Longevity medicine has created a strange new kind of patient: the healthy person convinced something must be wrong.

A wearable flags poor recovery. One test says your body is ageing faster than it should. Another gives you a completely different answer. And suddenly, someone who felt perfectly well starts wondering what needs fixing.

In this episode, host Daphna Stern sits down with Dr Chris Bachtsetzis, a physician practising general, preventive and longevity medicine in Switzerland.

Dr Chris sees patients across the full spectrum. Some have virtually unlimited budgets and are prepared to spend heavily on their health, travelling between clinics and trying the latest tests and treatments. Others simply want to stay healthy for as long as possible. And when it comes to those with money to spend, Dr Chris is often the person telling them to do less.

The conversation gets into where more testing becomes more noise, why Dr Chris questions the precision of biological age testing, and why he believes the enthusiasm around NAD+ has moved faster than the evidence. Daphna also challenges him on a more fundamental question: what does a longevity doctor actually offer that a very good GP should not already be doing?

They also explore what happens when the pursuit of better health goes too far. Can constantly tracking biomarkers and wearable scores turn a healthy person into an anxious patient? And if money really is no object, should you actually be doing more?

This is a conversation about how far to go in the pursuit of better health, and why knowing when to stop can matter as much as knowing what to do.

Guest Bio

Dr Chris Bachtsetzis is a physician based in Switzerland specialising in general, preventive and longevity medicine. He has a background in biomedical sciences alongside his medical degree, with additional academic training in economics, business management and political science, as well as experience as a healthcare adviser with the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care.

Before medicine, Dr Chris was an athlete and personal trainer, an experience that continues to shape his emphasis on fitness and human performance. His career has since spanned clinical medicine, research, healthcare management and public health, and he has practised preventive and longevity medicine across several countries.

In Switzerland, Dr Chris has worked with the Chenot Group, The Kusnacht Practice and Longevity Centre Switzerland. He now practises general, preventive and longevity medicine in the Canton of Zurich, working with patients ranging from high-performing executives and professional athletes to everyday people looking for a more proactive approach to healthy ageing.

His guiding philosophy is “Prevention and Longevity for All”: maximise healthspan through prevention and lifestyle first, use proven medical interventions when indicated, approach emerging tests, treatments and technologies critically, and make effective longevity care accessible to all.

Where to Find Dr Chris Bachtsetzis

Website: drchrismd.com

00:00 Welcome and Premise

02:04 Meet Dr Chris

05:29 Longevity in Switzerland

09:34 Longevity vs GP Care

14:31 Insurance and Costs

16:03 Who Seeks Longevity

18:51 Is Longevity for Rich

22:03 Hype and NAD Plus

26:48 Biological Age Reality

32:43 Wearables and Anxiety

39:42 Choosing Tests and Tools

47:56 What to Do at 50

54:16 Rapid Fire and Wrap

58:28 Key Takeaways Outro

Foreign.

Welcome to Beyond Longevity, the podcast that explores not just how we age, but how we can build a longer, healthier future for ourselves.

Longevity medicine has created a strange new patient, the healthy person who's convinced something is wrong.

A wearable tells you your recovery is poor.

One test tells you that your body is aging faster than expected.

Another gives you a completely different answer.

And suddenly someone who felt perfectly well is wondering what needs fixing.

My guest today is Dr Chris Bachtsetzis, a physician practicing general preventative and longevity medicine in Switzerland.

He sees people who are prepared to spend serious money on their health.

Some have virtually unlimited budget.

They will fly to different clinics, pay for more testing and keep adding treatments because they want to do everything possible to stay healthier for longer.

And Dr. Chris is often the one telling them to stop.

That contrast runs through this conversation.

We talk about where more testing becomes more noise, why Dr. Chris is sceptical of the way biological age is presented, and why he thinks the enthusiasm around NAD has moved faster than the evidence.

I also push him on the role of longevity medicine itself.

If a very good GP should already be thinking about prevention, lifestyle and keeping us healthy before disease develops, what exactly is a longevity doctor Adding it is a conversation about how far we should go in the pursuit of better health and whether knowing when to stop may be just as important as knowing what to do.

Please enjoy my conversation with Dr Chris Bachtsetzis.

Thank you Chris for joining me today on Beyond Longevity.

Before we get into the longevity medicine itself, I'd love for people listening to understand a little bit about you.

What brought you into medicine in the first place?

How did you find your way into longevity and what does your work actually look like today?

Hello Dafna, thank you for your kind invitation.

First of all, I'm happy to be here and yes, let's talk about my journey.

First of all I need to tell you that I have a pre medical background and then I got my medical education started and then went deeper into that longevity medicine and all this hype in my mind is nothing more than preventive medicine.

But let me go back a bit.

I have a degree in biomedical sciences and then I jumped into the MD so that I can become a doctor.

And at the same time I used to be an athlete, I used to be a personal trainer, I used to.

