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Kalea Wattles:
Well, this is perfect timing, because November is, of course, Alzheimer’s awareness month. So this is a really important topic, especially for older populations. We know that over six million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s disease, and it’s become the sixth leading cause of death in the US. And this is really a diagnosis that can feel hopeless for both patients, their family, their caregivers—we know that early intervention is critical here. So, to kick off the conversation, let’s talk about some risk factors. I know age is a prominent one, but what other factors should clinicians consider, and how might we identify those early on? 

David Haase:
You know, Kalea, I think this is so important, but when, because the idea that Alzheimer’s just happens is really the idea that we have to start challenging. And so, if we instead realize that there’s vast differences in the outcome of Alzheimer’s disease, you know, even in individuals that are genetically the same, we recognize to come back and say, “Wow, there is something we can actually do about that.” And it’s really profound, you know, in recent studies, and even up in 2019, you know, show that, you know, if we adopt four of five healthy lifestyle factors, we can reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease by 60% by, rather than just adopting one factor.   

And if we think of the things that are, you know, most important, those would be, you know, avoiding smoking. You know, when we start to recognize, you know, the simple things, because smoking impairs our vascular system and increases our oxidative stress. A goal of exercise—exercise is, you know, really the great therapy. It treats just about everything, but profoundly when in the case of Alzheimer’s disease. Getting good sleep, you know, going to bed on time and having a full, restful sleep without the burden of sleep apnea, modifying your stress, keeping your stress down, you know, it’s very fascinating. Individuals with high degrees of stress will have hippocampal atrophy, you know, part of the brain that is very responsible for the modulation of memory.   

One of the other things we can do is to stay active in our brain, not just in our body. It turns out that, you know, because I like to say, you know, “Neurons that fire together wire together.” The more that we do, the more bypasses we create in our brain. And there are E4, even with the same biological progression of dementia, those individuals can have much less, much fewer, symptoms, because they have some bypasses to deal with within their brain. And another thing that doesn’t get often thought of as lifestyle is choosing where you live. Oxidative stress and particulate matter that happens in the air has a very surprising, elevated effect on causing Alzheimer’s. So just being close to a busy street is breathing in polluted air. All of those increase the burden of dementia. So, you know, the great news about the prevention of Alzheimer’s disease is that there’s such, so many things that each of us can do. And doing something, really doing anything, is already giving us some benefit, but then being able to layer that on with more definitely increases our output. 

Kalea Wattles:
Yeah, so I heard you say smoking, sleep apnea, maybe being sedentary, environmental exposures. I know chronically elevated blood glucose is a big deal. Are there any other red flag warning signs that you’re looking for? You know, for someone who’s working in a primary care clinic, are there other red flags that we should really be mindful of? 

David Haase:
Yeah, a couple. Depression, I mean, depression, I really think we have to be cautious about thinking of it as a pre-dementia process. We know that depression has a huge connection with neuroinflammation, and that neuroinflammation has similar components that cause the ongoing progression of dementia, paying attention and really looking for the full resolution of depression, not just the kind of getting it better. I think that’s something we need to watch out for. And then, also, traumatic brain injury. You know, concussions have a huge role to play here. I worked with many veterans as they came back from Iran and Afghanistan, worked with professional sports teams and doing quantitative EEG and evaluations of brain function. And that it’s, if we think of Alzheimer’s disease really as a final common systems failure from a multiple causation model, every hit, every hit, every challenge starts to build up and use up our body’s resilience for maintaining proper brain health.  

Kalea Wattles:
It seems like with cognitive decline and neurodegeneration, we really have to approach it from two different angles, right? The preservation piece and then prevention. So for patients who present with cognitive impairment, we want to look at those things that can preserve their brain function but also their brain matter, the actual physical tissue. So when a patient comes to you and they have cognitive concerns, what are some of the underlying causes that you’re looking for at that initial visit? 

