×

Terry Grossman on His Longevity Clinic at EARD2021

Dr. Grossman holds that his field is gradually beginning to understand longevity better.

Share







Terry GrossmanTerry Grossman

In this interview at our fourth annual Ending Age-Related Diseases conference, Elena Milova and Terry Grossman discuss his longevity clinic and how current medicine deals with the problems of aging.

Script

Elena: Greetings to the participants of Ending Age-Related Diseases 2021. This conference brings together thought leaders and researchers working on rejuvenation biotechnology with the goal of extending healthy human life. While the researchers work hard on bringing rejuvenation biotechnology to fruition, there is another open front: clinical implementation. Many methods of potential life extension, including existing drugs with geroprotective effects, have not yet passed human clinical trials. The early adopters, who often call themselves biohackers, have to take their own risks when using therapies that are still considered experimental. However, it’s clear that the best results can only be achieved with the support of a professional medical adviser. Luckily, we have pioneers in this field to learn from, and today I’m discussing the history of early longevity clinics with Dr. Terry Grossman, the founder of Grossman Wellness Center, lecturer and writer who co-authored two great books, Transcend and Fantastic Voyage, with famous futurologist Ray Kurzweil. Hello, Dr. Grossman. Thanks for joining us today.

Terry: Thank you, Elena, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Elena: Could you please tell us how you got interested in rejuvenation biotechnology? Was it before or after you met Ray Kurzweil?

Terry: Well, I first took an interest in rejuvenation medicine, rejuvenation technologies, and anti-aging medicine when I was in my mid-40s, and the reason I got interested was because I began to experience some aspects of the aging process. Prior to that, nothing ever hurt me, I could do whatever I want, whenever I wanted, I could eat whatever I want, I never gained any weight, I could do anything, and nothing ever hurt. And then after that, I would wake up in the morning and things hurt for no reason, and I didn’t like it. I realized that I was suffering the aging process, so I took an interest in seeing if there were things that I could do for myself to slow down and to reverse the aging process. In other words, rejuvenation. This occurred in around 1993. So I began doing anti-aging medicine in my office, and that’s in 1992, an organization, the first anti-aging organization in the world, was founded called A4M. A4M had their first annual meeting in 1992, and then I went to their annual meeting in 1993, and my medical practice was completely changed. I decided that I wanted to regard aging as a disease, and do what I could as a doctor to help my patients to slow down, stop, and if possible, reverse the aging process. So it wasn’t until 1999 when I was doing research on my first book called the Baby Boomer’s Guide to Living Forever, that I was at a nanotechnology conference. I happened in the lunch line to meet someone who was speaking about nutritional supplements, and I joined in their conversation. This man’s name was Ray Kurzweil, who I didn’t know at the time, and we struck up a conversation. After that conversation together, later, in 1999, Ray flew from his home on the East Coast of the United States in Boston, to my clinic in the middle of the United States, in Denver, Colorado, and he became a patient. Then, over the next few years, we had an extensive collaboration on many different topics in medicine and society in the future. One day, we decided we have so many emails, it was over 10,000 already, why don’t we put them together into a book? That’s how we decided to write our first book together, which was published in 2004.

ADVERTISEMENT

Eterna is a clothing company with a focus on longevity.

Elena: That sounds wonderful. Well, most doctors that I know are very cautious and conservative. It’s generally a good thing because of the principle ‘do no harm’, but often they don’t even want to discuss an experimental treatment or novelty that has been recently approved or is currently in development. One doctor I visited almost condemned me for bringing him the data from my very large checkup. What do you think is the right balance between conservatism and open mindedness for a modern medical professional?

