Senior Living & Precision Brain Health

James Maskell:

 

When I arrived there, 27 years ago, there was no Alzheimer’s care. If someone got dementia, if they started wandering, they had to go someplace else, because they believe it’s Russian Roulette that you get. There was nothing you could do. It would just happen. That was my belief, until I stumbled across Dale Bredesen, end of Alzheimer’s, and I thought, wow, there’s really something that can be done about this horrible disease.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. This week, we have something very special for you. We are going to be talking about the evolution of senior living. Joining me this week are two innovators who are doing the cutting edge work to transform Senior Living is something that actually creates health, and particularly creates brain health. You will hear from Hal Cranmer. He’s the owner of a paradise for parents, which is four locations in the Arizona, Phoenix, Arizona area.

And then you’ll also hear from Doug Motter of homestead village in Pennsylvania. Both are innovating to bring true brain health to places that it hasn’t been before. And we’re super, super excited. And just as a side note, as Doug mentions in the show, we are starting a our first pilot with trumura at Homestead village that will be overseen by Dr Chris turnpour and the team at turnpaw health and wellness.

So really excited to bring this out in innovate at the cross section of senior living and functional medicine. Enjoy. So a warm welcome gentlemen to the evolution of medicine podcast. So glad to have you both Hal and Doug. Welcome. Thank you. So today we are really going to dive into a topic that is mission critical for the evolution of medicine, and something that came right into my sphere when I had to fly both to South Africa to be with my father at the end of his life, and then also a little bit with my mother a few years before that, I have the enviable task of being an only child that lived on a different continent than either of his parents, and that they both lived on different continents that each other.

So I don’t know if anyone’s got a harder prospect with me, but here, here at the other side of it, I’ve become very interested now in what is possible in the senior living environment, and so I’m super excited to have two of the innovators on the front lines, both owners of facilities and both innovating at the cross section of this new medical paradigm and the senior living so I’m going to start with you, Doug. Doug and I have met each other in the last year, we were introduced by the turnport Clinic, which some of you have seen Chris.

Dr Chris turnport, we’ve had here on the evolution of medicine podcast. Dr turnport runs one of the most successful functional medicine clinics in the country, with now six locations and more than 20 providers. And when I spoke to Chris earlier this year about doing something with brain health, he pointed me to Doug as an innovator, as the founder of homestead Village and now executing senior care for almost 600 residents. And Doug, maybe we can just start like, what? What got you interested in this? And you know, as the starting point, and when did you realize that that something different had to happen. Well, thanks, James.

I have provided or sought to provide Alzheimer’s care. When I arrived there, 27 years ago, there was no Alzheimer’s care if someone got dementia, if they started wandering, they had to go someplace else. It’s one of the first things that I worked on, was making sure that we were able to provide safe care for folks with Alzheimer’s. And like most people, I believed Alzheimer’s was a disease that you get, like Russian roulette. You didn’t have it. There was nothing you could do. It would just happen. You had to wait for it to happen, and then you suffered with it the rest of your life.

And there were drugs that really didn’t work. So that was my belief, until I stumbled across Dale bredesens End of Alzheimer’s, and that book really shook my world, and I thought, wow, there’s really something that can be done about this horrible disease. I remember reading that at a national conference. I had it with me, and two people came up to me two different times and said, that book’s nonsense. There is no cure for Alzheimer’s.

And I found that I wondered if those folks had even opened the book and read it because it made sense to me, but I thought in my naivety of 2018 that medical world would breed it and things would change dramatically. The only thing that changed was the covid pandemic, and no one even talked about the end of Alzheimer’s and coming out of all of the experiences of covid. If I had one positive, one really positive change in my Outlook from covid Was I looked at that book one day on the shelf and said, it’s not happening in the rest of the world, so it needs to happen at Homestead village.

So I start, I knew I didn’t know enough. So I started reading other books, and when I got to the third or fourth book and started watching podcasts, and became a much more aware. I realized I needed a doctor involved. So I reached out to Chris turnpaw at turnpaw health, and he actually came out last September and did a large kickoff presentation on brain health at Homestead village. We had about 150 residents there, which was pretty exciting.

He got some pushback. From some residents that it was nonsense, especially because he was pushing an animal based diet, and we have a number of vegans and vegetarians who that offended, but, but overall, it was well accepted. And out of that, over the last year, I’ve done 11, an 11 part series with about 50 residents, small groups of six to eight, and every month we meet and we go through and we talk about the various aspects of having, maintaining brain health, so nutrition, sleep, exercise, reducing stress, and, of course, reducing toxins.

And that’s been extremely well accepted. In fact, there’s three more groups that are starting, but this year, 2026 we’re going to launch an actual cognitive Improvement Program. So we’re going to take all that information, working with Dr turnpaw, working with Truneura , and we’re going to create a program that’s and we’re going to try to make a difference in residents who sign up for the program. Incredible.

Well, there’s so much to unpack there, and I really want to, you know, dive into, you know, so many of the opportunities, and it’s really exciting. I really resonate with the story you told me the first time is that you thought it was all going to change, and then you realize you sort of had to be the change. And I think that probably sits well with our other guests. So Hal Cranmer, from a paradise for parents in Arizona, I’d actually written a blog about my conversation with Doug a few months ago, and someone in the comments said you must meet Hal.
Hals, the innovator in this space. And so, Hal, tell us a little bit about your journey and how you got here, and a little bit about the paradise for parents. All right. Well, Doug, that really inspiring. James, thanks for having me on. Great to hear a kindred spirit out there. I thought I was a lone voice in the wilderness. So thank you for doing what you’re doing. Yeah, I sort of have different motivations than Doug. I’m a lot more cynical. I guess.

