Redefining Patient-Centered Care with Regenerative Medicine

Foreign. Can you tell us a bit about your background and what led you to your own medical practice? Sure. So my background is I went to medical school and decided I wanted to be working in an emergency room or a trauma center. And I sort of like the variety of doing different things all the time. I had sort of a surgical interest, but I stuck with the ER because there's a lot of surgical procedures and you could take care of people and they're the worst time. And then about 2003 or so, some other opportunities popped up where there was a trend towards doing things that weren't covered by insurance, maybe were not resulting in life or death situations and that really weren't widely available. And even the term like we were used to be called Allure Medical Spy, even though we're Allure Medical now. There was no medical spas in Michigan. Botox was being FDA approved that year for cosmetic uses. Things like laser hair removal had just come around. There's breakthroughs in treating advanced vein disease. So there's a lot of new things. Things. So I set out to open up allure Medical Spa 2003, like November. We really just rented two rooms at a local family doctor's office and started offering some really unique treatments. One of the big successes at first, which, because there's nothing available before it was this medication that would actually destroy fat cells. It was called phosphatidylcholine deoxycholate. And we would inject it into small areas of fat. It would melt fat. And this did not exist. Now there's a lot of options now for different devices and stuff to disagree that. But there's nothing available. And that wound up being something that people were very excited about. Botox, something that was brand new for cosmetic. And I was at one of these meetings for the fat reduction. I ran to a Dr. Hunt who is doing ultrasound guided sclerotherapy for varicose veins. I never really heard of it before because the way we treated varicose veins with surgery, and he had been doing this for several years where they were using a certain type of a chemical, basically a soap type solution, to destroy veins that were on the legs. And a lot of times they were just ugly veins and sometimes they were really sick veins. And he trained me how to do this. There was really not much of a society for that. It wasn't included in surgical residency. So it was really not widely available. And I got that skill set up. We started treating people with varicose veins without surgery was the first. We're the first ones in Michigan to do that. Right around 05 or 06, these devices became available, not just FDA approved, but covered by insurance to replace the ultrasound guided sclerotherapy with a laser or radio frequency device that would destroy the vein from the inside. Again, without surgery, there's nobody doing it in Michigan. So I learned the skills to do that. Next thing you know, we the biggest fame practice in North America because we had this regular stream of patients coming in to get this stuff done and then we can offer them this new service that was covered by the insurance. It really, really kind of exploded. And we had kind of two businesses back then. We still do. We had our sort of our looking better on the outside business, which was Botox and fillers and some cosmetic laser. And these things just developed over time. There's nothing available 25 years ago. And it really came in. The first 10 years of my practice were skin tightening devices, laser devices, intense pulse lights came out. Then we had our sick leg business that we were really kind of passionate about both of them. Then we sort of segued into treating sicker legs. So what happened? I had a patient come in that was, had not just varicose veins, but he had a leg almost the size of like a big elephant leg, all discolored, skin breakdown. He was at risk for losing the leg because he had advanced vein disease. And there was really no surgical option for him. He wasn't a candidate. And the technologies we're using to treat the veins, I had been reading about people using them in different countries to treat these veins called perforating veins or little connection veins that were abnormal between the skin and the muscle. So I experimented with our laser to treat this guy's leg. His name was Jerry and he had a bunch of these perforating veins. And we over a period of a year treated all these perforating veins. And his leg turned into like a basically a normal leg. It's shrunk down in size, still a little discolored. There's no longer, no longer needing a wheelchair. He's up on his feet. And that really kind of launched me into this treating really sick legs. We call the ugly leg business, where people have sores in their legs, heaviness or legs swelling their legs. Where most of the vein business was aimed at more pretty legs. People that had a cosmetic concern, they wanted insurance to cover sort of an ugly vein on their leg, which maybe might not be medically necessary. And we were really treating people that had really sick, heavy swollen legs. And that became, you Know, a big part of our business. We opened up over 30 clinics across the country for that. And then we had this cosmetic business that was a different patient. They were trying to look and feel better with less risk. Well, in the last 20 years, other things that kind of bridged this gap between treating people with sick disease, that there was not many other options for them. There wasn't back then, there are now. And what else could be done for these same kind of patients that want to bridge the gap between looking better on the outside to look better on the inside? We started offering things like hormone replacement therapy back in 2004 when it really was just drug therapy. And people got paranoid about the drugs or afraid of the drugs because of some misinterpreted studies. And we were really on the forefront of that. My brother had a spinal cord injury and I learned about how to use stuff, stem cells to treat things such as that. And that's something we offer. So a lot of treatments that we offer that really weren't available in the traditional healthcare model typically because most of them were not covered by insurance. Now even today the veins are covered by insurance, but most of the other things we do, you know, are not. So we've done things such as we patent method to reverse sleep apnea which has a big impact on people's longevity. We do some, some longevity type treatments to help people extend their lifespan. We really focus now on adding years to people's health span by doing things that are probably not widespr that are available have been proven to work again like with the veins. I was doing this before insurance covered it. Now that's the standard of care. But it took 20 years to get there. I mean some people are still doing the old fashioned surgery, but it pretty much changed during those years. And we've seen this over and over again where things that we started doing years ago, you're kind of on the beginning of the wave. Early adopter patients who want to do these things that look and feel better with left wrist, they come to us. And that's a unique proposition we have. We can stay ahead because we're not bound by insurance company guidelines, basically, which is really the vast majority of doctors, 99% of them, they're really going to do what your insurance pays for, even if it might not be the best thing for you. Because there's sort of a, there's not a method for people to choose to pay out of pocket for stuff they want. We have that opportunity.