# What Is Health Optimization Medicine? | HOMe Podcast #001

An episode of [Health Optimization Medicine Podcast](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1663974629), 11 Mar 2026, 31 min.

Audio: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/672d8edf-a640-45ce-ac61-cd5f898a7b27/HOM_Podcast_001_AUDIO.mp3?dest-id=3824325

In this episode of the Health Optimization Medicine Podcast, the HOMeHOPe Faculty comes together for a roundtable conversation exploring the core philosophical framework behind Health Optimization Medicine. Dr. Scott Sherr, Boomer Anderson, and Dr. Allen Bookatz break down the three fundamental perspective shifts that redefine how we think about health, disease, aging, and the human body itself. Rather than focusing on disease management, this episode introduces the foundational principles behind building health from the cellular level up. Join us as we delve into: • The shift from pathogenesis (studying disease) to salutogenesis (creating health) • Why longevity alone isn't enough without vitality and morbidity compression • How neotenization focuses on restoring youthful biological function • The concept of the holobiont: humans as ecosystems of interconnected organisms This episode is for you if: • You want to understand the philosophy behind Health Optimization Medicine • You're curious why modern healthcare focuses on disease instead of health • You're interested in metabolomics, cellular health, and systems biology • You want a deeper framework for longevity, vitality, and resilience You can also find this episode on… Youtube: https://youtu.be/wuCXmT783_o Find more from Health Optimization Medicine and Practice (HOMeHOPe): Website: https://homehope.org/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/homehopeorg/ Virtual Symposium 2026:https://homehope.org/homehope-virtual-symposium-2026 Use PODCAST10 to get 10% OFF your purchase of the Clinical Metabolomics Module at https://www.homehope.org/ Find more from Troscriptions: Website: https://troscriptions.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/troscriptions/ Use POD10 to get 10% OFF your Troscriptions purchase at https://www.troscriptions.com/

## Transcript

[0:31] Dr. Scott Sherr: Just because you're sick doesn't mean you're well.
[0:33] It just means you are not sick.
[0:35] Welcome to the Health Optimization Medicine Podcast.
[0:38] This podcast exists because health is not the absence of disease.
[0:42] It's the act of creation, of resilience, energy, adaptability, and capacity
[0:47] over time, health is built on first principles, salute to genesis, how
[0:51] health is generated ization, how we preserve youthful adaptability and
[0:56] holo bology, how humans thrive as ecosystems night us, not isolated parts.
[1:02] Here we focus on metabolomics, mitochondria metabolism, nervous
[1:06] system regulation, immune balance, sleep and recovery.
[1:09] Because this is the ground, everything else stands on.
[1:13] Whether you're thriving, struggling, or somewhere in between.
[1:16] The foundation determines how you adapt, repair and respond, strengthen it, and
[1:21] life gets easier, more resilience, faster recover, and greater capacity for stress.
[1:27] Illness and aging.
[1:28] No sick care, no symptom chasing, just first principles, conversations
[1:32] about building and optimizing health.
[1:35] Let's get into it, boys.
[1:37] Boomer Anderson: Yeah.
[1:38] Hey, you know, foundations is a word I keep hearing this year.
[1:40] I'm curious, just since we're now recording this in January and for whatever
[1:46] reason, the turn of the year is a lot of time where people were set to, do,
[1:49] you guys set New Year's resolutions?
[1:51] Anybody got a good one?
[1:55] Dr. Scott Sherr: Do you have one?
[1:56] Alan?
[1:56] Dr. Allen Bookatz: Use all my flex spend before it runs out.
[1:59] Boomer Anderson: Excellent.
[2:00] Did you buy anything?
[2:01] Okay, so this is sort of like the, the next follow on question is what did
[2:05] you buy with your flex spend account?
[2:08] Dr. Allen Bookatz: It was more like looking back and saying, what
[2:10] could I write myself for my wife, a letter of medical necessity for
[2:14] so I can get them reimbursed maybe?
[2:15] Boomer Anderson: Mm. Okay.
[2:18] The system.
[2:18] Dr. Scott Sherr: Yeah.
[2:19] Dr. Allen Bookatz: I think that probably the best thing was
[2:21] actually the eight sleep because.
[2:24] I know Boomer and I share the love for sleeping on ice.
[2:28] It was arguably probably the one of the best purchases, and that actually
[2:32] when we talk about circadian biology.
[2:34] Uh, that's one of our foundational pillars in help optimization medicine.