I didn't finish any university, I didn't attend any university like the solid four or five year degree in sports science, but I have many certifications and I did it mainly for myself and through this path.

And also while I was doing my biomedical science degree, I saw that there is a lot of potential on the cellular level of the organism and it can help us live better, to put it simply as such, I decided that I would like to pursue a career in medicine.

That it's more on the preventive and personalized medicine side, rather than strictly the old patriarchal model saying you have this, you take this medication, then you have something more, you take second medication, and so on and so forth.

I'm more interested and curious to find the source.

Why did you end up having these things?

I shouldn't forget to mention that my father is a general surgeon.

So from a younger age, I was exposed to medical conditions, treatments, surgeries, rehabilitation processes, and so on and so forth.

And through this perspective, I saw that the doctor and the medication can do only as much.

When the patient on the other side doesn't do his or her part, then inevitably the results are not always the best.

That's why I decided to pursue a career in general medicine, which is the basis of all medicine, of course, and then try to look deeper and have some tests done in advance instead of going after the diseases or the chronic conditions, and try to see retrospectively why we have this, why are we facing that, what would have been the cause for the initial medical condition?

And then we ended up here, and now maybe it's too late or we cannot reverse it, and so on and so forth.

That's all super interesting, and you've mentioned quite a few topics that I want to get you to explain us a little bit further down the line.

But let's just come back to where you're working, because you are in Switzerland, a country with a very high life expectancy, and in general, a healthcare system that performs very well by international standards.

What's the longevity world?

The longevity field, actually, like in Switzerland,.

You put it correctly, Switzerland has a very solid healthcare system that does a lot for the patient.

And this is the truth.

And yeah, by international standards, we are ranking sky high.

The thing is with longevity that it's being used mostly like a year or two after the pandemic.

So you can see the term and the word everywhere around you.

Not only in Switzerland, but also globally, there is this question or this feeling from the side of the patient, what is this longevity medicine?

And is it a new hype?

Is it based on actual medicine?

Is it something that will go away?

And so on and so forth.

The question here is, why do patients have this idea?

They have this idea because they saw that medical doctors from different backgrounds and Specialties, they started using the term longevity and they started calling themselves longevity doctors, and so on and so forth.

So this is, in my opinion, always and other colleagues might see it otherwise.

It cannot be to my understanding that someone is an ophthalmologist, for example, and they say they are longevity medicine specialists, where in longevity medicine we do test that they never went through them in their lives when they were doing ophthalmology residency.

Same goes for other disciplines as well, let's say anesthesiology and so on and so forth, just to name a few.

To get the idea longevity medicine is based actually on lifestyle medicine, and lifestyle medicine is nothing more than some pillars that they make actual sense and they are guiding us through our lives.

And let me quickly elaborate on that.

Lifestyle medicine has its main pillar, which is general internal medicine, so actual physical medicine.

But then again, we include nutrition, we include fitness and movement, we include hormonal balance, which comes hand by hand with also sexual health and all the chain reactions of the hormones.

We're talking about social connections, we are talking about our mental health.

Obviously, sleep hygiene plays a role in different parts of what I have mentioned so far.

So all these things, they put a solid basis to what we call longevity medicine.

Longevity medicine is not just a question of what disease does a person have and how do we treat it.

Longevity medicine is very specialized in the sense that they are asking why does the body of the person actually becoming progressively a little bit more vulnerable, let's say, to diseases as it ages and how can we slow these processes down so it's more like acting proactively rather than reactively?

It all makes a lot of sense.

But I'm going to push you a little bit on that because in an ideal world, a normal gp, a general practitioner house doctor, as it's called, if he or she is really good at what they do, should they not include all this, what we call longevity work as a whole?

How do you really distinguish between a longevity doctor and a very good gp?

I could not be happier for you stating this question.

I can give you a binary, let's say, answer to that.

The one thing is, if the healthcare system supports everything that needs to be done, some tests, they need to take place once in your lifetime, and some things they need to be done repeatedly if there are any problems.

So this is the question, does the healthcare system allow it?

In other words, does it pay for that?

Does it cover it?

And then the other question on the side of the doctor is I think that the doctor should be like up to the task of longevity medicine.

Otherwise it could be like a normal DP or whatever answers you mentioned.

Let's say he's up to the task.

Is he up to the task with deep understanding of all these factors that they come into the equation and then we translate them into longevity medicine, preventive, personalized medicine, health span, lifespan, and so on and so forth.

This is also a big question.

Why?

Because in the medical school, especially some years ago, maybe until a decade ago or so, there were no courses whatsoever about nutrition.

There were no courses about fitness.

There were some courses about clinical psychology and so on, but very basic ones.

There were no courses on hormonal replacement therapy for males and females.

And what's the impact of those?

So, as I said, the one question is the deep knowledge of the doctor having these services or offering these services.