I was in the military for 12 years. So I see how bureaucracy works, and it doesn’t move fast, and it protects its interests over innovation all the time. So I do this more out of anger that healthcare industry and the medical establishment and how dare you treat people like this. You know I’m going to prove you wrong, and I’m going to get everyone else convinced that we’re going to prove you wrong. You know that you’re going to get overwhelmed by people asking why we’re not doing this kind of stuff.

I was along a lot of the same path as Doug. I don’t I haven’t been in this business 27 years. I’ve been in it about 10 I came from manufacturing background where they they’re much more into how do we improve all the processes? There’s not, there’s not a big regulatory body of manufacturing. It’s very wide, very diverse. There’s stuff like OSHA, and there’s, you know, ISO standards and things like that, but they’re more guidelines than rules. And the name of the game is, how do we reduce scrap how do we shorten lead times?

How do we make the product cheaper, faster, better, all those kind of things. So I kind of brought that mindset to assisted living. Now we’re dealing with human lives, and not punks of metal, you know. So there’s a big difference there. We can’t burn it, poke it and saw it and drill it, but we can, you know, there’s a lot of stuff you can do. It’s not dangerous for the resident. And even if it doesn’t necessarily bring back their memory, it lowers their blood sugar, lowers their blood pressure, makes them able to walk again, you know, able to function, have less pain.

It’s odd to me that when you’re in your 20s and 30s, everyone talks about, oh, you got to eat whole foods, and you got to get off the sugar, and you got to exercise a lot and work out and, you know, go running and everything. But when you’re 70 or 80, it’s like, Oh, don’t do any of that, because it might hurt you. You might fall you know, they like cakes, you know, let them enjoy sweets with their grandkids and things like that. And I’m like, if it worked in your 20s and 30s, it probably works in your 70s and 80s too, right?

You know, the 2030, year old that’s sitting playing video games all day and eating pizza and ice cream, people look down on them. The grandmother is doing that. You say, Oh, isn’t that sweet? And we need to change that mindset. Unlike Doug, I am a for profit business, you know, but I’m not trying to, obviously, I’m trying to make some money, but I really believe there’s a model here, especially in assisted living, you know, there’s a saying that cynical people in the medical industry saying that a patient healed is a customer loss, well, I’m proving and Doug, maybe you’re seeing it with your nutrition group.

The more you do this, the more interest you have of people wanting to put their mom or dad into our homes or our facilities, and not just, you know, let’s just try to keep them barely functioning for as long as we can. And then get the next one in. You start sending people home and say you don’t need assisted living. Which assisted living are you going to want to pick for your mom? So I went down the same track as Doug. I found Dale Bredesen. He’s an absolute hero to me. I don’t do the Bredesen protocol.

I’m officially been notified not to say that, because I do more animal based nutrition. He’s more into the plant based version. But there’s an awful lot of similarities to what he recommends as his protocol at I do. And the bottom line is, we’re all in agreement that low carb, low sugar, no sugar, high fat, high protein diets are really good for old people. Interesting. Well, look, thank you for sharing. And I see, yeah, so many, so many similarities there.

I guess maybe let’s just. Just wind it back from your experience, like, why has none of these Why have none of these conversations sort of bubbled up up until now? Do you think in these areas, is there a history of nutrition being discussed or exercise being discussed? You know, even in this pre world, and how different is what you’re providing than what would be provided at sort of like a high end senior living facility or assisted living.

Okay, so there’s a couple things there. Nutrition wise, when I first got into this business, like I said, I came from manufacturing, so I was scrambling to just keep beds filled and, you know, caregivers paid. And so I was just doing what the previous owner I bought some existing homes. So the previous owner was doing what most assisted living homeowners do and following Department of Health guidelines, I find that the biggest the most popular way to market your assisted living home or facility is to show that you have a perfect survey or inspection from the Department of Health without any write ups and see how good we are we comply with all the regulations.

That means that everyone just follows what the regulations are. So if you put as your standard of care or the regulations, and they vary state by state. So I’m sure Doug and I have some differences there, but you know, everyone thinks if I just comply with this, it’s sort of, if we build it, they will come if I comply with all these regulations and show the world that I complied and I’m doing everything right. And I’m not saying don’t do that, but people just move in. Well, your mom’s not going to worry that.

You know, all the forms in her binder are signed and dated at the six month point when they need a new form, they’ve signed that new form. You know, sons and daughters are more concerned about are you going to take care of my mom or, you know, when she’s in real pain at three in the morning? Is there a caring caregiver there that’s going to comfort her and going to give her something that will ease that pain and will figure out how to help her improve her health?

Those kind of things are a lot more appealing than did i dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s. So there’s just this inertia of our industry is extremely regulated, like all of healthcare, and with those regulations, people just take that as guidance, and it really cancels out a lot of innovation, in my opinion, how is definitely correct there? And you know, the food pyramid, it’s been improved a little bit from the abomination that came out 40 years ago, but it’s still very carb heavy, and it is a it is the standard of care.

