Blossom Your Awesome Podcast Optimal Health With Dr. Doug Lucas

Blossom Your Awesome Podcast Optimal Health With Dr. Doug Lucas

Dr. Doug Lucas joins us to talk about optimal health. Dr. Doug is a health optimization physician. He is an orthopedic surgeon who left the traditional medical model to start his own Telehealth center Optimal Bone Health.

Dr. Doug educates works with patients by reviewing genetics, extensive lab work and functional testing. His 6 month programs focus on lifestyle changes, customized supplementation protocols, hormone optimization and replacement, peptide protocols and medications when needed.

To learn more about Dr. Doug check him out here.


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Transcript

Sue (00:01.232)
Hi there today on the show we have got Dr. Doug Lucas here with us. I am so honored and delighted to have you here. Welcome to the show.

Dr Doug Lucas (00:08.738)
Thanks, Sue. I'm super happy to be here.

Sue (00:10.936)
Oh, I'm super happy to have you here. Get into your story. So you are an orthopedic surgeon. You are also an anti-aging and regenerative physician. So give us, I know you started with the orthopedics first, give us the backstory and then how you transitioned. I know you have this incredible center where you do both of this, so give us that story.

Dr Doug Lucas (00:35.99)
Yeah, so gosh, my story started like most physicians who are in the traditional medical space with, you know, medical school and residency. And I loved the idea of being able to make very clear improvements for people. So I jumped into the world of orthopedics because it was so obvious the benefit that we could do, you know, with black and white, you have a problem, I can fix it. And I did that, did my residency and finished my fellowship at Stanford and went on to practice in a traditional orthopedic practice.

About a year in though after the glimmer of goals faded, I realized that yes, I was making clear changes in people but that I really wasn't impacting them the way that I thought that I would. Meaning that yes, surgeries were going great and they were going as planned and all of that was working but what they really needed was something that I didn't actually offer and that's when I started taking a bigger look at the medical system just in general, not only in orthopedics but just across the board.

Sue (01:36.8)
And now, you know, I love an aspect of what you do and touch on here because I feel like not all physicians provide this, right? We don't always get, like, you're kind of helping people get to the root of disease, the root of things, versus a band-aid with, you know, a pharmaceutical.

Dr Doug Lucas (01:57.79)
Right. Well, not even just a pharmaceutical. I mean, I look a lot of times at what we were doing surgically and it kind of pains me to say this, but sometimes even surgically, we're putting on a bandaid, you know, because again, we're not getting to the root cause and we're just covering things up with one surgery after another and after another. And from a business perspective, that's logical. But from a patient centered perspective, we're really missing the big picture, which is why do you need these services in the first place aside from trauma, which is a whole other conversation. But my

My sub-specialty in orthopedics was foot and ankle. So we would see a lot of diabetic patients. I would see people that needed a very strong decision-making conversation around diet, exercise, lifestyle, stress, all the things that we focus on now. And I wasn't able to have that conversation. And even when I did, patients weren't there for that. So they weren't interested in hearing me have that conversation with them. So I took that next step to figure out what I was doing.

what I needed, what training did I need to be able to put myself in a position where I could actually have that conversation in a meaningful way.

Sue (03:00.692)
And what did that training look like? And another question, when you say you weren't able to have that conversation, was it just because of the training or is it because of this kind of Western clinical model of this equals this and this equals that?

Dr Doug Lucas (03:17.862)
Yeah, more than the latter really. So my training, I mean most doctors' trainings, we don't really get trained much on nutrition or exercise or the benefits or how or the what. So any doctor that knows anything about those areas, they've pursued that on their own. And I'll talk about kind of what I ended up doing for me to really get into a space where I felt very comfortable educating people like that. But what you said about the traditional Western model of this equals this, yes, it is very

Dr Doug Lucas (03:47.474)
And this is a little bit by demand, but it's also by design, meaning that if my goal is to figure out what drug you need, I don't need to talk to you for very long, right? I just get a little bit of information, check off some boxes, prescribe you a drug. That should take me about three to five minutes. And that's what a doctor's visit is for the most part. If you want to get to the root cause of something, you need hours, not just a few minutes. You need hours of time. You need a team. You need further diagnosis.

diagnostic labs, potentially functional medicine testing, you need to really dig deep. And our system is just not set up for that.

