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- [00:00]
Dr. Doug Lucas
Amazon Health AI presents Painful Thoughts why
- [00:05]
Dr. Susan Blumenthal
did I search the Internet for answers
- [00:07]
Narrator/Advertiser
to my cold sore problem? Now I'm stuck down a rabbit hole filled with images of alarmingly graphic source in various stages of ooze. I can clear my search history, but
- [00:20]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
I can never unsee that.
- [00:23]
Dr. Doug Lucas
Don't go down the rabbit hole. Amazon Health AI gets you the right care fast. Healthcare just got less painful.
- [00:30]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
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- [01:08]
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- [01:45]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio News this
- [01:51]
Bloomberg Businessweek Daily Announcer
is Bloomberg businessweek Daily, reporting from the magazine that helps global leaders stay ahead with insight on the people, companies and trends shaping today's complex economy. Plus global business, finance and tech news as it happens. The Bloomberg businessweek Daily Podcast with Carol Massar and Tim Stanweck on Bloomberg Radio.
- [02:14]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
We are doing them a special deep dive Bloomberg businessweek Daily we're talking about health, technology and health care and more on that specifically. Specifically when it relates to women's care. And there's been some research that's out.
- [02:26]
Co-host/Interviewer
Yeah, the Menopause Society reporting that osteoporosis, which is highly prevalent in post menopause menopausal women, has long been associated with an increased risk of fractures. There's a new study that suggests it may also increase women's overall risk of death by as much as 47%, especially within specific ranges of bone mineral density. Results of the study were published just last week in Menopause, the Journal of the Menopause Society, and it's not just
- [02:49]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
women, it's men too. Although women have a higher prevalence than men. Let's get into this. It's somebody we've talked to before about this area. It's great to have back with us, Dr. Doug Lucas. He's orthopedic surgeon leading the clinical side for bone health and longevity science over at Life MDS here in Student. He also has his own YouTube show. It's called the Dr. Doug Show, Longevity Through Bone Health. Welcome back. Nice to talk with you again.
- [03:11]
Dr. Doug Lucas
Thank you for having me back.
- [03:13]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
I have to say I was surprised. I think we were surprised kind of reading in that yes, it impacts both men and women, but it's more prevalent. It seems to be much more discussed about for women. Why is that? Well, I'm not, I'm not complaining. I'm glad we get attention somewhere. But. But it impacts all of us as we age.
- [03:31]
Dr. Doug Lucas
True, it is more common in women simply because women have lower bone density to start. So men just have a bigger room to lose bone density before they actually reach that threshold of osteoporosis.
- [03:42]
Co-host/Interviewer
So when we think about it, from what new research has told us or given us, is there any indication that we can start doing stuff earlier for preventive measures? Eating differently. Last time you were on, we talked a lot about what's being done with hormone replacement therapy. What does the data say? What do the data say?
- [04:04]
Dr. Doug Lucas
Yeah. So the challenge with osteoporosis is that in the conventional model, we really look at it as a chronic disease. And like most chronic diseases in the conventional model, we tend to just think pharmacology or maybe surgery. But like most chronic diseases, osteoporosis does respond really well to dietary interventions, exercise interventions, potentially even some over the counter supplement type things, depending on what your diet looks like. So there is a lot of room for opportunity to actually improve bone density.
- [04:33]
Co-host/Interviewer
How early though?
- [04:34]
Dr. Doug Lucas
Yeah, well, we start losing bone in our early 30s, both men and women. So I would argue let's start as early as possible. Let's learn what our bone density is, what our trajectory is and then intervene when we need to.
- [04:47]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
Are the health insurers, you know, game for this, for you to start early? Because it just feels like there's so many parameters about what's okay in terms of testing?
- [04:55]
Dr. Doug Lucas
Yeah, it's difficult with insurance because insurance is generally going to want to pay for the doctor's visit and the drugs if you need them, if you qualify for them. Prevention is challenging in our, in our conventional medical.
- [05:06]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
Why is that? Why is that? We're supposed to be about preventive medicine. We've been talking about that for years.
- [05:13]
Dr. Doug Lucas
And yet, well, we're better than we used to be. So now some preventive services are covered. But the system as it's built is just not good at educating on nutrition in a way that's meaningful for bone health, especially not good at focusing on sleep. Because these things take time. They take a lot of question and answers and back and forth and accountability and the system is just not built for it.
- [05:35]
Co-host/Interviewer
But I guess what I'd understand is in the long run, wouldn't they save the. Save resources, Would it mean less stress on the system? And by system, you know, I mean for our own bodies, but also the health system.