Dieticians go by it, and most people believe that butter, eggs, red meat are bad for you, and so they and they’re concerned about salt and so many other basic building blocks of life, the nutrients that for centuries, humans have sought after and wanted and couldn’t afford, and now we have them in plenty, and folks are afraid of it, and doctors and other professionals really push the high carb way of life. And so I think Chris Palmer, Dr Palmer, who wrote brain energy, talks about the fact that it takes 15 or 17 years for a new medical idea to actually take hold in the medical community, and sadly, I think we’re only about halfway there with this topic.

Yeah, I think everyone who’s listening to this maybe physicians and practitioners who have maybe faced their own demons, or, you know, resistance in the industry to practice a new standard of care, practicing functional medicine or lifestyle integrative care. What are some of the barriers that both of you have experienced, or pushback that you’ve received from trying to innovate on this topic or in these range of topics, because I know it’s not just food. How I know a day in the life of a paradise for parents is not like a day in your average nursing home, right?

I would hope not. Or actually, I wish they were, but I don’t think they are. Do you want to take that first Doug? Or shall I? Sure I’ll take it first. I think while food is not the only issue, it is the biggest issue. It is the one that has the most. There so many sides. There are so many diets out there that people really put their faith in whether it’s the Mediterranean diet or a vegan diet, or vegetarian diet, or on the other side, a carnivore diet, or Atkins.

So everybody has their opinion. And in a retirement community like mine, where I’m serving close to 600 residents, we’ve got to be able to provide all of those different diets and have them available. And on top of that, we need to have every kind of sweet dessert, from gelato to, you know, cheesecake. Everything is available. So it’s we, you know, we have a coffee shop that looks like a Starbucks with the drinks with tons of sugar in them.

It’s really is a challenge to then try to narrow people down to eating just the healthy food that this type of a program requires. And so that’s why I’ve spent the last year doing this brain health education program, to kind of open people’s eyes to the fact that it truly is the whole foods, the non processed foods, or ultra processed foods, that you want to go towards. Stay away from the boxes. Stay away from the sugar. We really talk a lot about sugar is the number one enemy. It is the biggest toxin in our food supply. But. There are a lot of other ones.

How what do you think sugar conversation is something that you’re, you know very much in it sounds like you people come, I guess, to your facility expecting something different, whereas I think Doug, there’s a range of expectations as people come in. Is that right? So how do you sort of set it out? I mean, I’ve always thought to myself, before I even met both of you, that I feel that like a senior living center that bolstered and offered a sort of a brain maintenance program or a brain improvement program would be always full, because ultimately, you know, having experienced what it’s like for my father and for for others my grandmother to be in a state of Alzheimer’s, like you wouldn’t wish that on your worst enemy.

And so, like, I’m feeling that would be something that I would be looking for the fact that it’s N equals zero, or n equals two, or N equals five is what’s available. But I’ve always thought to myself, like, if I’m making that choice, that’s what I want for anyone that I love. Yeah, I think if I was diagnosed with dementia, I would like do everything I could to Okay, I am not eating anything, but, you know, zero carb, whole food, organic, whatever it takes. My memory, to me, is the most valuable thing in the world. Pretty much.

Doug hit on a lot of good points. Diets are like religion and politics. It seems like, you know, everyone’s got their opinion of it and every and it’s really hard to change. I tell people, do what works for you. If you’ve been a vegan for 20 years and you’re in fantastic shape, and all your markers are great, and you’ve got no chronic diseases, more power to you keep eating like a vegan. But what I also tell people is, I have a lot of vegans inquire about my assisted living home, and I don’t ever have a Keto or carnivore person call me and say, my mom’s been keto for 20 years now she has dementia and cardiovascular disease and Parkinson’s that never happens.

So there’s kind of, I mean, it’s a small sample size, but it kind of starts seeing a trend here. So I just when I talk to people about diets, I try and show them the results of the people who really embrace this in my assisted living home, and explain that’s what I want. And you do get people who are just like, I want my mom to have whatever she wants. She’s 85 she’s had a good life. Just let her be. And we’re like, okay, but realize we’re gonna still serve her the state, you know, the fish or the eggs and stuff like that, but we’ll add some stuff to make her happy.

I don’t have the resources Doug does to feed everyone a you know, kind of restaurant style, you choose the meal kind of thing. And I’ve told some people, Look, I’m probably not the right fit for you. I can recommend five or 10 facilities in this area that are similarly priced and will serve your mom whatever she wants. So you almost have to be a little picky about who you choose and who you don’t. I mean, it’s the same thing as younger people. Everyone that’s in their 20s, 30s and 40s. Know, I shouldn’t eat a ton of candy and ice cream.

I should exercise, but they don’t. And that inertia gets even worse as you get into senior ages, because you have this thing called sarcopenia too, which your muscles just gradually decline after, I think maybe your 30s or so. So you’re fighting Mother Nature a lot harder than you did in your 20s. Now, in your 20s, you got a lot of extra energy. You can exercise really hard and everything, but you really should exercise harder in your 80s than your 20s, because you’re already at a much bigger disadvantage.

And muscle is a is the best cell in your body for absorbing glucose. So the more muscle you have, the less insulin resist, or Yeah, the more insulin sensitive you’ll be, the less insulin resistant you’ll be, and your chances of getting you very rarely see body natural bodybuilders. There’s probably steroid chemical problems and things like that. But natural bodybuilders, very rarely do you see one of them get dementia. If you Google famous bodybuilders with dementia, they’re not a lot of them.

