High School Reunion

By Dale Bredesen, M.D., Chief Science Officer for Apollo Health

Many people are starting to ask about LTIDBO, and perhaps you have been asked, as well? LTIDBO — “last thing I did before Omicron” — heralds the new wave of COVID-19, one that hopefully will prove to be less deadly than the earlier waves. For me, LTIDBO was to travel to Fort Lauderdale for my 50^th high school reunion (delayed by a year due to the pandemic). We had a large class of about 650, and it was wonderful to see many of my classmates once again, even though it was sobering to see how many we had lost.

At the reunion I was reminded once again — as I am almost daily with anecdotes and testimonials — about the ongoing revolution in medicine. Many of my classmates were taking antihypertensives or statins or both, as so many people around the world are. As Dr. Robert Lustig and many others have pointed out, non-communicable diseases are the major healthcare problem, and standard-of-care medicine has failed to prevent and reverse these diseases.

Thankfully, functional medicine approaches have led to unprecedented success in these complex chronic illnesses, from Alzheimer’s to type 2 diabetes to lupus and many more. Just today, I received a call from a friend whose wife had developed breast cancer and sought treatment at a leading cancer research center. I had recommended that, in addition to the standard of care treatment, they look into some of the writings of Chris Wark, Kelly Turner, and others, and his wife had started to follow Chris’s approach immediately and faithfully. After several weeks, the PET scan done to identify metastases showed none, but shockingly also failed to show the primary tumor, which had been significant initially. The oncologist was confused about the surprising change, and when asked whether the nutritional and lifestyle changes might have had anything to do with this, said, “No.” Oh, ye of little faith!

And just last night, our daughter, Tess, shared a heartwarming story from a patient homozygous for ApoE4, with significant MCI, MoCA of 23, who had improved both subjectively and objectively, with a follow-up MoCA of 28.

Of course these stories are anecdotal, so it is possible that the exciting results were completely random and unrelated to the interventions. However, with anecdote after anecdote after anecdote (not to mention clinical trials), at some point these become achievable reproducibly, thus driving medicine forward (or in many cases, dragging it forward … ). As many illnesses — neurodegenerative, autoimmune, toxic, and others — and longevity itself, yield to functional medicine approaches, we can look forward to reunions not only of high school classmates but of family members and friends who remain thriving and healthy for decades to come.