And the other question is whether the healthcare system allows with your normal health insurance, which is covered by the state, or with your complementary or supplementary health insurance, which has some preventive measures in their frame, and they can pay for some tests.

If none of the two is the case, it means that the client, the patient, needs to pay out of his own pocket a lump sum, at least for the beginning, so that we can set the basis that we have checked everything, like from a big blood panel, having nearly every single thing there, from hormones, electrolyte, all the fancy stuff that people try to sell now.

But we have been using those for at least five or six years now, if not more, like the apolipoprotein a B or the lipoprotein a, homocysteine vitamin B12 and so on and so forth.

So if someone is willing to cover this cost and then is willing to cover for a DNA test, and then they are willing to take the mitochondrial health status, and also they don't have a problem in doing a gut microbiome, obviously, if they have signs and symptoms and so on and so forth.

There are no burdens in how far we can go with the doctor who is specialized in what he's doing for you.

Where does preventative medicine end and longevity medicine begin?

I think they are interconnected because if you don't do preventive testing or if you don't adopt a preventive lifestyle, longevity medicine cannot be utilized as a term because you're not proactive.

So if you want to enter longevity medicine in any country that they are a little bit advanced in doing so, you need to do some basic testing so that the doctor or the clinic has solid evidence in front of them, and then they will advise you, they will Set a plan for some sort of medical coaching.

Coaching that is done by real doctors, you know, because sometimes there are medications included in this coaching.

I see it only as step one and step two.

And you cannot have step two, that is longevity medicine without step one.

Doctor.

Christ, that was really interesting.

Let me just pick up on something else.

Switzerland has a very advanced level of healthcare compared to many other countries.

Does the national health insurance pay for preventative and even longevity testing and treatments or not really?

Does that still have to be done privately?

The thing is that even here in Switzerland, insurance companies with the basic and the complementary insurance, they don't cover everything.

So they will cover blood tests, they will cover ECGs, urinalysis and so on and so forth.

So basic stuff, but more complicated things and tests for their minds, like DNA testing or gut microbiome or oral microbiome, that kind of stuff, they will not do.

They will not pay for NAD levels, for example, or for mitochondrial health status, which I find it a little bit extraordinary in a bad way.

I mean, I can understand if you don't want to pay for a full body MRI every now and then, because it's also fancy.

Yeah, I don't belong to these doctors that they suggested on regular basis just to sell some more information, if at all.

Yeah, this I would understand that the insurance company shouldn't be covering, but all the other stuff that we need at least once for a basic evaluation next to the clinical examination, it should have been covered.

Me and most of our listeners, I'm sure, will agree with you on that one.

So just tell me, who walks through your door?

Who is the patient that comes to see you?

Is it somebody who's ill?

Is it somebody who's young?

Is it somebody who's old?

Is it somebody who's already, you know, fit and wants to get better?

Actually, everyone is standing, everyone is knocking on her door.

There are these people that they have some conditions irrelevant, the age group where they belong to.

So with 30s, 40s or even 60s or 70s, they're coming in for a second opinion.

What they can do a little bit more, what they can do better, how they could apply principles of prevention and lifestyle medicine and longevity medicine into their daily habits and lives.

Yeah, so this is one major group.

Then we have health individuals of all ages that they just want to come in for prevention because they, they read about longevity.

They, they felt the hype.

They, they read it all around.

They listened to podcasts, they heard people online, they saw people on YouTube and then they are curious and want to know what they can do just to prevent or delay the onset of some chronic diseases.

Also based on their medical backgrounds, of course the other ones that they feel they have something and they come directly to us to do the proper clinical examination of a general medicine, internal medicine perspective.

And then they want to stay directly with us so that they know what add ons they can put in quotations, if I may, to their daily schedule.

No matter if it's going to be like some medications in the beginning or if they need to fine tune their hormones or their vitamins or they need to do a little bit more sport and what kind of sport or they need just some advice to make their human performance a little bit better.

So athletes, they are part of the game.

I have quite a few athletes that they are coming before major events like CrossFit events or the triathlon or Hyrux or because we are in Switzerland, people who love to go hiking and they prepare to go really sky high like to Everest or other top notch destinations.

They come to us some months before we do some proper medical examination and investigation that they are actually fit for that.

And then we try to increase their human performance with several treatments.

So yeah, we have a large variety of people showing interest in prevention and longevity medicine.

So do you think longevity is a rich man's problem?

Amazing question.

This is the $10 million question, not the 1 million dollar.

Yes and no.

I will start with no.

A basic medical checkup that basic in quotations that will include DNA, mRNA, gut, microbiome and so on and so forth.

It will cost you in Switzerland or in the UK something around 3 to 5k depending on the destination that you will end up choosing.

Now the question is this is a money, an amount of money that would be great for two times holidays in a year or I don't know, a down payment for a car or maybe two, three installments of your mortgage and, and so on and so forth.

This is the one side of the story.

