7. How Traditional, Functional, and Longevity Medicine Create a Healthier Future

Is your health just something you react to when problems arise, or is it something you actively shape every day? For many, the journey to wellness only begins when they're already facing a health crisis. I'm Dr. Darshan Shah, and I know this personally—I went from being overweight and on multiple medications to achieving a level of health I never thought possible. This awakening transformed how I view medicine and inspired me to prioritize an approach that goes beyond treating symptoms to actively enhancing wellness. In this episode of the Extend podcast, I will discuss the science behind hyper-personalized health and the simple steps you can take to become an active partner in your wellness journey. Because at the end of the day, no one cares more about your health than you do—and with the right strategies, you have the power to transform it. I also discuss: (00:43) Mastering Health With New Medical Protocol (05:12) The Wellness Wheel and Pareto Principle (07:44) Prevention Through Early Diagnosis (11:05) Functional Medicine and Systems Biology (15:30) Future of Personalized Preventative Healthcare and more. To learn more about Dr. Darshan Shah: Website: https://www.drshah.com/ Clinic: https://www.next-health.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/darshanshahmd/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Welcome to Extend with me, Dr. Darshan Shah, a podcast dedicated to cutting-edge science, research, tools, and protocols designed to help you extend your health span. Having become one of the youngest doctors in the country at the age of 21 and trained and board certified at the Mayo Clinic, I've accumulated three decades of practice as a board certified surgeon and longevity expert. Over that time, I've discovered that a mere 20% of health knowledge yields 80% of the results when it comes to your health span. We're living in a new era where we are creating a new healthcare system, no longer focused on disease management, but achieving optimal health and vitality. Join me as I interview world renowned experts, offering you a step-by-step guide to proactively avoid disease and most importantly, extend your health span.

• 0:49Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Dr. Shah here, and I'm really excited about today's episode because it's all about how I now think about our overall health and just the practice of medicine in general. So, over the last 30 years, I've spoken to literally thousands of patients about their health and longevity. My team and I have reversed heart disease, cognitive disease, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, autoimmune disease, pretty much everything. And we've actually saved hundreds of lives by proactively predicting heart attacks, cancer, and more. So, how do we do this? It's by practicing a totally new form of medicine that utilizes a four-step protocol to mastering the basics of health, outsmarting the leading causes of death, stopping disease at its root cause, and utilizing the latest in biotech to live a longer health span. I'm going to tell you all about this now.

• 1:34Dr. Darshan Shah?

  This new protocol uses the best of traditional medicine, functional medicine, and longevity medicine all together to bring the best methods in all of them to get you incredible results and relatively quickly. So, let's talk about how we do this. We basically take a new, fresh perspective on your health. Western medicine, which is a system of doctors and hospitals and pharmaceuticals that we're all used to, has pretty much done an incredible job of saving scores of lives from infections, and these used to kill thousands of people. It's also from developing the concepts of surgery and anesthesia and the advent of chemotherapy and radiation to treat Advanced cancers, just miracle after miracle for treating advanced disease and physical trauma.

• 2:15Dr. Darshan Shah?

  However, this is not the system that was built for avoiding disease in the first place. And I could tell you that no one in medical school, myself included, was ever taught really a lot about nutrition, sleep and exercise and all the other things that we need to advise our patients on the fundamentals of avoiding disease and preventing disease in the first place. Almost 10 years ago, I took time off from my busy surgical practice to educate myself on the fundamental aspects of health. And I did this because like many of us, I got so busy in my life and my business that I had made my own self-care and my own health my last priority. And I personally just got really very sick. I was 40 pounds overweight. I had uncontrolled high blood pressure, diabetes, and I developed an autoimmune disease.

• 2:58Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I was literally on eight different medications, including an immune suppressant. I had found that even though I had 14 years of intense training in medicine and surgery, with another 20 years of the practice of surgery and medicine, I literally had no idea how to reverse and prevent chronic disease in the first place. I had to go out and re-educate myself. So this started a journey into the science of health that was transformative, not only to my own personal health, but also to my mindset around medicine and health globally. For decades, Western medicine, of which I was a practitioner, became very adept at diagnosing disease and then figuring out what pill or surgery would mask the symptoms of the thousands of diseases that were popping up all over the world. Rarely was there any thought put into how did we get here in the first place?

• 3:42Dr. Darshan Shah?