So the other thing is, to build muscle, you need to eat protein, you need to eat fat, and so so many people are not eating enough protein and fat. They’re eating weight, especially in the elder community. You know, young I do want to point out something about how’s home, because it’s pretty special. They’re probably the majority of assisted livings are trying to keep their food budget as small as possible, and so to do that, you buy a lot of processed foods, and you buy you have a lot of carbs.

And one of the things that I was amazed about when I heard about how was he’s I know you’re doing it as economically as possible, but you’re providing your residents with real food, and that’s expensive, especially these days, and I’m sure you’ve seen your food budget go up, but I want to commend you significantly, what your chart, what you are providing for your residents, and how much you’re budgeting towards that that’s not normal for an assisted living.

No, I’ve seen some horrible food given in some assisted living facilities. We’re talking peanut butter and jelly. We’re talking like ham sandwiches that are two pieces of white bread and a piece of hand seen ramen. Yeah, I got into it, and I just got disgusted. But I also look at it as return on investment. Yes, I spend a lot of money, but my residents are around for a long time. I have a residents been with me since 2016 and I’ve told her, you can move back home, like you’re good to go. And she’s like, will you make.

This great food. And you You know, I get exercise with your trainer. You do my laundry. Why would I want to go home? Guys wait on me. So, you know, the as Doug can tell you empty beds cost you money, and they have these things called referral agents that bring you residents, and they expect a commission that you got to pay if you’re full all the time. You don’t pay any of those fees. You don’t lose money. You get a check in every month. And this isn’t just to keep people in my home.

I regularly tell people, you need to leave my home, but it’s to say there is an economic benefit in spending a little more on food. It’s not just I’m going to just eat into my profit margin by buying this food. And like during covid, I didn’t lose a single person to covid, and for I’m sure, Doug can tell you, the assisted living industry was pretty decimated by covid, and I had one home that went two years in covid without losing a single residence.

So for anything, there’s a lot of benefits from a business standpoint to doing this, not just from the resident’s health standpoint. I mean that to me, is the most important thing, and that’s, you know, I’m a little bit of religious guy. I saw Jesus go around and heal, and he didn’t get any compensation for it. So I’m like, if he could do it, I could do it, right, but I need some a little more compensation. All right, we’re going to take a little bit of a break from the interview just to talk about our mission partners and some of the tools that are available to you.

If you’re listening to every episode. You already know that we have mission partners right now that can facilitate you building the brain health practice of the future. So we talked last week about fullscript and some of the tools that they have to make it easy for you to run the details of running a practice day to day. They are the whole person platform, and they have a lot of tools to make it easy to you just have one one platform to organize your supplements and labs and so forth.

So go to goevomed.com/fullscript And we’re going to be bringing you some of the tools that most practitioners don’t seem to know about but are really cool. Within them, we have freedom practice coaching. Go to goevomed.com/fpc and you can really see where your to grow your practice, if you want to add another practitioner, you want to grow your revenue, if you want to bring in new patients, if you want to, you know, if you want to sell your practice to private equity, that’s a good place to do. Come and have a conversation.

Go goevomed.com/fpc, you could do the scalability assessment. Get in touch. You know, free and practice coaching is helping practices get their shit together, basically and ultimately, if that’s you, maybe you need to have that conversation and bigboost.marketing. Uli is the master. He has been super helpful in me getting this up and running. Super grateful to Uli. If you need to bring low costs, Discovery calls into your practice, speak to Uli, and then obviously Truneura is in the business of helping people organize brain health.

We have so many practitioners launching brain health programs. If you want to be one of them. It’s synergistic with HRT. It’s a really good fit if you have any sort of mental health focus in your practice. This is just a huge thing that’s happening in society. And we have very exciting pending information, you know, pending on the first placebo controlled trial of a functional medicine methodology. So goevomed.com/truneura these are our mission partners.

We have some really exciting new partners that we’re going to be announcing soon. Have you ever wished that you had a VA that was trained in your that was pre trained in your EHR and knew how to use servo before you, you know, even used it. We’re going to be talking about that soon. If that’s interesting, get in touch with me. james.maskell@goevomed.com. I’ve got some exciting things coming up. This has been our mission partners.

Let’s get back to the interview I shared with both of you recently that I saw that Dr Bredesen was asked to speak at the California Senior Living Association event, like a few weeks ago. And obviously Heather Sanderson. Dr Heather Sanderson, who’s been on the show before, I heard her, speak about at a conference recently, and she shared some incredible numbers. They obviously have a good, good ability sort of control the standard of care there where she’s done it, you know, I guess for both of you, if I hadn’t have told you that, would you have seen any other signals from your little part of the market to say that this might catch on?

Or do you still feel like sort of a lone wolf, lone wolf? Yeah, I think a little that there’s little glimmers of hope. I had a lady call me from an assisted living facility in Salt Lake City and said, Hey, we’re organizing a revolution at our assisted living facility. We’re telling them, you make this stuff, we’re all moving out. And I was like, Wow. I don’t think they ever really went through with it, but they were harassing the staff and the leadership of that assisted living facility. It was a large one like Doug’s to say, We want better food.

You know, you’re killing us with this food. So that was like a nice hope I had. I just recently had a couple in Tennessee call me and said, This just made my year. The guy, when he found me, weighed 470 pounds, and his wife, at age 58 had just been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s, and he said, we just did what you said you’re doing at your homes, in your pocket. Podcast, and we’ve pretty much completely reversed my wife’s Alzheimer’s, and I’ve lost 170 pounds. And this can be done. This isn’t rocket science.
It doesn’t need a controlled assisted living environment. You can do this at home, and you can avoid coming to Doug or me, I don’t mean to take business with Doug, but I mean, I think Doug and I both have the same heart here and want the best for everyone, you know. And I think what’s going to turn the tide is that more and more people are going to be learning about this and saying, why, you know, why do I have to put up with just getting 20 medications and, you know, sitting in a chair and forgetting who my kids are?