The other side of the story is you will invest in yourself this amount of money.

Some of it will go through the insurance as we said, some of it will go out of the pocket and so on and so forth.

And then you will make sure that you will try and do your best along with our help and coaching to be able to have a better life so that you are fit for fun.

So you are free to do all this traveling that you want to do.

You are free to pay the last installment of your mortgage, to build the family, to buy your second new car and so on.

And so forth.

So it depends on how you see the investment.

That's why I said no.

And you need to keep in mind that some testing will be taking place once in your lifetime or yeah, maybe in once in every two, three, four, five years, depending on your health status.

Obviously, the healthier you are, the longer the time period that you will be investing another amount of money in yourself.

Now going to the yes part that I said yes, it can be quite expensive.

We see people that they don't have any money problem and they are overreacting, overdoing things, uncontrolled and so on and so forth.

Will this make them have a better perspective or health outcome compared to someone who will be doing regularly checkups?

I doubt.

And time will show.

And we see at different time points that this fancy person, well known has paid this amount of money, has done that.

And then you see on the journals that, you know, this thing that they took and they exaggerated with it might cause this disease, it might stimulate that, and so on and so forth.

So I am leaning more towards the no.

It is not so expensive for someone to do when someone has in his mind or in her mind that they want to live the lives they are meant to live, but they want to leave them healthy without the burden of aging.

What do you think the longevity medicine market as a whole is currently overselling?

You know, there are a lot of longevity clinics where you go in and they sell you these mega packages.

Most of them you probably don't need or they don't really help you.

What is the longevity market promising at the moment that it can't yet deliver?

There are clinics that they popped up like mushrooms in the past five or six years offering earth and water and yeah, patients or prospective clients.

They need to be thinking widely what I do.

And I do it in all the centers that I have been working so far.

We tend to personalize.

So we might give you some things or packages that they are there.

But trust me, there is no one client, one patient that is taking the package as it is.

Not because the package is not good.

Because if something in the package is useless in quotations, again for this patient, I would never do it.

Either I will do less or I will add more things.

So we need to be careful because everybody nowadays unfortunately is promising things that not all of them have, unfortunately until now, solid medical research evidence to back it up.

And this is a tricky thing because you need really a very legitimate science in order to be able to establish a medical treatment or a medical approach with some studies Being there, that it helped with two specific animals or it's very promising and we need to see it in humans.

Yeah, I wouldn't like my family to participate in any of these protocols, to be honest.

I'll give you the example of the nad.

Everybody's talking about IV NAD boosters and the amount of marketing is amazing.

And there is a biomedical biological rationale behind that which says that NAD is involved in the metabolic process, in metabolism, in cellular signaling, and some other basic fundamental processes.

However, going from NAD is important to your cells and ending up with this will substantially slow human aging.

When there is not so much evidence as researchers globally are working on that whether NAD actually produces solid, meaningful clinical benefits in humans.

You see, there is quite a distance.

And then you see many people, they, they want to take IV infusions and their aspirin F for IV infusions.

And then there are medical journals or doctors say that IV NAD is not getting absorbed by the body.

So you would be better off if you take orally.

So as a supplement, the precursor that will help you produce NAD plus in the body.

And they don't like that because IV infusions are fancy.

I never ever give the nmn, which is the precursor for NAD orally or as a supplement to my clients before they do a specific test, which is the NAD levels in our body.

The more we are training our muscles, and mainly the big muscles group, the more NAD we produce naturally.

So if my levels are high, why should I supplement myself with that?

Especially when we don't know what harm can do having too much of that in the body.

So you get my point.

There is a little bit of a fogginess in the field.

I get your point a hundred percent.

And I love you've mentioned NAD because it's such a crazy thing.

It's a cheap one for people to jump on, you know, I mean, not cost wise, but the idea, you know, because it makes sense.

When you're young, you have a lot of it, when you're older you have none.

But it's true.

But all the protocols for IVs, a lot of them have been for addicts and things like that.

So there is a place for everything.

But like you very rightly said, it's not one size fits all.

And sometimes the simpler thing of just taking a supplement is much more beneficial.

So no doubt about it, I agree with you, you know, 100% with every word you've said.

And let me jump to another, another thing that people say, and I actually don't like it.

But I'm not against it, but I always highlight the fact that we cannot say it with a precision of like 100%, not even close to 50%.

Many people or clinics or doctors nowadays, they are proposing, come to us and we will tell you your biological age and this and that.

When your chronological age is the bloody number that it's written on our passport, IDs, birth certificates, degrees, and so on and so forth.

The biological age, it's something that can be obviously a little bit less or a little bit more.

However, based on a white paper that came from the roundtable of the Longevity clinics, end of 24, I mean, it was published like a year ago.

And this roundtable took place in the Buck Institute and the clinic I was working there, the Longevity center was part of that.

I need to tell you that there is no single equation that can give you your biological aids with precision.

