339: Empowering Health Transformation: Anthony Masiello's Vision for Plant-Based Telemedicine

00:00:00 Anthony: The term telemedicine or telehealth is very broad, it just means kind of remote,  practicing medicine remotely. And believe it or not, it's not always done at the same time. Sometimes it's done like with patients filling out forms, doctor reviewing forms, and making rese,  recommendations, and then sending information back to the patient. But that's not at all  what we are doing at  Love.Life Telehealth.

00:00:28 Maya: This is the Healthy Lifestyle Solutions podcast. And I'm your host Maya Acosta, if you're willing to go with me. Together, we can discover how simple lifestyle choices can help improve our quality of life and increase our longevity in a good way. Let's get started. All right. Welcome back to another episode of the Healthy Lifestyle Solutions podcast. I'm your host, Maya Acosta. Today I have Anthony Maiello. He's the CEO of the plant-based  Love.Life Telehealth, a national lifestyle medicine service, focused on the prevention and reversal of disease and optimizing health and wellness with lifestyle medicine and whole food plant-based nutrition. Welcome, Anthony.

 00:01:14 Anthony: Thank you, Maya. It's a real pleasure to be here,

00:01:16 Maya: And it's a pleasure of mine because of course, I know who you are. I know your history with plant-based telehealth, and I also know about your story, so I can't wait for my listeners to hear. Let's start with that because I find it fascinating that you have years of experience in healthcare, but you also have your own story that led you to now developing in a sense this telemedicine practice that is helping to reach people all over the world and at least all over the country. Tell us how you struggled with weight. I think that is so important, how you manage that.

00:01:55 Anthony: Yeah, thanks. I almost have to put my previous experience with healthcare in quotes because it's what I know now is so much more healthcare and focused on health than what I did before. But, I'll go through relatively quickly. So I grew up obese. I was an active kid. I did a lot. I rode bicycles. I rode skateboards a lot. I would go snowboarding in the winter, but I was well overweight to the point where I was obese for almost all of my life. I went to school for Computer Science in Baltimore and I got my first job in the DC area working on the Human Genome Project. And that was my first entry to what healthcare. I was a computer scientist. I knew how to do web database programming, and the Human Genome Project needed people who could basically publish applications and database tools and data on the internet.

00:03:01 Anthony: And this is back in the early nineties, so not a lot of people were doing that. So they didn't mind that I didn't know anything about microbiology or I didn't know anything about genetics or genomics because I knew everything that I needed to know about doing this kind of software development. But what happened while I was there, I fell in love with the idea of working towards something that is serving a higher purpose. I got to work with these passionate scientists who are really dedicating their careers to making an incremental step in the knowledge that humanity is gaining about understanding the human body. Right? And that kind of blew my mind. Like, it's fascinating to me because growing up my dad sold bagels and my mom sold makeup. Like it was very much, nothing against either one of them.

00:04:00 Anthony: They both had successful careers and they raised a nice family, but they were working for money, not for necessarily that higher purpose. And so I fell in love with that idea. And what that sparked me to do was to start studying, learning, reading, listening. You know, all of the scientists that we work with during the day that we were collaborating with on projects were teaching classes at night. So we would go to American University, Catholic University, Johns Hopkins University, and we would follow them to their night classes. And we would sit me and I say we 'cuz there was a small team, there were four of us who were doing this work. And we would sit in the back of the room and we would just listen and take notes, maybe sometimes even more so than the students who were in the classes so that we could learn this, learn this stuff.

