Revolutionizing Healthcare: Technology and Patient-Centered Care

In this episode, I’m thrilled to sit down with Dr. Carl Paige, a seasoned physician who transitioned from traditional medicine to focus on functional, cellular, and regenerative health. We dive deep into his journey, exploring how he shifted his approach to address the root causes of illness and offer more personalized care. If you’ve ever wondered about the limitations of conventional medicine and what’s possible outside the “take this pill and see you in six months” model, this episode is for you!

What We Talked About:

• Dr. Paige’s story of leaving traditional medicine and starting his innovative practice, Medical Transformation Center.
• The challenges he faced trying to bring functional medicine into a conventional setting—and why he ultimately had to go his own way.
• How addressing gut health can impact systemic issues like autoimmune diseases and chronic inflammation.
• Cutting-edge tools like genetic testing, peptides, and lifestyle coaching that Dr. Paige uses to optimize his patients’ cellular health.
• Practical advice on improving your overall health, including tips on diet, sleep, and stress management.
• The importance of finding the right healthcare team who listens and works with you, not against you.

What Stood Out to Me:
One thing that really hit home during our chat was Dr. Paige’s perspective on how traditional medicine is great for acute care but often falls short for people with chronic issues. He shared his journey of helping his wife through gut health issues and how that inspired him to step out of the traditional healthcare box. Hearing how he validates patients’ experiences and focuses on real solutions—rather than quick fixes—was so refreshing.

Why This Matters:
This episode is a must-listen if you’ve ever felt stuck in the traditional healthcare system or if you’re curious about what functional and cellular medicine can offer. Dr. Paige is proof that there are options out there for people who are ready to take control of their health and dig deeper into what’s causing their symptoms.

Resources We Mentioned:

• Dr. Carl Paige’s practice: Medical Transformation Center
• The Mediterranean-Paleo diet for improved health.
• Organizations like A4M (American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine) for finding trained practitioners.

Key Takeaways:

• Gut health plays a massive role in overall wellness—it’s often the starting point for solving chronic issues.
• Lifestyle changes like a clean diet, sleep optimization, and strength training are powerful tools for cellular health.
• It’s okay to ask for more from your healthcare providers. Find someone who listens and is willing to explore non-traditional solutions.
• Be cautious of one-size-fits-all approaches, especially online—personalized care is the key to true healing.

Connect with Rebel Health Collective:

• Facebook: Rebel Health Collective
• Instagram: @rebelhealthcollective

**Disclaimer: Please remember that the topics and information discussed in this podcast are for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered medical advice. Always consult with your healthcare provider or medical professional before making any changes to your health regimen or implementing any new treatments. Your health journey is unique, and it’s important to work with your trusted healthcare team to determine what’s best for you.**

Transcript

hey, Dr. Page. Really excited to have you with us today. You are our first expert and doctor in really the functional medicine space. So I'm really excited to pick your brain, understand what led you down the functional medicine route and starting just the amazing

Josh Bostick (00:44.889)
patient care that you've started and really hearing the story and some of the best practices that you do. without taking any more time, I'll just turn it over to you if you want to give us a background and just a short summary of what led you to leave the traditional conventional side of medicine and really start this journey that you're on.

Carl Paige, M.D. (01:04.908)
Hi, Dr. Carl Page here. My practice is medical transformation syndrome. We're in Louisville, Kentucky and thanks for inviting me on your podcast. I'm an internal medicine physician and a pediatrician. did both, boarded in both of those things and practiced them for about 25 to 30 years. And I got to see, I think I counted up 250,000 patient interactions over that time that I did that. So, you know, a lot of traditional clinical experience and then started and ran two traditional

practices and started a third one in Renitz and built them very big and sold them. So it was very busy. I we had a large busy primary care practice, essentially. Hired and trained other physicians and had it well respected in the community, which sort of built me a little bit of gravitas in the community when I tried to move into a different space. So it was helpful that way to have some traditional credentials and traditional training. So I practiced that way for a long time.

always was keeping my eye on other things available in medicine. know, Western medicine is, you know, a couple hundred years old, maybe 150 years old. There's a lot of things that happened before that and plants and botanical and, you know, medicine and other energy medicine and things that I was always interested in, but really didn't utilize in my traditional practice. So, but I did see a lot of patients there that somehow didn't quite fit the model of that linear Western allopathic.

here's your symptom, here's the label we give the problem, and now here's a pharmaceutical to help suppress that symptom or manage that particular issue. So people just didn't fit that. There was a significant group of patients that I was either going to have to say you're mentally ill or you need an antidepressant just to try to suppress where you really didn't care that you had these symptoms or tell them there's nothing we have to offer you. So none of that failed intellectually.

comfortable for me, you know, I was always curious and hadn't been in medicine, I guess, long enough to get to lose my intellectual curiosity and my critical thinking skills. So I always was looking for what else could I offer the patients and try to offer them things that were safe and hopefully efficacious in that space. We had eight kids, six of them in seven years, my wife and I. And during that process, you know, she kind of got ill, physically ill and was dabbling in sort of that autoimmune chronic inflammatory state by the end of the

Carl Paige, M.D. (03:28.657)
eighth child from the different mid-six C-sections, so lot of surgeries, anesthesia, had a bunch of antibiotics around that for different things. she challenged me one day when she came home saying she was not feeling well. said, well, here's your pill again, like what I was trained to do. And she said, that's not right. She's like, you need to figure this out. I I sent her to all my friends and she went through the mill of traditional things and they pretty much came back with, maybe she should be on an antidepressant. And I was like, that's...