So even though it sounds amazing, if you invest £1,000, let's say, or francs or dollars, and you take three different tests, all three, they will have a different biological age, to my understanding.

And what I'm trying to educate my clients and patients with is following that.

Yes, it is good that a test will give you a number that it's lower than your actual chronological numerical age.

But as we cannot be precise, the best thing that you can do, and I like to do, is to know that with regular testing, let's say once a year, you are in your best performance as an individual.

And ideally, you belong to an age group that is one step lower than your age group.

It sounds complicated, but it's not.

Let's say someone is 50 now, right?

And I get readings and markers and results and so on, that he's scoring amazing.

I would like him to be in the mean average of someone who is 45.

This goes for the vitamins, this goes for the hormones, for blood, lipids and so on and so forth.

Now, if this person is an athlete, a professional, or just for fun, and he does more activities and he still has a good vitamin profile, let's say belonging to the group of mid-40s, but he still tells me, you know, I'm feeling very well, and so on and so forth, but bad this and that, then I will try to optimize this human performance, but I will never play with the biological age, because biological age, it has been seen, lack of sleep can play a role in that.

Extra stress can play a role in that.

Inflammatory markers can play a role in that.

So if I do the test when I am under cold and Flu conditions and maybe I have also a bacterium coming in and I don't an upper respiratory tract infection.

And I do the test.

Most probably it wouldn't be so good.

You jumped ahead because I wanted to ask you exactly that.

Do you use biological age testing exactly for that reason?

Because, you know, you have all these different clocks and different measurements and like you said, it's very subjective.

If you're an athlete and you have a lot of inflammation, which is normal for athletes, you can appear much older than you are.

And athletes, it does age them more or the training they do, the excessive training they do.

So do you use the biological clock?

Do you test the biological age when patients come to you or you just don't?

What I do is a little bit of extraordinary, I would say I explain to them what kind of tests there are on the market, how they are performed, that someone will find discrepancies in the results of biological aids and so on and so forth.

And I tell them, choose whichever feels right for you.

Obviously I try to give some education and awareness how to distinguish from something that it's just something fake or, or doesn't worth the money and something that it's solid from a good reputable company and so on and so forth.

But I tend to put my basis on the inflammatory markers, blood markers.

So the biomarkers that I have, that they are actually solid.

You know, I took the blood and I did markers, I performed some tests and I have in front of me something that it has been studied and we know the before and after of the fluctuation and we know how to reverse it, because you can do that and then you can buy a scale at home that it gives you bioimpedance, which means a little bit of electricity goes through your feet to your hands and then you grab that and then one day or one week it will tell you you are with a chronological 41.

You are biologically 44, I'd say because you were stressed and after holidays it might be give you that you are just 39 and you will come and ask me.

Yeah, but why was I 39 when I did another test and it sold me 34?

Yeah, because you used the scale first of all, which is not accurate.

Then you did it before your holidays, then during your holidays you parted yourself out.

So even the fact that it gave you a lower age, it's still a win for you.

And then we start to go deeper and understand.

I would like to mention also the wearables, but they are amazing tools to give us information that otherwise we wouldn't have gathered the vast majority of us.

However, if you wear, and I don't want to advertise or say anything about specific brands, if you wear three different wearables, they will give you three different follow ups in a week or in a month over the same biomarker.

So with that, I rest my case.

Yep, 100% right there.

One of the attraction of the longevity medicine is looking or finding problems before somebody feels ill.

But the more you test healthy people, the more things you're going to find inevitably.

How do you make sure that trying to prevent disease doesn't end up turning a healthy person into a patient?

The short answer is that a healthy person will turn into a patient only if they are a little bit of hypochondriac or they are very stressed with or about medicine and medical markers.

Other than that, at least with my experience in the past like four or five years, people who are healthy, who are considering themselves healthy, they tend to have some minor things that they need fine tuning as I like to call it.

And none of them became actually a patient.

On the contrary, they wanted to do what's needed on any level to, to perform better, even if they were not feeling it.

And they were feeling pretty healthy.

Now I've heard from colleagues in other clinics that, yeah, you know, there was this lady that she was amazingly fit, healthy with 32 and so on and so forth.

But then we performed the DEXA scan and we found the muscle mass index to be extremely low for her age, size and so on and so forth.

And then yes, it was borderline with osteopenia.

So the thinning bones and it took her under.

I can explain it only psychologically, the reason why I took her under.

So the colleagues there, they invested a couple of months to educate her, be with her, coach her into a healthier lifestyle.

And then when she saw the new readings after the follow up, after three months, she was amazed.

And now she doesn't leave L I V E. She doesn't leave without doing regular checkups.

So it made her stronger.

In the beginning there was like a downward trend, but now she's flying and she doesn't do much.

She doesn't do things that they cost a lot.

Just a blood test per year for the past like two years and a VO2 max.

No, that's fantastic.

