Pioneering Preventive Medicine | Dr. Helen Messier | 563

And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining us on the podcast, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Dr. Helen Messier, and that's doctor twice, meaning PhD and MD.

So we call it Dr. Squared. Yeah.

Dr. Squared. Yeah. So she's a PhD and an MD, primarily in the translational, translational medical space. And we'll dive into her work as opposed to her bio, 'cause that would take us a long time. So welcome aboard today, Dr. Doctor.

Thank you. Lovely to be here with you, Peter.

Great. So give me, uh, let me start with, from a thought leadership standpoint, how the heck did you get here? 'Cause this is typically not linear or planned, or no 9-year-old girl dreams of being this. I would imagine.

That is true. You know, I did dream of being a doctor to some degree, but at that point my concept of a doctor was, you know, a small town family med doctor, which, you know, right. I was used to and seeing. But, you know, I think, I think when I went through school, I got very interested in the science and so did, you know, did the science kind of research way, looking in molecular immunology, got deep into the research, but then thought, what am I going to do with this crazy amount of knowledge? I want to apply I want to be able to make use of it. So went into medicine. So with the idea of, wow, all of this amazing stuff that I've discovered, published on, learned in the scientific world, I want to apply that to, to people. And I thought, of course, we do that in medicine. But when we got out in medicine and I got into practice, I realized that, you know, pretty much 80% of the people I saw had chronic disease. And the tools that I had that I learned in med school were not enough. We actually never did learn how to apply that scientific, you know, really our real understanding and what's published in the scientific literature. Very rarely did we actually get to apply that to our patients. And we're not taught that in med school. So really just got me, you know, I saw this chronic disease, I saw these hard cases. And I went back and I started reading the literature and went, wow, there's so much information here that if we were able to apply this, we can make a difference. So I started doing that and, uh, and it actually starts working. And so, you know, 20 years ago before things like the microbiome became very popular, those were all in the literature. We are, we had really good understanding of it, but it never made it into medical practice. So I really have spent my career in what I call this translational medicine, as you mentioned in the intro, translational medicine space where, you know, instead of typically scientific discoveries on average take about 15 to 20 years to actually make it into clinical practice, if that. And so we now, like, what we're doing is, is really making that happen in much more real time and helping a lot of people in the process.

And when you say we, so broaden that to the current thought leadership and the business, businesses that you're involved in that solve that gap, that solve that problem.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, so thank you. I've been involved in lots of different businesses. You know, how do we actually apply this? Concierge medicine. I've founded a number of concierge medicine practices. Currently I'm at a company called Fountain Life, and at Fountain Life what we are doing is, is really trying to leverage this. It changed the conversation around medicine. Actually, if you think about it, when do you go see a doctor? You see a doctor when you're broken, when you're feeling unwell, when you have symptoms. But if we wait until symptoms, you know, when we have symptoms, you're going to be very late stage in most diseases. So we absolutely, in order to actually even save our economy, right, with chronic disease becoming It's an epidemic with our aging population as it is now. And we know that aging is the biggest risk factor for chronic disease. If we don't do something about it now, we're going to bankrupt our whole society. And we see this already.

When we say— when you say we, I think this is important for all thought leaders to think about. Who are the we's that you're talking about?

Yeah, I mean, we in general as a society, I think, is one big one. But we, you know, here at Fountain Life as well, I think the idea is, as a thought leader, you have to make it easy for people to do this, right? You see that, you see where it's going. So at Fountain Life, we're being very proactive, preventive. We're actually screening and looking deep at asymptomatic people. That's never been done before, right? The idea of, oh my gosh, why would you, why would you do a test on someone that doesn't have symptoms?

Go backward a half a step because health and medicine, you know, one of the, one of the many problems is everybody's gotta got a horse in the race, right? I want to be healthy. I'm not an MD, I'm not in the business, whatever, but I'd like to be healthy. I'd like to live longer. Like those would be good things, right? So is your thought leadership focused on me? Is it focused on general practitioner doctors, health admin? Like who are the constituents that you're trying to influence the most with this message of, of this closing of the gap?

Yeah, I think, I think it's healthcare in general, you know, but in order, as you sort of said, there's so many stakeholders in healthcare as we have it right now. There's, there's a lot of money from insurance and pharmacy and, and there's so much involved. So we have to take that and get that kind of create a parallel system, so to speak, and prove. So the idea is having to prove that this works, show that you can save money, show that you can prevent disease. And we do that to policymakers, right? So, you know, from a political perspective, we do that to the general public as a grassroots, and then also to other people in the medical field, being other physicians. And, and so I teach our approach to other physicians as well.

Uh, so on the teaching to other physicians, so let's stay there, is that's one important population to get this, these ideas to other physicians. Now there's lots of ways that you can choose to go about that. You could say, hey, I'm going to have 5 phone calls a day with doctors and talk to them. Not particularly efficient. You could write articles, you could write books, you do delivery keynotes. How do you decide how to and where to deploy the message and the messages?

Yeah, so, so I think it starts with, you know, I think Deploying it in talks. So I speak at a lot of conferences. I think, you know, that already attracts certain open-minded physicians, I would say. I think publishing our findings and results and outcomes is really critical because to have credibility in the scientific medical world, you do need to publish. And through peer-reviewed articles and journals, I think that's really important. And showing— and those publishing, showing the outcomes. I think, I think the key is proving that it works. And so being able to, you know, where do you get it? I think writing is important, publishing is important, speaking is important, and then just teaching courses and then hiring physicians to work in our centers and training them on, on this approach too. And then that starts to get out, you know, because as a physician, as a thought leader, you can, like you said, talk to one person at a time, one patient at a time. That's not going to get the message out there. It's going to help those people, which is wonderful. But one of the things we can do is, is influence the influencers as well. So when you now can get the, the people that, you know, you get the politicians, you get the movie stars, you get the, you know, they're high net worth people, but they have a lot of influence in our society. And when they can personally experience what it's like to actually optimize their health, prevent disease, then we now create this kind of voice that they can influence the other people in society because they also have a lot of followers. So, so influencing influencers, I think, is one of the best ways to expand that, those thoughts.

