PREVENTION PLUS CLINIC
Doing our best to keep you healthy.

ANTI-AGING MEDICINE

If you look at health care, it’s not the pattern of health it’s really the pattern of disease. We wait until people actually get sick and then we perform tests to measure and see how sick they are.

It’s like a boat that’s sinking. We wait until it gets a hole in the hull and then try to patch up the hole before it sinks. Instead we should be putting in bigger motors or larger sails to get the boat to sail faster and further. In the office we use an analog scale of how are you today? On a scale of 1 – 10, 10 being awful and 1 being ok. When they are a 0 they think they’re well they think they’re healthy. But what it is, is a lack of symptoms, it has nothing to do with their health status.

Anti-aging Medicine is based on giving the patient optimal health and longevity, instead of measuring how sick people are. The focus shouldn’t be a measure of lack of disease it should instead be keeping people as active and productive as possible for as long as possible.

If we want to change that we need to have a different standard of health. We want to start looking at what’s happening in good health and how we measure it? We have our financial portfolio, our pension plans. We take that money and we analyze how far it’s going to grow. How much are we going to have in later life when we retire? The problem is how much is later life? Are we going to die at 60, 70, 80, 90 or 120? Are our needs for finances going to change if we live to be 120+? Of course it would. But we don’t measure our health. We just measure our money, and we measure our disease.

We need to start looking at it differently; we need health reports that are going to tell us if there is a decrease in functionality. If there is degeneration going on. What’s happening to our bodies? We need to take a look at that and try to measure that out. And what scale do we do it on? If we use the 1-10 scale and 1 is healthy then there should be a whole other side to the scale. We need to be able to measure one’s health status. If you go to the patient and tell them they’re cholesterol is 280 I want you to drop it. What does that mean to a patient? Or if they’re blood pressure’s high- it’s just an arbitrary number.

You can take a different scale like their biological age as a measurement of health. If we look at chronological age verses their biological age. Normally they both should go up together. With a good anti-aging program we should have a retarding effect going on. If you plot that on a graph the slop of the curve should show the rate of ageing or the rate of health or the rate of dying in some cases. We can use that scale and our patients can see the where they are and the benefits they are getting.

What is anti-aging? Is it the hormone replacement, vitamins, coQ10s, exercise, range of motion exercises? Is it the changing of the mind? All together it’s a holistic approach it can’t be just one it has to be all together.

“An individual that has the ability to carryout daily tasks with alertness and vigor without undo fatigue and enough reserve to meet emergency or enjoy leisure time pursuits” this is the definition of fitness. It sounds like the definition of health. Maybe this is what we should be looking at when we look at this whole concept of anti-aging medicine.

What does society want? Managed care has changed us from physician to providers.  Managed care sends you tons of patients that you can’t spend much time on. It’s like MacDonald’s. Get them in, get them out, don’t spend much time on them. What’s the quality of food and service at fast food restaurants? Where would you prefer to eat? We want service and good food. The 4 star restaurants still thrive because we want good service. We are crazed on fitness; 40% of the population is overweight and 30% is obese. We are obsessed with fitness but we are also looking for the quick fix. 

No one wants to end up in a rest home. It’s use it or loose it. Increased longevity without the quality of life is an empty prize. Health expectancy is more important than life expectancy. People want to know how to maintain their good health as long as possible. They want to delay the onset of a serious disability as long as possible. They want testing and treatment and intervention that have been proven to help. Functional clinical lab testing focuses on sub optimal functioning instead of waiting for an established pathology to develop. We know that it is very difficult to unboil a hard boiled egg and cellularly that’s exactly what happens. Once we see connective tissue hardening, changes in lipid structure and certain biochemical pathways it’s very difficult to reverse them completely. Eight modifiable risk factors blood sugar abnormalities, chronic inflammation,  impaired detoxification capacity, poor immune function, poor fitness level, poor nutrition, chronic stress response, and hormonal imbalance.

People need to realize that the insurance industry is there to let you gamble on disease not to enable you to preventative disease.