And that's actually the longevity medicine, or preventative medicine, whatever you want to call it, really, you know, is shining.

But I'm talking about more these alpha people, you know, that want to Be the best, get the best results.

You know, the ones that they have wearables and they say their sleep was bad, you know, their whole day is ruined.

So when you do these things, tests, do you have some people that they don't want to be good, they need to be excellent and you know, with their results.

Yeah, of course.

Does that not cause other issues, let's say.

And how do you deal with it?

I will tell you the ugly truth.

They are suffering, they are putting themselves into unnecessary stress that not only it will not make their readings better, but it can make them even worse.

And I have an example exactly as you described it.

It was like two months ago, a top financial guy, very athletic, very fit and this and that, working amazing hours, Home office flies here, there, he had his wearables here and there.

And then he came in and told me, you know, my watch showed me for a week that my hrv, the heart rate variability was not very well balanced.

And I saw it and I cannot sleep.

And then he went, he did a full cardiological checkup, everything was fine.

We checked the respiratory system, everything was fine, we checked.

Everything was fine.

What the specialist checked.

And then obviously he came back to me after he finished with the medical team and then I said, look, give me your cortisol levels, take this kid at home, give it to me.

And then I saw that the cortisol level was quite high.

Why is it sky high, my friend?

Everything else is normal and because of your stress and cortisol is that.

And you know what he told me?

Well, I thought I wouldn't have enough time to finish before the holidays with all my duties at work and to do's and then for the holidays I need to do this high thing.

And I was like, yeah, okay, but you are doing this to yourself.

So with these kind of people, you try to explain you will need more than 10, 20 minutes that you would be using for a regular consultation.

And then, yeah, you just hope that you will see the difference happening.

And then, yeah, they take a turn in most of the cases, quicker than later and then they are back on track.

But there are also these people, very alpha females, that they are prone to be the best at everything they do and they want also the results to be the best and they are overdoing it.

And then again, I cannot not be direct and honest.

I said, you are doing that to yourself, not your markers to you.

So you are destroying actually the markers.

It's difficult for someone to understand it, but it's not so difficult at the End they just need to experience a little bit of knowledge sharing.

Don't let them to ask Dr. Google or Dr. Chad things that they don't understand.

You need to invest in them time and then this comes back to you.

So if you are a doctor for the money, it's not good for you to do that because you will never get paid for the time and effort you are putting in.

But if you are a doctor that wants to see their clients smiling and they to be happy even behind your back and talk good about you and then come over and over again.

Yeah, you will do that because at the end some of us became doctors because of medicine.

Yeah, you'd hope.

So how do you decide what is a valuable test, a valuable treatment?

Where do you make the jump and explore newer technologies or newer tests without becoming too experimental?

And sorry, I just want to add this because I know you've spoken about things like C60 and hyper light therapy which till I heard it from you I had no idea about it and I'm sure most people haven't heard of it.

It sounds super exciting.

But you need to explain to us first of all what it is.

But coming back to my question, how do you decide what tests and what treatments you want to apply in your practice?

Okay, I'll put a bracket to explain to you very briefly.

About 660 sig 60 is a molecule of carbon that it has amazing properties.

So it's being used by a Swiss company in the production of a white light therapy that it's part of the well known for the past 14 years, but became fancy only the past three, four years and more affordable actually which is called photobiomodulation which means that some wavelengths of the light they penetrate your skin and they go depending on the wavelength deep until they reach specific cells and then they are helping the cells regenerate, to put it simply.

So this C60 is a filter that is used by a medical device which is FDA approved, also ECE approved and so on and so forth because it has a lot of research behind it and we use it for pain relief and also some dermatological conditions and so on and so forth.

Not many doctors use that because the vast majority of them, they belong to the older generations that they don't want to investigate a little bit more about the technologies that they are out there.

However, as I consider myself as one of the newest generation of doctors and we need to use the technology in our favor and help us, that's why I have been using these devices for quite some time These filters specifically is being used also in glasses.

So eyewear.

And it does the same thing.

It protects us from the eye, from the white light, from the LED lamps and allows only these wavelengths to enter that, let's say fruitful for the eye and not damaging to the eye.

And I'm closing the bracket here.

How experimental I am.

I am not in this sense, I am very old school following the same old is gold.

So all my blood tests, for instance, it's nothing more than a full panel that I have been using personally in every country that I'm working, or I used to be working for the past like 10 years.

Some people, they found out about these markers just now.

So not my problem.

But there I am going with the science.

And is everything rock solid there with DNA.

DNA was there for quite some time, but now it's more affordable.

So by giving a little bit of your capillary blood, we can take how you are, as I like to say, from the factory.

So how we were born.

That's why we do that once in our lifetime.

And I don't hold it as a huge investment to give some hundreds to see how your DNA reacts to specific things which are a whole bunch of vitamins or at least 10 basic vitamins that the body uses for several procedures, or if we have a lipid profile, or if we are prone to develop diabetes, or in case of an injury, if our body is able to produce collagen.

