Dr. Frank Lipman, a pioneer of functional medicine, is committed to longevity

Dr. Lipman, a beloved physician and New York Times bestselling author on aging, has shifted the focus of his decades-long practice in New York City to focus specifically on longevity medicine.

In the health and wellness space, trends and buzzwords come and go with the seasons. Longevity, however, is here to stay.

Longevity, essentially the science of aging gracefully, or slowing down the aging process altogether, has become a hot fad on social media, but it’s not just the podcasters and influencers behind the movement, although they have been helpful in bringing it into the mainstream.

Entrepreneurs and financiers are jumping on the longevity bandwagon, opening medical spas, metabolic health clinics and wellness franchises across the U.S. offering everything from GLP-1 weight-loss drugs to cryotherapy.

Increasingly, medical professionals are embracing longevity as a field of interest, bringing much-needed scientific rigor and clinical expertise to the space.

Dr. Frank Lipman, pioneer of the functional medicine movement and New York Times bestselling author on aging, is committed to longevity. Dr. Lipman has effectively shifted the focus of his decades-long practice at Eleven Eleven Wellness Center in New York City to focus specifically on longevity medicine, which he describes as a subspecialty of functional medicine. .

I’m obsessed with the longevity space, I see it as an extension of functional medicine, Lipman tells Athletech News. Longevity digs a little deeper into specific areas, delving into hallmarks of aging such as mitochondrial function, cellular senescence, and autophagy.

Lipman credits wellness podcasters like Peter Attia, MD, and Andrew Huberman, PhD, along with Joe Rogan, for helping to bring longevity into the mainstream. He also believes there has been a collective societal awakening to the importance of long-term health driven by the COVID-19 pandemic.

People come into my office knowing a lot more now than they did a few years ago, says Lipman. One thing that has probably changed the most is people, especially men, women have always been more health conscious in their 40s and 50s coming to optimize their health, which wasn’t the case before.

A new kind of longevity practice

Amid the increasing demand for long-term health solutions, Dr. Lipman has launched the Eleven Eleven Wellness Longevity Program. The comprehensive membership-based program is designed to help patients optimize their health, slow the aging process and increase their health.

For an annual fee, members receive genetic testing, biological age testing, and a comprehensive suite of blood biomarker tests, including a heart and lipid panel, hormones, nutrients, inflammatory markers, markers of cellular senescence, metabolic markers, plasmalogens, phospholipids and intracellular NAD levels. . All of these are analyzed by Lipman and his team of professionals, who then provide personalized recommendations for supplements, nutrition, exercise, hormones and peptides.

Perhaps most importantly, members have unlimited access to Lipman and his team for support, recommendations and reviews.

I’m a big believer that medicine is about relationships, Lipman says of his practice in general and the unlimited-access longevity programs. The Dalai Lama said that the three most important aspects of healing are the patient’s belief, the practitioner’s belief, and the relationship between the two. I mean meeting people where they are, making people feel good about what they do, and inspiring and motivating them to make changes.

While Lipman believes that proper sleep, diet, exercise and stress management are fundamental keys to optimizing health, patients in his longevity program also have access to cutting-edge wellness technology .

At Lipmans’ Manhattan practice, members get a body composition and body water analysis using an InBody machine, measuring their muscle mass, fat mass, visceral fat and body fat percentage, along with a phase angle of the whole body, which measures cellular permeability. a metric that has been shown to indicate overall health. These measurements can lead to important health insights that are often overlooked in traditional medicine.

The Longevity program also uses Shiftwave, an innovative wellness device that uses intelligent pulsed pressure wave patterns to fully reset the nervous system, the One Mind program, which uses brain mapping with AI-powered technology to deliver brain optimization hyper-personalized and a photodynamic light therapy machine, which improves cellular function, reduces inflammation and aids sleep.

The future of longevity: brain health and GLP-1

As the longevity movement continues to grow, Lipman has a couple of bold predictions for how the space, and potentially its practice, will evolve in the coming years.

For one thing, Lipman believes there will be a greater focus on brain health as brain-mapping machines become more advanced and readily available.

“I think brain health is going to become something that we can measure quite easily and then make changes accordingly,” he says, noting that this will have a profound impact on helping to defend against age-related cognitive decline.

Big changes could also come to the pharmaceutical side.

Currently, GLP-1 drugs are in the news for their weight-loss powers, but Lipman sees them having another use in the near future: as powerful anti-aging drugs. According to Lipman, microdosing GLP-1, or taking the medication in low, carefully prescribed amounts, can have powerful anti-aging effects.

Lipman shares that he himself, now almost 70 years old (although he looks about 20 years younger), has been experimenting with low doses of GLP-1.

People think of them as (just) weight-loss drugs, but they help glucose and insulin, help lipid numbers, help the immune system, can prevent neurological problems and decrease inflammation, he notes.

Lipman stresses, however, that GLP-1, even when taken in small doses, must be accompanied by lifestyle changes.

If you don’t eat a healthy, nutrient-dense diet with plenty of protein and do strength training, I would never recommend them, he warns. The whole package must be incorporated.

Assuming those boxes are checked, Lipman is extremely bullish on GLP-1s.

If I had to make a prediction it would be that these will become the hot anti-aging drugs, he says.

The social side of longevity

Staying on top of your blood work, measuring your body composition, and living a healthy lifestyle are certainly important, but they’re not the only things that matter when it comes to longevity.

Lipman believes that the intangibles—things like building meaningful relationships, finding community, and doing work you’re passionate about—are just as important as the physical.

Passion, meaning, gratitude, kindness and relationships are probably more important to your health than all the other things we do, he says.

Lipman believes so strongly in the power of community to drive health outcomes that he signed on as the medical director of The Well, a New York City social wellness club offering spa services, health coaching and classes of conscious movement.

There are so many studies that show how bad loneliness is for your health; it’s worse than alcohol, smoking and obesity, says Lipman. So the idea that you can create lovely spaces to go to, that have healthy food, and where you can create community, I think is very powerful. Bringing the community back to New York City, and the United States in general, is very important.