[2:38] Boomer Anderson: Yeah.
[2:39] I, I mean, so it's kind of
[2:40] Dr. Scott Sherr: the deal.
[2:40] Yeah.
[2:41] Boomer Anderson: I, I, and you know what, maybe we should reach out to the
[2:43] guys and tell 'em to sponsor the show, but we take the sponsors here so far
[2:47] other than, other than transcriptions and home oak, but, uh, okay.
[2:51] Scott, you're not getting away from this question.
[2:53] Year's resolutions.
[2:54] Dr. Scott Sherr: Yeah.
[2:54] I mean, I remember I used to make a lot of them back in the day,
[2:59] and I think what I've realized recently is like, just like life.
[3:03] Trying to keep things simple.
[3:05] My biggest one for 2026 is to try to schedule a time when I'm
[3:11] not doing something as opposed to when I'm doing something.
[3:14] It's very easy for me to over schedule my life, as both of you know, and there's
[3:19] only a certain amount of hours in the day.
[3:21] I always like to say I wish there were four hours extra every day to do work,
[3:25] but that wouldn't actually change anything as they would schedule all of that time.
[3:30] So that's inherently what my.
[3:33] What I'm kind of built to do.
[3:34] So if I had to say my goal for 2026, if, if any, is going to be actually has time
[3:39] where I'm not scheduled or time when I'm not booking something and actually putting
[3:44] in the calendar to not book something.
[3:46] So that's, that's my big goal.
[3:48] I don't know about ju boom.
[3:49] Boomer Anderson: Yeah.
[3:50] So I haven't set in years resolutions in a long time because, you know, the
[3:55] probability of them failing is greater than the probability of them succeeding.
[3:59] But a couple of things that I kind of do at the.
[4:02] Turn of the year is, it's kind of like a, you remember that Eminem
[4:06] song, cleaning out my closet?
[4:07] It's sort of like a, an exercise that Marie Kondo would be part
[4:12] of, of just kind of going through.
[4:14] I'm looking at my closet over here, which I did this this past weekend
[4:17] 'cause I didn't get a chance to do it around New Year's time of just.
[4:22] Going through not only my supplement cabinet, which is egregiously large, but
[4:25] also clothes and those kind of things.
[4:28] And rather than doing spring cleaning and spleen and clean spring
[4:32] cleaning in spring, I, I just kind of take the time to do it now.
[4:36] And then the one I guess, objective I have for myself for
[4:40] the years is to slow down because.
[4:43] I don't know, maybe it's just the fact that I'm getting older, but I'm like,
[4:46] maybe I should just slow down a little bit and and smell the, smell the roses.
[4:50] Especially in Chicago winters, which don't exist.
[4:53] So anyway, so let's get back to that word, foundations, guys.
[4:57] And I think since this is one of the first episodes that we're doing under the new.
[5:03] The new moniker, the new moniker of of Health optimization Medicine.
[5:07] It's good to lay some foundations here because somebody tuning us for the first
[5:11] time might not have any perspective as to what health optimization medicine is,
[5:16] and I think in order to embrace health optimization medicine, you kind of have
[5:20] to understand three perspectives, right?
[5:22] And we talk about the differences or three perspective shifts, and those are a shift
[5:28] from pathogenesis to salu agenesis, a shift from organo to holo tology, and a
[5:34] shift from ger authorization to ization.
[5:37] And so let's, let's kind of volley a little bit here, have some fun.
[5:40] Um, triangles are the first stable structure in nature, so this is
[5:43] gonna be a good, good conversation.
[5:45] Dr. Scott Sherr: And both that genesis I love, I mean,
[5:47] this is what Al and I grew up.
[5:49] You know, in our medical school training, like you learn about anatomy
[5:52] for like a hot second and then as soon as possible they jump you and
[5:57] throw you all hands, all feet, all everything into pathogenesis, right?
[6:02] Which is, okay,
[6:02] Boomer Anderson: so let's define pathogenesis.
[6:04] Pathogenesis is getting sick or how would you guys define.
[6:11] Dr. Scott Sherr: The way I would define it, and Alan, you can add
[6:13] in this, is, is pathogenesis.
[6:14] Like why do things go wrong, right?
[6:17] And like, what's wrong with the system?
[6:19] Why did that happen?
[6:21] And then from there, finding ways to treat what's wrong.
[6:26] So you learn pathophysiology.
[6:29] Pathogenesis, that's like the first.