I don't think that's right. She's been a little crazy her whole life. That's always what I liked about her. I don't think that's what's wrong with her. She just needs antidepressants. She challenged me to go figure out what was wrong with it. I looked and I read and I looked out of the traditional box and started to look into GI health and intestinal permeability, slash leaky gut and how that might trigger the autoimmune process.

That's really ended up being her primary problem. had gut issues, had some intestinal membrane permeability issues that were driving inflammation and autoimmunity. And we worked on that through diet modification and some other things that had tools at that time. And she got better. So then I also had a big group of my patients who were going through the, going through menopause, you know, at the time. And it was around 2000 or so in the traditional healthcare system. It's sort of abandoned ladies.

going through menopause after the women's health study in 2000 that said synthetic hormones might have some problems when you use them in patients. It also kind of said that natural hormones applied topically in skipping your liver didn't have a lot of problems in that space. So I went and credentialed and trained in that and started treating some of those patients. And it led me through a training program through the A4M and got a fellowship in a board certification. And now they call it nutritional and metabolic medicine in a

did a functional medicine fellowship there, which really gave me that toolbox that I was looking forward to break away from that linear evaluation and management paradigm in allopathic medicine to more of a systems analysis and looking at root cause. So that's really where I started in the functional medicine space. after blending those two practices, it was very difficult to have a group of patients who were trained in

Carl Paige, M.D. (05:51.501)
wanted the linear paradigm, me their pills and they'll come back in six months and I'll just keep adding other ones. Many of the patients were comfortable with that. You know, when I tried to present diet and lifestyle modification and using some non-traditional pharmaceutical tools in that space that were more botanical based or plant based or supplementation or lifestyle modification, that's a multifactorial management plan that was difficult for them to grasp. And we were still learning how to be supportive and coach and...

helped train patients to transition to that model. So most of the time I was wasting my time. Nine times out of 10, the patients just wanted their pills and move on to the next visit. But there was a group of patients who were looking for that, and they started to show up and be at the office. And we decided to create a different business model. So we moved into that, and that's when we created what's called Medical Transformation Center, the non-traditional practice that we have now. And we actually call it a cellular and regenerative medicine.

some functional medicine tools to help evaluate and manage those patients. We've kind of moved away from functional medicine as a label because like a lot of things, if it doesn't have good branding and marketing and codification, it sort of gets bastardized a little bit. And many people are functional medicine experts that maybe just went to a weekend seminar. So we kind of moved away from that from a labeling standpoint. we still like the paradigm.

Josh Bostick (07:16.822)
Definitely. And as someone who is going through the mill of trying to find a diagnosis and someone to work with, appreciate you giving the option to do things outside of the norm of just here's your pill and see in a couple of months. It's people like you that are truly making a difference and are the ones that the weird ones like me who are just not your normal case.

Carl Paige, M.D. (07:43.586)
Okay.

Josh Bostick (07:45.27)
can turn to and find help. So I seriously appreciate you not just following that linear path and branching out to really provide personalized care. Because like you mentioned, a lot of people are fine with just the symptom suppression, just make me feel better. But there's others who want to actually treat the root cause. And it is work. It's diet and lifestyle modification. It's taking supplements.

saying no to some of the fun things like going out to bars and things like that. So not everybody's willing to put in the work, but to have people like yourself for those who are willing to, I think is really important. you provide really personalized care. And could you go into some of the techniques that you use rather than just the basic metabolic blood panel that a lot of people will get blood work for? What are some of the tools that you use?

Carl Paige, M.D. (08:20.642)
Well, the first thing that happens usually when patients come in the office is they're

Josh Bostick (08:43.125)
for more personalized individual care.

Carl Paige, M.D. (08:50.689)
You know, they never come to our practice first, I would say at least 90 % of the time. usually by the time they arrive there with chronic problems, they're frustrated with traditional health care. literally just want to come in and I call it verbal diarrhea. Like they'll come in and just like explode the last four years of what's happened to them. And, you know, I've learned how to navigate through that with them. They need to express some of that. We'll validate that because we've heard it so many times because they need some validation that

you know, they're not crazy and that they have problems that is just, and really we don't try to undercut traditional medicine because you need that if you're super sick or acutely ill, it's really good at that. I mean, if I got, you know, a heart attack, I want to be managed with the latest technology and you know, to bounce your back, but it's not very good at like keeping you from getting there in the first place. And it's also not good at the recovery process on the back end of it, at helping you get back to normal function or looking at some of those root causes. So that's.

the role we try to fill. We encourage the patients to still maintain relationships with their traditional physicians because if they're already very ill, they may still back yourself into a spot where they need that acute support. what we've learned is to listen. We also need to have a good mechanism in place to work with the patients, to coach them lifestyle, health coaching, after the fact, multiple touch points because it's very hard to move from that.