David Haase:
Sure. Well, the first thing in any good systems medicine or functional medicine visit is to listen. You know, patients are remarkably good at helping you know what the problem is and when did this last begin and you think you’re talking that the tissue is the issue, right? You know that I’m always amazed that when we change our mind, it’s actually a physical event, right? To change our mind, meaning we have to have a little synapse that grows out and crawls over and touches another neuron and makes a new synaptic connection. And then that pattern electrically gets to be maintained.  

So the integrity of a cell and the integrity of your neurons and all the supporting cells make a big difference with regard to how the brain declines, because dementia, or, I really don’t like the idea of Alzheimer’s disease. I really think we need to change it to a verb, that you’re Alzheimer-ing. And if we change it to a verb instead and recognize that we’re all Alzheimer-ing, all of us have some of those characteristics moving forward. We are having degeneration and regeneration. And aging, if we think of a larger term, aging is more degeneration than regeneration in any given time period. Dementia is more degeneration of the brain than regeneration of the brain at any time.  

So I always think of what are the things that this person’s body and brain is missing that they need more of. One of the most important ones is omega-3 fatty acids. Omega-3 fatty acids are—especially DHA is present in huge quantities in the brain, is important in the cellular membranes of neurons, and is one of the compounds that creates anti-inflammatory hormones in the brain. And we see that there’s a direct relationship to the amount of omega-3 fatty acids in the blood and the rate of hippocampal atrophy that takes place long-term. And I want to state this, that whenever we’re trying to think about understanding causes, we need to go back decades as we’re trying to understand this. This is not a drug model where, oh gosh, you know, I’m having some senior moments, I’m going to start taking some fish oil, ta-da! I should expect them to be all better. No, number one, it’s going to take a long time to do an oil change on those cell membranes. 

But secondly, once we start having dysfunctions on an organ-based level, and that would be memory dysfunction, that means we already have dysfunction at a tissue, cellular, and probably subcellular level, and nutritional interventions can take much longer to provide their benefit. But, and most of our studies are not set up to look at that, they’re not set up in a way that help us delineate that. 

Kalea Wattles:
So, it sounds like fish oils might be a helpful intervention for preserving some of our brain function. Let’s talk about the prevention piece, because I think many of us want to know how we can prevent moving into that further down the Alzheimer-ing spectrum, right? So, in terms of prevention, what are some strategies that you’re utilizing with your patients to really maintain their brain health over time? 

David Haase:
Sure. Well, like I said, dementia is un-braining, so prevention is a little bit different for everybody. So you want to find, what is the hottest button for an individual? What is that intervention that for that individual is going to make the biggest difference long-term? Taking a person from being absolutely sedentary to having even mild levels of activity is going to create a huge prevention opportunity for that individual. Likewise, you know, you don’t have to work on helping somebody to quit smoking if they never started in the first place. If we are an individual who’s eating the standard American diet with a whole host of processed carbohydrates and very low phytonutrient content, you know, if that’s the way they’re eating, increasing their phytonutrient intake, decreasing their processed carbohydrate intake makes a world of difference.  

So I think this is where, this is the beauty of great clinical medicine. Prevention is not just, you know, stamping things out and saying, “Okay, here’s your checklist, person, go do this.” You know what? People are smart. My patients are incredibly smart, they are capable, they want to do better, and just giving them a to-do list rarely actually makes the difference that either I or they hope it does. But instead listening and saying, “Well, here are the interventions we can do together. We can improve the quality of your diet. Now have you ever tried to do this before?” And almost everybody will say “Yes.” Now, the fun of clinical medicine, how do we really do prevention, is by caring, is by listening, by caring and being able to walk alongside that individual so that they can make even very small changes but make those consistently and be able to carry them out through the long-term. This is what—I have a deep passion for longitudinal care, because we don’t make massive differences with the snap of a finger. Rome wasn’t built in a day, right? It’s consistent, and consistent effort toward an end goal. And the best thing to make that work is actually relationship. 