[6:32] Class that I can remember wasn't normal, normal physiology.
[6:35] I think I, we probably took that, but I think it was more in combination
[6:38] with, with disease physiology.
[6:40] Right?
[6:40] 'cause that's what we send, we spend the majority of time talking about.
[6:45] Is that how you define it, Alan?
[6:46] Dr. Allen Bookatz: Yeah, I agree.
[6:47] I, I, I think of it like what causes disease and for the
[6:53] listeners, we don't often.
[6:56] Distinguish health from disease.
[6:57] We just think, okay, well absence of disease is health, right?
[7:02] And in medical school we're actually in a very similar way, not to we, we
[7:07] don't learn to differentiate that.
[7:09] So like a, and as Scott said, we learn the basic anatomy, the
[7:14] basic way that things should work.
[7:15] And then we rush to pathophysiology and pathology, where we just study how we
[7:22] just study the disease state actually.
[7:24] Then, so we don't really even learn how things become disease.
[7:27] We just learn that there's healthy and then there's disease, and then
[7:30] we're taught, okay, this is the pharmacology that treats said disease,
[7:35] and we just, we just jump right there.
[7:38] And so it's really no surprise that you go to your doctor and you say, I am,
[7:42] Dr. Scott Sherr: you know,
[7:42] Dr. Allen Bookatz: I'd like to get checked up for my health.
[7:44] And they go, well, nothing's wrong with you.
[7:47] Right?
[7:47] You don't have any disease state.
[7:49] So, you know, there's not really much that your doctor can sort of offer
[7:52] you to, how do you stay healthy?
[7:53] Or maybe they're.
[7:54] Gonna share something like that.
[7:56] They learned follow the, follow the old food pyramid.
[7:58] Right.
[7:59] Dr. Scott Sherr: What we really ended up doing, boomer, is like we end up learning
[8:03] how to treat diseases and treat pathology.
[8:06] But nobody ever teach you, teaches you how to optimize or
[8:08] how to keep somebody healthy.
[8:10] Boomer Anderson: Yeah.
[8:10] So this is like, when I, I just wanna interject here for a second because
[8:13] look, I didn't go to med school for better or for worse, but one of the
[8:17] things that I always like to, when I explain this to people, I, I like
[8:20] to talk about healthcare as sort of.
[8:23] A bit of an oxymoron in some ways, and, and I'm talking specifically
[8:28] about the industry because what we're doing is really disease
[8:31] management, which is basically what you guys just outlined, right?
[8:34] There's no even digging into root cause analysis there.
[8:38] It's kind of like algorithmic.
[8:40] How do we solve this current issue in front of us, but.
[8:44] Then there's kind of that shift, right?
[8:46] And so when we're shifting over in our first perspective shift that
[8:50] we're going into, we're going from pathogenesis, which is for what I just
[8:56] heard, what you're taught in med school all the way over to saluted Genesis.
[9:01] Let's, let's jump into that now because I think this is something
[9:04] that if you're current practitioner in our healthcare air quote system, you
[9:11] might not be familiar with, but it's.
[9:13] Something that's worth, worth talking about, right?
[9:16] Like who doesn't want to get younger?
[9:17] Yeah.
[9:18] Dr. Allen Bookatz: So like if we're thinking about, right, if we, if we ship
[9:21] the frame and we say, okay, this is, we were, we all studied how diseases
[9:25] created or generated, pseudogenes shifts it and asks how is health created?
[9:32] And this was really, I don't remember a single lecture in
[9:35] medical school where we ever even considered that framework or that.
[9:40] Perspective.
[9:41] And so, you know, it's no surprise that your practitioner may have
[9:45] no idea what even salu agenesis means if you were to ask them.
[9:49] And so when you think about, yeah, it's a, it's a foreign
[9:51] word and that's why we're here.
[9:53] We're talking about definitions.
[9:54] Dr. Ted will often emphasize the precision of language here.
[9:58] And so I think, you know, going through these definitions
[10:01] is really, really important.
[10:02] So if we think about now go what is Salu?
[10:05] Agenesis?
[10:05] It's really about creating conditions in the body that support things like
[10:10] wellness, resiliency, and adaptability.
[10:14] So, um, yeah,
[10:15] Dr. Scott Sherr: and then for me, uh, just to interject is, you know,
[10:18] Dr. Ted's definition of health.
[10:21] Really stood out to me when I first heard about it way back
[10:24] in, you know, 2017 when he was,
[10:26] Boomer Anderson: you just secretly like algebra, don't you?