Sue (04:23.5)
So this is obviously why you went off and did your own thing because you have you kind you service people outside of a Hospital you have your own treatment center now essentially

Dr Doug Lucas (04:33.502)
Yeah, well, we actually even went the next step. So we started this practice at the beginning of the pandemic. So I kind of saw the writing on the wall and leverage the change in telehealth laws to say, look, I could treat people locally in Asheville, North Carolina, where I am, or we could treat people anywhere. Because at that time, all of the telehealth laws sort of went away. So now we were able to establish patient care through a telehealth visit, whereas prior to the pandemic, you could not. So we started as a telehealth company and, you know, we have not.

seeing a need to change. There's all kinds of things I would love to do in a brick and mortar center, but ultimately I can serve more people like this.

Sue (05:10.088)
Oh, wow. I love this Dr. Lucas, and I just so commend you because I think we need more like you. And I think, you know, you have that, the clinical background, but now you're into this whole other space and able to, you know, again, get to the root of people's problems. So give us some insight here. What is kind of the biggest myth around? What is the one thing you see the most of and that people are, you know, given misled about?

Dr Doug Lucas (05:39.714)
Man, the one thing I don't know, I could give you like 10 off the top of my head, but I would I'll give you two. So two of my favorite things to talk about one is osteoporosis and bone health. And I'll circle back to that one. And but the other one is diabetes. And the reason why I like talking about diabetes is because I was exposed to this and it's one of the conditions that really changed my perspective on medicine in general. And it's because diabetes as a as a medical student, I was taught it is a progressive disease.

And once you have the diagnosis, you're just going to continue to get worse and there's really nothing you can do when you just prescribe them the medications and watch their blood sugar and then all the bad things with diabetes that come. In practice, my wife who's a PhD nutritionist started treating people with diabetes and used a nutritional approach that not only made them better and allowed them to get rid of their medications but actually put their diabetes in remission or reversal depending on how you want to define it.

And I remember the first time she told me that she had done that with a client and I was like, no, you didn't. You can't do that. You're like, that doesn't happen. And of course she was right, as she usually is, and realized that you could make a tremendous impact in these patients' lives and prevent them from what I was offering, which was ultimately amputations and life-saving treatment in the form of surgeries that nobody wants. And so...

That's the biggest thing that I see now, people that have metabolic dysfunction, which is the precursor to diabetes, and it is so prevalent and leads to so many things we could talk about for this entire visit, but I'll just cut it short there and say, metabolic dysfunction, blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, all in one big package is something that is so completely mismanaged in our system that there is a very simple, not easy, but a very simple approach to that works almost universally. So that's probably number one.

And then number two with bone health, as I mentioned, we actually started a second company that is the same platform, same team, same approach, but different labs, different direction on osteoporosis because it is a group of women and men with this diagnosis that are again not served by the traditional medical model where there is a again relatively simple.

Dr Doug Lucas (07:53.086)
not easy but simple solution to reversing osteoporosis and I say it that way because it is a reversible condition for most people. And people live in such fear around this diagnosis and whether or not they're going to have a fracture that's going to change their lives and for most people they just don't need to. So those are the two big ones that I really enjoy treating.

Sue (08:12.856)
Wow, I love this. And again, a message that just needs to be out there more. Let me ask you, there was so much conflicting information, like you go on YouTube and reversing diabetes, that's a conversation that's being had more and more, but you'll have one doctor saying, oh, you can eat fruit and another one that's saying, oh no, you can't eat fruit or don't eat this. And so how do we decipher, like give us that insight there.

Dr Doug Lucas (08:36.13)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Doug Lucas (08:41.758)
Yeah, so I think it's tough. And I actually talked about this, I wrote a book about bone health, and I have a whole section on like finding your guru in it. Because there are you know, if you whatever you want to believe whatever your bias is, you'll find a person that can tell you how right you are at that confirmation bias that the internet provides so readily. But I think the proofs in the pudding.

