Dr. Jeffrey Gladden distinguishes sick care, which treats symptoms, from health optimization, which targets aging itself as the root cause. He outlines 12-16 biological hallmarks of aging like mitochondrial dysfunction and telomere shortening, and describes his framework of five circles: life energy, longevity, health, performance, and environment. Choose practitioners who ask whether they're restoring baseline or building resilience and mental sharpness.
Is this practitioner practicing sick care where they're basically focused on my symptoms and my problems and they're trying to get me back towards baseline or close to baseline? Or is this person really in healthcare? And healthcare, the way we see it, is health optimization. It's the idea of the 30-year-old body, no matter what your age is, the 300-year-old mind, no matter what your age is.
He went from saving hearts as a cardiologist to rewriting the entire aging playbook. Dr. Jeffrey Gladden believes 100 is the new 30, and he's got the science to back it up. This is the Gladden Longevity Podcast.
One of the pain points that people come to me with is that they've been to a physician or practitioner and they're not happy with the results they've gotten. And I think part of it is related to some confusion around what different kinds of practitioners or doctors are capable of doing. For example, I was trained as an allopathic physician. I'm an MD by training. And yet when I got sick, you know, back in the 2000s, it wasn't allopathic medicine that enabled me to get better at all. I had to go into the functional medicine space, and that's how I figured out my issue. So what is functional medicine? Well, functional medicine is actually looking at what I would call the root cause of the symptoms that you're having. So in traditional allopathic medicine, which would be an MD or a DO, you're trained to basically see the symptom, you're there to basically treat the symptom, treat the symptomatology, but not the underlying disorder. You may have a little bit of preventative kind of thought process going on, but not a lot. In functional medicine, you're actually looking deeper. You're looking at the root cause of what caused the plaque in the artery, what caused the cancer to develop, right? What caused the GI distress? And so it's a deeper look. That's very important. In naturopathic medicine, they're looking at people that come in that are sick, and they're looking at it through their own lens related to supplements and foods and not so much medications that are being involved, and they can be very, very helpful. There's some very, very smart naturopathic physicians out there. People that practice Ayurvedic medicine or Chinese medicine, they look at it through another lens. They're, they're constructing the body through other systems, and they're using different herbs and spices and tinctures to basically bring the body into balance. And then there's homeopathy, which is basically the science of using small amounts of things to actually scooch the body back towards equilibrium. This can also be very effective. We've seen people get good results with that as well. Then there's integrative medicine. Integrative medicine is saying, look, nobody has a corner on the market on wisdom, knowledge, or efficacy. And so let's take the best of each situation, each medicine, each practice, if you will, and apply it to the individual in a smart way. That's more the camp that we fall into when it think about sick care. In addition to that, there's actually longevity medicine. So what is longevity medicine? Well, the easiest way to think about it is that traditional medicine and many of the other medicines or practices are focused on the disease, the discomfort, the problem. Functional medicine and many of these other disciplines, we're now starting to look at the root cause. But in longevity medicine, we actually understand that aging is the root cause of all the problems that are occurring for the most part. And so with that, we're looking at the 12 Hallmarks of Aging, We actually think there's about 16, and these are the actual biological processes that are driving aging forward. And the really important thing to understand about that is that all of these processes, whether it's mitochondrial dysfunction, shortened telomeres, senescent cell formation, gut dysbiosis, lack of autophagy and proteostasis, all these different things, they play off each other. And so as we go through life chronologically, when one thing starts to go bad, it affects 2 or 3 others. When they start to go bad, they affect 2 or 3 others. And when those start to go bad, they cycle back around. And so all of a sudden you have this tornado of hallmarks spinning up and accelerating aging. It's the reason that aging is exponential and not linear. It's actually exponential. So in longevity medicine, we say, let's take the functional approach. Let's look at the root cause. Let's treat the symptom, but let's also go at the root cause of the root cause. Let's look at what's going on with those hallmarks of aging and develop strategies and plans to measure them, which we can do, and then also to actually treat them. And we're not really done until we're able to actually move somebody back in time, if you will, relative to where the hallmarks of aging are located. So this is a really, really important distinction. The thing about it is that there are new technologies coming all the time that give us more leverage on those hallmarks of aging. And when you have greater precision and you can basically layer together different technologies to address them, it's really remarkable the results you can get. It's one of the reasons that born in 1954, February 28th, I can run, I can mountain bike, I can surf, I can, I can do anything I want, right? And that's what we're going for. So when you think about these different kinds of medicines, ask yourself, is this sick care? Is it sick care wrapped up with a different toolkit? Are people here really going for optimization? In our world, longevity is a 30-year body and a 300-year-old mind. And the reason that 300-year-old mind is so important is because when you take stress out of your system from all that perspective and transcendence, all of a sudden you slow down aging itself. You actually heal better and rejuvenate and regenerate better. So having a very holistic approach to this where it's life energy, where it's longevity, where it's health, where it's performance, and where it's the environments we reside in. When you put all that together, it becomes a very, very powerful tool that's difficult for any of these other disciplines to actually replicate. And when you combine that with an integrative approach, curiosity, and the ability to take in new insights from any direction, it really sets Gladden Longevity apart. There's nothing like it that I've come across. I think when you're thinking about medicine for yourself, I think the most important distinction you need to make is, is this practitioner practicing sick care where they're basically focused on my symptoms and my problems and they're trying to get me back towards baseline or close to baseline? Or is this person really in healthcare? And healthcare, the way we see it, is health optimization. It's the idea of the 30-year-old body, no matter what your age is, the 300-year-old mind, no matter what your age is. And when you actually focus on optimization, you start asking a different set of questions. And what drives real results is what questions are your practitioner asking? So if they're asking, well, geez, he's got this, he's got that, he's got that, I just need to get him back to here. If we can get the gut fixed, everything will be okay. We'll let him go. That's one set of questions. But if you're asking, how do we actually make him more resilient? How do we make him bulletproof? How do we actually give him more capacity and more capability, make him more athletic, be sharper mentally? How do we actually improve over what his baseline was? That's optimization medicine, and that's what we practice at Gladden Longevity. That's true longevity medicine. And in order to get that done, you really have to focus on the hallmarks of aging. You really have to focus on the 5 circles: life energy, longevity, health, performance, and the environments we reside in. When you talk to a practitioner that's focused on optimization as opposed to sick care, healthcare instead of sick care, that's where you'll find your best answers. That's where you'll really make the progress that you're dreaming about. If you like this video, subscribe below and click here to see more videos.
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