- [05:46]
Dr. Doug Lucas
Yeah, I mean, financially, if we could prevent chronic disease, of course the system would spend less on chronic disease. There just isn't a way that I can see in the system to do that.
- [05:55]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
Yeah, I mean, I think about this too. Like what I was thinking about your YouTube and what you must focus on. And I don't know if people can call in and ask questions, but I mean, you know, what are we all doing wrong when it comes to bone health? So if we have to be kind of our own activist. Right. And advocate, what should we be doing from age 30 on?
- [06:13]
Dr. Doug Lucas
Well, I love looking at, you mentioned my YouTube channel, the longevity piece. Right. I love looking at bone health through the lens of longevity because I think every 30 year old wants to live as long and as healthy as possible. And when you look at it through bone health, it gives you a recipe for that. So the diet that's good for bone health is good for your brain, it's good for your heart, it's good for your skin, it's good for your energy, it's good for your sleep. Right. So focusing on eating a protein forward whole foods diet gives you all the tools that you need. Exercise that gets you out and moving, resistance training for your muscles, potentially impact for your bones. If you can tolerate that, that's the foundational pieces and then you can just keep stacking on top of that. Better sleep, better mindset, potentially. Hormone optimization for those that qualify.
- [06:55]
Co-host/Interviewer
Yeah, I mean, the food, there's a lot of stuff that we can dive into here. I want to dive into the food
- [06:58]
Dr. Doug Lucas
part a little bit.
- [06:59]
Co-host/Interviewer
Do you think there's a misunderstanding?
- [07:00]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
Oh, I take notes.
- [07:01]
Co-host/Interviewer
Well, do you think there's a misunderstanding about like saturated fats, fats? Because if you think about a protein forward diet, some people might say, wait a second, if I'm going to eat all that yogurt, for example, to get all that protein, then I'm going to just blow past what the USDA recommends for or FDA recommends for saturated fats. Are we a little behind when it comes to this stuff?
- [07:21]
Dr. Doug Lucas
It's challenging because if you look at the saturated fat recommendations, it's for the entire population, but the entire population is not sensitive in a bad way to saturated fat. So we have to kind of step away from these global recommendations from a nutrition perspective and start getting really individualized. What I need to eat, what you need to eat and what you need to eat are all different. So yes, I think saturated fat and dietary fat in general has been demonized in a bad way. And so people are afraid of it. And that does result in less protein, especially from animal sources being consumed.
- [07:51]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
Like I do think about that with nutritionists. Like, should we all be seeing a nutritionist early? Like, I can see your kind of your facial expression. Not so sure.
- [08:00]
Dr. Doug Lucas
Why so nutrition is a very challenging space. There is honestly not great research because it's difficult to do nutrition research in a randomized control trial, meaningful way. There's too many inputs. So a lot of the older mindset in the nutrition space is really set off of these dogmas from the 50s, the 70s, the saturated fat, dietary fat restriction that really no longer applies and has been hurting us for a long time.
- [08:27]
Co-host/Interviewer
Doctor, always good to see you.
- [08:29]
Dr. Doug Lucas
Thanks for having me.
- [08:30]
Co-host/Interviewer
Thanks so much for joining us on the program today.
- [08:34]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Business Week Daily coming up after this.
- [08:41]
Narrator/Advertiser
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- [09:13]
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- [10:10]
comes from Public Lately it feels like there are two types of investing platforms. Some are traditional brokerages that haven't changed much in decades, and others feel less like investing and more like a game. Public is positioned differently. It's an investing platform for people who are serious about building their wealth on public. You can build a portfolio of stocks, options, bonds, crypto without all the bugs or the confetti. Retirement accounts? Yep. High yield cash? Yes again. They even have direct indexing. Public has modern design, powerful tools and customer support that actually helps go to public.com market and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com market ad paid for by Public Holdings Brokerage Services by Public Investing Member FINRA SIPC Advisory Services by Public Advisors SEC Registered Advisor Crypto Services by ZeroHash all investing involves risk of loss. See complete disclosure@public.com Disclosures you're listening to
- [11:09]
Bloomberg Businessweek Daily Announcer
the Bloomberg Business Week Daily Podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from 2 to 5pm Eastern. Listen on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app or watch us live on YouTube.