So these things are very important also if we have sensitivity to salt or coffee.

In my case, for instance, that I tested it like 15 years ago, and now once more, I don't have any sensitivity to coffee.

So.

Or the salt people, they used to say, yeah, if you have a heart problem, don't eat salt.

And then what happens when we have an emergency?

We give normal saline to the patients that they have a problem with the heart.

So we give them fluid, and this fluid has a little bit of salt in there.

Using things that they are not just popping up on our screen.

Without research, without medical evidence, they don't necessarily need to be in every protocol in every country.

But I'm using things without experimenting on the clients.

I had a whole bunch of them asking me about peptides, which is a huge discussion among doctors, medical doctors and other peptide lovers.

I would never use a peptide on the long term, no matter if they are just Amino acids.

When there is no evidence for a specific use, there is a specific one that says it can help with wound healing or trauma or whatever else with your knees, with your, I don't know any injuries that you had.

But I will take it probably only after I have seen some results, especially if I have a young patient or client in front of me.

I don't inject to people who are like 20, 30, 40, even 50 things that I don't know what they will bring afterwards.

So I'm not happy for all those people who are testing these things.

But then again, somebody needs to test them so that we see how they work.

It's a big, big question.

But I tried to remain loyal to good old things that they are based on medical research, medical evidence and they have some validity external and they are being produced by obviously companies that they didn't pop up from any country that you need to look on Google Maps to find it.

And then they just say for research only or produced in the eu and then all the ingredients are from wherever else.

So I doubt it's been produced in the eu.

Anyway, what you've said just makes so much sense and it is really refreshing for someone who is in the field to call these things out because I think the biggest problem the longevity field has is exactly that, that you have these hype claims and they distort what longevity medicine can actually do for someone who's serious about it.

This is the thing.

There are things that we can test and there are things that we can do and obviously we need to do some treatment, some training for the long run in order to preserve the level that we will be reaching our health status.

Now when I see people that they invest without having any medical knowledge, medical background in a cryo chamber, let's say, or they get an HPOT hyperbaric oxygen chamber device without being trained and then they make it as, I don't know, like it was a business with solarium.

So come and do whatever you like and go back home.

Yeah.

For these people that they find it cheap, obviously they will go there without any medical treatment, without customization, without personalization and they don't know what they do.

They do it because it's a hype.

But if you use these tools properly, then you will find yourself enjoying great results.

And this is my argument, we should not fall for the hype.

Yes, very true.

Now let's come back to a little bit to where we were at the beginning because we're almost out of time.

If a 50 year old walked into your clinic today and doesn't really have any particular issues, feels quite good, you know, normal, whatever that means.

50 Year old and says, look, I'm trying to live healthier, live longer.

What can you do for me?

Where do you start?

What sort of the basic things you would test for?

I mean first of all I would like to have some sort of medical background obviously.

And if this person has done any testing in the past two, three years so that I have a basis I can like compare my tests to, I would like to have it then.

If we're talking about a person with no conditions, no diseases, that they are happy, they are enjoying life, they are not overweight, they are not anorexic either, they are sleeping quite fine, they are not feeling tired and so on and so forth.

I will try and optimize anything that can be optimized.

That is if I see a little bit of increased homocysteine, for example, even though it's going to be within the normal range, I will double check the vitamin B B12, but I will not check only that.

I will see what the person does on daily basis.

What are the habits?

So if you are giving me a white check because you are pretty healthy, I will just do a basic checkup to compare it to your medical background and what you brought me to see.

And then we will try to adapt your or fine tune your habits from nutrition, fitness or I will advise you what to do now that you will start getting older, which means not from today to tomorrow, but for the next year or two.

You should try to incorporate this or that into your lifestyle.

So it's more like lifestyle coaching but with a medical background.

Obviously not lifestyle.

How you spend your holidays and don't drink too much.

Now let me ask you the other side.

You have a 50 year old person that comes into you and says look, I have all the money in the world to spend.

Make me the best I can be.

How much testing would you actually do being, you know, a reasonable doctor that you are?

I mean as I said in the beginning or at some point of the discussion, less is more.

So I will try to adapt to the needs of the person.

I know that money is no issue.

This is going to be his flag or her flag, it's okay.

But still, I will not waste his money on things that they will not bring anything.

So I will make a package having the basics.

Maybe if there is any point on the medical background or any previous accidents that they don't have any problems, I might do a full body mri.

Because if money is no problem, I might do for once in their lifetime, for the 50s so that they can have a baseline and then I will try to do some treatments or suggest the person to do some treatments where they are at their premises or if they're traveling a lot, where is the place of their regular residence to find some things that they can take a healthy individual and they cannot make him or her healthier, but they can increase the performance of the body to that level so that it will last longer on the healthier stay too.

