Health for a Lifetime

Healthspan: Protecting a Life of Freedom and Function

There's a gap in America's healthcare system.

Most modern medicine deals in crisis care — treatments that are given to combat an ongoing illness or a recent injury. Then, operating in parallel, many primary care doctors work hard to offer "preventive" care, handling immunizations and giving general advice on nutrition, sleep, and stress.

Together, general preventive care and an excellent hospital can keep you alive for a long time. They work wonders for increasing your lifespan.

What they don't do, at least not all the time, is keep you capable, comfortable, and free. Chronic pain, minor illnesses, cognitive and neurological changes, and a hundred other small, non-life-threatening conditions can reduce our quality of life dramatically as we age, and begin affecting our health even when we are young.

There is a growing movement in medicine focused on expanding the human healthspan, the length of time that we have the cognitive and neuromuscular health to be active and engaged in the world around us. Our healthspan is the time that we spend living as our full selves. We all deserve to have our healthspan match our lifespans as closely as possible, and that's where individualized, integrative medicine comes in.

Increasing Healthspan

Increasing healthspan requires more than just crisis care, flu shots, and the occasional reminder to eat more fruits and vegetables — although, of course, those are all excellent things. Staying functional as we age takes preparation. We need to live active, healthy lives when we are younger both to feel good on a day-to-day basis and to give our bodies and minds the resources they'll need to age gracefully. General factors like nutrition and exercise are important for all of us, but exactly what we need varies a great deal from person to person: how many calories, the best ways of getting vitamins, the type of exercise that will give maximum long-term health benefits with minimum damage to joints and ligaments.

There are three sets of factors that link health to sustained quality of life. First, we need to maintain our neurocognitive abilities, like memory and executive function. Second, we need to care for our muscular health in order to preserve our mobility, strength, and flexibility and to be free from pain. And finally, we all need community, spiritual well-being, and a sense of purpose. Only together do these elements provide for sustained comfort and well-being.

You've probably spotted the problem here, which is that even the world's best hospitals don't have the time or resources to offer nuanced long-term guidance on increasing our overall well-being. The Boost Performance and Longevity Center is our way of meeting that need — of bringing together the advanced equipment, high-level medical expertise, and the time-intensive process of personalizing care in order to help our patients live the best lives they can, both now and in the future.

Functional Integrative Medicine: Tailor-Made Treatment Plans

Our approach relies on functional integrative medicine, combining two medical traditions that are focused on overall well-being. Functional medicine is highly individualized, relying on careful review of extensive lab testing, lifetime medical records, and results from advanced scanners to develop treatment programs designed to ease the unique physical and physiological challenges each patient faces. It focuses on underlying causes, rather than dealing primarily with surface-level symptoms.

Integrative medicine then adds the element of treating each patient as a whole, complex person: mental, physical, and spiritual health all affect one another deeply, and integrative medical practice is focused on finding the relationships between them that are dysfunctional or unhealthy.

Boost's Dr. Steven Conroy, whose background adds training in both functional and integrative medicine to 15 years as an emergency room physician and a lifetime of athletic performance and achievement. There are few clinics in the world that combine the resources, experience, expertise, and creativity that we are proud to offer.

We invite visitors to explore our Services, to read more about the Center itself, or to schedule a time to talk to Dr. Conroy.