- [11:23]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
Yes, we talk a lot about tech lately, but health care? We've certainly seen companies over the years make their mark here at the Exchange
- [11:31]
Co-host/Interviewer
and on health care. And really, public health. Remember last week we were talking about the hantavirus with Dr. Dalja of Johns Hopkins. Now we're actually talking about Ebola. The US has banned non US Citizens traveling to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, or Uganda for the next 30 days to curb the spread of a deadly Ebola outbreak.
- [11:50]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
It terrifies me. We've got a great voice, though, to talk about this. She served for more than two decades as a top federal government health official in the administration of four U.S. presidents. And so we are delighted to have back with U.S. Dr. Susan Blumenthal. She's retired rear admiral, former U.S. assistant surgeon general, and the first ever deputy assistant secretary for Women's health. I could go on and on and on. But we've done. But you are. We love talking with you. Your experience, your background. You've seen so much. When we talk about Ebola or a new virus, how do you think about these? I mean, is it just a matter of time before there's something that is akin to what we got with the coronavirus. Well, I think that what we need
- [12:30]
Dr. Susan Blumenthal
to realize is that there are more than 40 different infectious diseases circulating right now, and that infectious diseases have killed more people than war. And that's why we need to stay vigilant against them. We need to keep our public health infrastructure strong and our ability for preparedness and response. And we're at a time where that's being deconstructed and that's where the new tools of technology can help. AI is already helping us to really do predictive modeling about where outbreaks will occur and what the patterns might be. But we need to stay vigilant against these invisible enemies.
- [13:06]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
Will the predictive models be enough or do we also have to make sure we've got the infrastructure? Whether it's in government and in our, our health organization, we need to have the infrastructure.
- [13:15]
Dr. Susan Blumenthal
I mean, this is critical. And one thing that we need to do in rebuilding infrastructure and reimagining it is to build a seamless system of data and predictive analytics. And that means, because when we saw in Covid, some of our public health departments still were using fax machines and we weren't doing real time data monitoring. So we had to scrape the system to find different data sources. And we need to find new methodology. And I will help to do this as we move forward in this decade and beyond.
- [13:44]
Co-host/Interviewer
How does trust fit into this?
- [13:46]
Dr. Susan Blumenthal
Trust?
- [13:47]
Co-host/Interviewer
Yeah, the question really that I have is, we Talked about this, Dr. Dalger, last week, is that if we think back to the Biden administration and you know, during COVID and post Covid, there was a lot of skepticism from the right, including people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Who's now HHS Secretary, about the COVID vaccines. He gets into power now, he's communicating things from that perch. And there's an entirely different group of people who are skeptical. Skeptical of what he says. So now you have two different groups that are skeptical of what the government has said.
- [14:14]
Dr. Susan Blumenthal
Well, it's very dangerous because vaccines were a landmark public health accomplishment of the last century and continue new, new kinds of vaccines being developed like with Mrs. This has saved so many lives. You know, we wouldn't let our defense system decay, but we're letting our public health system decay. And, and this is a dangerous thing for the American people and people worldwide.
- [14:37]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
You're talking about military defense, correct?
- [14:39]
Dr. Susan Blumenthal
Yeah, absolutely, military defense because we want to have the shiniest missiles and, and methods of defending ourselves. But we're, we're tearing down the defense for, for human beings in terms of our health.
- [14:51]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
Dr. Blumenthal, I'm so glad you went there because we talk about, you know, the size of budgets that we're talking about what, one and a half trillion dollars or something, you know, extensive spending and then there's cutbacks in other parts of the government. I mean, do you think this is a one administration thing or do you think whoever comes in next, we get back to a government that is more involved in these issues? Well, as the poet Emerson can we afford to.
- [15:17]
Dr. Susan Blumenthal
So as the poet Emerson said, health is the first wealth. You know, health is not only important to foundation of our lives, but it's an economic issue. We spend over $4 trillion on health care in America. We get the right treatment only 50% of the time. We rank 42nd in life expectancy and there's a 20 year life expectancy differential based on your zip code in America. That's just a fragmented system. We need to do better and fragmented, flawed and flawed. And that's why again, new technology tools will help us move forward. And when it comes to women's health, I think this is an area that's been long neglected. It's a design flaw era because women were excluded from the research studies on heart disease and lung cancer. These are number one killer of women is heart disease. Lung cancer is the number one cancer killer of women. And yet women were excluded from those studies and prevention trials. When we got people to stop smoking or to look at the 20% of people who don't smoke, four times as many are women. Why? So again, we need to use AI and other technology tools to look at the patterns. We need to use it for discovery, we need to use it for access with telehealth and mobile devices to improve access underserved areas and to do prevention.