I call it McDonald's medicine where it's like, here's what I want, here's what you get, and you eat it it's finished. That's blood pressure, traditional diabetes, people are used to that. So when we tell them they've got to change what they eat and maybe exercise, and you might have to take a shot of a couple of different peptides and some supplements, it's complex and it's overwhelming sometimes for them to get their head around that or to really even commit to that.

other sort of compounding factors. None of that is valued or respected by any of traditional insurance. So it's all out of pocket. You're already paying huge amounts of money for your insurance that really doesn't cover any of that at all and doesn't really make you better. It's more catastrophe management type of health care insurances for that. So there's a lot of barriers for people to access this. On the provider side, from my space, fortunately I'd been practicing in the community for 30 years and had a level of

Carl Paige, M.D. (11:13.758)
respect and gravitas in the traditional world, was very good at that job and understood it quite well and built a decent reputation, very good reputation. We were the busiest primary care practice in our area for 20 years. So it allowed me a little bit of space where people were like, we're not sure what Carl's doing over there, but he was really good at the other stuff. So we're not gonna throw him out with the trash. So I had that and the...

to allow me to do that and transition into that and patients just started to pop up out of the woodwork and we grew very quickly to now being very busy and one of those few practices that has been able to be interested in some of this stuff implemented on a clinical level and I will give this credit to my wife really to take it from a business standpoint to be successful so no matter how much you like doing some of these things if it doesn't you know feed me or the kids it's not going to survive.

we had to make sure that it was able to survive from just a straight business standpoint too. But the type of tools we use once we have the patient in there is first again, listen, validate. We look at some traditional labs, but we also have made an effort to look at what are the latest cutting edge technologies you can use from a diagnostic standpoint that are available really in your primary care office, but they don't get trained how to use them and in fact are often discouraged from ordering anything outside of the traditional box because

You get so much trained on how to save the insurance and save Medicare a nickel that you're not supposed to look too deep at what's going on because it's too expensive. anyway, that's frustrating. I always try to train the residents when I train them. I said, don't worry about that. I said, you do what you think this patient needs. And on the provider side of us, when we ordered that kind of stuff in my traditional practice, we would get punished. The insurance company would.

why are you ordering this? Or, you know, this is too expensive, don't order it. And I'm like, no, I'm gonna take care of my patients. You know, that's really what's gonna make my final decision on these things. But it was a hard transition, but we made it to that other side of it. you know, from a, the big things we would, start off with is genetic labs. So we were doing a lot of SNP testing, you know, looking at MTHFR and COMT and, you know, APOE genomics and, you know, there's all sorts of things in the SNP world.

Carl Paige, M.D. (13:30.669)
in a single nucleotide polymorphism world that you can look at. Genetics really provide your potential to either do good or do bad, but they don't really box you into that. And then we started working more in the epigenetic world, which is how you turn on and off, how a particular gene risk might function in the body. And most of that is lifestyle driven. So the way you modify epigenetics is diet and lifestyle. So that's the most impactful thing there. So by eating right, exercising, we can impact that. There's also

nutritional things we can use to support epigenetic modification for patients. And then we started to work in the cellular medicine space about six or eight years ago and started working with peptides and using those. then looking at off-label use of some traditional pharmaceutical medicines, how do they work from a mechanical standpoint, physiologic standpoint in the body. And cellular medicine looks at how to make that cell function most efficiently.

If you can modify redox potential, you can work on cellular signaling pathways, modify some of the inflammatory modulating pathways, then there's ways to allow that cell to become more efficient and help deal with some of the primary manifestations of multiple disease processes. So it's not so much just a you have diabetes, but how did that cell fail in the first place? Some of might have been genetic, some of it might have been lifestyle choice.

But some of it may be environmental toxins. know, there's just a, it's a very complex multifactorial paradigm to work with patients in this way. And I think that's why a lot of people don't do it because it's much easier to just do the McDonald's thing. You've got high blood pressure and here's your pill. But I like to think, and I think the patients pay for doctors that still want to think and still try to not just plug into that.

whatever the latest drug rep thing they bought me for lunch was.

Josh Bostick (15:26.759)
Yeah, and I mean you touched on a good point and it's exactly how I was led to my functional health team. I was at my wits end. No one else could give me an answer and you know when we did my initial blood work and the stool tests and you know the saliva test and we're walking through everything at the end of it I was like, okay, so like what's my diagnosis? What do I have and their answer is we don't care. You have all of these different things that are wrong with you.