Terry: Well, as physicians go through medical school, we are taught, and this was what was taught to me when I was in medical school 45 years ago, and my son who just became a doctor a few years ago, nothing has changed. What doctors are taught is, in order for us to adopt the therapy, or to use a new medication, it needs to be subjected to what they referred to as a double blind, placebo controlled, randomized trial. The problem with that is, these type of experiments require hundreds of thousands of patients, they require tens of millions of dollars or more, they take a long time, many years to perform, and then when you get the evidence, at that point, they have to go through FDA approval in the United States, and that’s a process that often takes more years as well. So what I would like to say, for myself and to my colleagues, is life is not a double-blind placebo-controlled trial. I don’t have time to wait for the results of double-blind placebo-controlled trial to tell me that a certain intervention will extend my life. So what we have decided to do, and what is gaining traction among physicians at practice, longevity medicine, rejuvenation medicine, is referred to as evidence-based trials. In other words, if we have evidence, published reports of the fact that a certain intervention, like metformin, for instance, extends the lifespan of fruit flies, and mice and other animals that take this, and we find that this medication is the most popular medicine for treating diabetes and hundreds of millions of prescriptions have been written for this, and it has a very high margin of safety, we can take that evidence of safety and that evidence of the fact that it works, and that’s evidence medicine. Even though it hasn’t undergone the formal, double-blind, placebo-controlled randomized trial, we begin to use it. Interestingly, when it comes to that particular medicine, metformin, it is right now undergoing as the first anti-aging medicine being considered by the National Institute of Aging in the United States, and they are funding a $77 million trial called TAME, the trial to assess metformin in aging. That’s kind of the difference between rejuvenation doctors and conventional doctors, that conventional doctors are waiting for these formal trials to be completed first, but many of us in the rejuvenation community don’t want to wait that long. We can’t wait that long.

Elena: That’s a fair point. What are the bottlenecks that you face most when you are suggesting an evidence-based longevity-promoting regime to your patients? What were the bottlenecks when you first started, and what are the bottlenecks now?

Terry: I think that the reason that many doctors aren’t willing to stray from the FDA approved use of medications is they’re afraid. In other words, my ability to practice medicine is like my ability to drive a car. To drive a car, I have to have a driver’s license, and for me to practice medicine, I have to have a medical license. Just like the driver’s license is issued by the government, my medical license is governed by the medical board in the state that I live. If you don’t practice medicine according to what is approved standards, in other words, the way it’s taught in medical school, many times, this is considered to be substandard care, and physician who practices substandard medicine is subject to investigation and scrutiny by the medical board. This can lead to problems such as warning letters, suspension of your license, or in the worst case scenario, the removal of your medical license, and you cannot practice medicine at all. I think that’s really what the bottleneck is, is many doctors are afraid to get into this problem with the medical board. Early on, when I first began doing this type of medicine in the mid-1990s, I did come under investigation on several occasions by my local medical board. Luckily, in every case, I won the case and they said okay, you can continue doing what you’re doing, but if I had been unlucky, I would not be practicing medicine anymore. So I think doctors are afraid of that.

Elena: It looks like at the end of the day, it’s the result that matters to the medical board. The improvement of the health of a patient is the best proof that what you’re doing makes sense.

ADVERTISEMENT

An advertisement banner for PartiQular supplements.

Terry: Yes, what you say makes sense, but as you know, in this world, what makes sense and what is done are often not the same. I will give you one example. I was treating a patient who had a very bad stage four cancer, and it spread all throughout the patient’s body. They put the patient in a hospice with a plan that he would only have three to six months to live. Well, he came into my clinic, and we did some novel therapies, high-dose, intravenous vitamin C and some other things along those lines, and the patient had a remarkable recovery. Six months later, he went to see the surgeon that had originally done his surgery to have some revision of the surgery, and the surgeon was shocked. Why are you here, I didn’t even expect you to be alive now, and the guy looked healthy. Rather than calling me, the doctor, and seeing what I had done to help this patient, what he did instead was, he wrote a letter to my medical board and made a complaint about me, and the medical board investigated me. So when I got the letter, I wrote back, I said, What is the problem? The patient was in hospice and was dying, and I did some non-toxic therapies, like high-dose vitamin C, and now he’s much better. So it shows that what makes sense, and what has good results, does not necessarily translate to accepted medical care, you’re still supposed to follow the book. So it’s a very almost irrational way that we practice still today.