00:04:46 Anthony: So that's how I got interested. And then I worked there for about six years and the Human Genome Project was finished. The sequencing project was done and they were doing a lot of incredible work. But in between that time my wife and I got married and my now wife and I got married and we moved. She wanted to move back to New Jersey before we had children. So luckily for me by this time, now this is early 2000, 2002, the pharmaceutical industry started caring about genetics and genomics because they were working on this idea of individualized medicine. And they were using biomarkers to develop better drug therapies for people. And at that point I was like, wow, maybe I could get a job actually not just helping to learn and develop the science of understanding what's going on in the human body, but maybe now I can actually work towards contributing towards some kind of a drug or a therapy or a cure for a disease. So I started looking into opportunities and I took a job with Novartis Pharmaceuticals and we moved to New Jersey. And that same passion that I learned while I was at the NIH was shared now with people working in the pharmaceutical industry who were just working day and night to figure out how they were going to develop drugs and other therapies to help people to overcome or to better manage disease.

00:06:24 Maya: Fascinating. And I know we're, probably can't spend a lot of time in this topic. I love the idea of individualized therapy, and I'm not, as you know, I'm not in medicine, but I've also always felt that you have to know you can't take a general prescription and assume everyone will do well on it. I'm the individual. When you see all the pharmaceutical,  medications on television and they list a list, they make a list of all the symptoms that could possibly happen as a result of taking those medication--

00:06:58 Anthony: All side effects..

00:06:58 Maya: The side effects. I'm the person that's gonna get all those side effects. I'm highly, highly sensitive. And I wanna say maybe we, since you know the genome, like some of this that I once tested somehow and discovered that I have that one, I don't know if it's gene that makes me very susceptible to everything. I can feel everything, which is why I do everything possible not to have to take medication because I am the person that's gonna experience the vomiting and the nausea and the dry mouth or whatever it may be. But where are we today with that? Are we still moving towards working with individualizing some of these prescriptions?

00:07:40 Anthony: I mean, the short answer is yes, they're still working towards it, but it turns out surprise surprise that the human body is much more complex than anyone than we naively thought in the beginning. Right? Like, understanding someone's DNA is not enough because we all have DNA and that's fixed.Tthat's in all every single one of our shares ourselves share the exact same DNA. We got that from our mother and our father, and then we have our own unique set. But what is different is how that DNA basically codes for proteins or how that expresses in our body and how that expression is triggered. There's a whole so many variables that are involved. So including things like what we eat, how we live, how active we are, how much sunlight do we get in a day? It's becoming more and more complex to figure out how these genes either turn on or off. And how they express. So even though someone has a gene like myself, for example, I have a set of genes that allowed me to become morbidly obese.

00:08:51 Anthony: But now I've learned how I can live my life in a way where those genes don't determine my destiny. Right. So I've learned how to better control that. Now. I haven't changed my genes, it's all still there. I have the potential, the genes define the potential for what you can or cannot achieve, or how you, what you can and cannot kind of how, how you can or can't live. But they're not, but it's not a destiny. It's not a certain.

00:09:24 Maya: Absolutely. One more question on that

00:09:27 Anthony: Sure

00:09:29 Maya: How accurate do you think companies like Ancestry are when it comes to not only trying to map where you came from your DNA, but also they have this other component that you might be aware of that allows you to kind of have an idea whether you have the genes to where you're more likely to be a night owl, you're more likely to be athletic? For me it says I'm more likely to be very sensitive to sweet food, which is true. Do you think that's made up?

00:10:01 Anthony: No, I don't think any of it is made up. I think it, but the accuracy and you're really smart to ask this question, the accuracy depends on the vole of data. So if they have for example two samples, one person loves sweets and one person doesn't and one person has one gene and one person has another gene, then they could say, oh, well people with this gene love sweets. But then when they have millions of people, now they'll get into a little more fine tuning. So maybe it's these three genes, or maybe it's these four genes. So what those companies are doing is they're just collecting more and more and more and more data, and they're learning from the data over time. So they're accurate and they're becoming more accurate. You know, as the data pool grows and as they can do a better job. And that's why they even say like with ancestry, this is your snapshot for today. This is your DNA story for today. This is where you came from, this is where your ancestors are. But if they go get more data and as they learn more, then it might even change even some of your percentage from, where you're from could change. But it's not because anything changed in you, it's just because now we have more information to make better predictions.