Carl Paige, M.D. (15:52.248)
Thank

Josh Bostick (15:56.364)
And those are the symptoms. Those are the gremlins that are making you have all these different symptoms. And some of my cortisol was so jacked up. My nutritional intake and absorption was zero, basically, because my gut was just destroyed. And they said, our focus is dialing these things back into the optimal range by supplementation, lifestyle changes, all of those things. And you can label yourself with whatever. But the tactics that we're going to take on

Carl Paige, M.D. (15:59.191)
Yeah.

Josh Bostick (16:24.997)
bring those into the optimal range, those are going to quiet all the noise and bring down the heat, which is going to be your relief. at first, to your point, I was just kind of like, what? I need a title. need some sort of a give me something. And it's been really good to work with them. And they said basically, just trust us. It's a lot, and it's outside the normal scope that you're used to. But trust us and give us.

Carl Paige, M.D. (16:37.331)
Okay.

Josh Bostick (16:53.094)
four months to do another round of blood work and we'll see what happens. And everything definitely has dialed in and gotten a whole lot better.

Carl Paige, M.D. (17:00.894)
Yeah, you do have to give patients an expectation. Everybody wants to see some results. And it's not just A1C or diabetes realm factors, you know, those are markers of where your overall progress might be going. But there's almost always something that takes that genetic potential to maybe have in the diabetic world

Beta cells fail and immune system attack them and then things go haywire. But just dampening with some insulin is a traditional symptom or just managing the symptoms.

Josh Bostick (17:35.366)
Definitely, yeah, and since working with this functional team, you know, still need the insulin, but my roller coaster and average blood sugars and just the stability is so much better. So it's definitely helped there.

Carl Paige, M.D. (17:47.797)
Yeah, gut health impacts a lot of things. I always tell patients like your GI tract is like, you know, it's really like the first third of it is part of like your skin. So, you know, it's functions almost like skin and it's very, it's the first barrier between you and the outside world. And when you get a little further down the GI tract, it's all about nutrient absorption, immune modulation, immune tolerance. And if you maybe have some food triggers that cause inflammatory process in your gut,

then you end up with a systemic immune process that may cross-react with some of your other cells, thyroid, beta cells, whatever it might be, your joints, you want to call it rheumatoid arthritis. So many of these immune, autoimmune triggers start in the gut, then they have a global immune dysregulation that then becomes a labeled systemic illness. And once you have one autoimmune process, statistically you're more likely to have another autoimmune process. So if you don't dial in the

source of that primary failure of the lack of immune tolerance and immune regulation, you're going to end up with more problems downstream, even if you do dial in the glucose piece of it.

Josh Bostick (18:56.518)
And that's a way better way of saying what my functional medicine team said when they said we don't really care what it is. We're going to dial everything in. That was a much better way of saying that.

Carl Paige, M.D. (19:08.487)
Well, it's real. There's published literature and things that you can read if you dive into the medical literature that support the use of all of this. So I was being traditionally trained. I wanted to make sure that whatever I did in this space made sense from a science standpoint. this type of medicine does. It just ends up being complex. It requires you to think in multiple different directions at the same time. And it doesn't.

often lead to just a single pharmaceutical answer. that's frustrating if you're stuck in that linear paradigm to really make, it's like a paradigm shift in how you think about managing problems and assessing patients.

Josh Bostick (19:51.333)
Yeah, and you and I were chatting when we first got on the call before we started recording and you'd mentioned that, you you went through all of your medical school and all doctors are going through medical school because they want to help people. You know, that's why they're doing what they're doing. They're not there just to push people off or not help people. I mean, the reason that they're doing what they're doing is because they care and they want to help people. Do you think the things that your practice does, you know, some of the

genetic research and diving so much deeper into the testing methods. Do you think that it's too hard for traditional medicine practitioners to go down that route? mean, aside from not being able to just because of insurance and the cost and their practices and all that, but I mean, do you think that there's a desire to get into that deeper knowledge or?

Carl Paige, M.D. (20:45.351)
Thank you.

Josh Bostick (20:50.446)
Do you think it's more specialized and those are the people that break off it like yourself?

Carl Paige, M.D. (20:56.735)
Well, you know, I used to do primary care, which is sort of frontline medicine. I did that for quite some time, but because of where we were located, it's kind of in a semi-rural slash suburban area. I got the pleasure of being sort of the first line specialist in that area for many of these inflammatory crimes. So you had to be sort of a little bit of an endocrinologist, a little bit of rheumatologist, a little bit of a neurologist, because to go all the way into the city,

in many these patients, I'm not going into the city, I don't want to go there. They didn't want to go see the specialist. So I had to learn and learn how to manage a lot of those things that, you know, in a regular primary prayer practice, you would normally just punt those downstream to the, or down the hall to the specialist. So I got the luxury of doing that being relatively older now in practice. But I think they're intellectually want to do it, but they don't really get a lot of the tools to do it. And then once you're out in a