Now let me ask you a personal question.

How many people have come into your clinic and said exactly that money is no object, make me healthier and make me better.

Throughout the years I had quite a few that money was no issue.

And yeah, I'm always happy to receive like a WhatsApp or a text from these people to ask me another question because you know, sometimes people that they say money is no object and this and that, they like to do some clinical or doctor rolling, as I say, like people used to do the bar crawling back in the day.

Now they are thinking a little bit different.

So these people were money is not an issue.

They can travel from the States to Singapore, to Switzerland, to Greece to Moscow to wherever.

And if you see them coming back again and again, especially when you told them, okay, money is no issue, but I'm not going to waste your money and I don't care if money is no issue.

I'm talking to you as a patient and as a person that I respect and I want you to be healthy.

No matter if you have a seven digit budget or 70 digit budget, they respect that actually and they appreciate it.

So I had a lot, I'm proud, I had a lot.

But I'm even prouder that I have very, very many people that are normal, that they want to normal in quotations, I mean financially, that they are everyday people, they want to invest in their health, they want to live better for the life expectancy they have.

And they are quite happy to see the markers not being raised or sometimes getting lower.

And yeah, this makes me happy as well.

I have to say, if the whole longevity field would be filled with people like you, it would be amazing because that field often has people there that sell stuff that are nonsense and make claims that are rubbish.

And it's so important for this developing field to have credible people like you.

Now we're at the end of our conversation.

It was so insightful.

But I always ask my guest five rapid fire questions.

So what's the single Best piece of advice you would give your younger self to train more.

Even though I used to train, I was doing martial arts, I was doing skiing in the mountains, I was doing water skiing in Greece and I am a gym and TRX fanatic.

Name one habit everyone should adopt for a longer healthier life.

They need to try to balance their sleep patterns.

I will never belong to those ones that they say you definitely need eight hours or night hours.

There are people depending on demographics, depending on their lifestyle that they are pretty fine with 6.5 hours of sleep or 7.5 or even 6.

The ones that they are good with 5, they are very few and they are genetically predisposed to be able to adapt to a five hour sleep pattern.

So try, if not every single day, try looking back at your week to have six out of seven, a good solid sleep that you wake up and you are feeling not tired anymore.

If you weren't in longevity science, what career would you have chosen?

I have a pre medical background as I said in the beginning.

I have my Master's in Economics, Business Management.

I have a degree in political sciences as well.

I would be more likely working in a similar position like I did in the Department of Health and Social Care in the UK that I was healthcare advisor.

So I would like to do something with public health.

What?

Microdose habit, sort of five minute routine or small daily action yields outsized longevity benefits.

I'm a lover of taking the stairs.

I hate lifts, even if it is like a 10 story building.

But yeah, then again, for tricks that you can do, don't forget to drink water.

Water is very important.

Women should be drinking 2.5.

Mary should be drinking around 3 liters per day.

Do it throughout the day.

Don't forget or don't neglect that.

And coffee or teas, they, they are no substitute to that.

These are very important.

Another trick is to try and get enough vitamin D in your blood.

So you need to take it twice or three times a year because we are not producing so much from the sun.

Which is another truth and the last one that I could think of is don't try to restrict yourself too much.

So our life is a roller coaster in a good sense.

So we live only once.

You need to enjoy life.

So if you are out for an occasion and you need to eat some sweets and desserts, eat them and enjoy them.

If you are drinking alcohol socially, yeah on that day that you can drink a second glass of wine, it's not a bad thing.

But don't do things that they are damaging yourself.

And it's proven that they are damaging yourself, like regularly.

And I'm going back to sugar to give you a hint.

The problem that we had with the cardiovascular system that everybody used to say it's based or it's caused you to salt consumption, it's caused you to sugar consumption.

And last but not least, what's the craziest longevity myth you've encountered and is there any truth to it?

Yeah.

As we discussed before until now, the myth in my mind is your biological age.

You cannot, like, measure it.

You cannot have a precision for that.

So just live at your age.

Forget about the number.

Don't think too much about that.

Try to be healthy from inside out and then your life will be better.

As simple as that.

Fantastic.

Thank you so much, Dr. Chris, for coming on Beyond Longevity.

Thank you for the invitation.

Thank you so much.

Longevity medicine gives us more ways than ever to measure, monitor and intervene.

But having more options does not mean we need to use.

All that came through very clearly in my conversation with Dr. Chris, we talked about biological age tests that can give conflicting answers, the anxiety that can come from constantly checking wearable data and treatments where the excitement may be running ahead of the evidence.

We are going to have more tests, more treatments and more ways to intervene in the future.

That is not going to slow down.

The skill will be knowing which ones deserve our attention and which ones don't.

Because when it comes to our health, doing everything is not the same as doing the right thing.

I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Dr. Chris Parcetces.

Please rate, follow and review and join me again next time on Beyond Longevity.

Sa.