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Dr. Bob’s Story
Understanding my genome (Yes, I had the entire thing “sequenced” and I know all of my genes at our current level of discovery) reveals that I prevented activation of a lot of negative genes over these last 60+ years and protected my current level of health with that early intervention of exercise. The good news is, Exercise can have immediate effects, no matter what age you start. I played high school baseball and that was my main sport. In college, I initially studied to become a fisheries biologist, as I always loved the sciences and the Outdoors. I was a very good student, and my professors convinced me that I should have higher aspirations than Fisheries Biology. Long story, short-I ended up in Med school. I attended one of the top five medical schools in the country (I think it’s safe to continue to count University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas in that category) and I did well. I graduated 21st out of 205 students (almost made the 10th percentile), and was well trained by that school to enter the Specialty of my choice, Emergency Medicine. I admit I primarily chose EM because of the lifestyle, and I desired to come to Alaska and build a fishing lodge, which was a dream I had before starting medical school. I was blessed to have the opportunity to work in Alaska, commercial fishing after my last year in college. I fell in love with this Kenai Peninsula where I’m so fortunate to spend most of my year, and I knew that was where I would live. I completed my residency in Emergency Medicine and moved to my dream home, where I got a job in the local emergency room and practiced for almost 25 years. I am proud to say that I have never spoken to a lawyer or had any type of disciplinary action in my entire career. But that job gave me a front row seat to chronic disease. And the view was not very pretty! And over the years that I practiced, I came to realize there had to be a better way.
I fulfilled my dream and built the fishing lodge, All Alaska Outdoors (www.allalaska.com). And the view from that seat was considerably better. For the last 30 years I have been piloting bush aircraft across the wilds of South Central Alaska all summer, sharing this epic landscape with countless persons.
I am in love with God and he has blessed my life, and I recognize beyond any shadow of a doubt that this life is a gift, and it’s one that I am very interested in preserving. I want to not just live long. I want to have a good health span. As a teenager, I probably had a better than average diet. Like any kid, cookies and Kool-Aid was part of my intake, but I also started to read and understand what the bodybuilding community knew. I started to form a diet to eat as many healthy things as I could. I became fairly athletic and relatively thin and muscular by the time I was 14 and I’ve pretty well maintained that most of my life.
I’ve been a lifelong exerciser, as I started to get to my mid to late 40s, I noticed that no matter how hard I exercised the weight was coming on, and my energy levels were declining. It coincided with the time in my life that that I was getting burn out on practicing the disease model of medicine. I was frustrated with the things I was observing in that model, and then the Epiphany came when a guy 47 years old came into the ER, same age as me at the time, 47. He was about like me from a body composition standpoint. He was a little overweight, but not obese, had no cardiovascular risk factors (I didn’t have any either) and he was having a heart attack. I recognized at that point that that we don’t do anything to survey for the most common cause of death in our population, a heart attack, until symptoms are present and that is a really stupid strategy. I intuitively knew that there had to be a better way, but I didn’t know what it was, and I decided at that point I wanted to learn more. Additionally, I’ve always wanted to understand better, the science of longevity. I am confident, had I known the right thing to do to take care of my health long ago, I would have implemented the strategy. The problem was Medical School didn’t teach me this at all, and I didn’t know. Worse yet, most of what I thought I knew from medical school was wrong!
I stumbled upon an excellent training opportunity and took advantage. Boy, were my eyes opened. I now work with a group of doctors and this is what we do. We study the science of longevity, and we also study a more proactive healthcare model. We have strategies using really good scientific advancements to discover whether people are prone to disease, have early stages of disease, or already have advanced stages of disease and are not yet symptomatic. It is Key that we can discover that you have a problem before there is permanent end organ damage. We can then help mitigate the problem before permanent damage occurs. But if you don’t understand the problem, and don’t know you have it, you are unlikely to take action. If we can find evidence that you’re on the pathway to developing those chronic diseases, we can come up with a strategy to fix it in advance. This actually works. This is not easy and it’s not inexpensive, but the value resides in the ability to improve your personal well-being, to put more life in your years, to increase your health span, to make you there for your family, for your community. Health is not free. But it is achievable. It requires investment. It requires work, and it requires financial investment to follow the algorithms that we utilize. We do not follow the typical insurance based disease model algorithms, but a much more expanded approach. We think the approach is surprisingly inexpensive for the amount of data we can obtain with regards to your personal health and well-being.