in a group practice or in a now a lot of the practices are owned by health systems and you know, they have certain parameters, time limits you gotta work in and you know, can't, you gotta save money for the insurance all the time. So that drives them, they get disincentivized to look deeper. You know, it's not valued and even when we tried to blend the two ways of practicing when I still had a traditional practice, it was not valued at all from a

traditional healthcare standpoint financially. So you really, if you wanted to go broke, you would have done this kind of practice and tried to the insurance for it because it doesn't work. And that's unfortunate. We tried to work with the insurance companies and with several of the big hospital systems in our area to say, hey, you guys need to look at this. It's what people are going to want in the 21st century, but they just couldn't get their head around it. And I think that's where it is for a lot of practitioners once they've been in practice for a while.

it's almost easier to keep going down that road you're going down and just not look there. Now, we do see a lot of physicians and healthcare providers and people in our practice who are in the administrative side of healthcare, so they come there and look for support, but it's just very difficult to execute in that model. So they just think they don't do it. They don't have any way to execute it there.

Carl Paige, M.D. (23:15.214)
We gave up on it. That's why we do what we do now.

Josh Bostick (23:18.017)
Yeah, I gotcha. is it I mean, some of the tools that you're using, you know, looking at genetics, is that taught traditionally in medical school? I mean, I just

Carl Paige, M.D. (23:30.423)
Well, you learn about genetics. You learn about just gross genetic abnormalities. Do you have enough chromosomes or not? Are too many chromosomes? That's pretty obvious when you have those type of issues. SNP analysis can give you some idea. That's the single nucleotide polymorphisms of just how different proteins and enzymes are expressed in the body that might be altered based on your genetics.

give you some clinical information about how to manage a patient, but it's very complex. I so it's not really panned out in the practice world to say, you know, let's figure out all of your SNPs and there's a hundred places you can log into on the internet and send your 23andMe saliva into and they'll tell you what supplements you should take. it's, you know, I don't gonna have to say that it's not worked out really well, right? Because, you know, if you look at the entire SNP panel,

Half of them say take this and the other half say don't take it. So I need some more Q-Chem and maybe I shouldn't take as much Q-Chem. So it is almost too complicated to implement directly into clinical practice from a practical standpoint. There are some useful nuggets in there, but we don't know about most of the genome or what most of that means. So if you just take something as simple as redox potential, antioxidants you can buy everywhere and everybody says take more antioxidants.

Redox is just like pH for the body. You want to have it in a happy space, a zone where it functions optimally. You can over-antioxidize somebody and end up with reductive stress, which is not really well managed in this space. Even in the space I'm in, people just take more more antioxidants. That's not always the answer to do that. In fact, sometimes it may be counterproductive.

Josh Bostick (25:17.347)
Gotcha. OK. And you touched on something that I was going to bring up. took my 23andMe and plugged it into an online generator and found out that I have the CompT and MTHFR mutation and things like that. So that was going to be my question is, there's resources out there that are pretty easy to use. so CompT, MTHFR, and some of those just, I guess, well-known mutations.

Carl Paige, M.D. (25:30.132)
Right?

Josh Bostick (25:45.378)
I feel like those could be useful when trying to do a diagnosis.

Carl Paige, M.D. (25:48.82)
They are, and we do manage those and we do use methylation support and do work with patients on how do you digest your catecholamines, that's what CONT is. So, perfect patient would be somebody who doesn't methylate well, therefore, through 1298 pathways can't make serotonin efficiently and maybe they've got gut issues and therefore they also have impaired serotonin metabolism. And if they don't metabolize catecholamines, then they've got high stress hormones and they...

can't make serotonin to balance it out. And we do that regularly with patients. It's just that, I guess what I'm saying is when you just plug that randomly into some calculator and it spits back, take X vitamins, I don't know that that always gives you the right answer. It needs to be sort of massaged more in that personalized way with what's going on clinically with the patient. We have trouble measuring real-time methylation. So you may have a genetic inability to methylate, but that doesn't mean at the moment you are not methylated properly. You can look at homocysteine as a...

indirect marker of that, but it's not really at a cellular level, are you methylated well at this moment? And you can over-methylate too, right? So a lot of times we'll see patients come from the psychiatrist with like 15 or 30 milligrams of methylfolate, but I'm like, well, you're probably over-methylating. That works maybe if you've got bipolar illness, right? But if you're just kind of a little bit anxious, maybe you over-methylated and you might actually make it worse.

Josh Bostick (27:14.752)
Yeah, definitely. I definitely need to have a clinical team to be working with, not just going off the internet and willy nilly down in some supplements.

Carl Paige, M.D. (27:22.76)
The biohacker space has done a lot of stuff there. I think of them like bodybuilders. Bodybuilders will take 10 times of whatever that might make you recover a little faster just because they want some super physiologic effects, but then they may not live to be 90 either and function at a high level. There's happy spaces at a cellular level of the body. We try to create really cellular homostasis, cellular efficiency.

