watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0aY4h2cp_E
Danny: Hello again everyone, and welcome to this installment of practice perfection web-based educational series. Tonight’s presentation is entitled the third era of medicine, and we are indeed fortunate have Charles Chip Whitney, MD, as the night’s guest presenter. Chip is a board certified physician in family practice in sports medicine and is CEO of revolutionary health services, a known leader in the field of concierge and collaborative medicine. He is also the current vice-president of the American Academy of private physicians. We’ve invited Chip today to draw upon his twenty plus years in the field of concierge medicine to demonstrate how [inaudible] medicine is revolutionizing medicine and dentistry.
I first met Chip during my work in helping found the American Academy for oral systemic health when [inaudible] and the AAPP became sister organizations. It has been a true pleasure and privilege to have the chance to work closely with Chip in delivering an efficient and effective revenue-based patient health coaching and wellness model, and that is exactly what we plan to share with you this evening. As usual we expect the presentation to run for about an hour, during which you are welcome to submit your questions using the question button on your screen. We will do our best to get all of your questions answered, if not during this evening’s webcast, then shortly thereafter.
I am joined this evening by my life and business partner, Virginia Norton, who will present this evening’s attendee poll questions as well as field your questions during the presentation. With that, it is my pleasure to introduce to you Dr. Charles Whitney. Hello, Chip.
Chip: Hello, Danny. It’s great to talk to you again, and for all to be able to present the webinar tonight and appreciate all of you who joined us to to hear what I have to say.
Danny: Well, it’s our pleasure, and I know it’s going to be a fun, exciting, and informative evening, and as those of you who’ve attended prior webcast know, we do like typically to start things off by getting a feel for who is in attendance by polling our audience, so I’m going to ask Virginia to present the first poll and ask you to take a moment or two to answer those questions for us, and question, quite simply, is what is your profession? Are you a dentist, hygienist, non-clinical dental team member, physician, or other? Please take a moment you answer that, and then we’ll share the results.
A few more seconds. Alright, let’s go in clothes that, Virginia, and see who’ve got joining us this evening. Alright, hey, the hygienists win. We have thirty-one percent dentists, forty-six percent hygienists. We’ve got fifteen percent non-clinical dental team members, eight percent physicians, and no others. Though pretty good represented, very well represented by hygienists, which we’re pleased to see, aren’t we, Chip?
Chip: Absolutely.
Danny: Alright, great. Well, alright, back to you, Chip. Let’s get this show on the road.
Chip: Alright, very good. Okay, as Danny said, that’s a little bit about my bio, and what I’m going to present and share with you tonight is my passion. About a year ago, I first heard the concept of the tree earth medicine, and I immediately realized that I had always been a third era thinker, and my mind had been that of the third era medicine, but I’d been trapped in a second era world, and what I’m hoping to do tonight is to spark a flame in those of you who are like-minded as I am and kind of stimulate your interest in helping me move our country into the third era of medicine.
A while ago, a study was done where they interviewed people who are on their deathbed, people who are within days, weeks, or months of passing away of a terminal illness, and they asked them, “If you could have a do over in life, if you could change something in your life, what would it be?” And the three common answers that they had were they would let the little things go, they would invest more into relationships in their life, and they would look to leave a legacy. And like Robin Sharma says, no one expects to live forever, but we would love to leave a legacy that does, and the legacy that I’m looking to leave and my career legacy is to be instrumental in and leading our country in the third era of medicine.
So what this graph here shows is it shows what we’re all feeling. Health care expenses are astronomically rising in our country. The insurance premiums are rising typically ten to thirty percent every year, and that’s been happening for several years now. Most of the time the insurance companies are getting blamed for that, but the reality is because the cost of health care is rapidly rising too, and insurance companies are simply asking for the money to pay for the expenses they’re looking to spend, that they’re needed to spend. Why is that? Because we’ve got a rapidly increasing number of sick people needing to use rapidly increasing number of very expensive surgeries, technologies, medicines, testings, et cetera, and as you can see by the graph here that this increase is not sustainable.
Predicting by the year – this is from the United States GAO, Government Accounting Office – that by the year 2044, the amount spent per year on health care is going to equal that collected [inaudible] the taxes from the entire country. This has got to change. The World Economic Forum in 2010 published report showing that there are eight behaviors, risky behaviors that drive about fifteen percent, excuse me, fifteen of the most common chronic conditions that account for eighty percent of the total cost of chronic illnesses worldwide. So it’s just a very few number of risks that are leading toward that.
I heard Michael [inaudible] of the [inaudible] clinic say one time that eighty percent of diseases are driven by our lifestyle choices, and if you look through those list of [inaudible], there’s really only one of them on there that has changed significantly in the last ten or twenty years, and that’s that’s the risk or the problem of obesity. We really have an uncontrolled epidemic in our country that’s really ravaging the health of Americans everywhere. The CDC, Center of Disease Control, in 1988 started to look at the problem. Prior to that, it wasn’t an issue. Even as of ’88 you can see that about a third of the states here, the ones in white, weren’t even looking at obesity.
