A doctor traces how their practice evolved since 2003 to offer treatments insurance won't cover: cosmetic procedures, vein disease therapies, hormone replacement, and longevity treatments. They explain why they moved beyond traditional medicine to focus on what patients actually need.
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 their really 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 a term like we 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 it was 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 get just great fabric. 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 was 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're 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 stuck 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, that would destroy the vein from the inside again without surgery. Nobody doing it in Michigan. So I learned the skills to do that. Next thing you know, we had the biggest vein 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 lasers. 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 like a leg almost the size of like a big elephant leg, all discolored, skin breakdown, usually at risk for losing the leg. But 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 basically a normal leg. It's shrunk down in size, still a little discolored. There's no longer, no longer needing to wheel chair. He's up on his feet. And that really kind of launched me into this treating really sick leg. 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 their insurance 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 at the feel better with less risk. Well, in the last 20 years, other things, they 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 stem cells to treat things such as that. And that's something we offered. So there's a lot of treatments that we offer that really weren't available in the traditional health care 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 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 widespread yet 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, we were kind of on the beginning of the wave. Early adopter patients that want to do these things, they 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 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.