- [16:34]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
Why do we still need to be our own advocate? And I say that I'm a little bit older, I'm proud of it, but it's just I actually went to a doctor, not my gp, a specialist, not a heart specialist, but she said nothing wrong, but you should make sure you go to a doctor and get XYZ done just as like a base thing like because it's. She, she's a woman, she was a woman. And just saying things are overlooked when it comes to women and heart health and some different things.
- [17:00]
Dr. Susan Blumenthal
Well, again, you know, our health care system, it was a design flaw. Women were excluded and therefore so many of the clinical recommendations are based on data from men. So.
- [17:09]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
But you've Been a doctor for how like women have been in the profession.
- [17:13]
Dr. Susan Blumenthal
So I built, you know, infrastructure for women.
- [17:15]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
I know you did.
- [17:15]
Dr. Susan Blumenthal
Got men streamed. We were talking about all these issues 30 years ago, but you know, now we have to bring an innovation agenda back. What you were talking about, the misinformation that's out there. We need to use new tech tools to create a new communication environment because healthy messaging has to get out there.
- [17:34]
Co-host/Interviewer
Are the incentives aligned for all the different stakeholders right now? And I'm talking patients, I'm talking doctors, I'm talking hospital systems, I'm talking insurance companies.
- [17:43]
Dr. Susan Blumenthal
Well, as Hippocrates says, prevention is preferable to cure, but most of the funding has gone to treatment oriented solutions. You know, women are 50% of the population. They make 80% of the health care decisions, they make 85% of purchases and yet their health has been neglected. Only 6% of health care investing, private health care investing, has gone to women's health. And only 2% of venture capital has gone to women's health. Yet McKinsey has said because women live longer on average in every country In America, it's five years. They live longer, but 25% greater disability. If we invested in women's health, it's, McKinsey says, a $1 trillion boost to the economy by 2040 because of lower health care costs, more productivity, seems like a no brainer, A no brainer. And so that's what, you know, this new sort of laser beam focus on innovation in women's health is all about. And it will improve not only women's health, but the health of families, communities and countries.
- [18:45]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
Hate to tell you men, there's no babies without us, but I just, I just think about like you typically, sorry,
- [18:51]
Dr. Susan Blumenthal
but follow the money.
- [18:53]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
Like that's what I don't understand. Like if they understand the economic impact, why hasn't it flowed?
- [18:58]
Dr. Susan Blumenthal
I don't think the economic impact has really been underscored as it might have been. And I think that's something that we really need to emphasize. The economic gain and also the innovation agenda that there are so many opportunities to explore. How for companies, diseases that affect women only, like endometriosis or ovarian cancer, diseases that affect women disproportionately like autoimmune illnesses or Alzheimer's disease and diseases that affect women, women differently, which are diseases like heart disease or lung cancer. And, and that's where we need to really invest. And I think companies are starting to come along because this is the innovation agenda that and it's a new pipeline of opportunities for companies.
- [19:43]
Co-host/Interviewer
Are you hopeful?
- [19:44]
Dr. Susan Blumenthal
I am very hopeful. As Madame Curie, who won two Nobel Prizes but was never admitted into the all male French Academy of Sciences, once said, I never see what has been done. I only see what remains to be done. And I think if we, if we apply new tools like AI to discovery, make sure that women are included in those research studies and importantly that the data is reported and journals publish that data. Because again, AI is only as good as the algorithms, the data you feed into it.
- [20:13]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
Right.
- [20:13]
Dr. Susan Blumenthal
And then again for, for prevention, for prediction, for early diagnostics, and for access. Because it will help to bring care to people in underserved areas, women everywhere. I should stand for accelerated innovation, but also for everyone included.
- [20:29]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
All right, people included. You're optimistic about in health care, but we can't bias.
- [20:34]
Dr. Susan Blumenthal
But we need to.
- [20:35]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
I am absolutely always love time with you. Thank you.
- [20:38]
Dr. Susan Blumenthal
Thank you so much. Thank you. Great to be with you.
- [20:39]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
Dr. Susan J. Blumenthal she's retired rear admiral, former US assistant surgeon general, and the first ever Deputy Assistant Secretary for Women's Health. She's also a visiting professor with the MIT Media Lab.
- [20:51]
Co-host/Interviewer
Stay with us.
- [20:51]
Advertiser
More from Bloomberg Business with Daily coming up after this.