Elena: I’m so sorry to hear that, but that just shows that we must really rethink the very way how we provide those innovative therapies to the patients. I think your point can be even reinforced, if I remember, according to some statistics that I have read, around 25% of patients do not have a usual reaction, a usual response to treatment, they may respond differently, they may respond or not respond at all. That means that in all cases, when a doctor sees a patient, they actually have to work together to identify those, individual tolerance, individual reactions, and to adjust the treatment and to find a treatment that works, and sometimes it takes months and a choice of very different approaches, before a patient actually finds something that helps him or her. This just means that in every case, every patient is basically his own clinical trial.

Terry: Well, I think that one of the most important things that a patient can do, as regards their own health, is to enter the relationship with their doctor as if they are partners. So it shouldn’t be, the doctor is here and the patient is here, the doctor knows everything, the patient knows very little, that’s really not the way it is anymore. The doctor and patient are on kind of an equal footing, and they communicate with one another and they work together for the benefit of the patient.

Elena: I completely agree with you. I also think that the best results can only be achieved this way. Even in the community of biohackers, who are more knowledgeable than usual about human biology and medicine, even in their community, it’s a common practice to work with a medical advisor in order to understand correctly what’s going on in the body and how to address those issues, so that’s definitely an important point. How did the environment change since you first started the clinic? 25 years is quite a long time. I’m particularly interested in regulatory aspects but also communications technology, availability of new equipment, workforce, anything that looks different now.

Terry: Things have changed quite a bit over the past 25 years, since I’ve been in the rejuvenation and anti-aging medical space. When I first began doing these therapies, particularly when I was treating disease, not treating aging, because most doctors didn’t even regard aging as a disease, so they didn’t care about that. When we are treating a patient with heart disease, treating a patient with cancer, with non-standard therapies, a lot of the doctors would say to the patient, oh, you’re going and getting these vitamin infusions and you’re getting ozone treatment, et cetera, you’re getting all of these things that I don’t understand. If you’re going to continue to do that, I will not treat you as a patient anymore. You need to leave and get another doctor. That has changed. Now, you know enough studies have been published in literature attesting to the value of some of these complementary therapies. When I started to do this in the city I live in, in 1995, I was the only one, I was the only doctor that was doing this therapy. Now, there are several dozen in my city that are doing that. So as it’s become more common, more and more of the regular standard, traditional doctors are seeing patients that also get these non-standard therapies. So they won’t do the non-standard therapies, but they don’t tell the patient, you need to leave if you do them, we’ll work together, I’ll do what I learned in medical school. If you want to do this for anti-aging or rejuvenation, it’s okay, but that’s on your own, I don’t know anything about that. It hasn’t changed to where they really want to know about it. They’re waiting, like we talked about at the beginning, for the randomized double-blind studies. Until they come out, they won’t do it, but they’re not opposing it like they did. I think that’s a big, big change that has occurred in the past 25 years, which is beneficial for the patient.

ADVERTISEMENT

Elena: Anything else?

Terry: I think some of the medical schools are beginning to offer classes in holistic medicine and integrative medicine. They’re beginning to add nutrition to the curriculum and not just look at drugs and surgery as the only treatments that are available to patients. So more and more doctors as they come out of medical school, their eyes have been opened to these other types of therapies and to the possibility of rejuvenation medicine as well.

Elena: That sounds wonderful, actually, that that means that the new generation of doctors, at the very least are more open minded, at least than I expected.

Terry: I have to say it’s much better than it was 25 years ago.

Elena: Wonderful. Please tell me more about your center, how does a regular patient get in touch with you for advice on their general health matters or longevity regime, and then what happens next? How do your patients take this journey? How do they get started? What do they do?

