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Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
From Joint Replacement to Proactive Longevity with Grant Zarzour, MD
00:16:35
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- [00:02]
A
This is where healthcare leadership comes together. Becker's 16th annual meeting brings more than 3,500 hospital and health system executives and nearly 800 speakers to Chicago, April 13th through the 16th. This year's event includes keynote conversations with Dallas Cowboys legend Troy Aikman and former President George W. Bush. For the agenda and event details, visit Beckershospitalreview.com and click on the events tab in the upper right. We're looking forward to hosting you in Chicago.
- [00:32]
B
This is Scott Becker with the Becker's Healthcare Podcast. Thrilled today to be joined by a brilliant orthopedic surgeon, a leader in joint replacement, who also has a special interest in longevity in how we live our lives better. We're joined today by Grant Zarzer. Dr. Zarzer. Grant. Dr. Zarzer, can you take a moment to both introduce yourself, talk about your practice, and talk about what you've developed as this sort of separate concept, separate business around longevity?
- [01:03]
C
Yeah. Thanks, Scott. Appreciate you having me. So, you know, my day job is I'm a glorified carpenter. I specialize in hips and knees. I work at the Southern Orthopedic alliance, which is the largest orthopedic group in Alabama. I'm lucky enough to be president of that organization. And we've got 40 surgeons in the state focused on high quality care and get to perform a lot of hips and knees and fix them. I did seven earlier today. I'm also on the advisory board for Lantern, a really cool company helping people get access to great surgeons. And then as you mentioned, I'm founder and CEO of a longevity company called Sperrity Health. And I'll tell you, I just became passionate about proactive care and it's really kind of, I guess had a big impact on me from my family standpoint, but also just taking care of patients and seeing them come in the clinic all the time that I think in this country we're very good at reactive care. But I think we've got to start moving the needle on more proactive care. So that's why sparity health is a B2B solution. And in one sentence, what sperity health does is we lower our members risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease and dementia based on data in science, not snake oil and Instagram.
- [02:21]
B
Thank you. And, and tell us if you can't. Dr. Zara Zor, if you're comfortable, tell us a little bit the sort of the, the origin story of Spiriti and, and how you got so interested in this area.
- [02:32]
C
Well, you know, I have four kids, Scott, boy and three girls. And my boy is the oldest and, you know, first kid. And when he was 2, you know, he went to school for the first time. And the school called us on day two and said, something's wrong with Wyatt and you need to get him checked out. And my first response was, nothing's wrong with my boy. And he's only been there 15 minutes. You know, how do you know something's wrong with him? You know, he's our first kid. Well, we went to a neurologist, somewhat reluctantly, and we knew he had some issues, little anxiety, and he wasn't, he's all delayed in his speech, but we basically took him to the neurologist. That neurologist spent about 45 seconds in the room and then he exclaimed, wyatt needs to be in an antipsychotic every day for the rest of his life. He's never going to make it at regular school. And he looked at my wife and I and said, mom, dad, buckle up. It's going to be a long, hard ride. And you know, my wife and I looked at each other and said, we don't accept this, whatever this is, we're going to beat it. And so he got diagnosed with moderate severity autism, which is certainly a gut punch. And, you know, and during my time in medical school, we didn't cover a whole lot of proactive solutions and didn't cover a lot about. Autism is still new at this time, evolving. But I dove into the research and the science on how to mitigate the symptoms. Anxiety, adhd, a hundred other symptoms. And we learned about functional medicine, which I didn't believe in. We learned about diet, exercise and sleep. I'll tell you when the whole gluten free thing first came out. I'm embarrassed to tell you, Scott, I told people, if you don't want your gluten, I'll eat your gluten. And. And I was wrong. Some people can't eat it. Most people can, but some people can't. And it develops the gut to brain axis is affected and a whole host of things. So we got Wyatt on a great diet, exercise, sleep plan and speech therapy and all sorts of great solutions, really, in supplements. We didn't put him on an antipsychotic. And long story short, he's 10, eight years later and flourishing at regular school, much smarter than me. His IQ is 141. I'm trying to get there one day, I hope, but. And you know, the big takeaway for a child who we were unsure if he would ever speak in full sentences when this ordeal started And a year and a half ago, we're at Christmas dinner with the six of us, and the girls all say a blessing, and Bri and I say, a blessing. Wyatt never wanted to say a blessing. Kind of too much going on in his head, you know, anxiety and other things. But he had made so much improvement that he stopped us before we ate and said, I want to say a blessing. And Brie and I said, okay, buddy, absolutely. And he goes, hold hands. And so we hold hands. And he goes, dear God, thank you for all of our blessings and for a great day, and please remember those who don't have what we have. And Brie and I are crying. You know, you're only as well as your sickest child. And to see him kind of come full circle. And so now he really has barely detectable autism. And it's the greatest success of my life. No matter what I have done or will do, I'm really proud of that. But the reason that we've kind of extrapolated this is that proactive care works. It prevents disease, and it can certainly mitigate disease. And there's so much data and science to support this. And so that's what sparity health is built on. It's attacking cancer, cardiovascular disease, and dementia. And we do it in a kind of multi pronged approach.