00:11:12 Maya: Yeah. Well, I found it fascinating when there was the category of a level of sort of like performance that I, supposedly according to, according to my DNA, I have the ability to be athletic and perform well if I push myself to that. If I make the most of it. And I've never Anthony been athletic, although I love the outdoors. I love being physically active outside, not in the gym. But what I found it fascinating because as we move on to talk about, you know, lifestyle in general, we know that, you just said it earlier, we don't really change our DNA, but we have the ability to impact our DNA through lifestyle. In other words, maximize, I guess the potential that lies within us. So tell us more about your weight and how all of that came about. You're working towards improving your own health.

00:12:06 Anthony: So here I am with this passionate career, working with these passionate people, looking to help others to improve their health. And as planned, my wife and I moved to New Jersey and we started a family. And then in 2005, I applied for a 20 year term life insurance policy. By this time we had an 18 month at home, already in 18 month. And my wife was pregnant with our second, and I needed life insurance to know that if something happened to me, that my family would be taken care of or be able to take care of themselves. So I applied and I was denied. I was at age 33, I was denied a 20 year term life insurance policy. And that scared me, like nothing else scared me in my life because I had been looking forward to being a dad forever. I was expecting to be around and to be able to raise these kids and to be an active part of their lives.

00:13:01 Anthony: And having this company who very similar to the conversation that we're having, they took all my health data, they took my weight. By this time I weighed 360 pounds. I was on medication for high blood pressure. My cholesterol was high, but I was not yet medicated. I was able to convince the doctors not to put me on medication yet. I had sleep apnea. I had eczema on my fingers that had been there my whole life. I had psoriasis developing on the back of my neck that sometimes would flare up really embarrassingly bad and sometimes it would go away. And so I know that this insurance company took all of my data, plugged it into their algorithm in their computer, and it didn't tell them to put me in a high risk category. It said, don't insure this person. and on a 20 year term policy. To me, that means they expected me not to live 20 years. So that forced me to want to change.

00:13:58 Maya: That's so significant. Up to that point. Were you, so you had all these ailments that you were dealing with, but did you think, this is kind of like your destiny. This is how you are going to live life. You didn't at that point think that there was actually something that you can do to change your life?

00:14:17 Anthony: I had been trying forever to lose weight. One of my most successful attempts was in 1994, I actually gave up alcohol and meat on the same day. And I haven't had alcohol or meat since 1994. And in the early nineties when I went vegetarian, that means I went to the grocery store, I bought vegetables, I came home and I cooked them in a walk, and that's what I ate. But then slowly and surely more products started coming out. Now I can go get Morningstar sausages to have it, and I was still eating eggs and cheese and other things. So, I also figured out that Ben and Jerry's ice cream was still vegetarian. It's not vegan, but it was vegetarian. And I wasn't vegan and then I could still get all the cheese pizza I wanted and be vegetarian.

00:15:06 Anthony: So basically I went vegetarian, but then I learned how to even be a very unhealthy and morbidly obese at that point vegetarian. So I didn't, you know, it's exhausting to try and try and be unsuccessful and try and be unsuccessful and try and be unsuccessful. Literally hundreds of times throughout my life from the age, probably 10 or 12. Right. I remember giving up butter and fats. And then later I remember giving up anything with sugar. So I would have, when I give up butter and fats, I would have jelly on my toast, and then when I give up sugar, I would have just butter on my toast. You know what I mean? I would try all these things, but I was never able to get anything to work. So it was frustrating.

00:15:54 Anthony: But now I was so motivated to, to figure out how to do this. And I literally again, this is 2005 and everything was talking about Atkins or high protein diets, and I was a vegetarian, so I wasn't ready to do that. I probably would've considered if I couldn't find anything else. But what I did was I started Googling vegetarian weight loss on Amazon. Dr. Furman's book popped up: Eat to Live. And on the cover of his book it says, Fast and Sustained Weight Loss. And I thought that was pretty cool because that's exactly what I wanted. But then I read all of the reviews, and at the time, all of the reviews, none of them talked about weight loss. They all talked about getting healthy. And that was like a eureka moment for me. That's when I realized I don't really just want to lose weight. What I really want to do is I want to get healthy. You know, losing weight is not gonna let this insurance company think I'm gonna live. Losing weight is not what's gonna help me to be around for my children. Like getting healthy is what I needed to do. So I was convinced I bought his book and I brought it home and I just started doing exactly what it said.