You know, there, there is another way. And I’m interested. I mean, I liken it to cell phone. When cell phones first came out, I remember thinking, I don’t need a cell phone. You know, they’re pay phones on every street corner. I don’t want to pay 100 bucks a month for that. I can get a beeper for five, you know, things like that. I was a long late adopter to a cell phone, and now I can’t live without one. And I think the same thing is going to happen.

You’re going to get the early people who are gung ho, like Doug and me and a lot of families, and then it’s just going to catch on as we get more and more success stories. And that’s the key, is we got to just keep getting more and more successes wedding. Sorry, Karen, that’s okay. I was just going to say, I do agree with everything. Hal said that this is something that somebody who really studies it can do it at home.

I think what Hal and I offer is structure and a program that allows people to just follow the program. And it’s still hard. It’s hard when the gelato is in the case right there, and the sticky buns and the specialty drinks, it’s hard to say no to those things, but no, if you’re on the program, you can’t I don’t have a resident that lost 100 pounds. But I have a resident in his late 80s who’s lost 20 pounds just being in the brain health program and changing his diet and liver and onions menu, liver and onions is always available.

And I have lots of residents eating liver and onions every week. Awesome. That’s let’s just do a quick overview. Then, Hal, can you give us like a quick day in the life of one of your residents, what does that look like? What’s an average day, and what are the sort of health components for you? Okay, well, it changes a bunch because I research and finding therapies. But generally they wake up. I’d say seven, 730 we have breakfast.

You know, before that, the caregivers get them up, starting maybe 637 get them dressed, things like that. Then I the mornings are kind of busy. We do have showers and then lunch is soon after that, maybe 1130 the afternoons we we have something called exercise with oxygen therapy, which I think Heather Sanderson, she’s the one who turned me on to that where they wear a mask and they pedal on a bike.

For those who can, when they if they can’t pedal on the bike, we have them stand up and sit down in a chair, or we have a even this sort of composite bar that they can shake just something to get their heart rate up. Because the exercise with oxygen therapy will give them very enriched oxygen, like 85% or it’ll you can switch it to 14% which simulates high altitude. So we give them enriched oxygen just to warm up, and then we switch it to 14% we have a pulse oximeter on them, it drops their oxygen level down to about 87 85% what that does is dilate a lot of your blood vessels.

It gets your heart pumping more, and it prioritizes certain organs in your body, ie, your brain. And so it’s got all this parts of your body working very efficiently to get the oxygen where it can, because it’s at a deficit. And then we switch it to 85% and it sort of floods your body. And we’re seeing a lot of people get appetites go up, sleep gets better, energy levels go up, all kinds of good stuff, and then maybe contributes a little bit of cognition too.

So we do that. We have a personal trainer that exercises. My goal is to make them exhausted every day and then put them to bed and they sleep beautifully all night. I said in the morning, when we get them up to we’ll bring them outside. We’ll take them for a morning walk. I’m a huge fan of sunshine and fresh air too. And as we rotate people through the the oxygen therapy and the trainer, we’ll also have them go outside.

We have a walking track and back that they’ll do some walking, or they’ll just sit outside and read. We’re introducing some of them will go to hyperbaric oxygen therapy at a local provider if the family wants us to do that. And the most success we’ve had with brain health are the ones that do the hyperbaric oxygen therapy as well. And then we also starting a brain training program that was developed by someone actually who my son went through a program he had a learning disability when he was about seven or eight, and was struggling in school.

And we put him through this program called Learning RX, and it’s a very intense one on one, like workout for your brain, with a teacher a therapist, and she’s got a metronome going so you feel the pressure on, or she’s clapping, you know, like, come on, what’s the answer? And he did a 12 week programming. He went from the 27th percentile and reading to the 97th percentile. Well, people who did that now have it for elderly people with PTSD, depression, anxiety, dementia, things like that.

And we started that as well. So two times a week, for an hour a day, they’ll they’ll work one on one with a therapist over zoom, and they’ll hold up a card, for instance, and say. What’s the number on the card to start out with? And they just say the number. And then they go, Okay, what’s the number? Add three. So if they hold it before it’s a seven, nine, it’s a 12. And then they go, Okay, if it’s a red card, you add three. If it’s a black card, you subtract four. And it just gets progressively harder, like that.

And it’s what as fast as the people can handle it. We’ve already started seeing people’s cognition improve on that. And then we have dinner about four, 430 because we want to try to get a good 1415, hours of fasting time each night before breakfast the next morning as well. And we find they sleep a whole lot better if we don’t give them dinner at seven or eight at night, right before they go to bed. So that’s kind of a day in the life that sounds great.

Doug, I know you’ve obviously had these 50 residents that have opted that have opted in for this program in the last year, but for your average resident, are they expecting or they participating in any anything healthy throughout the day? Great question. There are a lot of healthy endeavors. Most of my residents are independent living. They’re living in their own homes or apartments. As part of our organization. We do have 26 residents in a memory support area, and we have 50 nursing home residents.