And so for me, when I say that you can reverse diabetes with this approach, you know, I'm leaning on my own experience. I'm leaning on my wife's experience, having treated thousands of people with, with a not uniform, but a similar approach. So I'm pretty confident that when we talk about something, we know what we're talking about and we have evidence to back that up. We also lean on research and we are very objective in our approach to things. But does that mean like when I say reversing diabetes, should you eat fruit? I would say probably not much.

Does that mean no fruit? I don't know that we need to be that rigid about it. My wife would say no fruit. She's a little bit more rigid in her approach than I am. But then is she more successful in her approach than I am? The numbers would have to bear that out. So if you look at somebody who's totally opposite of me, somebody who says, we'll go on a plant-based, low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet to reverse diabetes, the thing is that they have research that can support that too. So then you have to figure out what's right for you. Right?

I don't know any of my patients that would actually do well on that approach, but I'm sure it exists. Otherwise, they wouldn't have a platform to talk on, right? So there are people that must do well on that. I just don't know who they are. So I think you have to figure out A, do you trust the person, where they're coming from, and then B, does it work for you? And then if both of those things line up, then go for it.

Sue (10:21.28)
And now, what are some other things that you guys are working on and treating that we're kind of told that aren't treatable or reversible?

Dr Doug Lucas (10:33.278)
Yeah, well, my wife's business is all about weight loss. So she has really gone into the weight loss space with behavior and nutrition. And so you can you can maybe leave a link to that. And I'll let people go on her YouTube channel to learn all about what she does. But for me, I think that we look at health more from the big picture. So we talk about health span. And that's going to hit all of those things that will kill most adults, you know, and so most, most adults in the US in the world, but in the US.

will die of either heart disease, cancer, some kind of metabolic dysfunction, you know, coming from out of diabetes or dementia, right? Like those are the big four and then falls from fractures is the fifth. So we take a look at this concept called health span and say, well, instead of treating disease, because that's the Western model, right? We don't want to just treat heart disease or treat blood pressure. I want to treat you as a person and say, Okay, let's look at your health span. In other words, how long you live? How do I help you live?

longer better rather than just lifespan because lifespan is interesting but I don't want to live till 130 if my quality of life is terrible. So how do I help you live better longer and it might actually be that you live longer but I don't have any proof to say that that's true. But how do we prevent you from either dying from one of those diseases that I mentioned or to not be ravaged from some of those things like diabetes for example. So I wouldn't point to a single thing I would say focusing on healthspan is actually what we do.

better because that's going to help people to prevent all of those things through the kind of pyramid of health treatment or health optimization that we utilize.

Sue (12:10.824)
And now is nutrition one of the key kind of target, is that the main thing kind of lean into?

Dr Doug Lucas (12:17.518)
Totally.

Yeah, so we look at it like this. So we have a pyramid and I can get you like a little image of this if you want. But basically, we have this pyramid of optimization and the foundational pillars. There's I think we just changed it to six. So let's see if I can name all six. So nutrition is probably number one or closely followed by or behind number two, which would be movement or exercise, right? So those two are so critical and so overlooked.

Sleep optimization is a huge one because if you're not sleeping well, then kind of none of the rest of it matters. Stress mitigation or how you handle stress is really important. And then mindset and then connection. And so mindset, you know, if you don't have the right mindset about how you're handling your health, if you're not, you know, growth focused, if you're not, if you're, if you're staying in a victim mindset and you're not able to actually do anything, none of that matters too. And then the last one, which what did I just call it? I called it.

either spiritual health or connection, one of the two. That's a tough one, and that's something that we are still figuring out how to best manage, but that one is something that we're kind of growing on. But those are the foundational things. That's all part of our coaching model. We're talking about all those things, picking and choosing the ones that people need most help with, and most people, it sits in those first two, right? Exercise, nutrition, potentially sleep. But then we kind of have to keep going down those foundational pillars to help

people to understand exactly what it is that's preventing them from succeeding. And then on top of that then is custom supplementation assuming that it's needed based off of biomarkers so blood work. And then we talk about hormone optimization, then we talk about peptides, and then we talk about pharmaceuticals if needed. But by the time you've done all of that work, you generally don't need it.

