Episode 1: Inside The Cure with Dr. Charles Mok: Introduction

What does it take to cure diseases, not just manage their symptoms? This is Inside the Cure from Allure Medical and its founder, Dr. Charles Moak. He explores world renowned healthcare that benefits patients and the economy. I'm Cam Carman and I'm here with Dr. Charles Moak from Allure Medical and you're listening to a brand new podcast. We're very excited about, Inside the cure, and Dr. Moak is going to let us know what it's all about and what listeners can expect over the coming months.

Yeah, thanks, Cam. We're going to talk about kind of change, changes in healthcare in general. So we look at the healthcare model really as more of a disease management model. We look at several different service lines where there's a cure out there or a way to kind of stop things from happening. But we focus so much on the disease and the management of the disease, and it's really enormously wasteful. And it's something I think patients don't want. If they have empowerment by learning and understanding how they can manage diseases, by eliminating them versus just taking care of them with traditional medicine, I think they're gonna be much better off. I think a classic example would be some of the major healthcare concerns in America would be diabetes and heart disease. If you really knew there was a way to prevent diabetes and heart disease, would you do it? But when you go to see your doctor, typically they wait until you get it. There's really no coding or reimbursement by insurance to prevent it from happening. So they wait till it happens, and then they put you on medications. They do a bunch of tests and put you on medications the rest of your life. But if you knew that you could figure out before you got it that you were predisposed to it, maybe through genetic testing or monitoring your blood sugar before you have diabetes and seeing how to respond to foods, you can actually keep it from happening and not have the diabetes, and then you don't go on to have the heart attack. We also look at things like, you know, a friend of mine, Steve, he had a heart attack and he was by all means pretty fit. He'd been working out, had had a stress test a couple months earlier and it was negative. He was minor turns, cholesterol is great. He had lost 30 or 40 pounds in the last five years through diet and exercise. And he was eating, by all means, what he thought was healthy. But then he had a heart attack. He was out on a, on a trip and had a heart attack. And it was just really shocking for him. And he's a relatively young man. He's about my age. I guess I'm not that young, but he's my age, I'm in my 50s and this kind of happened. But what happens? We could have picked this up five years ago saying, you know, Steve, you're going to get a heart attack in the next five or 10 years. Let's do whatever we can to reduce that risk. And we know how to do that. But this is not covered by insurance. It's something that doctors are not trained to do. They wait till the heart attack occurs and then they manage the heart attack with different lipid lowering drugs and different physical therapy and occupational therapy and medications and blood thinners, do the heart catheterization. But what happens if we could stop the heart attack before it progresses? Well, that's happening now. One of our practices in Minnesota, in Minneapolis, the doctor was brilliant. He is a cardiologist, he was an interventional cardiologist where he did the heart caths. And he was mostly focused on, well, what happens if I can get these people five or ten years before they have the heart attack? Can I change their life? So he worked with one of the big self insured unions in Minneapolis and he was able to put together a program where he screens the higher risk people for heart disease. And the way you do that is very simple technology. We use ultrasound and we look at the arteries and the arteries are what gets clogged up in a heart attack or a stroke. We look at them and we compare them to other people in their age and if they're in the worst 5 or 10 percentile, we know there's a good chance they're gonna have a heart attack or stroke in the next 10 years. And then he aggressively works on lifestyle intervention with them. And the patients do change their habits because they see they've already got heart disease, they got some plaques or atherosclerosis. Now they make meaningful changes in their life. And we can also fine tune what they should and should not be eating based on how they respond. Well, in two years we found that if we see 100 people that are at high risk for heart disease, we can reduce two people's heart attacks or stroke in the next 10 years. Two people that does this enormous, we take the average risk of around seven and a half percent risk of heart attack or stroke in the next 10 years down to about five and a quarter percent. So that's just an enormous, enormous impact. And that technology is available today. But the modern healthcare system is designed around managing disease, not Health, okay, so that's something that sometimes people have a hard time grappling with, and sometimes they almost think it's like a conspiracy. Well, it's not. Like, for example, we know that if you go to the gym and eat healthy, you'll have less disease. We just know that that's true. If you eat healthy foods, you just kind of cut down on the meats and cut down on red meat and eat more plants and exercise and do endurance training and do a little weightlifting, you'll actually live a healthier life. Even meditating leads to health, intermittent fasting. But imagine that your insurance had to pay for that and they had to pay for your membership to the gym. They're not going to do that. They had to pay for your more expensive foods that are a little more wholesome. They're not going to do that. But we do it anyways. We'll go to the gym and we'll eat healthy and we'll try to do things that promote health. But when it comes to things that are traditional in healthcare, like having heart attack, stroke, diabetes, cancer, we just wait till it occurs, because that's what we're trained to do by our healthcare professionals. And when it occurs, they know exactly what to do. So your doctor knows exactly what to do when you have a heart attack, but what happens if you're going to have one in ten years from now? Well, the solution is this. Wait for 10 years, and then we know how to handle a heart attack. We'll basically do a heart catheterization, put you on some medications. Sometimes I think doctors are putting people on these statin drugs to reduce the risk of heart disease. That's pretty noble. But what happens? We can select the ones that would benefit from them versus just giving it to everybody. And then also what happens we intervene on specifically based on their genetics and their findings and their inflammation, can we lower the risk even further? And that's really where I think we're going in the future, is taking healthcare to another level, leaving disease care where it's at. You know, we still gotta have hospitals and take care of disease and strokes and heart attacks and cancers. What about like stopping before occurs, extending healthy period of life, extending longevity, where we're healthier for a longer period of time, a bigger period where we don't have disease. And that's what we'll be talking about. The different things that we discovered that are really kind of coming in the near future, we're already doing it in some areas. We found that some of the services that we've offered in certain areas, in certain states, reduce heart attack rates, reduce breast cancer rates, reduce diabetes rates. And how much further can we go? And how can we really scale this nationally and change behavior of medical professionals throughout the country of moving from a disease management system to. Let's talk about prevention, not just like an annual checkup to see if you have cancer, but actually preventing it and the people that are going to get it.

Okay, Dr. Moak, this is all very exciting, and we're really looking forward to getting your insight on our upcoming podcast. Thanks so much. Thanks for listening to Inside the Cure with Dr. Charles Mok. See you next time.