The myths about ageing debunked most effectively are rarely the ones circulating in wellness columns; they are the ones that have calcified quietly inside medical waiting rooms and family conversations for decades. Dr Dhanupriya Sivapathasuntharam, a Consultant Geriatrician and Clinical Lead for Older People’s Services at the Royal London Hospital, Barts Health, has been pushing back against five of them, and the conversation feels overdue.
Her perspective carries weight precisely because it comes from the clinical coalface, not the supplement aisle. According to her profile at LIPS Battersea, she works directly with older patients navigating the full complexity of later life, which is to say: she sees what the myths actually cost people.
The myths about ageing debunked, starting with decline as destiny
The most stubborn misconception, the one that perhaps does the most quiet damage, is that physical and cognitive decline is simply what ageing means. That it is inevitable, linear, and not worth interrogating. It is the kind of assumption that, once lodged, shapes everything from how much a person invests in their own health to how clinicians frame a conversation with a patient in their seventies.
The reality is considerably more textured. Ageing is not a single trajectory. How a person ages is shaped by an accumulation of factors across a lifetime, and a number of those factors remain within reach of intervention well into later decades. The idea that there is little point in addressing blood pressure, movement, social connection, or cognitive engagement after a certain age is not medicine; it is fatalism wearing medicine’s clothes.
A second myth concerns pain and low mood as expected features of older life, things to be managed rather than treated. This framing, when it takes hold in clinical settings, means that conditions which would prompt thorough investigation in a younger patient are sometimes met with a kind of resigned acceptance in an older one. Dr Sivapathasuntharam’s specialism sits precisely at this intersection, advocating for the same rigour of care regardless of a patient’s decade.
How the conversation around older people’s care is shifting
The myths about ageing debunked in clinical practice are increasingly being met with structural changes in how care is delivered. One development drawing attention is the use of tele-rounding, which allows clinicians to conduct ward rounds or patient consultations remotely. Recent feasibility studies published via PMC/NIH have demonstrated high rates of clinician and patient satisfaction with the approach, a finding that carries particular relevance for older patients who may face challenges with mobility or accessing specialist care in person.
The implications for geriatric medicine are not trivial. A consultant of Dr Sivapathasuntharam’s specialism covering patients across a large acute trust like Barts Health is working at considerable scale. Models that allow specialist input to reach patients without requiring physical proximity represent a genuine shift in what continuity of care can look like for older people.
A third persistent myth is that memory lapses are an automatic indicator of dementia. Anxiety about this conflation is widespread, and it leads both to unnecessary distress and, at times, to under-reporting of symptoms that do warrant investigation. The relationship between normal cognitive ageing and dementia is more complex than the binary the myth implies, and it requires proper assessment rather than assumption in either direction.
Two further myths circle the social dimensions of ageing: that loneliness is an inevitable condition of later life, and that older people are not interested in, or capable of adapting to, new technologies or new ways of living. Both do measurable harm. The first normalises an experience that has documented effects on physical health. The second shapes how services are designed and who is considered when new tools are built.
Dr Sivapathasuntharam’s intervention in this conversation, shared via Stylist, is a reminder that the myths about ageing debunked in clinical research take a long time to reach public consciousness. The gap between what geriatricians understand and what the wider culture believes remains, and it is closing more slowly than anyone with a stake in the matter would like.