Sue (14:06.82)
Wow. So are people able to get off some of those? I mean, can you in a realistic scenario have diabetes for how many ever years, have been on cholesterol pills and actually take on these models and get off of those and reverse it?

Dr Doug Lucas (14:26.506)
Yeah, so the short answer is yes. Blood pressure especially is one where people can definitely get their blood pressure normalized with very, actually very little change in metabolic function depending on their starting point. Not everybody, because there are other reasons to have high blood pressure, but if it's metabolic related, then absolutely. Cholesterol is a whole nother conversation, so that's a conversation around, is it really a risk factor, how much disease do you have?

Is it worth treating the cholesterol? What are the side effects of treatment, et cetera? So that one, it kind of depends, because I think a lot of people are naturally going to have higher cholesterol, and the question is, do we treat it or not? What's the risk benefit there? I could put you on a diet that would make your cholesterol medication likely unnecessary, but I don't know that that's gonna make you better. In fact, it would probably make you worse. So yeah, the answer is yes, you can come off of medications, and most people will start to peel back medications after they start with us.

Sue (15:21.244)
And now Dr. Lucas, it sounds like, I mean, medication is kind of like you're, it's down at the end of the list for you, right? That's the last resort.

Dr Doug Lucas (15:27.342)
Totally. Yeah. Right. And so we don't use pharmaceuticals often. And so I'll just give you an example like from a bone health perspective. I think the pharmaceuticals, most of them are terrible and I wouldn't recommend them. There are a few that I think are indicated for some situations. But by the time we go down this pathway of nailing the fundamentals, talking about custom self-implementation, you know, working on hormone optimization or replacement, discussing

And then looking at our timeline and your risk, by the time we get to the conversation of, hey, should we throw a drug at this? The answer is no, I think we're good. We have a clear path forward. I think we're going to make some great improvement here. And we usually have time. Now when we don't have time, whether it be bone health or whether it be somebody that has really high blood pressure and they want to come off their blood pressure medication and we're saying, no, look.

we need to get this under control first. So let's dial this in, let's make sure that this is okay. Same thing with diabetes medications. Yeah, I don't want your blood sugar to get out of control while we're getting your diabetes under control from a nutrition and exercise perspective. It doesn't happen overnight. For some people, it happens very slowly and there are risks of coming off of medications. So yeah, we do prescribe them in those scenarios, but our goal is to get off of them, not to continue on them.

And then the other point where I would say that we use medications would potentially be from a longevity play. So people that are interested in, have the right genetics for, and want to consider drugs like metformin or rapamycin, kind of these like Giroprotective things that we can potentially use, we have the ability to prescribe those things as well. Although the question is, is what's the risk benefit of them?

Sue (17:09.06)
So the way you guys are looking at this, it sounds like, correct me if I'm wrong or help me understand this. So when somebody's been on a drug, a pharmaceutical for some sort of condition, the longer you're on it, it's harder to get off or things are still progressing essentially.

Dr Doug Lucas (17:28.674)
Yeah, it depends on the situation, but blood pressure is a good example where if you've been on blood pressure medication for a long time, if you make a small shift in metabolic function, a lot of times we do see improvements. And so you'll see people that you've probably heard this, if somebody who's diabetic or overweight and they lose weight or they get their diabetes under better control and all of a sudden they start having low blood pressure, right? And it's because they don't need that blood pressure medication anymore. But you have to be careful and not just say, oh, well, I've lost five pounds, I can stop this drug because you don't actually know that that's true.