- [20:58]
Narrator/Advertiser
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- [21:30]
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- [22:27]
show comes from Public Lately it feels like there are two types of investing platforms. Some are traditional brokerages that haven't changed much in decades, and others feel less like investing and more like a game. Public is positioned differently. It's an investing platform for people who are serious about building their wealth on public. You can build a portfolio of stocks, options, bonds, crypto without all the bugs or the confetti. Retirement accounts? Yep. High yield cash? Yes again. They even have direct indexing. Public has modern design, powerful tools and customer support that actually helps go to public.com market and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com market ad paid for by Public Holdings Brokerage services by Public Investing Member FINRA SIPC Advisory Services by Public Advisors SEC Registered Advisor Crypto Services by ZeroHash all investing involves risk of loss. See complete disclosures@public.com disclosures
- [23:26]
Bloomberg Businessweek Daily Announcer
this is the Bloomberg Business Week daily podcast. Listen live each weekday starting at 2pm Eastern on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app. You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station. Just say Alexa play Bloomberg 11:30.
- [23:45]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
Our next guest has a front seat to what's going on when it comes to telehealth. Here is at the exchange is Justin Schreiber. He's chairman, CEO and co founder of the publicly traded digital health care platform and telehealth company, Life MD. It's got a market cap of about $209 million. Stocks up about 30% year to date. Well, welcome, welcome.
- [24:01]
Justin Schreiber
It's great to meet both of you. So yeah, go ahead.
- [24:04]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
No, no, no, it's nice to meet you. So tell us about telehealth because I feel like Covid really awakened us all to the possibility that you can do telehealth and it can work. But you've been in this for a while. Tell us about what you're seeing in the telehealth industry since COVID and the type of growth you're seeing.
- [24:21]
Justin Schreiber
Sure. I mean I think there were two things that like really created a lot of awareness and acceptability around virtual care and pharmacy, which, which is kind of how I look at telehealth. One was the pandemic and then the second was GLP1 medications.
- [24:35]
Dr. Doug Lucas
Right.
- [24:36]
Justin Schreiber
I mean, you know, Lilly and Novo launching their direct to patient self pay programs which are just, you know, changing the kind of way Americans access pharmaceutical products has been a game changer. And you know what it's done is it's created a lot of Amazing. You know, virtual health care and pharmacy platforms and it's created a lot of, a lot of kind of lower quality platforms.
- [24:56]
Co-host/Interviewer
So when you look at the landscape, what, what do you try to do to create one that is higher quality? Because there is a lot of competition out there.
- [25:04]
Justin Schreiber
Sure. I mean there's, there's hundreds of companies. Right. Maybe even thousands of companies. So you know, the biggest differentiators for life and D as a, as a platform for virtual health care and pharmacy one, you know, we rely on mostly full time providers. A lot of the big companies when you think of like the legacy term telehealth, it's an army of providers and, and those providers, like a lot of them are high quality but it's you know, oftentimes like they're, they're not like specialty trained.
- [25:30]
Dr. Doug Lucas
Right.
- [25:31]
Justin Schreiber
Sometimes they're doing this in the evenings and weekends to make extra money. Extra money. The big difference with, you know, our most important, the most important part of our service offering at LifeMD is delivering amazing healthcare. So and so for us like having these like this, you know, these like full time providers that we can train and make sure meet our quality standards and are interacting with our patients, you know, that's the biggest differentiator for our company.
- [25:53]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
So they're all staff, they're part of the team.
- [25:56]
Justin Schreiber
Exactly. Not all of them, but the majority of them are business. Our model at LifeMD is built around recruiting, training and retaining incredible providers.
- [26:05]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
Justin, one thing I was curious about in looking at some research about the growth of telehealth, they said turns in segment psychiatry was the largest revenue generating disease area last year. It was also the most lucrative disease area segment, registering the fastest growth during the forecast period. So I'm curious, on your platform, is that a big component or is it like you said, GLP1? And if so, how much does GLP1 is that type of business on your platform?
- [26:32]
Justin Schreiber
It's a good question. I mean we do have a virtual psychiatry offering, it's smaller. And the reason for that is quite frankly the demand for GLP1 medications as you know, has been off the charts. The number one reason a lot of Americans end up at virtual care providers is for a prescription medication. And so you know, we built this amazing platform for delivering longitudinal health care and pharmacy. The whole GLP1 opportunity presented itself a couple years ago when Oprah Winfrey like first kind of got behind, got behind these medications, created a, you know, a ton of awareness and we were one of the first companies to recognize even when a lot of our Larger peers were, you know, were discrediting these medications. We were one of the first companies to recognize that this was going to be a game changing class of therapy. And we went all in on it. And it's enabled us to take, you know, our platform from, you know, a very small number of patients to today LifeMD has approximately 350,000 active patients across all 50 states.
