Ep. 77: Navigating and Balancing Covid-19 with Dr. Mike Roizen- Anesthesiologist, Internist, Author, and Chief Wellness Officer at the Cleveland Clinic
We are thrilled to be joined by our long time friend, Dr. Mike Roizen, on Health Gig. He is anesthesiologist, internist, award-winning author of multiple New York Times Best Sellers. Dr. Roizen is credited with developing the RealAge concept, which compares one’s calendar age to the physiological age of their bodies that contributes to wellness and aging. Dr. Roizen currently serves as the Chief Wellness Officer at the Cleveland Clinic at their Wellness Institute, which is the first of the position of its kind at any major health care institution. While Dr. Roizen seems optimistic about the Covid-19 outcome, he also sees it as an educational opportunity, noting “Unless we screw it up, we should have learned an awful lot from this.”
More on Dr. Roizen:
Website: https://clevelandclinicwellness.com/pages/index.htm
Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/DrRealAge/
Twitter:https://twitter.com/DrMikeRoizen
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq7H06pqHyyJFeA3RQw4vkQ
Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/drmichaelroizen/?hl=en
Books Mentioned:
Books: https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Michael-F-Roizen/50007850
FOLLOW HEALTH GIG:
Learn more about BB&R and Achieving Optimal Health Conference by visiting BBRconsulting.us
Show Notes
[3:40] Now, we have to get lucky two more times. There are now 71 different treatments in 235 controlled trials. One of those, if we get lucky, just one of those treatments could decrease the risk of dying by 80 percent if you got it when we're in the co-morbid group, we'd be home free. I don't know if we're home free.
[04:06] From what I understand from the three manufacturers of vaccines and safety trials, we could get one of those by the end of December, maybe end of November and get really lucky. So the message is we could get really lucky and prevent it for when it comes back.
[6:04] No one knows really what it is, but it is the closeness of the earth to the sun is what determines when the virus goes away.
[7:09] What it looks like is that if you're under the age of 60, even if you have comorbidities, very little risk. Clearly under the age of 50, very little risk. Now, that doesn't mean you're not going to get it, not die from it. The chance is something like one in 30 thousand if you're under the age of 50 and if you have a comorbidity, it's probably down to one in two or three hundred, not zero, but very low. And in all the other people under the age of 50, it looks like it's .1 Percent, about the flu.
[7:57] The good news about many of the countries where there is crowding, etc, is they don't have as much obesity as the United States has, and they don't have as many old people as the United States has, that's a good and a bad. So we're going to find out whether it makes a difference to physiologic age and how much social distancing matters, etc.
[9:39] But it really attacks the people over the age of 85 in all of the countries that have been looked at pretty severely. What it means is if you're 85, you should realize that the only people you should be in contact with are people who've been tested, had the disease by serologic testing and no longer have it.
[10:22] Well, should Fauci quarantine essentially because he's 80? And the answer is, his real age is a lot younger and she's brought that up during the discussions that it may be the actual age of the body, your real age, rather than your calendar age that matters and what you've done. Have you stayed, if you will, with a normal weight? Have you exercised? Do you eat relatively well? Do you take enough multivitamins? Do you get enough sleep? You know, when you look at vaccinations, getting eight hours of sleep for the week beforehand and getting a multivitamin for the week beforehand, that really radically changes the take rate of vaccines, whether we get immunity from vaccines for about 30 percent to 80 percent. And that's really important in the elderly because in the elderly, they have a less good response to vaccination in general.
[13:49] If we don't screw it up, we're getting better at this constantly.
[14:18] But the process is there now. And if we don't screw it up and that's what I mean, if we continue that effort, we're going to get much better able to prevent what we would call biologic errors or terrorism from hurting us as a society.
[14:51] We got to be smart. We got to be prepared for the virus coming back. We got to get lucky and get treatment and get a vaccine in a hurry. But if we're smart, we can avoid both the deaths of despair and the deaths from Covid. It takes a really smart group.
[15:21] But we've gone from three thousand physical telehealth visits to now seventy five thousand in one month. Ninety percent of our visits are going to be telehealth in the month of April, I'm sure. And so we'll probably have one hundred and fifty thousand telehealth visits in the month of April. So we're getting much better at certain things.
[16:26] I think the government's going to get a lot better and we're all going to get a lot better at knowing what we have to build in the United States. One of my friends who lives in Ohio, he makes the most vacuum cleaner replacement bags for Target and he makes ninety five percent of them for Walmart. So he just turned a vacuum cleaner replacement bag set into a N95 mask production. 500,000 thousand masks a day now like this. Yeah, it looks like it's a duck, but so they're really clever things that can be done like that and then help us to manufacture in the United States and to keep our supplies.
