In 2025, we may see radical top-down changes to our healthcare system as new heads of the NIH – National Institutes of Health, HHS – Health and Human Services; the CDC – Center for Disease Control and Prevention. And the FDA – Food and Drug Administration.
How will the heads of these government agencies ignite tech innovation in the healthcare industry?
We’re speaking to many healthcare tech executives, such as CEOs and doctors and academics, to see what they think.
Joining us is Dr. Ivan Rusilko, a doctor of lifestyle medicine based in Miami. He’s been practicing this more natural way to address health and fitness for more than 15 years. He’s faced critics along the way but now his once-unconventional approach to medicine is being embraced.
Highlights from the conversation:
1:28 – Traditional medicine doesn’t take a person’s lifestyle into account: “Lifestyle medicine popped up about 14 years ago. Back then, lifestyle medicine wasn’t even a term, so I was the first one to market with it, basically, so it’s nice to see how everybody is using lifestyle medicine on every corner of every street of every city. But, again, it was forged through the aspect that each person has three different facets to them: it’s their mentality, their physicality, and their emotionality, all of which are combined into what makes you you. The basis of what we do is we definitely focus on diagnostic testing, so we’re testing a lot of things that traditional doctors won’t test, things like heavy metals, neurotransmitters, food sensitivities, and a lot of very unique biomarkers for hormones and whatnot, that help give us a picture of the internal chemistry of a person. But then we take it one step further with really unique and very in depth questions when it comes to somebody’s overall lifestyle. Sexual Health, relationship status, hydration, nutrition, sleep, all these different things should be forms of medicine that aren’t taught at all in the traditional way of teaching medicine that I had to go out and pull myself; I had to go out, while I was in medical school, and actually become a certified nutritionist, because we spent about 30 minutes on actual nutrition, and spent about four days on cholesterol medication. So, you tend to start to see that traditional medicine falls short on what somebody’s lifestyle is, they expect it to be taking a pill or having surgery.”
8:19 – Our bodies are built to live to 150 but we burn them out early: “When it comes to mental illness, we do a lot with neurodegeneration, which would be Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, dementia, things like that, and those are all symptoms of something. There’s a reason that it happened. Our bodies are built to live to 150; you can look at all the research that they’ve done, study after study on that one, so the fact that we burn them out early, the fact that people are now walking in with Parkinson’s at age 40, makes zero sense. So, everybody wants to treat the symptom of something while what we do with the diagnostic testing is we’re taking it one step further and seeing what caused it. The perfect example would be mercury toxicity. I would say that’s probably the biggest epidemic in this country right now, if not the world. The reason being is, back in the day, when they used to put amalgam fillings in your teeth, that’s actual mercury. So, every breath you took, you were actually absorbing mercury throughout the entire time. The ADA knew this, they still did it anyway, and now it’s banned across Europe. If you put an amalgam filling in your mouth, you go to jail. And the situation is, if you take a look at the rise in things like autism and Alzheimer’s, things where we don’t know why people get them or how it happens, and then you correlate it with things such as mercury toxicity, the introduction of mercury into the environment, the introduction of different vaccines, and everything else that goes along with it, we are causing these problems to ourselves. And the traditional, or the purest form of medicine, which I like to call precision medicine, is diagnosing, why do we have this problem? If you’re depressed or if you’re anxious or if you’re bipolar, what’s the stimulatory factor for it? Are you hormone depleted? Do you have decreased B12? Is it nutritional? Is it something like that? So, we’re taking a look behind the curtain, if you will, to sit there and be like, ‘Why does this person have this?’ not just give you a bunch of medications and drown them out on it. It’s basically putting a band aid on a hemorrhage.”
11:25 – The FDA is funded by user fees paid by Big Pharma: “Big Pharma doesn’t heal anything, they put a band aid on a hemorrhage and expect you to be a patient for the rest of your life. Cholesterol medication, diabetic medication, none of that stuff does anything to heal you, it basically makes you a patient for life, which again, you have to take a look at from a business angel, it’s a phenomenal business move: you scare people into being unhealthy, and then all of a sudden, okay, you have to be on this rest of your life. And then this medication has a side effect that needs to be managed with this medication, and so on and so forth. When the whole vaccine aspect came out with this, and then you’d have people who would question and be like, ‘well if you take a look at what COVID is, it’s basically the exact same virus as influenza. And we’ve been trying to vaccinate against that thing since 1920 with zero luck.’ So, it’s a situation where people went two ways, they sank or swam with it. Either people sat there and said, ‘okay, maybe I should question what traditional medicine is and where it’s going,’ or, ‘maybe I just shut my eyes and just believe whatever I’m told from the CDC, from the NIH, from the WHO, and all those different organizations.’ The most terrifying thing is that the FDA is funded right now, I believe it’s 52% by user fees. User fees are what Big Pharma pays to the FDA. So, if you think about it, it’s like Al Capone paying for the Chicago Police Department. So, it’s just the people that they’re paid to protect and police against are the ones that are paying their salaries. Then you have the whole revolving door policy whereas everybody in the FDA who is in a power position eventually transitions into very high paid salary jobs at these different Big Pharma companies.”