Kalea Wattles:
Yeah. I love how you really framed this as the best thing we can do is to uncover everybody’s unique drivers of disease, right? That personalized piece, and for me, I always go back to the functional medicine matrix where we’re assessing all of these different body systems and really customizing and tailoring our treatment plan. So, to link what you just said into my next question, we know that you are an expert in all things mitochondria, and we love hearing you talk about mitochondria. And energy production is one of the, I would say, most important body systems to look at when someone is experiencing cognitive decline, right? So what are the mitochondrial implications for cognitive decline? I’m just curious about those connections and if you have any therapeutic targets in terms of supporting mitochondrial function.  

David Haase:
You bet. Absolutely. Well, the brain, as we go through, go over in our Bioenergetics APM, really consumes about 22-23% of our daily energy expenditure. Just think of that, that little two-and-a-half pounds of mush up there in your cranium is really, is burning through—literally burning with an internal combustion engine we call a mitochondria. It’s burning through your fuel by combining oxygen with that fuel to make ATP and make energy. And because the brain and all neurologic tissue, nerves, like the retina, the cochlea, all these areas of concentrated neurologic activity, golly, because those cells are responsible for making electricity, and so we’re going to see symptoms occurring in neurologic tissue from mitochondrial dysfunction. And that’s one of the keys to understanding mitochondria is to be thinking, wow, is this a neurologic manifestation? Because those cells consume a lot of energy, so therefore, they would be the first cells to start misfiring or having a dysfunctional behavior and therefore producing a set of symptoms that go along with that.  

And the first step of being able to do something about mitochondria is to think about mitochondria. They’re buried inside of every cell, and, you know, they’re really not given the credit they deserve. You know, every single cell runs on energy, and the mitochondria are this way of making huge amounts of molecular energy in a way that would be safe, in a way that we can kind of compartmentalize that internal combustion engine or the, you know, the power plant area of the city, if you think of it that way, in an area where you can control the pollution that comes from that.  

And so, if we think about, what are some of the best interventions for mitochondrial function, it’s interesting that fasting comes out as being one of our best interventions. And you may think, well that’s really odd. If we have an engine, wouldn’t we want to feed that engine? Wouldn’t we want to give it more fuel? Isn’t that the way we’re going to make that engine work better? But the body doesn’t work that way. The body works by, it heals by having an ability to respond to challenge. It loves a good challenge. And that’s why exercise, we actually, you know, exhaust ourselves a little bit, and then the body says, oh, I’m going to make bigger muscle cells, and I’m going to make more efficient mitochondria in those muscle cells. The same thing that happens when we hold back from flooding the engine with fuel and instead do some intermittent fasting. So giving a period of time where we’re not bringing in excess fuel in the form of food from the outside. And then remarkable things happen. We get gene cassettes that kick in. One of my favorite gene cassettes is PGC1-alpha. And it, when we fast, we tend to turn on this gene cassette, and that turns on the production of more mitochondria. It causes the mitochondria that are already there to start merging and splitting in a way that removes their damaged parts of the mitochondria. It turns on the production of antioxidant enzymes like NRF2 or the antioxidant-response element. And all of this happens by just not feeding yourself for a period of time, and I love this because, you know, sometimes, golly, there’s so many people who are struggling with their finances and they’re wondering, well, how do I do good for my body when I’m having a hard time, you know, making ends meet? Fasting is the least expensive intervention you can possibly have, and you actually are doing your body good by eating less, eating it in a constricted time period, maybe only eating eight hours of the day. And as a result, you get this amazing mitochondrial resuscitation that occurs, and it can help your brain cells. Other aspects of fasting could go to experimenting with a ketogenic diet, a lightly ketogenic diet. And there’s some great evidence showing in neurodegenerative disease that’s quite beneficial. 

Kalea, I don’t know if I told you this, but I’m… Maxwell Clinic, the clinic I founded and run here in Nashville, Tennessee, we’ve been chosen as one of the six centers to run really a landmark trial that is looking at a precision medicine approach to the reversal of cognitive decline. And this is a study that was enabled and funded because of all the incredible work that Dr. Bredesen and several other functional medicine practitioners have done leading up to this, gathering the data, publishing the data, and showing that really this functional medicine approach to cognitive decline makes a real big difference. And diet, diet’s a foundational part. And so an intermittent fast with a low, low carbohydrate count can be profound for helping people. 

