there is.