And so this is where having a very close observation, working with a team that can answer your questions. If you have symptoms of, you know, I'm lightheaded or whatever, having somebody that you can reach out to and get an answer like that, you know, that's where a concierge style program, which I would consider us, although I don't love the word, but basically easy access, right? To somebody who like, who can listen to and understand what your concerns are. That's the right model in which you can get off of those things, but it does take time depending on what the medications are.

Sue (18:27.568)
And now so working with you in your center, what does that look like? What does that entail for people?

Dr Doug Lucas (18:34.206)
Yeah, so we went round and round on this out of the gate because we initially did, you know, just we would do a consultation and we would get labs and we would put people on a direction and some people did coaching and some people didn't. And we found that the people that were really engaged did really well. But of course, people that didn't engage, you know, they didn't do very well, right? Because they weren't they had no motivation, they had no follow up, they had no accountability. And so we kind of went round and round with how to best help people to optimize themselves. And what we came up with is

the idea that we need to bring people in a membership style model. So now we only do membership style models. I don't do any consultations, one-off, hey, look at my labs and tell me what to do because it doesn't serve people. And so we bring people in, have them sign up for 12 months at a time. And whether this is health optimization or this is bone health, it's the same thing. They come in, they chat with our dietitian and coaching team. We figure out who the right fit is for them from a coaching perspective. Right now we have five dietitians and coaches and that's the...

the kind of fastest growing side of what we do. And then they do some intake, they get some questions answered, they start them on their lifestyle side. And while that's happening, we're getting the biomarkers, we're getting labs drawn. And then once the labs are resulted, then they meet with myself or one of my PAs, and then we go over the labs together, and then we finalize that plan. That plan is gonna include everything in that optimization pyramid that we just described, right? So we're gonna go from the beginning all the way up and figure out what we wanna do for the next six months.

Actually, that's not entirely true. For the health optimization side, it's four months. For the bone health side, it's six months because things tend to change slower for that group. And so, we do that for four months and then we repeat the biomarkers and then we adjust and change the plan and we just continue down that road as long as we need to. The coaching continues on. So, you're working with your dietitian or your coach either as often as you want to, potentially as often as every other week or some people even more frequently than that. But here's the key thing is that you have access to us.

pretty much all the time. We always have people that are checking messages, whether it's your dietician, it's your PA, or it's myself. Someone is fielding concerns immediately so that we can then give good feedback and get people on the path forward. We have all these tools that we utilize, different ways that we can obtain data, whether it be food tracking or some kind of a biometric device so that we understand what's happening so kind of live as people are going.

Dr Doug Lucas (20:56.502)
So we're always kind of watching, helping, using their experience as feedback for what we're telling them to do, but we're always making sure that they're continuing to move forward in the right direction. That way, we can help people to achieve their goals. If we just give them a thing and have them go off and do it on their own and let us know how it goes, we don't as humans do well in that type of environment. And that's the traditional medical and also the functional medicine model.

Sue (21:22.316)
I think it's so profound, this coaching element, and that you're onto this, where a lot of, again, not to knock anybody, but a lot of doctors are kind of like, oh yeah, here's what your blood works as, here's the medication, and people aren't always accountable. And now, talk to us about this spiritual component. I just love that. What are you tapping into here and seeing?

Dr Doug Lucas (21:44.382)
Yeah, I mean, this is part of gosh, part of my journey. It's part of, you know, it's amazing when you talk to patients and you bring this up, you kind of get one or two responses. One is this like stone cold, like, it's fine. You know, like, oh, okay. Or you get this people will open up and they'll, they'll be very open about their experience and how they're growing spiritually. And this isn't necessarily a religious thing. This is just a spiritual growth that I feel like

We as humans need something and again, it doesn't need to be religious. It just needs to be some kind of connection to something bigger than ourselves. Otherwise our intentions just kind of get lost because our goals don't seem adequate. You know, why are we doing what we're doing? What's our mission? And so I love having that conversation with people because once, once people would get really dialed into their mission, then all of a sudden, the goals they're setting for themselves, whether it be, you know, increasing muscle mass or getting off of this drug or losing X amount of weight.