But as the years have passed, from ’98 to 2008 to 2010, the amount of obesity in our country is rapidly rising so that by 2010, over a third of the states, thirty percent or more of the population was obese, which was way more than it was just two decades prior to that.
Recently I saw a report from the CDC saying that they’re estimating that thirty percent of Americans are now obese countrywide, and unfortunately, although the obesity is considered a social problem, it’s actually, at the core, it’s a health problem. Overweight and obesity, well, by the time a person is obese, most of the time, they’re insulin-resistant. Insulin resistance is the disease mechanism that ultimately will lead diabetes and spot that a person about seventeen years after they cross into obesity, many will develop diabetes, and then after diabetes comes vascular disease and other obesity-related illnesses like cancer, Alzheimer’s, and several others so that those are where the game changers occur, where it severely impacts a person’s life and is impacting the economic health of our country because that rapidly rising number of obese people is driving the diseases that we’re having to pay for.
Duke University, earlier this year, published report estimating that by the year 2030, there’s going to by thirty-two million more obese Americans than we have now, and that up to eleven percent of the Americans are going to be severely obese, a level at which they would be candidate for bariatric surgery. And isn’t this sad? Unfortunately, we all are aware that obese parents lead the lifestyles of obese children, and this young man is going to have a terrible future unless he changes his course, because he’s probably already insulin resistant, and in a relatively short number of years will be diabetic, and I’m predicting that in the next couple decades, we’re going to see a dramatically change and shift in the age at which people start to have a lot of these diseases like cancer, heart attacks, and strokes.
This is a 1921 Bentley. It is a beautiful vehicle, but you don’t see any of those around anymore. The problem is that a lot of vehicles, whether it’s this or more modern vehicles, that the owners don’t take care of their vehicles very well, and they rust, their parts wear and they end up dying at young ages. In the case of vehicles, they end up in the junkyard. Well, there’s a pretty strong analogy to the vehicle we drive and the vehicle that we own in our bodies.
This is a model, it’s not a data-driven model, it’s a conceptual model that shows the current and projected health path. It’s basically showing that at birth, most of us are optimally healthy. At death, everybody’s sick, and we all have a health path that goes from birth to death.
I’ve gone in my practice to start to ask questions to people every time they come in for their annual health evaluation, I simply ask them a question. How do you envision your life when you’re old? I leave up to them what they consider old being, but inevitably, everybody says the same thing. Everybody’s saying they want a healthy brain, they want to be independent, they want to be [inaudible] free, they want to be as active they want to be. So it all makes sense, those are no surprise.
So although everybody in their middle ages is saying those kinds of things, but unfortunately when you get out to these older ages, let’s just say seventy to eighty, there’s a huge variation in the health of people. Yes, there are people who have reached their goals and they’re doing pretty well in older age, but there’s a really large and rapidly increasing number of people who don’t reach those goals and are developing sickness at these older ages, and that fortunately the health path is shifting to the left where they’re getting these sickness at much younger ages.
Danny: What I think is a good thing too, Chip, is that this little yellow region between the green and the red, people realize that there are three states. There’s healthy, there’s sick, and then there’s this middle stage which is sort of pre-sick, or you call it here non-sick. That’s the unfortunate reality, people don’t realize that they’re just, their symptoms haven’t manifested yet, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t.
Chip: No, absolutely. No, I mean, once people reach middle age, unfortunately, most people aren’t optimally healthy anymore. Not everybody, but most people aren’t, but they’re not sick yet, so they’re generally feeling pretty good. I mean, it’s quite often I see people who I know, they’ve got all kinds of disease processes. Let’s just take obesity alone. If a person is obese at this age, they’ve got the oxidative processes going that lead to inflammation that lead to free radicals, and those are the chemical processes that lead toward very poor health. So if a person is obese at middle age, no matter how decent they may feel, their trajectory is not a good one, and they’re on a trajectory so that their older years are not going to be pleasant, and they may be headed at any point with a problem.
Danny: Ignorance is not bliss, in other words.
Chip: No, it’s not, unfortunately, and I’m, in my practice, trying to identify those at middle ages who are on the path towards sickness and find a way for them to turn around, and that’s the point to make in discussion. So there’s got to be a way to turn the ship around. I mean, health in our nation is going down the sewer very quickly. We need to find a way to turn that ship around. So in order to understand how to do that, I’m going to introduce you to the concept of the [inaudible] era of medicine.
In the first era of medicine, it began at the beginning of medicine, way back whenever, and up and through the first era of medicine, the main goal was to fight infectious diseases. That’s what was killing everybody is that people were have short life spans because they get an infection, and it would kill them. Well, once we got antibiotics, once we got improved public health, once we got immunizations, then we got a grasp on infectious diseases, and we still fight them, but it’s no longer the major issue that we fight.