Kalea Wattles:
Well, congratulations on the work that you’re doing. It’s so exciting, and hearing you talk, it’s reminding me several years ago when I took the Bioenergetics Module for the first time, I learned this term from you: mitohormesis. 

David Haase:
Yeah.  

Kalea Wattles:
And I think that is really relevant to everything that you’re describing about these challenges to our mitochondria and how we actually have a net positive effect. 

David Haase:
Right, mitohormesis. Hormesis is a little bit of a poison that causes us to be healthier, right? This idea that, you know, a well-dosed challenge or a well-dosed poison causes our body to push back against it and makes us stronger. So, yeah, so this is making your mitochondria stronger by giving them a challenge. And that challenge could be fasting, it can be cold exposure, it can be exercise, it can, you know, it’s anything that depletes that mitochondria of some fuel. It says, “Wait a second, we need to make more, we need to make more ATP.” How do we do that in a condition where we’re not being flooded? And I’d love this idea of the, even though I drive a Tesla, I like talking about internal combustion engines, because you can understand the mitochondria perfectly that way. What happens if you flood your engine, you know, pour in a, you know, if it’s a gas, a bunch of gasoline, too much gasoline and not enough oxygen in your carburetor, what comes out the exhaust pipe? Well, it’s big billowing clouds of black smoke, right? It’s incompletely burned fuel that makes this oxidative pollution. Same thing in the cells. If you have too much fuel being flooded in, if you have your mitochondria getting a bunch of glucose that’s just pouring in, and glucose is a very hot burning fuel, and too much glucose compared to the amount of oxygen that you can handle, you start making the soot and smoke that we call oxidative stress inside the cells. So, you know, you can take all the antioxidants you want under the sun, but if you’re flooding your engine on a regular basis, you’re not going to keep up. 

Kalea Wattles:
It seems like there’s so many dietary and lifestyle interventions that we can utilize to support our mitochondria, but before we move on, I have to go back to this cold exposure piece, because folks always ask us about this at our Bioenergetics Module, and you’ll have to fill in the detail, but it’s not super cold, right? I think I’ve heard you say exposures like in the 60° range are even helpful, is that true? 

David Haase:
Yeah. So, when people ask, well, how much cold? The answer is some, I mean, so you know, you want to be chilled, and so it can be, they did nice studies with just a, approximately a 62° office, and yeah, turned down the temperature in the office building, and that was, people had exposure to that for a couple of hours a day. And that was enough to make a meaningful difference. Now, or instead, you can take cold showers or, you know, cold air exposure, there’s… anyway, but cold is remarkable, because what are your mitochondria, what do they do? They help you produce heat. And so now you give your body a huge challenge that needs to make more heat, but in making that heat as opposed to exercise, it tends not to be, you don’t cause as much tissue damage with cold exposure that you could with exercise.   

So, it tends to be one of these therapies that people tolerate quite well. And you get this other initial really cool benefit that mood often improves substantially in the hours following an intense cold exposure. And that, probably that’s mediated by some other mechanisms, but in any of these cases, right, you still need to be cautious, you know, this is why you should work with a well-seasoned clinician as you’re digging into anything unique or more intense in your lifestyle, because, you know, doing too much too fast, well, it’s too much and too fast, and you can cause yourself harm with the goal of causing yourself help. So, you know, pacing these things, pacing these interventions is often the key to success. 

Kalea Wattles:
Very wise advice. Thank you for that. You know, you mentioned… 

David Haase:
My disclaimer, right? 

Kalea Wattles:
You’ve got to get the disclaimer. Totally understandable. You mentioned fasting, which was fascinating to hear about. Are there any other dietary approaches that you’re using? You briefly mentioned a ketogenic diet. What about a Mediterranean diet? We tend to love that one. Any other styles that would be, you know, appropriate for cognitive decline? 