00:17:11 Maya: If I can kind of interject, I love how we all in this lifestyle have that one individual that impacted us so much. For me, it was Dr. John McDougal. I found the start solution at Whole Foods and I felt like I finally had permission to eat the carbs that people have always said are awful for you. The healthier approach, healthier sauces and dressings and all of that. I wanna kind of go back just for a minute how you talked about trying to figure out,  a healthy way of consuming that vegetarian diet. I can totally identify, I stopped eating meat in college and did the vegetarian way of living. And most of the cookbooks back then were loaded with the other things that are not meat. So the dairy, added milk and cheese on everything it seemed like along with eggs.

00:18:05 Maya: And I never felt any better being vegetarian. I was kind of pescatarian too. But,  it was very difficult for me. And I'm so thankful we're having this conversation cuz I wonder, you know, if the listener has been on that path as well. We now have so many resources and cookbooks that are in alignment with what we believe is the best way to optimize our health. [crosstalk] So then, so I'm gonna meet Dr. Joel Fuhrman in Cleveland at the NHA Conference. So I'm so excited about him. And so that was the book that got you started? 

00:18:41 Anthony: That was the book. And I read that book in 2005. I started doing exactly what it said. I made so many mistakes in the beginning. This is not to say that I was on this perfect path. Like I didn't realize that some of the things I was doing, but I kept trying to be better. And I had this mantra every single day. I wanted to eat more fruit and more vegetables than I did the day before. And then I was letting that crowd everything else out and it worked. I lost a total of 160 pounds in just 20 months, and I got off all of my medications in about four or five months. My doctor had me coming in to see her every two weeks. And she had me keeping a blood pressure log. I had to log my blood pressure three times a day.

00:19:30 Anthony: And each time I took it, I had to take three readings. And then she had me bringing these sheets in. She might have in the beginning, I think she had me bringing them in weekly because it was changing so fast and she needed to adjust my medications so my blood pressure didn't go too low. But she was just impressed because she would put me on the scale every time I came in and she would track my weight loss with me and she would look at my blood pressure. So within a few months I was completely off all the medications. I started seeing her less frequently at that point because it was not as necessary to monitor me medically. But I continued and then I reapplied right away. After 20 months, the weight loss stopped and it stopped just as suddenly as it began.

00:20:15 Anthony: And I didn't start eating differently. I didn't start eating more. I ate the same way I did when I lost the weight, but it stopped. And I got right around 200 pounds, from 360 down to 200 pounds. And then my weight just stayed the same. And that was fascinating. Alone to me, someone who's pretty much had to always look in my drawers to see which shirt I could wear today, based on how some of them fit a little bit more snug than others. But it was incredible, you know? It was incredible the way it happened. I know I just explained two years in like,  maybe one or two minutes But..

00:20:54 Maya: It's fascinating that you've been able to keep the weight off all these years. It's not a diet.

00:21:02 Anthony: It's not. And I'm still eating the exact same way that I was before. I did take up some other hobbies in the meantime I started running because now I love it. It was enjoyable. I was always riding bicycles, but now I'm riding bicycles more. The good news is I got to spend so much incredible quality time with my children growing up. You know, I was the dad who, I coached them in track for eight years each. I got to take them on the amusement park rides when the carnival came to town. When we go on vacation, we go hiking, we go snowboarding, we do all kinds of active and fun things together. And because I was able to figure this out for myself,  I feel like I raised, I got the opportunity to raise my kids exactly the way I wanted to. And I'm incredibly grateful for that.