  So I took a deep dive into nutrition and even got a degree in it. I became a certified personal trainer. By attending conferences in these fields of nutrition and training, I happened upon Jeffrey Bland and Mark Hyman, who were speaking of a new type of medicine, medicine 2.0, focused on the root causes of disease and a systems biology approach called functional medicine. It was a combination of functional medicine and a focus on the basics that changed my life. Within months, I lost 40 pounds. I got off almost all my medications. My paramedic care doctor was astounded that my blood pressure tests and my autoimmune disease tests were now almost completely normalized. And my diabetes- Well, it was gone. As my patients saw my dramatic transformation, they naturally asked me,

• 4:25Dr. Darshan Shah?

  "So what are you doing, Dr. Shaw?" And I educated them on my protocols. They also started seeing dramatic changes themselves when they were following the same things that I was doing. And many of my patients were actually able to avoid surgery completely. A couple of years later, I quit surgery and I decided this was the kind of medicine I wanted to practice, a proactive approach that emphasized feeling incredible and completely avoiding disease as the first principle. So how exactly do we execute on this vision? In my office at Next Health, I have a diagram on the wall of a framework I created called the Wellness Wheel. The Wellness Wheel is a circular wheel with 12 wedges, one for each aspect of health, organized in the order that we address these aspects during a patient's engagement with our practice. Let me describe this to you in more detail. We start with the

• 5:10Dr. Darshan Shah?

  basics. The first three wedges are nutrition, movement, and sleep. These are fundamental to get right in all of our health journeys. The problem here that I found is that most people are overwhelmed with too much conflicting information. They get paralysis by overanalysis. What we do here is we cut through all the noise by focusing on the Pareto Principle. Pareto was an 18th century economist. He found a very curious pattern in economics that also translated to just nature in general. He found that 20% of information gets you 80% of the result. This is absolutely true in all aspects of your health. By giving people the 20% of the information that will make most of the difference, we can quickly see results and make massive

• 5:54Dr. Darshan Shah?

  changes. As I do these solosodes for every aspect of the Wellness Wheel that we talk about, we're going to discuss what is a 20% and really hone in on this. Sadly, the combination of the profit-centric big food industry creating a massive amount of ultra-processed food, combined with industrialized farming and poor government advice on what we should eat and not eat, have led us all to a disastrous dietary pattern that's led to metabolic disease, obesity, and chronic disease. We see it all the time and all over the place. Combine this with an epidemic of being sedentary and being overly stressed out and being sleep deprived, and you have the perfect storm of the foundation. Of disease. The good news is, however, is that we can turn this situation around completely by focusing in on what will move the needle for nearly everyone and putting protocols into

• 6:39Dr. Darshan Shah?

  place that actually work by following the Pareto Principle. Our first few solosodes will break down the science on nutrition, movement, and sleep, so you can lay the foundation for optimal health. Next on the Wellness Wheel, we discuss one area where Western medicine really shines, having the technology to avoid death in the first place. So Peter Tia calls this medicine 3.0 in his recent book, Outlive. And if you go to the CDC's website and you look at the page of the top 10 causes of death, you'll see that heart attacks, metabolic syndrome, cancer, and neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer's will lead to most deaths in our older years. For most of us, we find out that we have one of these diseases way too late, when we're trying to reverse decades and decades of damage that we've done with pharmaceuticals

• 7:21Dr. Darshan Shah?

  or with surgery. In reality, we have the technology, and we've had it for years, to diagnose these diseases 20 to 30 years before they turn into a problem that requires Western medicine. We just use all this technology way too late. This is where I encourage all of our patients to become the boss of their biology, or the CEOs of their health, to take control and personal responsibility for their own health by tracking a few but very important biomarkers. These are a combination of blood tests that are easily and cheaply available, and by using a few simple devices like wearables and bioimpedance scales. I talked about this in a previous solosode episode. We can dive into these in more detail as we go through future episodes of this podcast. By using this framework early and consistently, I feel confidently that we can make the CDC's top 10 list of why you will die

• 8:06Dr. Darshan Shah?

  a complete non-issue for you. It's a bold statement, but one I believe that is achievable with a little effort and knowledge and personal responsibility. That's the key. In addition, if you're already being treated for one or more diseases, please know it's never too late to reverse these diseases. We will go into all of this in detail along the topics of cardiovascular health, brain health, and immune health in future solosodes on these three wedges of the Wellness Wheel. The third goal of health gets into what I refer to as the fun stuff. This is functional medicine, or root cause medicine that I talked about earlier. This is the field of medicine. Popularized only in the last decade. When I'm on stage and I speak to large audiences, I ask people to raise their hand if they've heard of functional medicine. Sadly, it's usually only about a quarter of the audience that answers this in the positive.