And we do try to provide really healthy food, obviously, probably too much sugar and too much carbs are in most folks diet exercise programs. But I have to say, how is my inspiration when I first heard him on a podcast talking about diet that he provides. It really spurred me to really make sure that we had our food options labeled, so that folks would know what they could eat that was the most healthy for them, especially from a brain health standpoint, those 50 residents who’ve gone through my program that was mainly to help them maintain their brain health when we institute our cognitive improvement program this, this coming year, I’m going to be taking a number of those things.

I read that in Heather sanderson’s book, but the fact that you’re doing it, and now the Vero metric chamber, you’re really inspiring me again. How I appreciate those. I’m actually trying to buy a hyperbaric chamber to put in at least one of my homes to try it out there, and the state of Arizona Department of Health won’t allow me. So I’m actually going to I have a friend who’s an Arizona state senator, and she’s introduced a bill to allow hyperbaric oxygen in assisted living facilities.

It made it out of committee. It got voted it passed through the committee. It got passed in this Arizona State Senate, and it’s in the house right now. It died last year in the house, but she’s going to reintroduce it this year. So fingers crossed. I’m hoping, because it’s a whole lot easier to put them in the chamber in my home than drive them to a hyperbaric place. But yes, I think if you can get them, yours would be perfect, Doug.

And I’m jealous of you, because a lot of people come to my home when they after they’ve been taking care of their mom or dad for 10 years, and they’re well progressed into the dementia journey, and so it becomes really hard to turn them around. Where Doug’s got these independent living people who are still relatively healthy, maybe just got diagnosed or something, he’s going to potentially have a lot of success, because that those people really have a shot at turning this around and avoiding dementia for their whole lives if they adopt this.

Well, my hope with this podcast is that you know, both of you have sort of cited each other and obviously, like Heather Sanderson, other people in inspiring but you know, my hope is that you know, there might be other owners who might or other operators that might listen to this and think, Okay, well, what can I take a chunk of? I guess I’d be interested to learn from each of you where you think the leverage is for this transformation.

Is it in the sort of owner operators? Is it in the residents, or is it in the, you know, children at the residence, where, who really holds the power to make this shift? It’s the marketplace, right? There’s got to be a demand. We’re trying Hal and I are trying to create a demand that people don’t even know they want this product. And so we first, we have to educate folks that it’s possibility because they believe it’s Russian Roulette, that you get Alzheimer’s.

And after we educate them, then we need to develop a program that will make a difference. But eventually, as people learn about this, the marketplace is going to demand it. Yeah, I completely agree. And you’ve got different generations you’re working with here, sort of, we’re at the very tail end of the silent generation, sort of the World War Two generation who believe doctors implicitly. I have older relatives that they judge the competency of the doctor based on the physical attractiveness of the doctor.

That guy’s so cute though, you know. So if you have a lab coat on, they’re just going to do what you say. But I see a lot of the younger ones, the boomers and their children, who are the older ones, are kind of like, okay, whatever. I have dementia, you know, and not really want to be in this fight a whole lot, but the kids are like, you know, I’m not going to just take this for my mom and dad. I don’t want them walking around as a zombie.

And what can we do to make them better? So it’s the market, and there’s definitely older people that want this, but there’s a whole lot of younger ones coming up that have those parents that are against it. And as I. Tell people my grandmother died of Alzheimer’s. My mom’s 85 I’ve got her doing a lot of this keto stuff and exercising and everything. They’ve hired a trainer. My mom and dad, my dad’s 87 they’re in great shape. They live in a four story house. They walk up and down the stairs every day. My dad chops wood for his fireplace.

My mom is cooking up a storm and can’t wait to host us all for Christmas, and they’re 85 and I’m like, if this is so hereditary, my mom should have Alzheimer’s, and I should be well on my way, and she is sharp as a tack. That’s, you know, anecdotal, but I see it all the time. It’s not destiny at all. Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, one of the things I wanted to ask you is that, you know, ultimately, the people who listen to this podcast are typically, like, functional medicine doctors or practitioners out in the field.

And you know, one of the things that I got kind of excited about when I met Doug was that I just felt like one of the ways that you could move this along, like, if, let’s just say you’re a you’re a practitioner, and you the standard rate for, let’s say, direct primary care, where you’re going to have, like, a direct membership relationship with a practitioner would be, let’s say, 150 bucks a month. In fact, there’s that new new law coming in, start of January 1, that now direct primary care, $150 a month will be able to be paid pre tax.

And let’s just say, for like, memory related care, you need to charge a bit more because you need a little bit more time, because this is a complex patient. But even few $100 a month, my feeling is that, like, if you were capable of practicing a standard of care that could prevent and reverse cognitive decline, and you went to knock on the door of a senior living center that like was the best in the area, that you might be able to have a warm audience for an owner there who has some of the things that you were talking about, wants to be full, doesn’t Want to have to have to pay those brokers commission, you know, wants to have the beds there, because it’s in my judgment.

And maybe it’ll be even more after this. You know, new placebo controlled study comes out, and the, you know, the outcomes speak for themselves, where it says, Hey, cognitive decline is reversible if you deliver it this way. I just feel like, if I, if I was starting a functional medicine practice from scratch today, the first thing that I would do is get good at brain health. And the next thing that I would do is call every senior living center and say, hey, there is a big shift happening in how we understand whether or not cognitive decline is is optional and is reversible.