- [06:20]
B
Dr. Zarzar, that's an incredibly heartwarming piece. It's hard almost not to have tears come to my eyes. I hear you talk about Wyatt and that evolution. Give us a couple of thoughts on what you've learned during this journey.
- [06:32]
C
And.
- [06:33]
B
And then a couple thoughts on what you're doing at Spirit. Exactly, because I've heard some of it. I know you work with companies, with organizations. Tell us a little bit, a couple lessons you learned from the experience so far, and then also what you're doing with companies and how Spiriti works.
- [06:48]
C
You know, kind of correlated from my day job in orthopedics, people say, oh, I'm, you know, sometimes patients, I'm too old to have surgery. I don't care what your chronological age is. I really don't care what year you were born. I tell people, I care how hard you've been ridden and if you were put up with. And that's how you treat your body. And so biological age is what we measure at Spirit of Health and all of our members. And it's basically 10 different lab values looking at the health of your organs. And that we extrapolate that up from, oh, this patient's not a surgical candidate, Even though they're 55 years old or at 90, they look great and don't take any medicines. They're going to live 20 more years. So maybe they do need a knee replacement or hip replacement so they can have a quality of life. So these lessons I've learned from actively practicing in orthopedics has helped us evolve towards sparity health, which now we're growing across the southeast and across the country is allowing those kind of things I've learned in clinic to adapt and kind of expand everyone's horizon and hit our members with more details of their own health. I had a patient in clinic on Monday ask me the difference between a protein and a carb. I mean, we, we've got a big challenge on education. And if you look at health insurance issues in this country, the trend is double digit health insurance premium increases for businesses. It's unsustainable. These businesses cannot afford for this trend to continue. But their current strategy is hope. And, and I really feel we've got to change it more toward being proactive. I understand we're trying to look for the best treatments for cancer and best treatments or cardiovascular disease and any other ailment. And we should continue to do that. But what if we could prevent the number of people that were getting cancer and having all these cardiovascular disease issues and all these other complications? There's great studies that show people who get breast cancer, you're in way longer remission if you exercise regularly versus not exercise. What we do is we'll put wearables, I love a whoop band, all sorts of other good wearables to measure your sleep quality. We have, we help with nutritionists for diet education. And I'll tell you the single greatest weight loss tool on the planet. Scott, it's not a GLP one. It is a CGM or continuous glucose monitor. And one month of that a year and our members go, wow, look how sugar affects my body and how can I try to mitigate sugar? I mean, sugar is the devil. I mean, I tell my patients that caramel frappa mocha chocolate latte they're having for breakfast is a killer. 1,000 calories, 100 grams of sugar. You have no chance of losing weight for the week when you put that in your body. But people think, oh, I got the diet version, or whatever else. So we partner all of our members with the nutritionist. They get an exercise physiologist to do a VO2 max treadmill test, because that's a 12 minute test on the treadmill measuring your oxygen carrying capacity of your Lungs. And it's not an easy test, but it's the single greatest predictor in all cause mortality. If someone wanted to know, how much longer do I have, Doc? If I only can have one piece of knowledge about you, I want to know your score on that 12 minute treadmill test. So really one of the things we love doing is activating your amygdala, which is this small structure deep in your brain that's in charge of fear and, and emotions. And when we can connect your emotions to your health status, you will improve it. When you see your data on the whoop band, when you see your data on the cgm, when you get a coronary angiogram to look at your cardiovascular status, when you see your VO2 max score and go, man, the first time I took it, Scott, there's six categories. I got the very top of the very poor category. I cut it out. It's on my bathroom mirror right now.