[10:29] Dr. Scott Sherr: I don't maybe algebra one, but maybe after, after that,
[10:34] getting into calculus was not my thing.
[10:36] I remember that was not easy for me, but with with a very simple definition.
[10:41] Using some algebra.
[10:43] He, he made it quite easy for me to understand really what we were talking
[10:46] about here, which is, you know, just like we said in the beginning of the
[10:48] podcast, you know, just because you're not sick doesn't mean you're well,
[10:51] it just means you're not sick, right?
[10:52] So health we typically think of as the absence of disease.
[10:55] But what Dr. Ted developed was a definition health
[10:58] equals A plus B plus C, right?
[11:00] So A is the absence of disease, that is true.
[11:04] B is the balance of an and metabolism, which is the an is the building up.
[11:10] You know, if like Boomer was taking his anabolic steroids to get huge,
[11:14] or catabolic, which is, you know, breaking down, you know, somebody that's
[11:17] older, they have less muscle mass, they're, you know, they're breaking
[11:20] down, they're gonna break a hip, you know, like, like Alan, because he's
[11:23] in his forties like me, you know?
[11:24] And so there you go.
[11:25] No, you still hanging
[11:26] Boomer Anderson: on, still hanging on guys,
[11:27] Dr. Scott Sherr: and they're still hanging on there for a little while.
[11:29] So it's a balance between an and and catabolism.
[11:32] That's the B. And then the C is according to the lifecycle or the organism.
[11:36] Where are you?
[11:37] In your life cycle, are you early?
[11:38] Are you going through puberty?
[11:40] Are you an an early adult?
[11:42] Are you an athlete and looking to optimize for a specific sport?
[11:46] Or are you elderly or older and you're looking to, you know, maintain muscle
[11:49] mass and you have to understand kinda where people are in that spectrum.
[11:53] And then using that definition, that's when we can create the
[11:56] salutogenic and use it salu, agenesis, and use that perspective.
[12:00] Boomer Anderson: I think just one thing to kind of bring this real for
[12:02] people that when you say anabolic and catabolic, it's nice to kind of put
[12:06] tangibles to to that for, for some that are tuning in that are not necessarily
[12:11] familiar with all the anabolic and catabolic processes of the body.
[12:15] And one of the easiest ways I like to.
[12:16] Look at this as hormones, like testosterone is anabolic.
[12:20] Uh, and I'm not gonna give the the actual network one here, but an interesting
[12:24] example of a catabolic one is cortisol.
[12:27] It's quite hard as an athlete to put on a lot of muscle if you're
[12:31] constantly stressed out, right?
[12:33] And so, you know, those are two examples of anabolic and catabolic and there's
[12:36] dozens to talk about throughout the body.
[12:39] But I, I think that's a great way to kind of sum up saluted genesis Now.
[12:44] This is, that's the first perspective shift.
[12:46] Let's go on to our second perspective shift here.
[12:49] Ger authorization for to ization, and I, I just want to interject
[12:56] here because when I was giving a TED Talk in 2020, and this was.
[13:03] Pretty much a couple months after I had spent time with Ted and Manila and
[13:07] I gave the Ted Talk partially about, well, it was mainly about health
[13:10] optimization medicine and holo tology.
[13:14] Ironically, that day, the woman after me who just absolutely crushed her Ted
[13:20] Talk, gave her entire TED talk about ization, and we were throwing balloons
[13:26] at each other in the middle of this auditorium on a beach in the Hague, but.
[13:33] That kind of sets the frame as to ne optimization, but GER authorization
[13:38] and gerontology, I guess, has become a very popular word these days.
[13:42] Let's get into ger authorization.
[13:44] How do we look at that?
[13:46] Dr. Scott Sherr: Well, Dr. Ted likes to, to quote this one Greek fable, which
[13:51] is, I think it's Greek, where it's like, basically if you wish for eternal life,
[13:56] you better as hell wish for eternal youth at the same time, or you're gonna live a
[14:02] very old and decrepit sort of existence.
[14:04] Right?
[14:05] So the, there's a lot of emphasis now on longevity, which is.
[14:09] Good.
[14:10] But the challenge is if you live a long time and your morbidities,
[14:14] you know, like basically you have injuries, illness, conditions that
[14:17] make your life miserable, then why?
[14:19] Right?
[14:20] So what we're all kind of going for is a lovely term called morbidity compression.