David Haase:
Yeah, absolutely. You know, so, you know, the DASH diet is one that was studied for a long time looking at hypertension, and then now the MIND diet has been studied extensively, and that’s a Mediterranean-based diet, you know, that’s high, very high in fruits and vegetables, olive oil, emphasizes whole grains, very small amounts of meat and, but more fish, very low amount of sweets, and that has shown benefit. So, the MIND diet is the one I think that has the largest studies to date. But in individuals, if we’re looking at before and after cognitive scoring, if we really want to move that needle in an individual, a ketogenic approach is profound clinically for those individuals.  

And it’s not just in, we’re also very cautious when people start to move into a ketogenic diet. That’s one that has a very low carbohydrate count and may have still a relatively low protein, but it’s very high in fats. And the quality of those fats makes a huge difference. In individuals that are like APOE4 positive, we try to stay away from saturated fats, you know, there’s some negative associations for those individuals, and really lean toward the plant-based fats, high amounts of omega-3 fatty acids, the polyunsaturated fats: avocados, olive oil, oh my gosh, olive oil. If you can learn nothing else, just use more olive oil. Olive oil has huge side benefits for just about every condition that we can possibly measure.   

But I think what’s important when you’re looking at these multitude of diets, it’s not so much to do the right one, it’s to try something, stick with it, and increasingly make a healthier diet your lifestyle, and that is, we need to exercise compassion on ourselves. Eating is a sacred event, right? Eating is something that we do with loved ones, and as clinicians, we’re very gentle, we try to be very mindful of this fact that food has a lot more functions than just fuel. You know, food is information, food is building blocks, but food is also important for relationship. Food has meaning, and as we’re changing somebody’s diet, let’s be, I want to be very clear and cautious that we’re making certain that we’re taking care of that person as they make these changes for themselves. And that small amount of compassion and consideration can be the difference between somebody moving forward and actually getting the benefit from the recommendations or not.  

Kalea Wattles:
I think that really, I mean, we underscored at the beginning of this episode the importance of sustainability. And I think that’s what you’re speaking to right now. It has to be an intervention that someone can stick with that’s really approachable. 

David Haase:
Yeah, and because, you know, I love training clinicians, and we have almost nine clinicians now at Maxwell in Nashville, and we continue growing, and it’s so fun to see how with some coaching and some mentorship, how fun this can get, how the over… sometimes approaching things from a functional integrative systems medicine standpoint can feel so overwhelming. But it’s because I think way too many people are doing it alone and not with the encouragement and the understanding that they’re, that these are things that are meant to be done together. Just as we need a patient-clinician partnership, we really need a community where healers can thrive together, and it’s, and we’re getting to see those things emerging, and it brings my heart incredible joy as that’s, we have to heal together, right? There’s no way that we are going to really make a difference in this world as single units. Our medicine, right, functional medicine is a medicine of connection. It is, it’s putting things together that people have forgotten are actually connected. And so we have to be the change we want to see in the world, and connecting with our patients, connecting with each other as clinicians, and each of us bringing our own unique brilliance to the table is really what’s going to, what’s going to make the day. 

Kalea Wattles:
Absolutely. Well, I’m a big believer that having fun is so good for our brain. And we’ve talked about nutrition, we’ve talked about exercise, let’s talk about brain fitness, because this is a, what I think is a fun concept that’s become popular in the last few years and in functional medicine, we love the exercise prescription. Is there a brain exercise prescription that you talk to patients about? 

David Haase:
Yeah, there is. You know, it’s very clear that being active in your brain makes a difference. Neurons that fire together wire together. And so what I encourage people to do is something that they haven’t done before. And I say, “What have you always wanted to do?” “Well, I always want to learn to play the guitar.” Bingo, there we go. Because now you have, you’ve got auditory feedback happening. You have, you know, you’ve got motor neurons working, you’ve got auditory, you have auditory processing, you have visual, visual processing, you have emotions connecting into that learning to play an instrument, unbelievably powerful and can be very rewarding. And so in a person that feels like, wow, I’m degenerating, I’m becoming less of what I once was, seeing this new skill emerge in the midst of that is something that can really feed a person’s soul in that process. So, there are, you know, there are some online games. There’s a platform called Brain HQ that’s, you know, has some online games and things like that, but I really tend to prefer real world things. People say, “Oh, I do Sudoku every day.” I said, “Well, then stop doing Sudoku.” You know, if that’s all you’re going to do, you’re just wiring your Sudoku networks, and, you know, now, okay, do Sudoku like every Sunday, but then, you know, on Monday, you know, start learning how to juggle, on Tuesday, you know, take a dance lesson online, you know, and have some fun with this, right?   