Now it's tied to something bigger. It's not just about the numbers on the scale, right? It's not just about getting rid of that medication so I'm not paying with $10 copay. It's about, oh, I'm doing this for, whether it be my career mission or my kids or my this or whatever, or because it's the experience that God has for me, or whatever it is, it gives them so much more drive. And I think as a physician, if we don't ask about it, it gets lost. People are afraid to talk about it.

in our current culture. People are just afraid to say like, oh, I think that this is my calling from God. People don't usually say that to their doctors and I think that they should if it's important to them.

Sue (23:16.692)
I love that. I think that's so awesome. Now give us some practical guidance, Dr. Lucas, on I know you said nutrition and exercise, and we've all heard that, but what about some like really practical tips for those listening at home? What should that look like?

Dr Doug Lucas (23:34.058)
Yeah, yeah, and it's I'll give you the blanket statement, but recognize too that everybody is different. And this is why that whole concept of eat less move more, you know, it just doesn't work because everybody has a different starting point. Like if you told me to eat less and move more, I would be undernourished and overexercised, right? So like that's not good. That's not good advice. But I think from a nutrition perspective, what I can say is that even though everybody's different, there are some ground rules that we start with for everybody. And

The number one thing we see that is deficient in the vast majority of people as they come into our program is protein consumption. We live in this really weird space culturally with protein and animals and plant-based versus eating animals. And it's like without getting into any of that controversy, what we see from a health perspective is that people are protein deficient for various reasons, even if they are eating animals, they're just not eating enough of it. And so we recommend that people start tracking their food and anybody can do this.

Track your food for two weeks, be brutally honest about everything that goes in your mouth and see what kind of protein consumption are you getting. What's your micronutrient analysis look like? Now it's not super accurate, but it'll give you an idea of what you're potentially deficient in. And then also look at dietary fat, saturated fat, and carbohydrates because you can really get a sense like, oh, I'm eating an 80% carbohydrate diet. Like I had no idea. But what we tell people is, okay, now that you know, let's aim for, and this is true from most people.

one gram per pound of ideal body weight and protein. If you start there, make that one change, it'll actually have a profound impact on the majority of Americans and probably worldwide. But the majority of Americans because when you focus on that macronutrient, then you will by default drop back on carbohydrate because you just are going to be satiated after eating and you're going to give your body the amino acids that it needs. So it might not be robust for some people, but for a lot of people, that's going to be a big shift.

compared to what they're eating now. So that would be probably the single easiest thing that somebody could do from a nutrition perspective.

Sue (25:37.628)
And when you say protein, I mean, it shouldn't obviously we should kind of mix it up, right? Not all red meat. I mean, a little of this and a little of that or.

Dr Doug Lucas (25:46.678)
Yeah, that's variable. So if your goal is nutrition, so if your goal is to get the most mineral and vitamin bang for your gram of protein buck, actually it's gonna be pretty much red meat across the board. Now there are downsides of red meat when it comes to saturated fat content for those that are saturated fat intolerant and that's a genetic thing. And then there's the rest of the discussion around red meat which we don't have time for. I'm happy to talk about someday.

But from a nutrition perspective alone, I think your best bang for your buck is actually coming out of red meat

Sue (26:21.044)
Wow. Okay. And now exercise. What, what do you recommend? There are so many now different things out there.

Dr Doug Lucas (26:25.214)
Yeah.

Dr Doug Lucas (26:29.85)
I would say this, it doesn't need to be fancy. Number one, don't get wrapped up in I need the cool new mirror on the wall that tells me what to do or I need the app that guides me through it. Depending on your starting point, just do something. Walking is fantastic. Lifting weights is probably the most important thing and it doesn't need to be fancy. It doesn't even need to be a real weight.

Dr Doug Lucas (26:59.478)
you know, like chunks of rock and steel in his whatever basement or garage, whatever it was, right? Like it doesn't need to be fancy. It just needs to be heavy and then you need to not get injured. So starting with very simple resistance training is the most important thing you can do. Uh, and then don't get injured. Kind of like the three criteria to start with.