Terry: Well, most of the people that come to our longevity clinic, in Denver, have either read one of the books I’ve written, or, like everybody finds out about anything, they go do a web search. They put in certain keywords, and they find information about us. So those are the two most common ways that people at least find out about us. The third, which is probably the most important of all, and the most common, is they’ve talked to someone else who is a patient of ours. So those are the three ways that people find out about us. Also, I do give lectures and things like that from time to time. So we do spread the word, and then the process is, they will call our office, and we have a patient care coordinator, who is very knowledgeable about the different therapies that we offer, and is able to talk to the patient and find out what they’re looking for. So at the one extreme, we might have someone who knows very little about anything other than standard medicine, and they don’t even know much about that. They don’t know much about their body, they don’t even want to know, they just want somebody to take care of it. Quite honestly, that’s not too many of my patients. At the other extreme, you have the quantified self movement and the biohackers. They know more than I do half the time about all of these things, and they come in, and they’re just looking for somebody to do some tests to help them with the program they’ve already established for themselves. Most people fall in the middle. So they know something about it, they’ve read some books about it, and they want to do some testing. Really, they want to know how old they are biologically, for instance. Now we have many things, whether it’s telomere length, whether it’s the age of your arteries, from testing that we can do, whether it’s methylation patterns, epigenetics of your genes, and these all can establish where you are. So you’re 36 years old chronologically, but biologically, you’re 26, or biologically you’re 46. Whatever the case may be, depending on the kind of genetics you have, depending on the lifestyle choices you make, you can find out where you are, so people will want to do a series of tests. There are a lot of tests. One of the two main pillars that Ray Kurzweil and I discussed in our books together were early detection of disease and prevention of disease. Prevention of disease, I think, is the most important. If we can prevent a disease, we can do that with diet and exercise and supplements and detox, and things along those lines, but if we can’t prevent a disease, at least we want to detect it as early as possible. Even in the last few years, the ability to detect the main killers, heart disease, stroke, and cancer, are responsible for 55% of all deaths, if we are able to detect heart disease at its earliest stage, now we have the ability to do that with ultrasound technology. It’s inexpensive, it’s painless, there’s no radiation involved, it’s safe. People can do this test, it takes 10 minutes, and they can find out if they have any build-up of the kind of plaque that leads to heart attack or stroke. If they know that they do, they can begin to do things to make that number one cause of death go away. The same thing applies to cancer detection, the cost of a total body MRI, to look at your entire body, from head to toe with an MRI scan and look inside, has come down to just a few hundred dollars to where it’s really become affordable for many people now. I think we’re on the verge of what’s called the CTC, circulating tumor cells test, where it’s available, but it’s quite expensive now, but I think it will become less expensive in the year or two ahead, and people will be able to just do a blood specimen and find out if they have any circulating tumor cells, and if they do, take aggressive action to even get rid of a tumor before it’s the size of a pinhead. So there’s many things that are available right now. That’s how the journey begins.

Elena: That sounds wonderful. I am fascinated, in fact, by the amount of diagnostics that became available in the last few years or maybe even in the last decade, I personally have taken a genetic test that explained a lot of health issues that I have, that was a huge revelation. I am regularly using those large diagnostic panels to make sure that I don’t have those flags that you’re discussing. And by the way, my intima-media complex is fine. What do you consider the best rejuvenation promoting methods that are at your disposal?