15:29 – The Trump administration is going to ruffle a lot of feathers: “Big Pharma is a gigantic industry. I mean cholesterol medication alone is billions of dollars per year. So, it’s a situation where, of course, they’re going to dictate things that they want people not to get healthy. Like I said, the more healthy people are, the less patients they have, and that’s the scary thing. And with this new administration coming in, it’s going to shake a lot feathers, because it’s a situation whereas we’re focusing on basic things like red dye number 40, that should never have been put into the population, fluoride and water, all this stuff, take a look at the mercury and fillings. All this stuff should never have ever made it into it, and it’s not the immediate effect, it’s the downstream effect. Mercury can lead to all kinds of different things, from arthritis to cancer to autoimmune neurodegeneration. So, you’ve just now purposely put something in somebody’s mouth that we think is good for us. ‘Oh, I have a cavity,’ but why did you have a cavity in the first place? That should have been addressed.. And then all of a sudden, now it’s just slowly polluting our system, which causes you to go to the doctor, spend more money, and Big Pharma gets bigger.”
17:57 – Government health organizations should be stripped of power: “I would love to see all these government organizations completely stripped of all the power that they have, and built from the bottom up, and really start to police Big Pharma, because, at the end of the day, they’re the ones manipulating physicians into prescribing what they want. It’s sad, because I always tend to joke that the more specialized the physician comes, the more in Big Pharma’s back pocket they become, because they’re so focused on one specific thing. Like kidney disease, ‘I need these four different medications and somebody won’t die.’ That shouldn’t be your goal. Traditional medicine’s main goal is the prolongation of death regardless of what your life is, whereas what we do in the wellness industry is we try to augment your life, which will eventually lead to prolonged life. So, it’s just scary to sit there and see that traditional medicines’ main goal is not to heal you or protect you. It’s just to basically make you live as long as you can with as many medications that you’re on.”
20:12 – The FDA needs to provide the reason behind what they’re doing: “I’d love the FDA to come out and go and start to go over and just like, ‘’This is what this does. Boom, boom, boom.’ Give us more information about why we’re taking all these things. Secondly, I like to sit and see any research funded by Big Pharma be completely wiped off the internet. Because if I’m putting out a study on a pill that I just made and I’m saying, ‘This looks great,’ of course it’s going to look great, you’re the one who did the study, you’re paying people in positions to do it, of course it’s going to look good. Because if it doesn’t look good, then you’re going to either manipulate the data or just not produce it. So the FDA, I’m all about policing it correctly, but you need to sit back and sit there and say, ‘Big Pharma should not be the FDA’s best friend,’ which is what they are. The revolving door policy, if you get a chance to look at that, it’s one of the scariest things you ever see. Every single major FDA person, whether it’s the top of the rung or a couple down, all transition into ridiculously high paying jobs into Big Pharma. And if that’s not common sense nonsense, then like it’s just insane. So, the FDA, if they don’t disband it, which I hope they do, but if they don’t, I just hope they start providing reasoning behind what they’re doing, not just saying, ‘this doctor and this doctor said so.’ A bunch of these doctors actually have positions with Big Pharma, so, of course they’re going to say it. So it’s terrifying.”
27:56 – The goal is not to have people on medication the rest of their life: “At the end of the day, I don’t want somebody on that medication the rest of their life, I want to get something fixed. That’s where the whole lifestyle comes to do it: teaching people how to eat, teaching people what to avoid. Hydration, hydration, hydration: your brain’s 80 to 90% water, so mostly in the elderly, they don’t drink any water because they don’t want to pee at night, so, you’re walking around dehydrated, and you’re wondering why your brain isn’t functioning at a full capacity. So, as we’re getting into these certain things, we’re teaching them how to eat: eating once a day is not good, especially at that age, they should be eating five times a day. And sleep’s the most important thing that we do here. I’m 40 years old., Ive slept 13 and a half years of my life. That’s how important it is. And people don’t really understand, like, ‘Oh, I get four hours a night, blah, blah, blah.’ But, again, is it good quality? Is it whatever it could be? So, there’s a lot of stuff that goes into it. We aren’t just sitting here exchanging one pill for another one, which I don’t want people to think, ‘Oh, were you putting them on this.’ Our main goal is to get them on that for six to eight months, teach them how to do the actual lifestyle aspect as well. Get out, walk, do this stuff. We’re giving you all this energy, you’re going to feel like you’re 50 again. Use it. And as we start to take things away, their body has now healed itself, and they’re able to operate with not only a better physicality, but a better knowledge of what makes them them, in a healthy way.”
39:31- There’s no sense in being healthy if you’re not going to do something with it: “Ball Deep Living is basically about living life this close, so we do deal with a lot of people who have a lot of affluence, and a lot of people with affluence don’t really know how to spend their money. How to spend their money the right way, I guess you could say; they’re buying cars, they’re buying things that are just accumulating, so we have a lot of patients come in and, as you can see in my office, it’s very bipolar, but it’s all the different adventures I’ve taken, whether it’s swimming with sharks, rhinos, all kinds of stuff, playing with tigers. But the aspect is, life is experiential, and there’s no sense in being healthy if you’re not going to do something with it. So, we take these people to extravagant places to do really, really weird things. An example is, I took three people to Dominica Island, which is in the West Indies, which has a resident population of sperm whales. So, these are people who have never swam in the open ocean. You jump in the water at 3,000 feet, we don’t see the bottom,that alone will wake you up, and then you’re actually being let out right in front of a sperm whale, or that’s 50 to 60 feet, maybe even 70 if it’s a male, and it comes right by you. I don’t care what movie you’ve been in, I don’t care how much money you have, or how much square footage, that can change a life, because now you’re all of a sudden, like, ‘wow I’ve just experienced something that money can’t really buy.’ You can’t walk out down the store and buy this. So you start to see growth in people. And that’s where the emotional part comes into health, because now you’re helping people overcome fears, you’re helping people see something that nobody else does, and it’s making you the most interesting person in the room.”