[14:25] Which just basically means that you live as long as you can, as healthy as you
[14:29] can, and you die very, very quickly.
[14:32] Once you do get, you know, some of those ailments or whatever,
[14:34] you go fast, right in your sleep.
[14:36] Everybody wants to die in their sleep.
[14:38] Like that's like, just like the movies, right?
[14:40] It doesn't happen very often anymore.
[14:42] Most people end up going to see Alan and then in the ER and then
[14:45] spending the last six months of their life and pain and suffering.
[14:48] And the amount of Medicare dollars that we spend in that last six
[14:51] months of somebody's life is like 80% of their, all of their
[14:54] Medicare dollars is a huge amount.
[14:55] Of money.
[14:56] So in essence, what we're talking about here is different, right?
[14:59] And it's talking about the optimization is kind of the
[15:02] opposite, or at least important to have an addition to geo ization.
[15:07] I dunno how you think about it, Alan and Boomer, but that's
[15:09] kind of my preamble there.
[15:11] Boomer Anderson: Yeah.
[15:11] So I mean.
[15:13] Gerontology has got a lot of popularity.
[15:16] There's a lot of people calling themselves bio and gerontologists too.
[15:19] And so just kind of looking at the, I, I think you outlined it a little
[15:22] beautifully there in terms of, if I, if I were to take, you know, a time continuum
[15:27] of life and just have your X access be time, your yxi be quality, let's say.
[15:35] You want your quality of life as high as possible for as long as possible.
[15:39] And then like one day you just want that to just drop to zero.
[15:43] Right?
[15:44] That, that to me is sort of the difference as Yeah.
[15:48] As fast as possible.
[15:49] And so, you know, when I, when I think about Ger authorization
[15:53] is sort of, you know.
[15:54] Getting older and you know, we have this image of the 120 year old woman
[15:59] in Italy who has been drinking wine and smoking cigarettes her entire
[16:03] life and somehow has lived to 120.
[16:05] But you know, she can't get out of bed or hasn't been able to leave her
[16:10] house in, you know, 10, 20 years.
[16:12] That is one version of getting old.
[16:16] And then you have this idea of what you said with morbidity, compression
[16:21] or just the ability to, you know.
[16:24] Live as healthy for as long as possible.
[16:27] So that's kind of how I think about it.
[16:29] Neo optimization itself, when I think about getting younger, it's
[16:33] about not only adapting behaviors of.
[16:38] What it's like to be young, but also part of what Scott talked about
[16:43] earlier in terms of the definition of health, A plus B plus C, the
[16:48] lifecycle, the organism part.
[16:50] When we talk about getting younger, we look foundationally in home
[16:54] hope at the cell, and we mentioned earlier about bringing people back
[16:59] to the age of 21 to 60, which is.
[17:02] Evolutionary optimized levels in terms of how evolutionary optimized levels
[17:07] for both nutrients and hormones.
[17:08] And that's really a, a good place for us to bring people so that at
[17:14] least foundationally your cells are younger, by definition, they're
[17:18] between the ages of 21 to 30 if you've got optimized for those levels.
[17:21] And so that.
[17:23] Foundation, and that's a word that I keep hitting at is,
[17:26] is what we set the base for.
[17:28] That allows for the ization to occur elsewhere.
[17:31] And you know, I don't know Alan, how much you spend, how much time you spend
[17:35] on social media, but occasionally you see like those pictures of like the
[17:37] cute old couples and it's like, uh, or, or I picture the wedding singer with
[17:42] Adam Sandler, drew Barrymore, and he's.
[17:45] Like the last scene he gets on the plane, he sings that song and it's
[17:49] like, I wanna get old with you.
[17:52] It's like a new romantic way of like looking at at love, right?
[17:56] And so I love over a time span.
[17:59] And so you know this woman who gave this TED talk at the end, she was
[18:05] giving examples of like how people ize or get younger and she wasn't talking
[18:10] about it at a biochemical level like we do in health optimization medicine.
[18:13] She was talking about it more in the context of like activities and things.
[18:18] And so going back to that social media point, you see like these old couples
[18:22] that, like the old guys sort of in his.
[18:25] Wheelchair going down the street.
[18:26] Hopefully you're not in a wheelchair if you're doing this properly, but like he's,
[18:30] he's like grabbing the ass of his wife.
[18:32] And
[18:32] Dr. Allen Bookatz: kind of like
[18:33] Boomer Anderson: at a younger age, you would be seen as inappropriate,
[18:35] but an older age is kind of cute.