Terry: A recommendation for what people can do. Obviously, the two main pillars are diet and exercise, because everybody can do that for themselves. People can read, and they can study, and they can even do genetics, and the genetics can direct them, should they be more towards a higher-fat diet, or should they be more of a vegan diet or things like that, or they can just trial and error, they find out if they’re vegan, they gain a lot of weight, it’s not the best diet for them. They find out that they eat a lot of protein, well, their blood tests go crazy, their cholesterol goes up. With trial and error, people can find out the best diet. Also, some people do better with strength training exercise, some people do better with more aerobic exercise, so with trial and error, people can come up with a game plan like that. That’s good. Then I think there are some simpler things that people do. Obviously, we need to take supplements. After the age of 35, virtually everybody needs to take something like a multivitamin, maybe flax oil or fish oil. Almost 100% of people are low on vitamin D, so you check your vitamin D level, you take enough vitamin D to get the level into a good range. So doing some basic testing, and then determining what you need to take, would be a benefit. I think that as a kind of an entry-level medication, anti-aging medicine, I think metformin is a good one for people to consider. It’s very inexpensive. It’s very safe. It doesn’t require extremely close monitoring. Getting metformin, it’s one of the best that we have. There are better ones. I mean, rapamycin is now undergoing some clinical trials, and we’re using rapamycin with some patients, but it requires a lot more monitoring, more blood testing, more frequent visits with a doctor, it becomes more expensive and things like that. Detoxification is very important. I mean, we do not live in a pristine world. The world we live in is filled with toxic food with pesticides, with plastics, with air pollution, so we need to do things to detoxify our body. One of the most important things to rejuvenate your body is to keep your hormones at a youthful level. When you’re 25, you don’t have to worry, your hormones are fine. When you’re 35, things just begin to change, when you’re 45, they begin to change a lot. And after 50, they really change. It’s important to measure your hormone levels, and we don’t want to be 18 again, I mean, most of us don’t want to be 18 again, the hormones are a little bit too much to deal with, but maybe we should for levels of like healthy 35 year olds. So we measure our hormone levels, and then a woman would, as she gets into the perimenopausal age group, consider taking supplemental estrogen and progesterone. There are many reasons why that’s beneficial in terms of bone health, in terms of heart health, in terms of Alzheimer’s prevention, just general youthfulness. Testosterone, I think, is one of the most underutilized hormones that we have. Both men and women do very, very well when we measure their testosterone levels. If they’re quite low, using testosterone supplementation can keep the bones strong, have the exercise lead to more development of muscle mass and loss of fat mass. Also, the other many beneficial effects, mental effects of testosterone in terms of clear thinking, better memory, deeper sleep. There are a lot of benefits to hormone replacement as well. Those are kind of entry level things that people can do that don’t cost a lot of money and can be done with the assistance of their physicians and don’t require a specialized anti aging clinic.

Elena: That sounds very interesting, and I completely agree with you that it all starts with diagnostics. I think that the role of diagnostics is severely underestimated by the general public, because how in the world can you feel that you have iron deficiency, maybe it’s magnesium deficiency, maybe you’re lacking vitamin B group, or something. That’s why you may feel anemic, and we’ve experienced some sort of fatigue and such, so we cannot really tell what kind of deficiency lies behind a certain change in our condition, right?

Terry: It’s interesting that you say this, because they did a study along these lines, and they found that 90%, the study was done in the United States, that 90% of American people were deficient in one major vitamin or mineral, at least one. The problem is, to test all of those vitamins and minerals will cost a lot of money. To take a multivitamin mineral supplement every day costs a few pennies a day. In many cases, it’s good to do the testing, and in many cases, if money is an issue, just take the multiple vitamins and things like that. What I spoke about before was things that could be done kind of at an entry level, I also just want to take a minute or two to talk about the advanced things that are available. I had mentioned rapamycin. There are more and more doctors that are beginning to use rapamycin, which is an immune suppressant, but it’s been found to have very powerful longevity effects. It’s probably the most powerful thing we have right now for longevity. Also, some doctors began doing the young blood therapies where they took the patient, gave them some blood from a healthy 25 year old, which didn’t do very much good, because they were thinking that it was something in the blood of the young people that would make the old people younger. Well, now they they have found out thanks to the research of the Conboys and others, that it’s really, there’s things in the blood of the old people that if you take them out, you don’t need to replace it with young blood, just take them out, like the apheresis and the heterochronic plasma exchange type of things. These are some new therapies that are now coming online that are very powerful for rejuvenation that the specialized rejuvenation clinics are beginning to offer.

Elena: That sounds wonderful, and I’m happy that those therapies are currently in clinical trials. In fact, I am a volunteer in such a trial in Russia; we’re also testing plasma dilution therapy here. Pretty much like the kind of therapy that Irina Conboy is developing, it’s just a little bit different in terms of the protocol, the volume of plasma that is taken out at once and such, but it’s very, very similar. It’s interesting, actually, I cannot obviously share any further details about it because it’s a trial and I don’t really want to increase the placebo effect in people who are going to be participating in it, but that’s indeed one of the very interesting directions of scientific research right now, especially because plasmapheresis might be a useful addition to another longevity therapy, as I was explained by the lead researcher of that trial, Ilmira Gilmutdinova, by the way, she is speaking at this conference. She explained to me that if you first detoxicate the body, and you create a more positive environment in the body, then if you apply a longevity therapy next, whatever it can be, it might be that you’re going to get a much greater effect. It’s a possibility; it’s still to be tested.