Our model is a comprehensive evaluation of your current picture of health, something we call a Performance Health Assessment. This can be performed in a single, all day office visit (after blood samples are obtained a couple of weeks in advance). This allows us to look at your risk of metabolic and cardiovascular disease based on lab analysis, and some other routine studies that we do in my office in Alaska or in my surrogate office in Las Vegas. I am affiliated with dozens of physicians scattered around the country that offer the same approach. We use the data collected in that encounter in combination with the labs and study of your past history, your family history, your current complaints and your physical exam to determine your current picture of health. We can then uncover what your risks are, and start to look at strategies to investigate in a more advanced level with additional diagnostic studies that makes sense for you. This is called Personalized Medicine, and it’s where we should be going with Medicine, but I don’t have the confidence that conventional medicine is going to arrive there.
So that being said, if you are one that thinks that your life is valuable enough that you want to personally invest in it, so that you are healthier, have more energy, more cognitive capacity, more strength and vitality, and for as long as possible, you will want to proceed with scheduling a Performance Health Assessment. We would be happy to see you here at Community Health And Wellness at one of our two locations. I would be happy to refer you to a respected colleague that practices this type of medicine if our locations are not a good fit.
I have applied these strategies to myself. I have studied myself in great depth, and understand my current health with much greater clarity than I ever thought I would. I know what my risks are, and thankfully I don’t have any evidence of significant chronic disease. But I have challenges, and I know how to approach them. You will have the opportunity to inspect my health, my studies, my strategies and the outcomes in great detail if you choose to do so. My transformation from a tired, burn out, slightly depressed, flabby middle aged doctor to a fulfilled and happy practicing longevity physician, fit, muscular and strong with mental clarity and energy I never thought possible, was miraculous. Just the changes in my body composition that I was able to affect in a few months after my enlightenment was astonishing. But, the greatest benefit of this model, is the reassurance that I now have knowing that I am at very little risk of the chronic diseases I treated for so long.
If you’re convinced, or want to learn more, you should probably proceed with a more in-depth explanation of the performance health assessment.
Don’t Miss Out-the Science is
Happening Quickly
It is critical to understand that modern science is unraveling health, wellness and disease at the molecular level. We are literally understanding what is happening inside the cell at the molecular level, and we are understanding pharmaceutical, supplement and lifestyle prescription strategies that affect these findings. We are learning what things turn the genes on that repair our DNA, when you activate these repair genes your cellular age lessons. Aging is a product of many factors. We have all these stresses in our lives damaging our genetic blueprint that controls our cellular function by coding for the proteins that make our cells “work”. Aging is a loss of information at the DNA level. We age when we experience oxidative stress, radiation and carcinogenic exposure and inflammation. What happens is there is damage that occurs to our DNA.
When the DNA is damaged it results in proteins that are malformed and don’t work right and then we start to see evidence of the cells aging and not working right. There are strategies that we are proving reverse this process. That is my “why” now. That is what I want to share with you. So from this point forward we are going to talk about what we know, what we don’t know and what we can say with confidence has impact. I want to share this wealth of knowledge that I have obtained by carefully studying the science of longevity. I’ll be honest, there’s been a bunch of great books, many of which are on the shelf behind me, where other doctors and scientists have done a good job of outlining these concepts and reviewing the research. I digest it. I review the actual science that they are analyzing. I see if I agree with them.
The Main Strategies Are As Follows:
These are our strategies that lead down the pathway to a Health span that is long. We would like to prove to you that you can have Health and Wellness at any age, and I think that together we can accomplish that.