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If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as at thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. Two thoughts that come from that. One would be the select criteria, right? There's only so many days in the week and so many flights that you want to take.

Correct.

So if you're invited to 10 conferences in a particular month and set criteria that you use, whether it's a conference or where to be published or whatever, and then on the flip side of that, what are the metrics that you use for any vehicle that you put out in any format to say, yeah, that's a good way to measure if that the efficacy was there?

Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, I think from conferences perspective, you, you do look at number of attendees, you look at other speakers who are there. You know, I think it's important to maintain credibility. That's critical. You know, you, you have to stay in that group of very credible people. So that's important. And then measuring it, I think the, I think the key, you know, you can do things like number of views, you can do things like, I think that's, but ultimately it's, it's kind of like you and I talking now. You have a lot of followers on your podcast. We start to get messages out by doing podcasts and other types of webinars and YouTube things as well, in addition to the conferences. And then of course, not just looking at number of followers, but types of followers. I think that's really important.

Right. So now it gets hard, right? Because not, not all people are created equal, right? Equally, right? So there might be a, a choice that you make to go, here's, here's a podcast that's got, 10,000 mommy bloggers or whatever, and here's another one that's got 200 people, but they're really, really critically important because there may be deans of medical universities that by their position, right? So you have to, I think it's easy to fall into the lazy numbers of how many zeros is better versus the quality. Not that one is better than another, but it's better relative to your purpose.

Depending on who you're trying to reach. That's a hundred percent right. And, and I think It's, you know, it's much better to get the, you know, 10,000 people or 200 people, whatever that number is, of influential, impactful people versus the million of people that are interested in the message but may not have any ability to affect it. Now, there is value in grassroots demand for things, but I think that comes next.

Got it. Got it. Interesting.

Cool.

What are the things that you think about in terms of collaborating? Right? Because oftentimes what happens as thought leaders is it's easy to make it a solo sport, right? And say, hey, I am going to research, I am going to— and there's a lot, there's a lot of burden, responsibility, work, effort, and energy. What have you done that's collaborative? Meaning, oh, you know what? I've, I should put my chocolate with the peanut butter of this person. And together we could co-write an article or do something like that. Have you done much of that?

Yeah, absolutely. I think, I think all of it, nothing can be done alone, you know, especially in the, in the medical scientific world. Research is critical. Showing outcomes is critical. None of that can be done by yourself. So even when you, when you publish, having co-authors that also have credibility that help you get into, right. Better journals. I think that's important. And, you know, also thought leadership, I think, is critical. But I think, you know, the sort of the power of the collective mind is even more than the individual mind. And I think that when you get a bunch of thought leaders together, that you create much more, it goes much farther than a thought leader all by themselves.

Yeah. And I also have found in my experience that when a thought leader or an aspiring thought leader reaches out to another thought leader and says, hey, I admire your work. I've been reading your stuff for a long time, et cetera. And here's what I'm doing. Would love to get your feedback, your thoughts, your insight. People want to help people, particularly when there's a resonance or an alignment, or it might just be, I like you. That's fine. But more importantly, there's this sort of unspoken mission that we're all trying to achieve. And when I say, like, wow, what you're doing is really cool, how can I, how can I be of assistance to that? How can I support that? And there is a bit of the greater good going on with that.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And there's a synergy even in the thoughts, right? There's the greater good helping each other achieve their own individual purposes. But then there's also the creation of new ideas and new purposes when you start to collaborate. Because, you know, a lot of my best ideas come from when I'm talking to people, right? When I'm trying to share and get my ideas out there, I get a lot of new ideas just in the way people ask questions and their interest in just throwing out different ideas. So a lot of that— there's not a lot of absolutely brand new thought. It's the connection of disparate ideas and how you can connect them together that is the new— is the—

and I think that's the thread of thought leadership that people don't utilize as much for this purpose, but it's great to develop relationships, right?

Yeah.

You know, it's a great way to say, hey, I'm working on this problem. I know you're working on the same problem. Can we talk a little bit? Like, yeah, that's an immediate warm relationship versus a cold call of, can you do this for me? Right? Like, it's just different. And then it's fairly frequent. Then someone will say, hey Helen, you know what? This was really fun. You were a great guest here. There's 5 other docs that I've interviewed on the podcast. Go take a look and I'd be happy to make introductions to them. Like, great, no-brainer. Like, I'm not a doc, but now I'm on the team and doing what little bit I might be able to do to be of assistance to you and your mission.

Yeah, absolutely right. And I think that's where you create the magic is in those connections and in bringing these like-minded people together because over and over again, once you have this group. And, you know, I liken this to one of the things I've been working on is, is this concept of, you know, a physician, you're going to get very different, I think, results and experience depending on what physician you go to, because we're not all the same. Yes, we all go through med school and our med school is very similar. But what happens after that? Every person learns from the experience that they've had. Right. But I have experience of patients I've seen and other things that the next physician next door doesn't have. Now imagine if we could combine the learning from all those experiences together. That would be amazing. And so the other, the other idea is, can we start to leverage the power of technology to bring all of these together and create the, the combined thoughts, so to speak, that are really going to change the world? And then no matter what physician you go to, you're going to get the best care possible. Exactly.

Well, this has been great. I appreciate your time. I appreciate your insights. And thank you for joining us today. I appreciate this, Helen.

Thank you. Thank you, Peter. It's been a lot of fun.

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