And, you know, I could come and work with all of your residents, and this is the outcomes that you could think about financially, you know, for your residents by having something that no one else in the area has. And I just got excited about that concept. And there’s a few people have said, I’m going to go and do that. And I’ve had these different conversations. And I can report like, those are interesting conversations for owners, especially of these bigger, bigger groups, because they know, like, people have read Dale bredesens book.

The patients, and they’re like, Well, you know, they’re they’re waiting for something to change, too. So it’s interesting, because I feel like, you know, when we saw in medicine with functional medicine, the first time around, the easiest thing to change is the mind of a patient. They can read a book and say, Well, that makes sense to me. I’m going to get into it harder to change the practice of a doctor. Way more friction there, and then even more friction in any sort of like institution.

And so I think that there might be, you know, a good opportunity for a practitioner to go and build some relationships with organizations that have access to hundreds of potential patients. I think the way Doug’s doing it is brilliant. Have a nutrition group. Don’t just come in and say, Hey, you’re 200 bed facility. We’re going to get everyone on the ketogenic diet. They’re going to be like, That’s overwhelming. A lot of these guys have corporate contracts with food distribution companies.

There’s a huge inertia against doing that and changing so if you could start with a few residents and say, I’m going to come in and just give them seminars for free, you know, and if they want to sign up for my practice, great, but you just start that education process, you start getting some wins with those residents in that small group, where it’ll spread, but it’s if you overwhelm someone and just come in and say, I’m going to transform your Assisted Living Center, they’re going to be like showing you the door in no time.

Love that, yeah, you’re definitely speaking my language. I mean, I wrote a book about group visits, Doug, I know you’ve been reading the book as well, and that’s actually one of the ways that we’ve been talking about it is to build connective groups. I wanted to share something that Heather Sanderson shared at a conference recently. She was talking about the impact of covid and the isolation of covid policies to residents, and she shared that 10 days of isolation at the beginning of covid did as much to reduce the health of residents as it took them 10 weeks to build back that health.

And I just love to, like, check in for both of you as to whether that resonates, and to what degree you’ve been able to sort of maximize the sort of peer to peer delivery of value through community and groups and social connectivity. And what we can learn from that for the rest of health, for the rest of medicine. Well, I would say, you know, I am reading your book, and you recommended it because it it really helps me understand the group visit process.

And I’m on chapter four. I found the book to be really good, but it really talks about how and when people connect. When I was was doing the brain health education groups this past year, having those six or eight residents in the room together. They created almost like a squad or a tribe together. And sometimes they would gang up on me and ask me questions to try to throw me off. What about this? What about this? Why? Why is my blood sugar higher when I get up in the morning? And I’m not a doctor, I’ve never studied this stuff, but we would learn together and go through that process, but that sense of community.
We had a graduation, and they all came to the graduation, and you know, they want to keep one group of women. They’re actually going back through the program with me, because they don’t want to lose their little tribe. That sense of community really means a lot, and I really want to capture that when we do this cognitive Improvement Program, try to build that same community, to encourage one another to stay with the program, to go to exercise every day, to get in that oxygen therapy, because we’re going to do that too, especially to avoid the coffee shop and all the bad food.

Al, I know you have multiple smaller groups, so does that naturally lend itself to community, or is it more tricky to build those relationships in the structure that you have? It’s a little harder to build it, just because Doug’s dealing with a lot of people in independent living that are, you know, pretty close to where we are cognitively. I get a lot that are well down the road of Alzheimer’s, so that it’s just not physically possible. They’re interested in what I’m doing, and they tell me if the food is good or not. But we kind of have to lead them by the hand and do it very carefully.

What I have found with the people I have sent home is they become really fanatical about this stuff, and they text me, I was just on a zoom call with my nutritionist and the wife of a guy we sent home, and she’s going through every meal she’s serving them. Am I doing this right? What should I change? You know, what? These are the exercises we’re doing. So they do get into it. And one thing I’ve noticed about the ketogenic diet, especially for myself, because I’m on all this because I’m like, why not do it myself?

You really start losing your desire for those coffee shops and those swirls and that ice cream parlor and the gelato shop, and even just eating out at restaurants. You know, I’ll do it to go meet friends, but on my own or with my wife, I have no desire much to go out to a restaurant anymore. I would much rather know what I’m cooking and cooking at home. And I think more and more as we do this and get them more fat, adapted and more into the low carb lifestyle. They just the desire for all those kind of treats disappeared. It’s never gone completely, but it definitely diminishes, and that helps a lot.

Well, I guess I asked the question about where the leverage was in the different people, but I’d love to see. You know, obviously with with brain health, the potential is to arrest it before it starts going down, right? To keep prevention is worth a pound of cure. But ultimately, you guys are running businesses at different parts of it. Doug’s a little bit earlier on, so he’s got like that sort of assisted living or independent living.

And then how you’re doing more memory care, I guess, in the same way, it seems like there’s more potential in the sort of more independent living to keep them independent for a long period of time, but you can probably see that there’s probably more, maybe demand in the sort of early memory care space, because it’s only once people sort of feel the pain of something going wrong that they’re ready to take action. Does that resonate somewhat, but I think more and more people are thinking, My mom has it, so I’m going to get it.

Wait a minute. There’s a way to prevent it. You know, I’ve heard from marketers, you can never sell prevention. People have to be hurting to sell them something, but if they see their mom like that, and they know that’s coming, I have a lot of people that are interested in, what can I do now to prevent that from happening to me? So the pain is sort of not personal, but it’s within their family, and so you can get the leverage there. But the big thing is, the better results are going to be, the earlier you take care of this.