00:21:59 Maya: Very different than your life before you looked into life insurance, you were probably not as involved. I don't remember if you had children at that. You did, you wanted to take..

00:22:12 Anthony: My oldest was just 18 months. Oh my God. So, wow. So that's why I was going for the insurance was because I was starting a family and I needed now I had responsibility. And if I wasn't going to be around, I needed to make sure that I could still provide for my family.

00:22:27 Maya: Absolutely. What a blessing.

00:22:29 Anthony: Just to wrap it up, I was able to get the life insurance policy, but when I got it less than two years after I first was denied, I got it in the preferred category. And just like being denied sent my world crashing down, like getting it in the preferred category, which truthfully probably means I didn't need it. That made me feel so good about what I had done for myself, what I had done for my family. And that really convinced me, because again, they're making objective decisions on data, That this was the lifestyle for me.

00:23:05 Maya: That's right. Oh, that speaks volumes too. Yeah. I mean, talk about if the life insurance company says, Hey, you're gonna outlive this insurance policy. No,. Yeah, exactly. You don't need this. But no this is, but..

00:23:19 Anthony: We'll still charge you just a little bit just in case.

00:23:21 Maya: That's right. That's fascinating. So we were talking before we started recording just briefly about what stands out is that for me, when you go through a story like this, when you yourself have improved your health, you've battled with your own health issues, and now you're in a good place, it makes you I think even more effective when you're working with other people. How did you decide as an I guess an engineer, sort of, you know, with the prior history that you had in your work history, how did you decide that Telehealth was the best approach to reach people?

00:24:00 Anthony: So now that I was healthy, I was still working in pharmaceutical research and I continued there for about 10 years, even after I transformed my own life. But the different things swirled around in my head. I worked on a campus that was about 500 acres with about 10,000 people on this one site. And I just kept thinking to myself and from everything I was reading, that 80% of what we were doing at work with in the pharmaceuticals industry is probably just to enable people to not take better care of themselves. Meaning that if someone's cholesterol is high, that we were creating a medication to lower their cholesterol instead of force. If we didn't have those medications, those people would be forced to make the lifestyle changes to lower their cholesterol. Same thing for hypertension, same thing in many cases, but probably not all, but many cases for type two diabetics or for pre-diabetics or all these other chronic conditions.

00:25:05 Anthony: Things related to heart disease and all these chronic conditions that now what I was, I kind of lost some of my passion for what I was doing professionally. And I really wanted to figure out how to help people. Now, instead of helping to treat disease, I really wanted to help people figure out how to prevent disease or how to eliminate disease, or how to help them create this wonderful environment in their body where their body heals itself and then they no longer have the disease. So I was looking, but I had a lot of responsibility,  as well. So I needed to make sure that I could support my family and that I could make a living and that I could do all of these things. So especially early on, in the 2000 and even like 2007, 8, 9, 10, I was so passionate.

00:25:57 Anthony: I wanted to change careers. I couldn't figure out what to do. It's still challenging,  in this field of lifestyle medicine for people who want to work in this field full-time. So what I did was I controlled what I could control. And my wife had watched the documentary called The Minimalists, and we figured out that the best way to create room for new opportunities in life was to get rid of everything that was holding us back. And in our case, that was Bills, right? So we set out to kind of follow these minimalist principles to eliminate all of our bills. So we had a big house on a lot of property and we had a barn full of tools and a tractor to take care of the property. And we had a big garden and we had a field and we had a tree house and we had a long driveway and a snowblower so we could take care of the driveway.

00:26:54 Anthony: So we literally got rid of everything, including the house. And we went from a 4,000 square foot house on about six and a half acres of property to 1200 square foot condo that we were able to just purchase. And with the sale of the house. And then we had no mortgage, then we had no bills. We had much, much lower taxes because we were now in a condo instead of having all this land. And what we did was we kind of freed it up. So now what my kind of check marks for me to still be a responsible father and a responsible husband, I didn't have to make so much money. I didn't have to do things 'cuz most of my bills were already taken care of. So that enabled me to leave the pharmaceutical industry.