[18:37] Right.
[18:37] And so it's like not only adopting the.
[18:41] Behaviors that you would do when you're younger, perhaps in a a, you
[18:46] know, with your partner of course, but also making sure that you bring
[18:49] your cells and nutrients and hormones back to 21 to 21 and 30 years of age.
[18:53] So anyway, let's, let's kind of wrap it up on ization with Mr. Boot Kats here.
[18:58] Yeah.
[18:58] Dr. Boot Cats.
[18:59] Dr. Allen Bookatz: Dr. Buca.
[18:59] Well, I, you say that and I like look around from my father here, you know, so,
[19:04] you know, I, I love what you said about.
[19:06] Your goal is not, you know, we talked a lot about longevity, right?
[19:10] And that's a really big buzzword, or healthy aging, and this is really
[19:14] fundamentally different, right?
[19:16] We're not saying healthy aging, we're saying no, we wanna ensure that
[19:21] you have the vitality of what it's like to be biologically youthful.
[19:26] So functionally looking at the basic unit that is reflected.
[19:32] In all of your organs and your tissues, and ultimately how you function is
[19:36] the level is at the level of the cell.
[19:38] And so it's very different than what we'd say when you go to your doctor.
[19:42] We are looking at the level of perhaps the organ system, which is important, but
[19:47] rarely there's anything you can do to, to try to bring back that biological age.
[19:52] And so, and I think when we talk about quality of life and health
[19:57] span, this is really, this is really what we're referring to.
[20:00] Yeah,
[20:01] Boomer Anderson: absolutely.
[20:02] All right, so let's, we've covered two of the three perspective shifts.
[20:05] We're gonna go to three, and just because I have the microphone right now, I wanna
[20:09] give a little bit of a, a foray into this.
[20:12] And so I'm gonna passport back to 2019.
[20:15] And in early 2019, I did not know.
[20:18] Anything about health optimization medicine, if anything, like I'd already
[20:23] been three years into dissecting my own health issues and I've kind of gone
[20:27] through the functional medicine world and I kind of went through and dabbled
[20:31] with whole bunch of stuff, right.
[20:33] And then I interviewed Dr. Cher her to give you a little Nelly reference
[20:40] there, for those of you that are old enough to know who Nelly is, and I, he
[20:45] mentioned this word called the hobi.
[20:47] And for me it was like one of those moments.
[20:50] And you ever have like those divine moments where I know some
[20:53] cool kids call this downloads into their operating system.
[20:57] But you have those moments where you're like, holy shit, I get it.
[21:00] And he mentioned this word called the hobi, and I think at
[21:02] that point I was just grabbing towards any word that sounds cool.
[21:06] And then I heard Dr. Ted explain the hobi and I was like, I,
[21:12] between the two of them, I was like, okay, I get it, I get it.
[21:15] And this is ultimately like how.
[21:18] For me, the, the vector in health optimization medicine was through
[21:22] the holo bion, and so the last of the three perspective shifts is
[21:25] from organ to holo tology, and.
[21:28] You know the holo bion.
[21:30] We're going let Dr. Buka here explain ology a little bit.
[21:34] But the holo bion is a concept that was originally, there was a German
[21:39] scientist that did it many moons ago, and then it was popularized in the
[21:43] early nineties by a woman named Dr.
[21:45] Linmark.
[21:46] She recently passed away, but.
[21:48] The idea is, is that your body is not a super organism or a collection of cells.
[21:55] It's not, you're not a super organism sitting on top of just cells.
[21:59] You're actually a collection of other organisms, and I could give
[22:02] it, let me just give examples of those to make it real.
[22:05] We're all familiar at this point.
[22:07] At least I hope we're familiar with the fact that we have bacteria
[22:10] living in our stomach, right?
[22:11] We have.
[22:13] Billions, if not trillions of those.
[22:14] Right.
[22:15] And there's so many different varieties of them.
[22:17] We also have fungus and that, you know, we know that there's different
[22:21] populations of fungus that exist in somewhat of a healthy balance in our body.
[22:27] For some people.
[22:28] We also have viruses.
[22:29] We have, you know.
[22:31] Basically the hobi is the idea that you are actually a collection of organisms.
[22:36] And to me, this was one of the moments where I was like, holy shit, I get it.
[22:39] Because your job then, as the health manager, or if you're
[22:43] taking care of yourself and trying to help optimize, it's not to.
