The Health Score Card: Five Measurements That Are Good Enough One of the questions I keep coming back to is how we get a more accurate depiction of someone's overall state of health. Not a lab value. Not a symptom. The whole picture. In 2027 we'll be rolling out the health score card. The idea is simple: the same way a business has a scorecard, a person should have an objective evaluation of where their health actually stands — and a way to tell, year over year, whether it's

Overall: Hard to believe 9/11 was 25 years ago. This motivated me and a lot of my generation to join the military. I miss the unity that took place nationally right after this event. Wishing peace to all the lives impacted directly or indirectly from that event. Another up and down week. Sleep was really poor. Made a decision and we should have a roof at some point in the near future and my brain is finally able to refocus on getting systems set up to provide better patient

The 5/2 Matrix: What Do I Want, and What Do I Do? Goal setting and health go well together. The whole practice of medicine is more or less goal setting: we see something we're trying to accomplish or change, and we run an experiment. Humans are complex and things come up, so we're never running a clean experiment where only one variable changes. That's why medicine is a practice and not a classically controlled experiment. Goal setting is a lot like coaching in that both star

Overall: Challenging week, but overall good. Old partner from COPC got married, more or less recovered from procedure last Friday, gym equipment came in, still haven’t figured out what to do with the roof. Training will be wonky this upcoming week as well. Going to get back into standard training program this upcoming week. Know that's going to be a mistake as it will be a weird week, but feel like I need to start this progression. Learning: Podcasts WCI Attia Knowledge

There's a concept in personal finance called paying yourself first. Retirement contributions and tithing come out before the money ever lands in your checking account. The reason is simple and a little unflattering: money in the checking account gets spent. Not maliciously, not stupidly — it just evaporates against a hundred small, reasonable demands. So you take it off the top, before the demands get a vote. Your days work exactly the same way. The moment you interact with a

Overall: It’s been a long and short year. I can't believe we're entering into September and that means Professional Integrative Care is turning 2 years old. The second week in the building was more normal. It was my last week going to Pickerington, with the intention of freeing up more time for family. It will be the first time in my career I’ve been at one location. My biggest concern is that the staff will get sick of seeing me that much. I think it was a hard choice becau

When I ask people what they want their life to look like five years from now, the most common answer is some version of "I want to be healthy and happy." It's usually said without much thought. But I'd push back on the phrasing, not the sentiment: I'm not sure how someone could be truly healthy and completely discontent at the same time. If health is understood correctly, "healthy" is a good enough answer on its own. This idea isn't new. Aristotle called it eudaimonia — liter

Overall: The weeks are kind of rolling together. Last weekend was the big push to get into the new building and this was the first week in the new space. Big hiccup we have now is getting the roof repaired. Mentally I’m ready to be done with the move as it’s taken up a lot of headspace over the past couple of months. I’m fighting the fact that it will probably take a couple months to fix up the roof and settle in. I’m thankful for everyone who helped out with the move. This

The Tools Got Fancier. The Fundamentals Didn't. Cardiovascular disease is still the number one killer of men and women, in this country and globally. The major levers haven't changed in decades: hypertension, hyperglycemia, and hyperlipidemia. Add two things we don't have a clean number for — stress, which feeds all three, and the body's tendency to clot — and you've more or less described what's going to land most people in a cardiology office. In 2026 the guidelines for two

Overall: It’s been a tiring 2-3 months, with a big push over the past couple weeks getting moved into the new office. Have been falling asleep around 8-8:30p just from being tired. I might have found the new solution to avoiding doomscrolling, being too tired to pick up the phone. Of course there’s been hiccups moving into the new space including a last minute audible of having to put in a claim for the roof because of the amount of damage from the recent storms and leaks it

Automate Your Health the Way You'd Automate Your Money Health and wealth are highly correlated, and I'm a fan of automating both. The people who build real wealth aren't the ones making heroic financial decisions every morning. They set up the system once and let it run. Health works the same way. At some point you want a set-it-and-forget-it posture toward the major decisions. You work out because it's on the schedule, not because you negotiated with yourself about it. You e

Health Is a Set of Ratios — Not a Series of Extremes A long time ago Martin Rooney wrote something I copied onto my medical school desktop and kept as a note. The advice was simple. Read twenty-five pages a day. Go to two conferences a year. Talk to an expert in your field once a month. Do that for seven years and you'll be an expert in almost anything. But the line that actually stuck wasn't about expertise. It was about your entertainment-to-education ratio — how much of yo

Overall It's been a strong push getting everything ready for the move over the next two weeks. Stressful — these have been a challenging couple of weeks, and I'm excited to have it behind me soon. The coordination has been the hardest part. Once it's complete, I want to make time to reflect on it and celebrate what's ahead. This is a major milestone — the culmination of nine months of work. Physically, the back rehab continues to progress. I'm pushing a little harder in the g

Right now everyone wants to know their biological age. The wearables sell it, the clinics sell it, the supplement companies sell it. People walk in genuinely rattled that an app told them their "true age" is seven years north of their driver's license. I understand the appeal. It's a more interesting question than how many times you've circled the sun. But you don't have one age. You have at least four — chronological, biological, functional, and emotional — and the inconveni

Overall: Shoulder/pec is feeling better week over week. PT finally got out of the ROM only phase and started doing light resistance. Still ahead of schedule on rehabbing that but suspect it will be another couple of months to get back into drilling only with BJJ. Went in and seeing some of the guys from BJJ on Sundays is good, but just makes me want to get back on the mats. Move is coming up in 3 weeks to the new building. Hopeful that ends up being a good thing for patient

When it comes to your long-term health — how long you live, and how long you stay functional while you do — I'm not sure anything matters more than your metabolic health. That's a big claim. Here's why I make it. Metabolic health is how efficiently your body manages fuel. It's the ability to take in energy and process it without the system backing up. Almost every other topic in this series eventually drains into this one. Sleep, exercise, nutrition, cellular function — they

I love birthdays. For the past decade I've done a review twice a year and set goals for the year ahead. One lands in December. The other lands around my birthday, July 18, and I start it about two weeks out. Last December the reflection stretched across the whole month, which tells you something about the year I was having. Most of life is swimming. Head down, arms turning over, working hard just to stay afloat. That's not a complaint — it's the job. But you can swim for year

Overall: Being busy continues. Continue to feel like there's improvement in the pack healing and range of motion. Had follow up physical therapy this week and it seemed like range of motion was objectively improving. Still have significant restrictions in the right arm to only work on range of motion exercises without loading. Subjectively can start working on back exercises for that arm in the next two weeks. Training with Mike has gone really well. Certainly a change and t

Two terms have been making the rounds lately: cellular health and mitochondrial health. The pitch is roughly the same in both cases. If the cell is functioning efficiently, the whole organism is healthy. Optimize the mitochondria and the rest of the body falls in line. This gets positioned as a more sophisticated alternative to traditional medicine, which is framed as a reductionist, organ-system-by-organ-system approach that misses the deeper picture. I don't have a problem

Overall: Happy 4th of July and Happy 250th Birthday to the United States of America. Just finished the third week being post-op from my right pec major repair. Came out of the sling more or less full time this week. Pain has still overall been limited and things feel better in the shoulder on almost a daily basis. Rough week for my left leg because my patellar tendinitis and then turf toe on the left flared up from doing too much on the leg and then limping around. Second