How to Live to 100 With Great Quality of Life
Ask most people if they would like to live to 100, and the answer is almost invariably and emphatically negative.
“Why would I want to live to be 100?” they reply. “My health and my quality of life will be horrible. I’ll be a financial burden to my children or grandchildren. What’s the point?”
At Human Longevity, they phrase the question a different way: “What if you could live to 100, while enjoying amazing health and wellness so that you can continue to have a great life—essentially maximizing your healthy human lifespan?”
For its elite clientele of individuals looking to reach the century mark in fine fettle, the answer to that second question is a resounding yes.
“Our battle cry is ‘Die young as late as you can,’” says Dr. David Karow, president of Human Longevity, a premium precision health care membership-based in San Diego, California, and poised to open clinics around the world, including locations in Beijing and San Francisco later this year.
For Karow, “Die young as late as you can” means avoiding passing away before one’s time due to preventable, if all too common age-related diseases like heart disease, cancer, diabetes or other silent killers.
“Historically, for most people,” Karow notes, “the only time you find out when you have one of these fatal issues is when you either die of it or it’s become so advanced that it’s nearly impossible to cure. So we ask, what if you were to do a true deep dive into a person’s health, far beyond the traditional ‘executive health’ checkups, so that you can identify these conditions years earlier when they can still be treated fairly easily? That’s the fundamental mission behind Human Longevity.” To put it another way: Their mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to 100+ living.
The company started with the sole vision of collecting comprehensive health data to identify personal risk factors for the individual, which would then be shared with their physicians or concierge doctors. Members historically came to Human Longevity once a year for their assessment, including a full-body, brain and cardiac MRI, echocardiogram, electrocardiogram, insulin sensitivity testing, whole-genome sequencing, pharmacogenomic analysis, blood work and a wide variety of other tests.
“The problem is that our clients’ personal care physicians were overwhelmed with all the data we were providing them,” Karow said. “For example, part of what we do during the testing phase is to sequence the entire genome of our clients. This allows us to identify the biomarkers that predict potentially fatal diseases, among other things. The primary care doctors and concierge medicine providers with whom we shared this valuable information simply weren’t familiar or trained to incorporate the implications of the data we provided to their patients.”
“We realized that we needed to do more than capture enormous amounts of health data and hope that other physicians were able to execute on it. We needed to offer full-on precision concierge care to guarantee that our patients were receiving the proper ongoing care they deserved, especially in instances where future health risks were detected,” he added. “In other words, we needed to become the primary and precision medicine care physician for many of our clients instead of just an assessment clinic they go to once a year to get their comprehensive health baseline.”
Human Longevity has recently launched what it calls its 100+ Membership. The 100+ program enables members to combine the clinic’s signature data-driven precision medicine testing to predict the future risk of chronic age-related disease, along with a personal physician at Human Longevity, who offers precision and personalized care, as well as direct access to world-leading specialists at Mass General Hospital, Harvard Medical School’s largest teaching hospital.
“We can now handle everything from routine aches and pains, vaccinations and prescriptions, to deep, data-driven precision medicine,” Karow explained. “The goal is to keep our clients living healthily even beyond the century mark.”
“Western medicine isn’t health care,” Karow continued. “It’s sick-care. If you want to be well and stay well, don’t go to where people are sick! We are very different. People come to our facility where they have their own private luxury suite. They get their testing done and then benefit from a quantifiable baseline of their health that we provide using the 150 gigabytes of data we collect over the course of the assessment day. There’s no place on earth that provides a deeper dive into the health of an individual.”
“By closely examining every aspect of the human body, and then having the capability to interpret the data that results from that testing, we give our clients clarity about not only their current health but also their future health. In instances where we become their primary care physicians, we provide them with day-to-day action plans and treatment programs to head off any life-threatening diseases years before they would have otherwise been detected.”
Karow acknowledges that while Human Longevity is not an inexpensive approach to health care for the individual, the company’s broadening use of prevention technologies is actually driving down the cost of elite care for everyone. Human Longevity is world-class luxury health care that cannot be found anywhere else on earth.
“Companies like ours are at the forefront of democratizing precision medicine for everyone in society,” Karow says. “What may be expensive and out of reach for many people, today will be affordable and actually the norm in the future. Our clients are pioneers, paving the way towards the future of affordable proactive healthcare for all.” While everyone is talking about new care paradigms, such as value-based care, they actually miss the mark, Karow notes. “Value-based care is good at controlling costs, but the value doesn’t really accrue to the patients who generally have the same outcomes and life expectancies. Instead, Human Longevity is focused on outcomes-based care where the most important outcome is 100+ living. At scale, our 100+ preventative platform will not only achieve 100+ outcomes but also control costs.”
“We’re very excited not just to be serving our current market of relatively affluent clients, but also being part of a process that is going to make precision medicine, and the ability to avoid dying of preventable illness, the foundation of health care in the very near future.”
The post How to Live to 100 With Great Quality of Life appeared first on Worth.
