From Botox to Wellness: The Self-Care Mindset That Extends Your Life

I think there's groups of people that love themselves more than the possessions and groups of people that love their possessions more than themselves. And you see that in society, how people take care of themselves. But this is investing in yourself and in your longevity. And we have two angles to our business, two totally different arms of the business that are really aligned with the same thing. So one is looking better on the outside cosmetic and one is looking better on the inside wellness. And the people that self identify as I want to do something like Botox or filler, give myself a little confidence and take care of myself, they're more likely to be people that are going to want to take care of their inside of their body. But the first step is doing something cosmetic to make yourself feel and look better. And once that happens, you start thinking about other stuff. Maybe I can live longer and look great at my age. So I've seen this pattern where we have services that are regenerative, potentially extend lifespan, but they're not free because they're not covered by insurance. And keep in mind, insurance designed to cover catastrophic costs associated with disease. And only until about 2010 or 11 were preventative health care services coverage such as doing a mammogram or cold colon cancer screening, that was not ingrained in law prior to 2010, the so called Affordable Health Care Act. So what how can we look at this? Is this vanity or is this self care? So we had the cosmetic angle and we're having groups of people that are thinking, well, I'm going to try really hard to slow down the appearance of aging. And the next step is slow down actually slowing down aging. How can I slow down aging? And when we look at things like Botox and fillers and medical grade skincare lasers that we do on the cosmetic side, we can meaningfully show that your skin age or your appearance age has gotten younger. One year later, this happens like consistently now. Does it go back all the way to 10, 20 years younger? It really doesn't. But what we can do is take somebody who's, let's say somebody's a 55 year old woman and skin looks a little rough. She hasn't done much yet. We do an automated analysis called Visia of the skin that looks at the skin and it predicts the age and maybe her skin looks a couple years older. Well, we do some interventions and a year later she looks maybe two or three years younger. And it couldn't even get four or five, six, seven years younger. It doesn't go much more than that. And we maybe Keep the clock there so she'll continue to age but at a slower rate. And we can look at the same thing internally. What can we do to make our heart look younger? We can look at the heart. We can do what's called a clery CAT scan of the heart. That's a very specialized test that uses contrast that tells you the amount of damage your heart is occurring. We do get that. So you get atherosclerosis doesn't just pop up one day. You have a 70% stenosis. You start out with a 5%, 10%. So we can see that and reverse it. If we take interventions that may not be covered by insurance. We can measure the brain age with what's called neuro quantitative imaging. It's an MRI study that shows your brain's age relative to your peers. You might be a little older brain than your age and your sex and your race. And we want to take interventions to handle that. I think about the regenerative services that we offer that really meaningfully extends people's lifetime. And we can measure that based on what we call epidemiologic data. So if somebody has knee arthritis and maybe they decide they don't want to have surgery to replace the knee, the lifespan is actually shortened because of the decreased mobility that occurs. If we do regenerative medicine, which is not covered by insurance, stem cells, platelet rich plasma, we can extend the lifespan, at least in theory. Same thing goes with sleep apnea. Most people with sleep apnea never get it diagnosed. Testing is very you can get done through insurance. You can pay 100 bucks to get it tested. And then we have a treatment that reverses sleep apnea, might say reverse and make it go away. Maybe it goes down 75%, which is equivalent to any of the treatments for sleep apnea. Hormone replacement therapy, it can be covered by insurance, typically bioidentical. Truly replacing all your hormones is not so it's something you pay out of pocket. But it can extend your health span and lifespan. So it's not vanity to do those things. The person on hormone replacement will typically look younger than they would without it. The person that has their sleep apnea treatment will look better having treated it than without it. So if you love yourself more than your possessions, there are things you can do that can impact your lifespan and how you look and how you feel.