Aging is not caused by wearing down, but is more accurately described as an orderly program of self-destruction. Some aspects of aging appear as accumulated damage (such as cartilage worn away from joints or build-up of cross-linked sugar-protein complexes), but on closer inspection, even these are seen to be entirely avoidable consequences of the body shutting down its repair systems. Luckily, various types of bodywork can drastically improve our body’s aging process.“Living things are fundamentally homeostatic. They can repair themselves. They build themselves from a single egg cell,” says Josh Mitteldorf, of the Mayo Clinic. “The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that entropy (disorder, degeneration, damage) must increase in any isolated physical system. But living systems are not isolated. Living things draw free energy from their environment, use it internally, then dump waste entropy back into the environment. Total energy cannot be created or destroyed, but free energy becomes degraded into warmth as it is used. Both living things and non-living machines take in high-grade forms of free energy, use some of that for their various functions, and discard the same total amount of energy as low-grade chemical energy and warmth.”