Longevity Medicine and Preventive Screening: Don’t Rely on Insurance

Your health insurance is not going to pay to keep you healthy for the most part. There's only so much your insurance is going to do, your company's going to do, or the government's going to do for you. Exercise. Clearly, if you are faster and stronger for your weight, you will be a healthier, longer living person. It's very hard to die when you're very fit. A woman who goes on hormone replacement therapy on or about menopause is going to live longer, on average two to three years longer than a woman taking nothing. The men that took the testosterone were half as likely to be dead. Conventional screening can only theoretically pick up one out of four cancers. If everybody had them MRIs, you pick up a tumor the size of peanut that can be removed. Once the size of a walnut, you got a problem. We really evolved from years ago having health insurance to keep you from going bankrupt when you had a heart attack or something like that, to maybe doing some screening. But does it really making you healthier? So we look at the history of health care in America, it's pretty storied. Let's talk about recent days. So health insurance was brought on to prevent people from having financial catastrophe when they have a health care catastrophe. And just like your car insurance pays for a car wreck, health insurance is designed to pay for when you get sick. And this evolved into, you know, Medicare, government related health health insurance, Medicaid for the states, private health insurance in America to pay for disease. And until the Affordable Health Care act, also known as Obamacare in 2010, preventative screening wasn't even covered by insurance. In other words, a mammogram was not mandated to be covered by insurance. It was considered not medically necessary because if your breast doesn't hurt, why would you do a mammogram screening for cancer? And at that time, they put about 74 screening tests to be covered by health insurance. That was a novel concept just less than 15 years ago. So we really evolved from years ago having health insurance to keep you from going bankrupt when you had a heart attack or something like that, to maybe doing some screening. But does it really make any healthier? I'd say that was a big advance screening. We know that about one out of four cancers can potentially be picked up with insurance mandated screening. We actually can go much further than that. We start thinking about things that maybe aren't covered by your insurance. And I know a lot of people have bias about doing stuff they got to pay for their on their own. But your health insurance is not going to pay to keep you healthy for the most part. So I know in some cases, people have the gyms paid for. We buy food for our staff here, so they're healthier, so they have healthy meals. But there's only so much your insurance is going to do, your company's going to do, or the government's going to do for you. And we look at what's turning in more of the wellness industry. What are we doing to slow down aging, and what can we do to not die of anything totally predictable or preventable? Let's say we had a pyramid. At the base is your general health care, which is going to be going to your family doctor. Getting some routine blood working, maybe screening for cholesterol, kind of a really crude way to check for heart disease. And then getting your screening test, which is really important. Your colon colonoscopy when you're 50, and your, you know, mammogram at the appropriate age. If you had smoker, doing a CAT scan of your lungs, doing an ultrasound of your aorta. All these things are covered for prevention. Making sure your blood pressure is well under control, your blood sugar is under control. I even lump wellness into that here. A lot of people talking about cold plunges probably, like, makes you feel bad. I don't think it'll do anything with your longevity saunas. Yeah, probably a lot more evidence. The finished sauna study showed that regular sauna use reduced risk of cardiovascular events substantially. Things like eating healthy in the diet thing, you can get in a whole different California can of worms with that, the exercise. Clearly, if you are faster and stronger for your weight, you will be a healthier, longer living person. It's very hard to die when you're very fit. So we look at VO2 max, which is your maximum ability to extract oxygen. That's kind of like doing like a stress test. And your strength relative to your weight, these are all good predictors of your longevity. So those are all really important things to work on. Diet, exercise, potentially sauna, seeing a wellness doctor, controlling your emotions, maybe having some group interaction, reducing stress. These are all, I think, phase one for the wellness track. On top of that, I look at regenerative stuff. Fixing things that are broken, that maybe some are covered by insurance, some are not, Some are really obvious, some are not. But for example, I put in the regenerative category, hormone replacement therapy. So if a man's an andropause or sort of the male menopause, the risk of dying goes up if he does not take testosterone. We know in the big study published in 2016, 84,000 man years. They looked at men in the VA in St. Louis that were about. It was run by St. Louis as multiple states, but they were on average 66 years old. They had low testosterone and about half of them took testosterone, half of them did not. And at the end of six years, which is a long study, the men that took the testosterone were half as likely to be dead, which is remarkable. Right? So that's really a simple one. And I consider regenerative women, Women's Health Initiative study kind of put us in the wrong direction. But a woman who goes on hormone replacement therapy on or about menopause is going to live longer, on average two to three years longer than a woman taking nothing, have a longer health span, even longer than that. That's regenerative because it's regenerating your organs that are damaged by the lack of testosterone, estrogen, progesterone. We look at joint health. If you have single joint arthritis, like let's say knee or hip, major weight bearing arthritis, that's clinically significant and you don't treat it, you have shortened your lifespan. We've got a lot of data on this because we've been treating joint replacements like that for years. And we use regenerative therapy, which is some cellular medicine to reverse arthritis or treat arthritis. But if you go untreated, you've shortened lifespan anywhere from two to seven years, depending on how severe it is, how much you reduce. It's not the arthritis itself, it's the fact that the arthritis leads to less of the normal stuff you do to be healthy. Earlier I said your strength and your speed really are predictors of your health. And if you have a joint that's keeping you from exercising or walking fast, you got parked close to the door, you're going to have a shorter health span. So that's regenerative therapy. Weight