[22:48] Just jack up my dopamine levels and my testosterone levels so that I'm
[22:53] on all the time, and then give me something to just knock out at night.
[22:57] Your job is actually to just balance these organisms and to give them the
[23:00] environment that they need to thrive.
[23:02] Right.
[23:03] And so your detection then becomes more of a balancing exercise rather than
[23:08] a, an exercise in overhauling things.
[23:11] And, and that can look at, look at, you can look at balances of metabolites.
[23:14] You can look at balances of metabolites in both the gut as well as your cells.
[23:19] But that to me was the moment where I was like, damn, mic drop done.
[23:25] Okay, but we have to go back here and do a little moonwalk and go into organ.
[23:30] So.
[23:32] Let's go Dr. Bcat.
[23:34] The current healthcare system is very structured on ology and I was having
[23:39] coffee with a, a friend who's a pretty prominent professor at, at, at a school
[23:45] in Washington, DC and he laughed when I said ology, he just said that nails
[23:50] it on the head, but it's hilarious.
[23:51] So what is organ?
[23:53] Dr. Allen Bookatz: So you can think of organ.
[23:55] If you look at our, you know, our medical system, right?
[23:58] We have.
[24:00] We have a medical system of physicians that are specialists and
[24:04] they specialize in organs, right?
[24:06] So for example, we have a gastrointestinal doctor, we have a Pat Billary
[24:10] doctors, we have a cardiac doctor, we have endocrinologists, right?
[24:15] And they might focus on a particular organ or a subset of organs, and the
[24:21] role is, or maybe a very, very small part of an organ or the eye, right?
[24:27] You have an ophthalmol ophthalmologist.
[24:29] And so the, and they, and they, so what they do is they study, you know, organ
[24:34] traditionally studies the role of organs and their roles, and in a more, the,
[24:40] the more, we'll call it evolved version of this would be looking at the body
[24:44] as a collection of these, we'll call them functionally specific units that.
[24:51] Should you know that work together.
[24:53] However, if you ever go to a specialist, they're going to look
[24:56] at you and your issue through the lens of that organ, right?
[25:01] Boomer Anderson: And that that is like.
[25:03] The, that, that's really how I, I kind of grabbed this whole framework.
[25:07] I was like, yes, this is great because every time you go into the current
[25:12] healthcare system, and again, there's certain reasons why you would want
[25:14] to, you would wanna go see that specialist, but they're viewing the
[25:18] lens through whatever their, their, their bias is more towards, okay, this
[25:23] organ is so important and therefore.
[25:25] The complexities of how other organs interact with it don't
[25:29] necessarily occur, right?
[25:31] Dr. Allen Bookatz: Correct.
[25:31] Boomer Anderson: And so,
[25:32] Dr. Allen Bookatz: and in a disease based model that works, right?
[25:35] If you are, if your liver is failing, then you want to go to somebody who is
[25:41] a liver specialist who can help you with why your liver is failing at that moment.
[25:46] But in health, we can't, we can't really take the perspective
[25:48] of the isolated organ.
[25:51] And so maybe Scott, we can, you can tell us a little bit about, we back
[25:55] up our view when we talk about whole the, the concept of the holo bion here.
[26:01] Dr. Scott Sherr: Yeah.
[26:01] It's funny.
[26:02] Back in way back in residency in medical school, there was a funny.
[26:06] YouTube video about going to see a specialist, right?
[26:09] If you go to see a cardiologist, you get an echocardiogram and an EKG.
[26:15] If you go to a pulmonologist, you get a chest x-ray and pulmonary function test.
[26:18] If you get a neurologist, you get an MRI like.
[26:20] These are, these are just the things that you do.
[26:23] When you're thinking about things from an organ specific way, and, and we get
[26:26] it right, you can, you can see these things like you can open up a cadaver,
[26:30] a body, and you can see a liver, you can see a heart, you can see, you
[26:34] know, every, you can see a spleen.
[26:36] But what you can't see unless you're looking under a microscope is that
[26:38] all these organs are run by the same basic cell and that same basic
[26:45] cell, if you optimize at that level.
[26:48] Then everything else gets better because it's all networked
[26:52] throughout the whole system.
[26:53] And when Ted was talking about holo tology me, to me, just like with you Boomer,
[26:57] back in the day, it was like, holy crap, this is exactly what's missing in health.
[27:01] 'cause we know that things don't work in silos.
