So once [inaudible] got his measles shot in 1958, we transitioned from the first into the second era of medicine. The second era of medicine is where we are now. It is the era of chronic diseases. About the time [inaudible] was getting his measles shot, we were having a rapidly escalating ability to identify diseases and treat them through surgeries, whether it’s bypass surgery, eventually stinting, cancer treatment, expensive medications, things like that. We were able to, more than ever, once a disease hit us, we were able to treat it adequately.
The problem with the second era of medicine is it’s a very reactionary model, so the mindset of a physician when you see it – and those of us, I’m forty-eight, and anybody who is practicing now has grown up in the second era of medicine where the mindset is to find a disease and fix it, so if you go to see the doctor and your blood pressure is rising a little bit, blood sugar’s a little borderline, cholesterol’s a bit high, what do we tell you? We tell you to eat less and exercise more.
Well, that’s the right thing to do. We know that’s the right thing to do for people. Unfortunately, seventy-nine percent of physicians were never trained adequately in lifestyle modification, so we don’t know how to adequately counsel people to do those things, and we don’t have the time to. The average [inaudible] visit has been cut down to six or eight minutes in today’s modern medicine, so we just don’t have the time.
So what happens? We send people off to do it on their own. Most people can’t do it. They come back to us, and we give them pills. So we are giving pills [inaudible] the numbers for the blood pressure and cholesterol, but we’re not treating the underlying disease process that’s causing it, and the inflammation and the oxidation is ongoing. So eventually, when it comes to obesity, pills aren’t working, and we suggest people have bariatric surgery.
So the physicians in our country, through no fault of our own because that’s how we’ve been trained since the fifties, we’re caught up in the web, in the web of the second era of medicine where the reactive disease model is not helping a person to create health. We’re waiting for the disease diagnosis to happen. We’re not preventing the cancer, we’re not preventing ever needing a stint, we’re waiting for these and treating them when they come. And how about this as a model of health care?
And unfortunately, the model that the physicians have adopted of reacting to disease is now being transitioned over to the patients, and the patients have the model, the pill treatment model, not the prescription medications like the physicians do, but I can’t tell you how many times in practice I’ve had people walk in who were severely obese who got – I asked my patients during their wellness to bring their prescriptions and supplements in so that I can make sure I know what they’re taking, and they’ll have this big box load of supplements that they’re using try to get healthy, but not doing what it takes to truly create health. It’s just [inaudible] mentality.
And unfortunately, we’ve resigned ourselves as a country to accept sickness. We’re never going to cure – the mindset is we’re not going to cure our blood pressure, we’re not going to cure our [inaudible] diabetes. We hope it never happens. When it does, there are experts in the country teaching people how to live with their diseases, not how to cure their diseases. Isn’t it sad when a seventeen year old is being recommended to have a bariatric surgery?
I think Albert Einstein said it best. It really, really is insanity when we keep trying to do the same thing over and expecting different results, and when it comes to health in our country, we are not going to be able to turn that ship around in our country. People aren’t going to be able to have a better future unless they find ways to create health.
So what the third era of medicine is a new health path. We’ve got to create a new health path for the people who want to go down, to have an opportunity to truly create health in their life, and that’s my passion, that’s my mission in life, that’s the legacy that I want to leave. It’s the reason that I volunteered to be vice president of the American Academy of private physicians. It would give me the platform to hopefully be the tool to help carry, one of the tools to help carry our country into that third era of medicine, to change the mindset of one from reacting disease to one of creating health.
So when you’re on that new health path, you’d be amazed at the capacity the human body has heal itself. In the past two years since I’ve created my third era practice and adopted a lot of those methods that I’ve learned through the AAPP, including tge one you’ll hear about tonight. I’ve watched countless of my patients to change their course. They’re ascending up the health path, creating more health and giving themselves much more of an opportunity for more good years, and in addition, feeling much better for. I knew it, but I felt it over the last couple of years, just feeling these lives change, watching these lives change as they create health in their life.
This is a wonderful poster put together by the Cleveland Clinic Foundation. What they did is they did a study where they took people who were severely, extreme obesity, body mass index of at least thirty-five or more, and they reached a healthy weight of a body mass index of twenty-five or under, so these people truly created health in their life through weight loss, and in doing so, what they found was that not surprisingly, eighty-two percent cardiac risk reduction. They also found eighty-two percent of asthma was improved. They also found that fifty-five percent of depression was improved. So there’s a lot of these diseases that were cured through this person attaining a healthy weight, and then maintaining it through developing healthy habits. You can see in the bottom right box over here, even the five year mortality was reduced by eighty-nine percent for people who [inaudible] accomplished this weight loss.
