I’ve been in practice for forty eight years, and I started out in functional and personalized medicine. And at that time, nobody knew or understood what it was, but I was very lucky. I went to a very progressive Ivy League school, and they focused on preventive medicine. And now, of course, today, it’s the main thing that people are looking for.
But back then in the seventies, there were very few people that were practicing that. So I became pretty well known at the time. And I continued to be ahead of the curve. And so in the early nineties, I got involved with antiaging medicine and hormone therapy when, again, that wasn’t really something that people were doing.
And then, more recently, I moved into longevity and peptide medicine because to me, that’s the future of medicine right now.
And I also thought it was important because being seventy three years old and having a lot of friends of my age, unfortunately, the last number of years, many of my friends have passed away from things like heart disease or cancer.
And I think the problem has been that they weren’t even aware that those issues were actually existing. And so getting involved with longevity testing and some of the newest types of testing that we’re doing, you can actually predict those things before they happen. And to me, that’s what medicine should be all about, is really trying to figure out what might happen and prevent it before it happens. I joined Genetic LifeSpan because I was looking for a cutting edge way of working with patients that would really be comprehensive in terms of dealing with genetics, epigenetics, and biomarkers, and a company that was able to put it all together and come up with a report that I felt was really cutting edge, and that’s what I found with Genetic LifeSpan.
We aren’t just a testing company, but we’re a company that offers a lot of different pieces to the puzzle. So besides offering testing, we also offer ways of banking one’s immune system. We also offer cutting edge types of anti aging medicine, clinics, and things of that nature. So we’re really an all in one setup here, which you really find out there in in the world.
So being a functional medicine doctor, I’ve always strived to keep my vitamin D levels at the absolute highest level that they could be. And usually in preventive medicine, we look somewhere between eighty and a hundred. So I prided myself on the last ten, fifteen years getting in that range. As a matter of fact, I recently did a vitamin d test on myself, it was a hundred, and I was celebrating the fact that this is really great because vitamin d is one the most important vitamins for the immune system as well as hormone balance, and it also affects a lot of, genetics.
And I thought it was great. And then I get the age code test back, and I look at it. I said, says I’m deficient in vitamin d. How could that be?
I I have my, you know, biomarker that says that it’s a hundred. And when I took a deep dive into my test, I realized the issue was methylation. The fact was, yes, I had a hundred vitamin D in my serum, but it was never entering the cell. So it’s not being utilized.
And I never would have known that information had I not done the age code test. And it’s really changed my entire protocol, for myself in terms of what I’m doing now. A matter of fact, recommended I stop taking vitamin D altogether and really focus heavily on methylation compounds because I carry the genes for methylation and also the vitamin D receptor gene. Had I not done the test, I would have not had the information, I would have had a false sense of security all this time.
And it’s also changed my entire thinking process now when I see patients in my practice, because now I have to take that extra step to be able to say, hey, it’s not just the vitamin D levels your serum, but it’s also how well is the body methylating the vitamin D? Is it available to the cell? Because the bottom line is, it’s not available to the cell, it doesn’t matter. So what excites me about peptides is the fact that I honestly believe peptides are the future of medicine.
And if you remember back to sixth grade science, you’ll remember that peptides, which are actually amino acid chains, small chain amino acids, are really building blocks of protein. And they act as signaling mechanisms. So what they do is they tell the body to do something, to produce more hormones, to metabolize certain issues in the body. And so they are like sending a text message to your cells, for example.
And what’s so exciting about them is the fact that we actually have the ability to, in this day and age, to be able to work with diseases like Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and MS by using various peptide therapies. And it’s exciting because up until now there hasn’t been really anything that comes close to being able to treat those particular diseases.