[17:23] We think you can open up and we don't know yet from the data, but to anyone under 50, the risk is so low, you could open it up and then you test the other people or the people that they come in contact with so that you're going to be able to say, at least until it comes back, we can open up the economy much broader, much quicker than we thought.
[18:31] From a standpoint of a scientist, the governors are doing all kinds of variable things and we're going to learn a lot.
[19:01] We're going to learn a huge amount over the next four months. By the way, I think this is the major cause for getting well, because if you're above the age of 60 and make yourself much younger by staying healthy, you're not going to have the risk.
[19:29] If you get healthy and do exercise, a little bit of exercise, food choices, stress management, getting sleep, avoiding toxins like tobacco and vaping, you're going to be much younger.
[20:55] But if we're lucky and it's a one dose vaccine, who knows? Maybe we can get it by the end of November and largely avoid this. My real thought is we might get a treatment that decreases the adverse events by 80 to 90 percent.
[21:17] It's a unique virus so far, similar to the flu in its effects on those under the age of 50 or 60, but seems to be much more deadly in those over the age of 60 than our current flu strains, and especially those with co-morbidity over the age of 60. So if I was going to say it's a flu, it's a flu I don't want to get it.
[21:53] We're lucky enough that when 50 percent of us get inoculated, we have a large degree of herd immunity. I'm hoping 50 percent of us can get inoculated quickly and get herd immunity. Who knows when we get these population studies with good serology, and we'll do that in the next month or two, we'll know how many of the population have really been infected
[23:04] And yea, vaccines aren't safe, but they're much safer than getting the disease. Meaning if you got all the childhood vaccines, you're forty thousand times more likely to avoid illness than you would have been to get it. Deadly illness or very serious illness. Forty thousand to one. Wouldn't you place that bet anytime?
[23:33] Forty thousand to one chance. That's what vaccines are.
[23:38] And one of the great things about the anti-vaccine movement is it's made the vaccines much safer. Now because we said that in the chapter, in the book we wrote, no one would talk to us for a while. Pro-vaccine, the people who are anti. Only the CDC, and we did some public service announcements, because the CDC realized it was the right data.
[24:10] Viruses want to survive, live, and they mutate. So they find a host and they mutate. But they usually mutate actually to more benign things because they want to survive, right? And if they kill their host, they don't get to survive. So they tend to mutate towards benign unless they come from other species and we're unprepared for them.
[25:18] And so we think they're going to be more viruses over time. And whether it's every five years or every hundred years, we aren't sure. But they're coming. They seem to becoming more frequently now, but everything is happening faster.
[25:35] Unless we screw it up, we should have learned an awful lot from this.
[27:02] But you look at life expectancy and it's been going up continuously. Even accounting that knocked down and backup.
[27:27] But we're in this period where we're all going to live longer for a long, long time.
[27:41] So we want to live longer, but we want to live healthier.
Thank you for joining us on Health Gig. We loved having you with us. We hope you'll tune in again next week. In the meantime, be sure to like and subscribe to this podcast, and follow us on healthgigpod.com.
“We got to be smart. We got to be prepared for the virus coming back. We got to get lucky and get treatment and get a vaccine in a hurry. But if we're smart, we can avoid both the deaths of despair and the deaths from Covid. It takes a really smart group.” - Dr. Mike Roizen
“We're going to learn a huge amount over the next four months. By the way, I think this is the major cause for getting well, because if you're above the age of 60 and make yourself much younger by staying healthy, you're not going to have the risk.” - Dr. Mike Roizen
“If you get healthy and do exercise, a little bit of exercise, food choices, stress management, getting sleep, avoiding toxins like tobacco and vaping, you're going to be much younger.” - Dr. Mike Roizen
“Forty thousand to one chance. That's what vaccines are.” - Dr. Mike Roizen
Keywords
#DrRoizen #DrMikeRoizen #Health #Wellness #HealthGig #Pandemic #COVID19 #TriciaReillyKoch #DoroBushKoch #MentalHealth #PhysicalHealth #WellnessInstitute #ClevelandClinic #Diet #Exercise #Stress #Wellbeing #Vaccine #Statistics #Data #Reopening #RealAge #PhysicalAge #CalendarAge #Young #Youth #Old #Education #Learning #Gowing #Optimism #Physiology