Hi folks, it’s Chris Rovzar, Pursuits editor-at-large, here with a little insight into the wild world of wellness.
For the October issue of Bloomberg Businessweek, I tested out an EMS suit—one of those fitness whizbangs that zaps you with electricity you as you work out. Your muscles tense up more than they would with just resistance training alone, and you see results after a shorter period. In a few months, I gained a significant amount of muscle, lost about 10 pounds of fat, and improved my posture. In other words: It works.
The $2,999 suit is called the Katalyst Gen4 training system, and it’s just one of many wellness tools we explore in a whole package about what we like to call “lil cheats.” These are the things you might turn to you if you’re exhausted by all the hype around longevity fads, biohacking, fitness tracking, celebrity MRI startups, new supplements, vampire facials, and on and on and on.
Among the things we examined: Is ketamine therapy really the quick mental health fix some providers promise? Can NAD and other peptides really work magic? What quick turnaround treatments are New York’s top plastic surgeons and dermatologists offering their patients?
A doctor weighs in
I’m not a physician, but we talked to many for this package. And I wanted to share highlights of one of my favorite conversations.
Jordan Shlain has run a concierge medical practice, Private Medical, for 23 years. It has offices in New York, the Bay area, Los Angeles and Miami. Dr. Shlain believes that America’s health-care system focuses too much on addressing harm after the fact, rather than preventing it from happening in the first place. If you have a doctor who knows how you live your life, that person can help you avoid illness and injury far better than the kind of doc you call after you’ve gotten sick or developed a heart condition.
You don’t know what you’re getting when you order an unregulated treatment, even if it seems like it’s from a reputable company. “We had a client of ours who wanted to do an injectable peptide supplement for muscle recovery, L-carnitine. And I had a sample tested,” Shlain remembers. “We got the results back and there was MDMA in it. There was an herbicide in it. I mean, there was L-carnitine in there, like what he was originally looking for. But you’re gonna feel pretty good if you got a little MDMA in your shot.”
Think twice about using IV therapy for wellness (be it athletic performance or even hangover recovery) because it might do more harm than good. Shlain recently wrote an article about this: “The Hidden Cost of Chasing Shortcuts.”
“The number of microplastic particles you get in an IV is far more deleterious to your body than any benefit you’re going to get from a wellness IV,” he says. “There is evidence that plastic’s being leached into your blood, like 58,000 microplastic particles per liter of IV fluid.”
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Read the full article: Five Longevity Secrets From an Elite Concierge Doctor (Bloomberg)
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Full article: https://archive.fo/VJg0s