Try to make that cell burn sugar, free fatty acids, efficiently. Try to keep body pH as well as we can by diet in a happy range. that's easier to do and easier to think about on a global cellular level. And we do use methylation support with patients regularly and help them manage the COMTV effects. I don't know that everybody can just send their saliva off to a website and then come back with the perfect set of vitamins.

I wish, but that gets more backlight to the traditional healthcare thing. It's like your cholesterol is high, here's a pill. So you're back kind of into that just binary, this is low, give you this, if it's hot, let's take something away. I wish the body was binary, it would be nice, but yeah. Yeah, it would make things a lot easier, yeah.

Josh Bostick (28:41.717)
make things easier for sure, huh?

And I guess for those that don't have something chronic going on already, as far as cellular health, what are some things that people can do just on a day-to-day basis to promote good overall cellular health?

Carl Paige, M.D. (29:04.165)
Well, the most important thing is going to be clean diet, which in our space, we use the phrase Mediterranean paleo because there's a lot of resources out in that world to find dietary things that will fit within that space. know, grass fed, organically derived, organically fed, you know, meat products if you eat those, avoiding pesticides and herbicides on your plant-based things you're eating and on feeding your animals, things that have been covered with pesticides and herbicides, you know, trying to get regular

strength training, adequate protein intake for maintenance of muscle and bone density, working on circadian rhythms and sleep because that has so much to do with helping your body recover. You know, if you don't sleep efficiently, we work a lot on vagal nerve tone because there's so many things in the circadian rhythm that then cross interact with how your vagus nerve controls that stress response. You know, the fight or flight response versus the rest, relax, digest response. And so many people have had vagal nerve traumas from surgeries or from

know, just chronic emotional trauma or physical stress, that getting back that day night sleep cycle is very important. And a lot of that is lifestyle and management again. So we use a lot of peptides in that space to help reset some of those processes. You know, they're not the be all end all, but they're very clean tools that you can use that don't leave a lot of footprint in the body. They're just sort of natural signaling small sequences of amino acids that, you know, will get.

digested locally, just like insulin is a peptide. Or like if you're in a type 2 diabetic, you might use the semiglutide or trisepidides, the GLP-1s and GIP modulating peptides. But there's a whole space of peptide things that are out there that are available clinically. If you understand how the body functions and how the cell works, you can dabble these little tools in there to modulate the immune system or recover gut health if we've got intestinal permeability.

There's a lot of tools that you can use that just aren't available in a traditional medical practice.

Josh Bostick (31:05.337)
And as far as using, you know, a peptide, so going back to the semi-glutide, for example, for someone with type 2, if they're, if they represented the option of metformin or that semi-glutide, is there a difference in like root causes we were talking between the two? I mean, is there one that is better for you internally and not so much like on a results basis, but

Carl Paige, M.D. (31:17.452)
Mm-hmm.

Josh Bostick (31:33.127)
you know, just taking a pharmaceutical versus an amino acid that seems to be more naturally reoccurring, I guess.

Carl Paige, M.D. (31:40.116)
Well, know, some of glutides, an example is it's been about two people that these GOP1 agonists, they've been available clinically for 20 years now. We were using them a long time ago, back when you had to take a twice a day injection and then they got it down to once a day injection and then they moved to once a week with some

plastic beads that slowly released it in your body. So it took a little bit before they got to taking this natural GLP-1, which your body has a GLP-1 receptor, and working with that can help postprandial glucose, what happens after you eat. that is if, so getting it to a format that was easy to use when we got some agglutide once a week, most people can do once a week. When you've got a...

swallow a pill more than once a day or inject yourself more than once a day, most people don't do it efficiently. They miss it and don't execute it. So that really brought them in to more widespread clinical use. I do think it's a better option than metformin because you're helping that cell do more efficiently what it wants to do. Metformin has benefits, but it also has some negatives too. you have to, it's gonna work more on fasting glucose, right? When you wake up in the morning. So.

We used a lot of the GLP-1 agonist for traditional diabetes management early because it addressed in that type 2 patient where most of them are overweight or obese, it did come with some side effects of weight loss. What a lot of people forget about them is that they were kind of looked at initially more in the cognitive enhancement space. So that really gets into the type 3 diabetes that Alzheimer's has been labeled type 3 diabetes in some spaces. So helping that cell uptake glucose and get it into the brain so it can work properly.

There's a lot of pleiotropic effects to GLP-1 agonist, including endothelial function. It does modulate lipids in a good way. They've been known to improve visceral and liver fat or NASH or non-alcoholic statohepatosis. So there's a lot of things there where they can come into play clinically, not just for sugar or just for weight. They also are being looked at for beta cell preservation and early in the type 1 diabetics.