• 8:51Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It's sad because this is how we should have been practicing medicine in the first place, in the very beginning. The history of functional medicine is very interesting. In 1910, the Carnegie's, who were starting the pharmaceutical industry, funded a report called the Flexner Report to look at medical education. The report actually standardized medical education based on science, but it also had the side effect of demonizing all forms of alternative therapy and root cause medicine. And it made medicine very disease focused. It's looking at the interconnectedness of all of our cells and body systems and how they affect each other, referred to a systems biology that really works. This is the reason why the wellness wheel is really a flywheel, where if you optimize one area of health, all the others magically get better.

• 9:34Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Functional medicine gets down to the nine root causes of disease. These are beautifully described in Jeffrey Bland's book, Disease Delusion. If you treat these nine root causes, you will likely never get disease in the first place, and you could actually turn around over 70,000 of the diseases described in the ICD-9 code manual, a book of disease codes used in the Western medicine system to bill insurance for the treatment of those diseases. I will be doing solos in the future on topics like hormone health, gut health, emotional health, and detoxification that will address all nine of these root causes. Here's another reason functional medicine is really incredible. The side effect of applying functional medicine to your life to avoid disease is actually feeling incredible. You'll have a sense of vitality and health that you haven't felt in years.

• 10:20Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Most of us don't remember the last time we really, truly felt great and full of true health. Well, we're going to make sure that we get there together over the lifetime of this podcast. Finally, in the wellness wheel, we dive into anti-aging and longevity. This is the new frontier of health. It's popularized by biohackers and influencers using everything from peptides to cold plunges to methylene blue and NAD IV. Although much of the science around these therapies is new, I can tell you there are definite benefits to being educated and knowledgeable on what's happening. On the frontiers of science. We're going to break down the science and test the legitimacy of all of these techniques, supplements, technologies and breakthroughs in the world so that you can stay safe and potentially benefit from this brave new world of lifespan extension.

• 11:05Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It's exciting for me to see what's happening in this space. In 1965, Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel, predicted that every two years, the number of chips that we can put in a transistor would double. This leads to what's called the exponential curve, where we will see new tech coming to us faster and faster every year. It's one of the reasons your cellphone in your pocket has one million times the computing power of every supercomputer on Earth in the 1980s. Well, the same exponential rate of discovery is occurring right now in biotechnology. Ray Kurzweil, who's the author of Fantastic Voyage, and he's also the chief futurist at Google, he predicts that we will soon reach what's called longevity escape velocity. This is where we're going to have the science to radically expand our lifespan,

• 11:46Dr. Darshan Shah?

  where we're adding one year of lifespan to every year of scientific discovery. So, look, I personally don't know what the upper limit of how long we can live is, but I do know one thing. I want to stick around long enough to perhaps find out. And I want all of those years between now and then to be filled with health and vitality. And I want that for all of my patients too, and for all the listeners of this podcast. So that's it, the wellness wheel of optimal health. I've taken thousands of patients through this journey, and it's been a game changer. I'm truly excited to do this with all of you. My motto is that true health is not simply the avoidance of disease, it's actually the abundance of vitality. I welcome all of your comments, your feedback, your participation, every step of the way. Of course, before you do any major change, remember that you're a special individual.

• 12:31Dr. Darshan Shah?

  We're going to talk about you being an N of one. Every therapy or recommendation can have various effects on different people. So check with your doctor and be safe. Leroy Hood and Nathan Price say in their book, The Age of Scientific Wellness, that the future of medicine is personalized, preventative, predictive and participatory. This is exactly what the future of health is. Hyper personalized to you. Fully preventative of all chronic diseases. Predictive of what is in store for your future. It requires you to stop outsourcing your health to your primary care doctor and the whole Western medical system and to participate in your own health outcome. No one cares more about your own health than you do. We're going to lay the foundation and give you all the science and back information you need to make that happen.

• 13:17Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It's an exciting new world of health out there, and I can't wait to share all of it with you. Thanks for joining me on this podcast.

• 13:26Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Thank you so much for listening to the podcast today. Please remember to subscribe if you like this episode and give us a good review and share a link with your friends. It really helps to support all of our efforts. I also want to remind you that the information shared on this podcast is for educational purposes only and is not intended to replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Please consult with your healthcare provider or physician before making any decisions or taking any action based on what you hear today, especially if you have any underlying health conditions or on any medications. Your doctor knows your personal health situation the best, and it's always important to seek their guidance.