Dementia is a disease starts in your 30s and 40s, and you know, the symptoms manifest in your 60s, 70s, 80s. Lately, they’re more. They’re coming down like in their people are more and more in their 50s are getting it. So the sooner you can get on this stuff, the better. And it’s not when symptoms appear. You’ve had it for a while, and those symptoms, you know, get really cranking. The leverage is we’ve got to catch it early.

And I would love to tell people, you get a dementia diagnosis, come to me for six months, and we’re going to get you clean. No one, that’s a really hard value proposition to take. They’re, you know, well, we’re going to fight it at home and everything like that, so as best I can. But I think as more and more again, it gets down to, let’s get more and more results of this, and more and more people look at the carnivore diet. Five years ago, six years ago, no one’s ever heard of the carnivore diet.

Now, a hugely popular and you can go online to like a site like Rivero health, and see 1000s of testimonials of people turning around all kinds of chronic diseases, including dementia and Alzheimer’s with that diet. And so that’s why it’s growing so fast, and that’s why programs like Doug and mine, I’m firmly convinced are going to grow just organically. I can’t. Believe how many people know my name. I really didn’t. It’s that popular. You know, I’m very small operator, but apparently the words out and people like it wonderful.

Well, look, I’m really grateful for both of you. And I’ll share, you know, maybe each of you could just share a little bit, as we wrap up here, a little bit about, you know, where to find out more about the locations and the offerings. And then we’ll make that available for people to do. I just, I guess, I just want to share with both of you, you know, how much I appreciate the sort of the friction that you’ve overcome to do something new, and that ultimately, it does make sense to me that there’s a convergence upon us between, you know, sort of participatory brain health and, you know, a senior living.

And I hope that in my lifetime, you know, one of the things that we’re really excited about with with Truneura is creating a structure that would allow organizations that haven’t got it yet to start to get it, because there’s a lot of details, you know, especially as you get into sort of like the medical care part of it, and not just the lifestyle part. And so, you know, we’re hoping to, you know, to accelerate that. And I just want to honor both of you for the incredible work to, you know, to take it thus far, especially when there’s no one else doing it.

You know, I know that you take a lot of arrows at the beginning for being the Pioneer. And I think that feeling is well known in our community as practitioners have practiced outside of the standard of care, you know, to deliver functional medicine, integrated medicine, that now just becomes sort of the everyday reality. So how you want to share a little bit about the site? One of the things I loved on your site is you said there’s no visiting hours. You can come whenever you want. That’s got to be unique.

Yeah. So my website is aparadiseforparents.com. We have four locations around Phoenix, surprise, good year in Mesa, and we don’t have visiting hours. I mean, my homes are homes, and I tell people when they move in, I want your mom or dad to feel like it’s their home, and people can have people over anytime they want when it’s their home, right? So whether they’re renting or owning. So we really try to make it a family atmosphere.

And I think one of the biggest testaments I have is even when some of my residents pass away, their families still come back and volunteer at our homes for parties and things like that, because they make really good friends when they’re there. I’m on a bunch of social media. If you just search for my name, you’ll probably find it as well. And we post, you know, some success videos and stories and things like that on there.

Beautiful Doug. Homestead village is in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and our website is homestead village.org and we offer all levels of senior living, from independent living to memory support to skilled nursing to home care. And our vision is thrive where you are. And I think this brain health program is the epitome of helping residents, especially those who have mild cognitive impairment, to truly thrive by repairing their brain through their lifestyle.

So I’m really excited about this program. I’m also excited about connecting with how over the coming weeks and months, and learning more from him. He’s walked the path further than me, and I need to catch up to him. Doug, you know, if you’re open to it, maybe later this year or next year, in 2026 at the end of the first year there, we’d love for you to come back with, maybe with Dr turnpaw, and share, you know, how those outcomes have gone.

Part of the beauty of using Truneura will be able to track the outcomes, you know, the lab outcomes, the wearable outcomes, to be able to actually see what happened to the residents. And I think actually, that’s the next big step in this work is being able to show that one of the reasons I’m so excited about this study that’s coming out is that forever there’s been, you know, sort of people don’t believe that this is possible because they’ve never seen it. And every neurologist would tell you you’re crazy.

I think this Dale Bredesen, who’s a neurologist, and actually, we’ve had some interesting, you know, neurologists coming through Truneura in the last little while, like starting to poke around and realize that it’s going to be a bit weird when your whole profession says that nothing can be done, and then there’s a placebo controlled study saying that, yes, something can be done, and it works in most people, and especially when you compare it to and this is my soapbox thing, but if you got like, the number needed to treat is the only number that you need to look at.

And ultimately, what you see is that, you know, drugs don’t really work in the majority of people. And you know, this placebo controlled trial will show you that it does work in the majority of people, because, like you said, how it’s not that complicated. It’s actually quite simple. And from an engineering point of view, I can totally understand how a number of people I’ve met in the space who really think about medicine clearly have come from that background, because they understand, you know, some of the the process of improvement, like that. So thanks so much for being here.

This has been the evolution of medicine podcast. I’m your host. James Maskell, if you’re interested in this topic, you’d like to get in touch. Feel free to book a concierge call if you go to goevomed.com/concierge you can set a time with me or someone from my team. You can talk about how you could you want to talk about how to go and speak to local Senior Living Centers. You know, feel free to chime in. We have some resources there on how you could go and try and make those connections. Thanks everyone for tuning in, and we’ll see you next time you.

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