[27:04] We know that the heart functions and it's a part of a cardiovascular system
[27:08] and the blood vessel walls and, and the mitochondria that are in the cells.
[27:11] Like there's all these things that are happening that we, you know, we know
[27:14] about this, we learn about it in medical school, but we don't realize that.
[27:18] There's a basic cell that runs everything.
[27:20] And so, and not only that, like at the basic cellular level, you can see
[27:24] what's happening both from the genetic side, the gen genome and things, and
[27:28] the sort of the, the manifestations of that in the cellular level, but also
[27:31] the environmental exposures and things that are happening outside of the body.
[27:36] And this is in the field called metabolomics.
[27:37] And that's the field of metabolomics that really drives hobi ontology,
[27:43] which is understanding how things are working real time at the cell.
[27:46] Right now and what, so what has happened?
[27:49] What's happening now and what has just happened?
[27:51] And by looking at that holo biot level, using metabolomics, which I know are big
[27:55] words, but that holo organism that is you, and looking at a networked level
[28:00] of metabolites or laboratory values that give you the sense of how a cell works.
[28:04] Well, that's the change in perspective that we all need.
[28:07] Because if you look at that perspective, if you focus on
[28:09] the cell, then everything else.
[28:12] Just sort of goes and, and, and extends from there as opposed to trying to hammer
[28:17] it from the outside and not getting to that basic cell in the beginning.
[28:21] Dr. Allen Bookatz: Yeah.
[28:21] The word, the word that I always love Ted using is that, is that we are an ecosystem
[28:25] of ecosystems and you know, one ecosystem is the basic unit is a cell, but that's
[28:31] not just our cells within our organs.
[28:34] We're also referring to our microbial partners, who I think, as
[28:39] Ted affectionately refers to as a.
[28:42] Postnatal organ, which I just, I just love that 'cause it, if we start to really
[28:46] think about our microbiota, wherever it may be, we historically think of it
[28:51] in terms of our endoluminal or our gut microbiota, but we have it on our skin
[28:54] and our mucus membranes in every orifice.
[28:57] You know, there's even different regional differences within parts of
[29:01] our tongue in our, like the, like the type of bacteria that lives on the
[29:06] front of our tongue versus the back versus on our teeth are all different.
[29:10] And they.
[29:11] Perform different types of roles.
[29:13] And so moving to a perspective of, you know, these are also part of us, we're
[29:17] made of these human cells, but we're also made of trillions of these other microbes
[29:21] that, that work very closely to help us co-regulate things like our immunity, our
[29:25] metabolism, our mood, and so much more.
[29:30] Boomer Anderson: Uh, gentlemen, it's been an absolute pleasure,
[29:33] but we have to wrap things up.
[29:34] Okay.
[29:34] Today we've discussed three.
[29:37] And I'm holding two, but I mean three.
[29:39] Three different perspective shifts, which are core to
[29:42] whole, to core to all of health optimization, medicine and practice.
[29:46] We talked about pathogenesis to Salu.
[29:48] Agenesis.
[29:49] We talked about geriatric to ne authorization.
[29:51] We talked about ology to holo tology, and ultimately what does that mean
[29:55] in terms of perspective shifts?
[29:56] It means shifting your perspective from disease to health.
[30:00] All right, I'm gonna pass it over to the man with the radio voice to close us out.
[30:05] Dr. Scott Sherr: So don't forget everybody, this is a new perspective,
[30:07] but it doesn't change the need for the other aspects of health as well, right?
[30:11] We need acute care, even functional medicine.
[30:13] We have great, great colleagues that do great work for root causes, but
[30:16] what we're really doing here at Health Optimization Medicine and we're gonna
[30:19] be doing in this podcast with you is bringing on guests, having people on, and
[30:23] having conversations internally to talk about this shift in perspective, right?
[30:26] And so the, the shift in perspective is this.
[30:29] Health optimization medicine is the first standard of care for health,
[30:33] not disease, tons of standards of care for disease, right?
[30:36] You have diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer, et cetera.
[30:39] That's fine.
[30:40] What we're talking about here is the first ever multis standard of care for health,
[30:47] and so we wanna welcome you all home.
[30:50] Health optimization medicine is we welcome you home and health optimization
[30:54] practice is we give everyone hope that there is a different perspective that all
[30:57] of us can share and build as clinicians.
[31:00] So thank you so much for listening to the first episode of the Health
[31:04] Optimization Medicine podcast.
[31:06] More to come, more to arrive, and we'll see you all next time.

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