One of the beautiful things about somebody recognizing that they have a degenerative problem is all of a sudden days become much more precious. And when those days become precious, you know what? A lot of other things don’t matter anymore, and the things, and now it’s like, wow, I only have, I have a limited number of days on this earth to experience this being, so let’s have some fun. And when people can do that, when they can get over their denial that there’s a problem and let me—I want to come back to denial in a little bit—but when they can embrace the fullness of who they are, wow, they get like a second life. So the diagnosis of cognitive decline is what you make it. What is your mindset around this? Is it going to be fear? Is it going to be disease-driven? No, that’s the allopathic model. Ours is a functional model. Ours is a thriving model, and that’s a big difference of how we practice our medicine, not just the medicine we practice.  

Kalea Wattles:
Hmm, you really got me thinking about a whole person approach to treating neurodegeneration, and of course, thinking back to that functional medicine matrix, the center of the matrix is the mental, emotional, spiritual center. So you mentioned denial, let’s dive in there, tell us a little bit about that. 

David Haase:
People often ask me, “Well, what’s the most dangerous? You know, what’s the most dangerous risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease?” And I didn’t want to start out with this when you started asking that, because it, you know, but really, it’s denial, because if you, people are afraid of neurodegeneration, they’re afraid of like, oh my gosh, well, nothing can be done. So if nothing can be done, I’ve got to just, I just have to close my eyes to these things that I’m experiencing in my life, you know, I can’t remember names like I used to. I can’t hold as many numbers in my head. I can’t do this. Instead of going like, you know, loss of function is loss of function and being honest about it and then reaching out to a clinician who cares and who wants to go for optimal function. If they don’t do that, if they instead live in denial, then they are just screaming down that same pathway of neurodegeneration that they are on. They’re not changing their trend.  

I’ve been pioneering doing therapeutic plasma exchange as a very advanced treatment for Alzheimer’s dementia and neurocognitive disorders. This is a medical procedure that really is the gold standard for treating very severe autoimmune disease, which we also use it for, and it was shown in the AMBAR study to slow the progression of moderate Alzheimer’s, which is really quite an advanced form of Alzheimer’s disease, to slow that by 60% over 14 months and actually to have trends of improvement in individuals with mild Alzheimer’s disease. I’ve been amazed at the responses I’ve gotten to, hey, here we have this large international double blind, randomized placebo controlled trial showing the benefit of this therapy, and why don’t people want to talk about it? And it’s because there’s fear. There’s fear, because the fear of hope that there could be something that could help, right? There’s fear in that. There’s fear. What Dr. Bredesen has run up into again and again, people are, that they’re afraid of being wrong. I mean, why would a clinician not want to look at the data and realize that a multifactorial approach toward a treatment of a degenerative process is superior? Well, there’s pride issues, but there’s also, there’s this denial that, oh, if this really did work, I would’ve known about it by now.   

So, the calcified mind really precedes the degenerating brain, and if your mind is calcified and it doesn’t want to change, it’s not open to seeing life as it is, being real that there is a real problem, then you’re screwed. Right? Now, you really are screwed. Because if you’re not being honest with your level of function and your progression of degeneration, then you’re going to get the same outcome. And I think it’s important to remember that we’re Alzheimer-ing, we are all on a trend. It just depends what your curve is, right? Are you on a steep curve where that disease is going to happen quickly? Are you on a really, are you on a medium-sized curve or on a super shallow curve where, man, you’re going to live to 120 before your brain is going to give out, right? And that’s what we want, we want that shallow curve of neurodegeneration so that we have a great quality of life for as many years as we can be on this earth. So, and that’s, but denial, denial is the thing that will absolutely shortcut and impede the possibility of that improvement from occurring. 