Carl Paige, M.D. (33:49.407)
And many of our patients that have lot of, they can help you keep what beta cells you got left in that late onset autoimmune diabetes of adults are a lot of. So we'd like them in that space. I would say yes, they are better than metformin, way better.

Josh Bostick (34:05.746)
Yeah, when you list off things that are positives versus side effects that usually moves the needle one way versus the other. very interesting to hear. as we continue on just general health care, it seems like there's a lot more interest in the functional, more holistic, just outside the norms of traditional medicine right now. There's some different

Carl Paige, M.D. (34:14.035)
Yeah.

Josh Bostick (34:35.877)
organizations, know, like Function Health has come out and they offer a really big, broad workup of, you know, blood work. And do you see more of that coming along or do you see like a change in the traditional health care?

Carl Paige, M.D. (34:36.669)
Well, I've heard the analogy like to, you know, for to change what happens in traditional health care. It's it's almost like

It's an aircraft carrier going in one direction in the ocean and somebody at the tail end of it's trying to get it to turn a little bit using like a single oar. So there's a giant dinosaur, I would say, of healthcare that's going in one direction. And you have to understand that this space is still like that person in the back of it with an oar trying to shift it. And there's market forces that don't want it to shift. They want it to stay there.

You know, it's unfortunate. It doesn't really work for wellness or healthcare, in my opinion. You they aren't really designed for that. It's like now a business. there's a, the government is in the business of this too. I there's people that want to keep the current system rolling the way it is, and Medicare and all of that. So billions and billions of dollars that are, in a lot of cases, in that space that could be moving toward helping people be healthier.

I don't think that individuals in that space are bad people or want people to be unhealthy, but the system is broken and it's why I had to move away from it to practice this way. And it's also antagonistic to this way of practice still. They don't value this at all because it's threatening because it's offering something that doesn't fit that traditional paradigm. anyway, I probably rambled a little bit on that, but I do have some hope.

I think that younger people want this. think there's a generations that are popping up now are interested in eating right and staying healthy and they don't want to drink as much alcohol and they want their food to be clean and they understand that in certain parts of the world that they've got a much cleaner food supply than we have here and why don't we have that here? So I do think that it's shifting but shifting that aircraft carrier

Carl Paige, M.D. (36:59.576)
with an oar on the back of it, it's gonna take a while. And it's gonna, I'm a huge fan and a believer in catastrophic change or disruptive innovation, you so this is sort of disruptive innovation in that space, which means it's going to upset some people who are in the traditional world, you know, and it's hard for even at the academic level for people to give up some of the things they've invested whole careers in. You know, so it's a hard shift, but it's happening. And I do think we're probably.

you know, from where I started, you know, 10, 12 years ago doing this full time to 15 years ago, be interested in it, you know, it's not, if people accept it now, they don't really understand it, the systems are going to come around to this way, but you always have to be careful if a big corporate entity or a giant venture capital, at some point they're going to make a lot of money off of something and therefore you have to compromise integrity. Unfortunately, that's

Josh Bostick (37:49.936)
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And you make a really good point that I really haven't put much thought into is that we may not be able to overturn and 180 the ship like you were saying overnight, but by people becoming more aware of the food and the things that we do and intake and put into our bodies and the environments that we're in and how those can potentially impact, you know.

Carl Paige, M.D. (38:15.962)
Thank

Josh Bostick (38:17.444)
our long-term health and chronic illness and those kind of symptoms, that alone by not having so many patients in the system, the traditional healthcare system, that alone is gonna make a big difference.

Carl Paige, M.D. (38:21.12)
.

Carl Paige, M.D. (38:31.738)
Well, I want it to be really in that concept of integrative. I mean, we tell patients when we still use tools that I learned in traditional Western healthcare regularly. If I get run over by a truck, I want to go to the traditional hospital. You know, if I'm having a heart attack or stroke, think I'm in the 21st century, we've got things that can maybe flip that switch in the other direction. I do think that the

you know, just like you work with your physical therapist or you work with your, you know, hopefully properly trained nutritionist and that you can use a lot of the tools that, that we have in this space to work together to help patients achieve wellness. And, know, and one of the neat things that's happened is, as we got through working with chronic, chronically ill patients is, know, that those people find our product and we don't try to find those patients. You know, we did early on, they find us now. But what we found was once they felt better,

you know, they lost whatever needed, if weight was an issue, their inflammation resolved. Now these patients have, now they want to feel better, look better. And how do I build back some muscle or, how do I deal with some of the damage to my body? so we've worked a lot more in that regenerative space over the last few years, which is using some of those same tools to help people rebuild body composition or improve athletic performance, or, you know, how do I get rid of some of these, you know, damaged joints without having to replace them and, know, to, you know, use things like

stem cells or exosomes or, you know, to help people improve and function, you know, with a joint or whatever we're working on, or even just cosmetics.