Sue (27:20.948)
That is great guidance there. Now want to for a few moments touch on anti-aging because I know that's one of your specialties. What is, let's start with like the biggest myth around age.

Dr Doug Lucas (27:27.874)
Yeah.

Dr Doug Lucas (27:35.17)
Yeah, so here's the biggest myth around aging that there is a drug or supplement that is going to cure aging. It's just not going to happen probably in our lifetime. No matter what some very well known influencers and book writers and authors, I guess, would be a better term for that say there just isn't a supplement or a drug that's going to reverse aging. So we can't lean on that. What we can lean on though, as I alluded to earlier.

it's pretty clear what's going to kill most of us, right? It's heart disease, cancer, dementia, diabetes, and loss of muscle mass. So from an anti-aging perspective, start there. I'm actually just drafting a talk I'm going to do on Wednesday at a local, um, a local, um, living facility. And that's the summary of the talk, which is focus on the things that we know we're going to kill pretty much everybody in this room.

It's not the supplement. It's not the NMN. It's not the vets. It's not the cool test. It's not stem cells. All that stuff's interesting, but make sure that you have everything else nailed first.

Sue (28:44.849)
And now in terms of food, are there some, what are those super foods for you or that stand out in your mind that can help with the anti-aging?

Dr Doug Lucas (28:54.346)
Yeah, you ready for the controversial statement? I'll give you two superfoods. Number one is going to be liver from agriculturally sound grass-fed beef. And the second thing is going to be red meat from the same source.

Sue (28:57.518)
Yes.

Sue (29:10.7)
Wow. Okay, and now talk to us about what is coming up next for you. I know you have a book. I'm gonna have links to your site. I'd love to add a link to your wife's site as well because it sounds like she's got a lot of great information. Maybe even have her on the podcast. That would be awesome. I would love that. So yeah, talk to us about what's up with you.

Dr Doug Lucas (29:27.158)
Yeah, I'll pass that along for sure. Yeah.

Dr Doug Lucas (29:33.814)
Yeah, so what's next for us, man, we have really loved building out the bone health side of our practice for the last year and a half. We're seeing such incredible results there. And obviously I wrote the book called the osteoporosis breakthrough, which is kind of a jumping off point. And so it's, I know you'll link to it. We also have it available. I'll show you the download link where you can download it for free. We just want to get information out. Just get it out there about this disease.

For us though, the next thing is probably going to be kind of doing the same thing from a health man perspective. So this approach that we've taken with we have a self-directed course and a book and we're doing master classes live once, I guess every two or three weeks and we're seeing I mean we have three, four thousand people sign up for these master classes. It's unbelievable the response. And so we want to continue down that pathway and I love the mission of just educating people about.

the things that are so difficult to figure out in the, you know, the YouTube sphere, the Twitter sphere, the Instagram sphere of like, what is right for me? And I'm not saying that I have all the answers, but I can point out how we work with patients, what we see work, what the literature says, and then what kind of the big controversies are. It's a really fun thing that I enjoy doing. I bet you do too. I'm just kind of pointing out things that just don't make sense, but are really popular.

Sue (30:51.38)
Oh, I love that. And again, I'm going to be sure to have links to all of your stuff. Now, a couple of things. First and foremost, you've just been so awesome and so insightful and have given us some like information here that we haven't heard before on the podcast. So I always love that. Now, in closing, if there were just one message, your hope for everybody, what is that closing message you want to leave us with?

Dr Doug Lucas (31:16.534)
Yeah, I think number one is to be an advocate for your own health because in our culture of our medical system, you will get passed over if you don't overtly have disease. If you don't have a problem that either requires a surgery or a drug, you will be ignored. And if you're not feeling your best like most people aren't, know that you're not alone and then work to figure out who can help you to figure it out so that you can feel better.

Sue (31:43.58)
Oh, I love that. That is such a powerful closing message. You've been so awesome, Dr. Lucas. Thank you so much.

Dr Doug Lucas (31:51.158)
Thank you very much. I appreciate your time.

Sue (31:53.304)
Thank you.

Wow.