loss. As crazy as it sounds, weight loss is regenerative therapy. We have a metabolic derangement when we're obese or overweight. And when we reverse that, our organs become healthier, our liver grows back to normal, our brain gets less inflammation and starts living longer. Our heart is healthier, our tissues are healthier, our eyes are healthier. That is regenerative medicine. And one service that we've offered for a long time is treating the circulation of lower extremities, which is involved with the veins, not necessarily varicose veins, but swollen legs, heavy legs, discolored legs, that shortened your lifespan. Not treating that and then simply treating that condition, which is very Easy in that case is covered by insurance. Gives you a bump in your lifespan and your health span. Another thing I think about this regenerative is a specific treatment for sleep apnea. So sleep apnea is a condition where it's kind of related to snoring, but people have periods at night where they stop breathing. And we know if somebody has sleep apnea based on a study published in 2008 sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. If you have severe sleep apnea and you're, let's say 30 to 60 years old, your chance of dying is 3x of your non sleep apnea peer over the next 20 years. 3x and simply treating the sleep apnea regenerates your body. And I've written a book on that. That's a whole nother subject I'm very passionate about because we actually have a laser treatment that we reverse it. So that's the second tier. The third tier I think about for longevity is not dying of anything. I say stupid, that sounds very inflammatory, but not dying of anything. Totally predictable. And the big three are cardiovascular disease when you're younger, cancer a little older and neurocognitive decline a little later. And we could detect this. Now your insurance will not pay for this. So that's, that's unfortunate, but it's not that expensive. So for cardiovascular disease we use labs and cholesterol to try to predict very, very crude predictor, almost a non predictor of who's going to have a heart attack. And there's certain other more advanced testing like oxidized LDL and uric acid, homocysteine, hemoglobin, A1C. These are all somewhat more better predictors than cholesterol. But we actually can do imaging studies such as a coronary calcium score when you're younger. That's a $90 test, a CAT scan doing what's called a CIMT, which is an ultrasound test of the carotid arteries. That's really a harbinger of your entire body. Or what I like the best is a clery C L E E E R L Y. Pretty much every state has these. It's a special angiogram that's the most sensitive for seeing heart disease 10 or 20 years before you have the big one. Okay, so if those are all clean, you're clean. But there's a problem, you'll know you got to attack it regarding cholesterol. So that's the one. The second one is cancer. Okay, so there's something called liquid biopsies. They're not ready for prime time yet. But in the next five years you'll be able to get a blood test that that tells you if you have a cancer that's not detectable, that that will happen. It's already kind of there now, but it's not real sensitive. And then there's a full body mri. There's a few centers throughout the country that they do basically a scan of your body, basically knees to the top of your head that pick up like sarcomas and liver cancer, pancreatic cancer, ovarian cancer, all the ones that we don't see with conventional screening. Conventional screening can only theoretically pick up one out of four cancers if everybody had them. Okay, so the idea with MRI is you pick up a tumor the size of peanut that can be removed. Once the size of a walnut, you got a problem. And the last one is neurocognitive decline. This is where your brain is going into Alzheimer's dementia. We can actually see that, what's called neuro quantitative imaging. So we can look at the brain and measure it against other brains your age and see where you're at. So you've got your brain matter and the liquid around it. And as you get more dementia, your brain matter shrinks and the liquid increases. We can give you a score and even a brain age. And that's actually reversible too before you have the dementia. So if your brain is in the lower 10 percentile, you're still functionally perfectly normal, but you're going to get Alzheimer's way before your periods. Peers and there's intervention you can do to reverse that. So that's the next one. Then the next one is truly anti aging medicine out there a little bit yet. So we look at different drugs that kill off senescent cells. We look at drugs that impair or inhibit cells turning senescent or turning old. Some genetic reprogramming that's being tested right now and actually very close to human studies are ongoing. Drugs that restore the thymus glands activity, which is the little gland underneath your breastbone that withers away as we get older, protects us from cancers. And we can measure these with different clocks, like biologic clocks, epigenetic clocks, neuro quantitative imaging, VO2, max lab testing. So there's a lot of ways we can measure aging and materially reverse it. And if you're, let's say 60 and your brain is a 40 year old brain, your heart's a 40 year old heart and your biologic age is 50 and your epigenetic age is 55 you're going to outlive your peers that aren't in that situation. We can predict death. I mean, that's kind of scary, but we can predict it fairly accurately. So I see the whole regenerative medicine and wellness category moving into true longevity, which the word is maybe overplayed right now because we don't know exactly how to measure it. I use a combination of ways to measure it, but this is. This is coming in our lifetime. So right now, don't die of anything stupid. So obviously, get an Uber if you've been drinking. If you have depression, seek some help. Make sure you have community screen for cancer before it occurs. Don't wait for it. In our community up here in Michigan, we use bionic mri. They're in Southfield. There's another one in Novi. They just do a full body MRI. You pay for it. I think it's roughly $2,000. I see that coming down a lot over time. Get the clery C L E E R L Y imaging. You know, I get that done locally every year. I've got the heart attack gene. So I've been watching my heart. I was. I first tested it when I was 56. My heart age was two years older than I. I am and now it's about 16 years younger. I did specific intervention that I wouldn't have had to do based on my labs, and I had a little atherosclerosis. It's all regressing. My arteries are getting softer and more compliant. So these are things we can actually materially attack if you know what the risk is. I hear people saying, I don't want to know. Well, you're going to find out. So I'd rather know in advance and do something about it versus find out, let's say had a heart attack or a stroke. If you know a family member or friend that could benefit from this video, please share it with them.