- [10:55]
B
So let me ask you a question. Let me ask you a question because people can't see you, but you look like about the most fit orthopedic surgeon in the world. So talk about that need to measure things because people look at you, think like, how could that be the top of the bottom quartile? But, but, and what have you done? How have you made that work? And I agree with you on sugar 100%. It's like it causes you to want to eat more, so it could reverse everything else you're trying to do. And it's so much negativity. And I, and I love frappuccinos and all that stuff, but I just can't do them. But, but tell us a little bit about, you know, the need for data and how you work at Spirit. I know we've got a few minutes left, so tell us sort of, you know, your own fitness, need for data and how you work with customers.
- [11:42]
C
Well, I'll tell you, first of all, you know the worst patients are on the planet. Doctors, okay, we're really good at caring for other people, but we put ourselves dead last on the list of who we need to be worried about. We worry about our family, our patients, everybody else. We give out our cell phone numbers, we're checking the EMR 25 times a day to help people. We've got to start putting ourselves more in first place so that we can continue to provide care. And burnout's a big problem. Over 80% of physicians are experiencing burnout. And so for me, you know, I have to focus on diet is my number one deal. Because I don't have enough time in the day to do as much exercise as I would like. But what you put in your body matters. And your microbiome has to be retrained. That's your kind of gut bacteria, and it determines your urges. And the way to plant a healthy microbiome is 25 different fruits and vegetables a week. Some can be the same, but if you can do 25 fruits and three a day or just over, you know, that helps train your body to go after the healthier foods than the french fries and the sugar. So you have. That's why GLP. 1's 2/3 or more of the weight comes back immediately when you stop. We didn't do anything to retrain your microbiome. So real big on diet sleep. You know, you can't hide from the need for sleep, and poor sleep equals dementia. So I love a wearable to track it because people say, oh, my sleep's fine. Let's see what the data says. So we have all sorts of wearables we connect with. And the biggest differentiator people, you know, we. Southern Company is a big, big client for us. Southeastern Conference is a big client. We've got a number of others that are coming on board very soon. The key is in person physician engagement. So we have a team of primary care longevity experts that meet with all of our members in person. I know that's hard. It's logistically challenging, but it doesn't activate the amygdala if we're just doing telehealth. So you meet in person with the physician, the nutritionist, the exercise physiologist for that VO2 max. And we have a phlebotomist who's going to draw your labs. And then we engage throughout the year with your data plugging into our app, giving you a score. It's what we call a sparity score. It's like a credit score for your health. And so it's a health KPI. What are we making this money for if we're not going to have the health to spend it? And so we kind of allow people to find their path and listen, you don't have to be perfect. Seven days week, Scott. Give me five days a week. The other two days down here in Alabama, we say roll Tide. Okay, you got to still have fun. You got to go. You know, I play golf and a whiskey front will come through every now and again. I'm not here to tell you I'm perfect, nor do I want to be. Life's not worth Living. But hey, let's do five out of seven days and, and really focus on that. And we're trying to beat yesterday, not be perfect. No.
- [14:41]
B
And I love that perspective, Dr. Zarzer, and I love what you're doing. We'd love to get you back on the podcast as you involving with this before we do. So where does the name spirit come from? Can you give us the name Spirit? The. The derivation of that?
- [14:57]
C
You know, I kind of thought about prosperity and we made it a little shorter. But, you know, prosperity is focused on your wealth. And so we wanted to make a new term that kind of was focused on your health. Easy to spell and kind of memorable. But I think that everybody's focused on their how much can we save for retirement? But I see patients every day that would trade everything in their bank account to be healthy and 45 or 50 or 55 years old again. They really wish they could go back and do anything to get that great health. And what sparity health is about is you're helping you live to be a great grandfather running around chasing great grandkids or traveling the world being able to put a bag in the overhead bin. We want you active and productive.
- [15:45]
B
No, I think it's just fantastic. I absolutely love it. Like, you're exactly right. People would trade almost anything to lose a few pounds, be a little bit healthier, drop a few points off their index. It is what it is. But you're absolutely right. We totally agree. And I know you're not working on the golf index or handicap index, but you are working on people's health, which is more important, I think. No, I know it's more important.
- [16:07]
C
That's right. That's right.
- [16:08]
B
Dr. Zeisser, thank you so much for joining us. We'd love to have you back on in three or six months to talk about the Spiriti story. We think this concept of aging well, living well, and taking care of it is about as important as anything that anybody could do while taking care of their physical and mental health. So we admire what you're doing. We love it and look forward to having you back on Grant.
- [16:28]
C
Thanks so much, Scott. And I'll see you in June.
- [16:30]
B
Looking forward. Thank you so much.