Terry: I agree with you, I think they they refer to that as a biological terrain. In other words, when you plant the seed, if you just go out in the field, and it’s all hard and rocky and not ready, you throw the seed out or replant it, it doesn’t grow very well. But if you fertilize the soil, and you take care of it, and you till it and do the things that are necessary, like you do with the body, you prepare the body, then the anti-aging and rejuvenation therapies will work better.

Elena: Wonderful, and that’s great to hear. One more question that I had for you, there is currently no consensus regarding aging in academia. What’s your opinion on whether or not you should consider aging a disease, and, by the way, the public doesn’t really feel that it’s such a problem. I spoke to many people, and we even had some surveys. And they are fine, because in their mind, aging is so close to a disease that there is no concern, but academia is another thing. So what’s your opinion,

Terry: My personal opinion is that there’s a difference between the process of aging and getting older. There’s nothing that we can do about getting older. Next year, I’m going to be a year older than I am now, but I’m not necessarily going to have aged one year, next year, I hope I haven’t. Maybe I’ve gotten younger, depending on the lifestyle choices I’ve made. I personally regard aging as a harmful process and one that I would like as an anti-aging rejuvenation physician to treat as a disease. I can’t treat getting older, but what I want to do is help my patients to get older without aging, so that is the goal. I understand that a lot of people there, they are stuck in the mindset that it is natural to get older and to age and to die. I don’t necessarily believe that. I think we can get older, not necessarily age, and I think we’re on the cusp of not having to die as well. So I think that when Ray and I wrote our books together, the title of our first book together, Fantastic Voyage, was “Live long enough to live forever”. The idea is, let’s take advantage of the technologies that are available today, to live long enough to take care of that, to take advantage of the technologies that will be available in the next few years so that we can leapfrog into longer lifespan so that we can leapfrog into longer lifespan to where, later in the century, I think it will not be meaningful to talk about lifespan, because I think it will be indefinite.

Elena: In a related question, then, since you have been in this field for quite a long time, did you notice any major shifts in the public perception of longevity-promoting treatments?

Terry: Yeah, I’m a baby boomer. So in the baby boomer generation, it’s a split. Most baby boomers have the old mindset that we’re going to get older and we’re going to die in the old-fashioned way. Some of the baby boomers don’t, particularly the younger baby boomers. And they’re of the opinion, there are things we can do to change that process and to live longer. The generation that’s older than the baby boomers is beginning to, they’re not so many of them around anymore. But that group didn’t believe in this very much at all, very few. Although, in my practice, I do have patients in their 90s, and even patients over 100, and they are very youthful, and they believe that they want to live for many, many years ahead. But of that small group, as we got down towards the millennials, they have been raised in a in a world where the idea, this concept of living out your life and retiring at 62 or 65, and then dying at 75 or 80. They don’t buy into that at all. The younger people, I think many of them believe that they will have the opportunity of human immortality, so it’s really generational. I think it’s when you were born and what mindset you were raised with, but the younger people today, I think adopt the idea of extreme longevity much more readily. Because it’s been like using computers, they were born with computers, so computers are second nature to them. Oeople in their 80s, computers are very foreign and hard to use and kind of spooky things. It’s really where you are on that spectrum.

Elena: I agree with with this perception of yours, and it’s interesting that you mentioned that, you know, people go with apparently people go with changes, and if things change fast, then probably it’s the mindset that becomes more flexible, and allows people to see innovations as something positive rather than negative and spooky. That’s an interesting thought. All right, what are three pieces of advice that you could give to an aspiring entrepreneur who plans to start a charity clinic and participate in the implementation of rejuvenation, biotechnology?