Kalea Wattles:
Well, I feel very inspired at this point to take my mitochondrial support, do my fasting, I’m going to learn to play a new instrument, learn how to do salsa dancing maybe. So, you know, we’ve talked about supporting so many different body systems. We’ve talked about the mental, emotional, spiritual considerations. We’ve covered several lifestyle factors. As we wrap up our conversation today, is there anything else you feel like our listeners need to know as you’re looking ahead into the future? What are you feeling excited to learn about? 

David Haase:
Oh man, so much. How much time do we have? Because we have been bringing more of a longevity focus into our practice. Because when we think of what is the most, most important risk factor for dementia, what is it? Most important risk factor is age, it’s getting older. The more times around the sun, you know, the higher your risk by huge amounts, like COVID-19, when you look at all the risk factors like smoking, obesity, type two diabetes, age was 20 times more important. And I think what’s going to happen is there’s going to be a merging of a recognition that to treat a degenerative process is to be curious about and knowledgeable about the underlying mechanisms that cause aging itself, biologic aging. Because individuals age at different rates.  

So there’s some wonderful tests now that look at like the methylome that give us a lot more understanding about how many biologic years, are you aging for every one trip around the sun? And as we start to think about that, if we can nudge, if we can just maybe age 0.8 years biologically for every one circle around the sun, we are shifting the curve. We’re making that difference, and so we have a full research facility at Maxwell Clinic, and one of the studies we’re engaging is looking at proteomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, and how this impacts the process of aging. And I think that we’re, and what that data is going to help us with is to be more precise in our recommendations.   

And, but the more precision we get, you know why precision’s important? It’s not so we have a fancier intervention. It’s so that our energies cannot be wasted on the things that are not likely to help as much, right? Precision medicine is there because we all have limited resources, we have limited resources of time, of money, of focus, of energy, of relationship. We have limitations, and so our job as great clinicians is to help an individual best match their resources with their needs. And so precision medicine is about understanding that human on a soul basis, on a biologic basis, on a desire basis, so that we may be better stewards of their limited resources.   

I mean, I take care of individuals that, you know, have absolutely nothing they couldn’t pay for anything whatsoever, all the way to billionaires, to, you know, people that have of high renown, gosh, every human’s the same. You know, we’re all the same underneath. It’s fascinating. When you take care of a billionaire, they have no more time than the person who doesn’t have two dimes to rub together. They have no more time, they have all kinds of other, you know, resources they can buy. But it’s amazing to me, the creation of health is a very human activity. It is an activity that really is the great leveler for us, and it’s such a privilege to get to be a clinician in functional and integrative medicine. So, you know, when a patient finds somebody that they go like, man, I resonate with this individual, they have found a gem, and it’s such a joy to get to practice this medicine, to bring your full head, your full mind, your full heart, your full soul into this process and to keep being curious about what is it that’s going to take this person from their state where they are right now, the state of desirous, of wanting to be a more full version themselves to, you know, getting them there from where they are now. It’s just such an incredible honor and privilege, and it’s a privilege to get to teach clinicians like this and learn. I mean, what an amazing community IFM has been for so many. And this is only just beginning.   

So, Kalea, I want to really thank you for this time to, you know, come and, you know, share some of the things that are going on. I think that we’re going to see with more precision, we have the opportunity to have more heart in medicine. It’s not to make it more cold, it’s not to make it more scientific. It’s so that we can have a more human interaction, and if we do succeed in doing that, we have done something, we have done something great indeed, so… 

Kalea Wattles:
Yeah. Beautiful conclusion. Thank you, Dr. Haase for being with us. And if time is the currency, thank you for helping us pay attention. It’s been a joy to be with you today. Thank you so much. 

David Haase:
Thank you, Dr. Wattles. 

Kalea Wattles:
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