Josh Bostick (40:02.108)
That's awesome. It's really cool to hear that people go from not just trying to get rid of symptoms and feel normal, but to go from that to wanting to improve, getting back to, I guess, a baseline and saying, all right, well, now I want to live another 20, 30 years and I want to be able to move and pick up the grandkids and play in the yard and do gardening. mean, that's the goal. You don't want to just get back to feeling OK. You want to be improving.

Carl Paige, M.D. (40:17.781)
Thank

Carl Paige, M.D. (40:23.477)
Right.

Carl Paige, M.D. (40:30.677)
Yeah, well, it's fun to work in both spaces. We probably see about 30 % of our patients are those, you know, I'll say disasters that show up after being through the regular system and wanting to see what they can do to, you know, get things back and get that under control without just having a giant box full of medicine to take every day. And about probably 30, 40 % of our patients are just, they're either coming in early and trying to prevent it because their family members had it.

or they just want to be healthy and be productive. And we end up seeing probably about 15 to 20 % of kids with these problems that happen very early on. that's because the pediatric, we still see about that amount of kids, but it's a wide range of patients over multiple ages that fit into all of those buckets for us. So it's very enriching. It's been a fun ride to do this. And it's, if I had to still do.

what I did in traditional medicine, I'd probably be like most of my colleagues that retired 62, 63, because I just, I can't do this anymore, know, but I can do this space, do this for long time. Hopefully.

Josh Bostick (41:37.563)
Well, I hope you stay doing it for a long time and keep helping people. I know that you are out of town and just arrived at your hotel for a conference, so I don't want to keep you too much longer. But is there anything that you want to leave the listeners with from a knowledge standpoint and any resources personally that you have out there that they can find, either online podcasts, anything like that, that you might be able to point them to?

Carl Paige, M.D. (41:51.624)
Thank you.

Carl Paige, M.D. (42:06.501)
You know, I personally don't do a lot of podcasts myself because it's, listen to little snippets of it here and just grab things, but I just don't have the time, you know, to go through that. But I do think that's a great resource for patients to sort of catch up on this space and learn about what's out there and be available. there's, it's just like anything on the internet. There's a whole, whole lot of stuff. Some of it's

okay, some of it's great and some of it's like really you shouldn't listen to it all. It is very hard for a consumer to know what's what there. So just realize when you're looking at those things, just take it as information and it's good to have a, it's like me, I have a business coach, I'm learning how to play jazz guitar now, I've got a coach and an expert in that space that I can, he can tell me when it sucks and when it doesn't.

So, and point me in the right direction about how to correct that. you do want to have somebody who's maybe trained and has some experience to help you make good decisions as to what direction you go down there. Because, like, I wouldn't know how to do what you do, you know, working with making missiles or whatever it is you do, but you wouldn't want me to make that missile. You know, I could probably do some of the things in that space, but I would need some direction from an expert. So, try to find a good expert that you can communicate with, they'll listen to you.

and help you guide you in the right direction there. And just realize the internet's got a lot of information, not all of it's good. And for me personally, the things that I tend to do, go and seek out the best people. Like I'm here in Santa Fe gonna be working with Dr. Will Seeds, who's with SSRP this weekend, training some other physicians and providers in how to execute cellular medicine and work in this space. I...

teach some of them some things, but you learn so much from other people in that networking. So go out there and talk to people, reach out to other people, listen to some podcasts. There's a whole lot of resources out there. It is not codified into some little, you're looking for this doctor with this label. That's very hard to find. We're still probably in that space with it. Functional medicine's a good place to start, but there's also some boundaries to that as well.

Josh Bostick (44:23.491)
Definitely. And as you mentioned, there's people out there trying to jump on the functional medicine of Bidwagon who did a weekend long certification.

Carl Paige, M.D. (44:32.848)
Well, my red flag there is if you went someplace, you ordered a bunch of tests, then you end up with a bucket full of vitamins. It's no different than traditional healthcare. It's just a different bucket full of different pills. There's a lot of other things that you have to look at there too, to make sure some of those you may need. There's often a lot of duplications. Many patients come in in that space, and my first visit is like this section of your bucket full of things you're taking.

are all the same thing, and you don't need to do that. You've just, unfortunately wasted hundreds and hundreds of dollars on this. So we try to clean it out first and start with a base slate. Sometimes they've made good choices, but many times they've duplicated beyond imagination, just taking the same thing in five different bottles.

Josh Bostick (45:23.106)
Yeah, well, just speaks to working with a qualified team and having that partnership.

Carl Paige, M.D. (45:28.624)
Yeah, get a good team, get somebody to listen to you, try to make sure your primary doctor you work with at least listens and is willing to work with you in this space. If they just poo poo you and say that's all voodoo, then that's probably not your good primary care doctor you want to stay with.

Josh Bostick (45:44.684)
Completely agree. Well, again, thanks so much for your time. I know you're traveling.

Carl Paige, M.D. (45:48.207)
Well, thanks for having us on. Yeah, we appreciate you asking us on. Nice meeting you.

Josh Bostick (45:52.972)
No, you too. Thanks, Dr. Page.