Terry: Well, most doctors who want to do rejuvenation medicine, or do anti-aging medicine, things like that, they already have an existing practice, and what I would suggest is continuing your existing practice and have a sideline, so a little part of your practice is devoted to anti-aging or rejuvenation medicine. You still do most of what you do, but then you say, okay, I’m going to do 10% of this rejuvenation medicine. Then, as your practice begins to grow, and people find out that you’re doing these therapies, they will tell their friends, and now it will be 20% and 30%, or 40%. For some people, it may be 50% or more. That’s what most anti-aging clinics are like, in my experience, is they’re doctors that do some of what they’re specialists in, it might be a gynecologist, and there might be anesthesiologists, or who knows what they are. They will continue to do that, and then they will have part of their practice be devoted to anti-aging and rejuvenation. Very few doctors will do what I’ve done, and just do the whole thing as basically a longevity clinic. There are a few, but that’s relatively rare, and most doctors would just add that on. For entrepreneurs that are looking to get into this space, you know, they can go to existing clinics, and they could have a program that could be an add-on to existing practices to begin to grow this so that it’s available to more people.

Elena: Alright, sounds fair. I have one more question. Because the process of looking at an experimental treatment requires reaching out to a biotechnology company, finding out what kind of scientific work there is, I just wonder, what’s your way to deal with rejuvenation biotechnology companies? Are they part of your network majorly?

Terry: How to deal with biotechnology companies?

Elena: I mean, how do you exchange with them? Do you learn directly from them, or other some other ways that you prefer to educate yourself and the members of your company about innovative treatments?

Terry: Well, I was fortunate enough for many, many years to be able to work in Bangkok, Thailand, at a hospital there, and I was their medical director for longevity medicine and things like that. I was able to do that until last year, when the pandemic changed travel and I couldn’t go there anymore. I was able to learn from being able to travel around the world. Now what I do is I attend conferences. So, biotechnology conference, my biotechnology company may have a new therapy, and they’ll have a conference and they’ll invite doctors. Now most of them are done virtually, so I can attend the conference and learn new things. For instance, the conference that we are part of right now will be introducing both the public and doctors into therapies that they maybe only know a little bit about or don’t know too much about or don’t know anything about. That’s how the word gets out. The actual companies will often sponsor events, like one of the new therapies that many doctors are using, you may have heard of called peptide therapy, and so some of the companies that are making peptides, they’ll have a training seminar, one-day, two-day training seminar, and doctors can attend the seminar and learn about this new therapy, or they may have a genomic test that they want to offer. They’ll have a seminar so doctors can learn, and every once in a while the companies will send people to the doctor’s office to train us and give us some free tests that we can try them and things like that. So they have different ways of disseminating the information.

Elena: Yes, that’s exactly the answer that I was looking for because I really want to understand how the doctors of the new generation can actually educate themselves about those things. Wonderful. One more question, also concerning networking, how o you work with the investment community?

Terry: I have a number of venture capital and investor people that are patients of mine, and some of them have expressed an interest and said, “We want you to duplicate your clinic or all over the country”, things like that. There is money out there to do this. There’s a lot of interest. I am interested in different companies and different technologies, and I’m the medical advisor to one and the medical director on another, so I work with them on different projects, which I find to be very exciting because it’s all cutting-edge stuff that I think can change the face of medicine for people and have them live longer and healthier lives. That’s how I personally interact with them, and I think many other doctors can do the same thing.

Elena: Sounds wonderful, and I really hope that those will be very fruitful collaborations. My last question, do you have a take-home message for our audience?

Terry: It’s the quote that I gave before, and it’s the subtitle I gave of our book from Ray Kurzweil, Live Long Enough to Live Forever. It’s very important that we do the things today to keep ourselves healthy enough, to live healthy, so that in five years, the new technologies that don’t even exist today, we could take advantage of. Then, they will let us leapfrog into the next. It’s like a staircase, to the next level, to the next level, to the next level. I wish that all of us have the ability to live long enough to live forever.

Elena: Sounds great. Thank you, Dr. Grossman, for taking the time to speak with us and share your valuable experience with our audience. Thank you, and good luck in your work.

Terry: Thank you so much Elena, take care.

To do this, we need your support. Your charitable contribution tranforms into rejuvenation research, news, shows, and more. Will you help?

Related Community Members