So my mission is to get America healthy, and I say here we must empower patients to create health, adopt that third era mindset, because physicians are so entrenched in that second era. It’s going to take all health professionals to do it. It can’t just be the physicians. We don’t see patients enough, and we don’t have the right mindset. And all health professions, we shouldn’t just be treating the body parts, we need to be treating the person, and treating person requires helping them to create health.
So what was my journey? My journey in creating my third era practice has been a pretty fun ride for the last decade, where in 2003, University of Pennsylvania started me in what I’ve got now, [inaudible] I’ve got a concierge practice. We take care of a small number of people, and I really help them to, I give them personalized care.
So throughout my first several years, I was doing kind of what we all did, and treating diseases, and trying my best to help people get healthy, but like all physicians, I was [inaudible] trained on helping people with lifestyle, so people really weren’t getting that healthy. Well, 2007 I joined the board of – 2008 – the board of AAPP, and I started to get introduced to a lot of these improved innovative ways of helping people to get healthy, and my transforming point of my career was in April of 2010 when I met Dr. Brad [inaudible]. He was the developer of the [inaudible] method of heart attack and stroke prevention. Once I saw that program, I was like a kid in a candy shop, and I came back from it, and I felt like for the first time in my career, I felt like I could make a difference. I could really impact a person’s life through his method, and by December of that year, I had fully implemented the program into my practice.
Well, April of 2011, about six months into doing it, I was seeing several patients who were having [inaudible] disease on testing called CIMT ultrasound. I was looking for the cause of the disease, [inaudible] define the cause and treat the cause, but none of them – there was a subset of people who absolutely had no identifiable cause. Well, I remembered during the training program Dr. [inaudible] had a few slides up about the oral systemic connection. I said okay, well, time for me to learn about this mouth thing. Physicians aren’t typically taught to look in front of the tonsils, but I figured I had to kind of learn about this because that was probably the source of their problem, and that began my road into the mouth, and it’s been a fun ride.
For those of you who don’t understand, your body part, the mouth, has a tremendous impact on systemic disease, and it was only after I started to learn about this and I’m helping people to create oral health in their lives through my practice am I starting to watch some of these people heal their disease.
About the same time – actually, almost exactly the same time – I met Dr. Mark [inaudible]. Well, the first six months of the [inaudible] method, I was doing great with the drugs, I was doing great with the supplements, but I was being very frustrated because they weren’t very improving their inflammatory markers. They were improving and curing their insulin resistance very well because that wasn’t effectively helping them to do the lifestyle part, which is the most important part of treatment in the [inaudible] method.
Well, Mark introduced me what you’re going to be hearing a little bit later about Take Shape for Life, and I knew immediately it was the [inaudible] of my practice that I needed to help people create health for their life, and for the next five, six months after that, I just watched person after person for the first time in their lives get healthy so that in September that year, I decided to add being a business coach for Take Shape for Life into my revolutionary health services business plan, which is why I’m talking to you tonight, and Danny has done the same.
And my ride with the dentist has gotten kind of interesting, so that in this summer, I had a eight credit continuing education course published in Penwell about heart attack and stroke prevention, how dentists can be impactful in their practice, and in August, an editorial viewpoint that I wrote to Dentistry Today, they published it where I was commenting on the irresponsible colleagues of mine in the American Heart Association leading the public to believe there is no need to take care of your mouth, there’s no proven connection, so I kind of made some scathing comments about my cardiology colleagues on that one. But my point in saying that is that it’s introduced me to many, many conversations with the dental community, and I recognized very quickly that dental practices are health professionals who can use this program powerfully to help their patients get healthy.
Danny: Let’s not forget, too, that you last month had an article published in RDH [inaudible] village, which was targeted for the hygienists among us.
Chip: That would be true, yeah. And thank you. I’d forgotten about that one.
Danny: Yeah. Well, some of them –
Chip: They’re running together, so –
Danny: You’re doing a lot. But I just –
Chip: [Inaudible] get my honorary DDS of DMD here.
Danny: RDH.