- [27:32]
Co-host/Interviewer
What's the next GLP1? And I asked that in the sense of like what's the next inflection point for telehealth?
- [27:37]
Justin Schreiber
Well, a lot of additional GLP1s and I think a big kind of unmet need in that market. So, you know, fewer than 15% of Americans that qualify for a GLP one are on one. I think another big area is women's health, hormone therapy. You know, in men's health there's a lot of talk of, there's a lot of talk around like descheduling, testosterone therapy. You know, you also have a lot of new peptides that RFK is talking about bringing to market, which, you know, could be. And that kind of ties into the whole longevity space, right? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, longevity as a whole is going to continue to be a massive space for us.
- [28:13]
Co-host/Interviewer
What, what determines whether or not you offer something? Because some of the things that he has talked about necessarily have the clinical data or the randomized controlled trials to back them up at this point. So what does it take in order to say, okay, we will offer these?
- [28:27]
Justin Schreiber
I think that's a great question. It's one like I've personally wrestled with. You know, a lot of our competitors have offered products to date that are most likely safe, but where there was no like, you know, no like large controlled clinical studies around.
- [28:40]
Advertiser
Right.
- [28:40]
Justin Schreiber
And personally, this is something that I care deeply about. So. So I think, look, most important is safety. Right. Our clinicians, our kind of independent clinicians need to really feel like a medication is safe after that. I think the second thing that they'll look at, independently of the business side of the platform side of life and is efficacy data. And I think there's like this kind of in between that I've been thinking a lot about personally, where some of these things like peptides, which are already being used by large numbers of Americans, you do have a lot of safety data. A lot of them are, you know, almost feel more like a prescription supplement offering. Yeah.
- [29:19]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
Like, yeah.
- [29:19]
Justin Schreiber
And so that's. It comes back to safety. Right. Like we're never going to make claims like efficacy, efficacy claims about, you know, One of these medications, first and foremost, we're going to want to make sure that they're safe and then we're going to decide whether, you know, it's something that we want to attach our brand to.
- [29:34]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
How much of your business is related to GLP1 drug?
- [29:37]
Justin Schreiber
Yeah, right now it's, it's about 60%. 60.
- [29:40]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
Top line growth. Top line.
- [29:42]
Justin Schreiber
60 plus percent of top line revenue is related to GLP1 medications.
- [29:46]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
Because, because I am curious like you guys reported earnings, there were some disappointment over your guidance and you know, is there more that you can share about the business and the outlook as to why you think investors may have had it wrong? I said your stock is up a lot, but the stock sold off following that. What do investors need to understand?
- [30:02]
Justin Schreiber
I mean our business, our business is going through, has been going through over the last couple of quarters. A bit of a transition. Early on we had a lot of patients that were on compounded GLP1 medications prior to these drugs coming off of the shortage list. When they came off the shortage list, we, we basically formed collaborations with both Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, which I still believe was the right thing to do long term. However, like it's, it's a lot, it's less profitable for us.
- [30:28]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
Yeah.
- [30:29]
Justin Schreiber
Then certainly a GLP1 medication. So the easy, the answer to your question is, you know, we're focused on building durable revenue streams. Sometimes that means getting a little bit less revenue upfront, having a better value proposition for the patient and it just, it takes a little bit longer for that to materialize. And so that's what we've tried to guide to our shareholders and I think most of them really understand that.
- [30:51]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
Yeah, that makes sense. Justin, thank you you so much. We unfortunately have to run. Hopefully we can check in in the future.
- [30:57]
Justin Schreiber
We'd love to. Thanks for inviting.
- [30:58]
Host (Bloomberg Businessweek Daily)
Yeah, thanks. Thanks for being here. Justin Schreiber, chairman, CEO and co founder of LifeMD, joining us right here on Bloomberg Businessweek Daily.
- [31:06]
Bloomberg Businessweek Daily Announcer
This is the Bloomberg Businessweek Daily podcast available on Apple, Spotify and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Listen live weekday afternoons from 2 to 5pm eastern on bloomberg.com the iHeartRadio app, TuneIn and the Bloomberg Business app. You can also watch us live Every weekday on YouTube and always on the Bloomberg terminal.
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