00:27:41 Anthony: And I just started exploring. And while I was exploring, I got to go to all the conferences, to see all of our friends, like you mentioned the NHA conference. It's wonderful. And when I was at these conferences, I noticed a pattern. And the pattern is a physician would get up, go on stage, and they would talk about the science of lifestyle medicine or of plant-based nutrition or of whatever the topic is, even being out in nature and all this stuff. And then they will show some case studies, they will show some of the patients that they've been able to help. And Dr. Essen has these famous images of the arteries that were clogged, that they become free. And Dr. Stik has this story of where she recovered, where she's managing now her multiple sclerosis, and she's able to function in a beautiful high quality of life where in the past, she was not able to do that because her disease was taking over.

00:28:43 Anthony: And they share other patients and then they go to Q&A. And then during the Q&A, almost every single time someone in the audience raises their hand and they say, hello, my name is so-and-so, I'm also suffering from diabetes, heart disease, multiple sclerosis, lupus, autoimmune conditions, whatever they're suffering from some condition. And then they ask the question, where can I find a doctor who can help me? And it's very, very hard, you know, if there was really no good answer to that question, because of course you can go to Cleveland Clinic and you can see Dr. Essen, or you can go out to do one of Dr. McDougal's retreats for 10 days. Or you could go to the [inaudible] center in San Diego, and you could stay with Dr. Fuhrman for 30 or 60 or 90 days and they can help you or you can go to, there are a couple of doctors who were around who had very small practices.

00:29:40 Anthony: Dr. Weiss is here in New Jersey, and he sees patients on a 360 acre farm. Right? But there's no place where the majority of people could go. So my background is in computer science and I have experienced kind of figuring out how to make technology work for us. And I just started looking around. I knew doctors who wanted to practice lifestyle medicine, and I knew patients who wanted a doctor who practiced lifestyle medicine. And the idea of what was initially plant-based telehealth, what's now lifestyle. I mean,   Love.Life telehealth is to create a platform where these doctors and patients can find each other very easily and that patients can have truly individual medical care focused on the individual. Not like a general program or say, oh, sign up and come through my program. The doctor's gonna get to know that individual and then they can treat that individual with care. So that's where the idea came from.

00:30:45 Maya: Wow. You found something that worked for you and you used your background in understanding again, how to make technology work for us to help really to have a broader region support other individuals. I sort of see that need as well. And when, when I saw you at the conference, the lifestyle medicine conference. I was speaking about how we constantly have people in our area in Dallas asking for a plant-based physician in the area. And we usually say we don't know one, like a general practitioner, just someone that they can just start to work with. And so I keep wanting to convince people that telemedicine is just as effective, and there's all of this hesitation, which I'm so glad that you're here today to talk to us about that. I've also said that, you know, there's the one physician in the area that endorses the lifestyle, but does not, so does not embrace it for himself. And so there is a big difference, and I'm hoping you can go into detail about that when a doctor just says, sure you can eat that way if you want, if it works for you, as opposed to someone who's actually also implemented the lifestyle and seen significant changes in themselves. So, please go into, tell us what telemedicine is.

00:32:07 Anthony: Okay, so telemedicine, the way we're doing telemedicine, which is what I'll talk about specifically. So first when we started plant-based telehealth again, I'm still calling it that sometimes, but now it's  Love.Life Telehealth. When we started that, we thought we had two obstacles to overcome. First obstacle, we had to help people to understand that telemedicine was a real and effective and legal way to deliver licensed medical care using audio, video technology, the term Telemedicine or Telehealth is very broad. It just means kind of remote, practicing medicine remotely. And believe it or not, it's not always done at the same time. Sometimes it's done like with patients filling out forms, doctor reviewing forms and making recommendations and then sending information back to the patient. But that's not at all what we're doing at  Love.Life Telehealth, what we're doing is trying to recreate the in-person experience as much as possible.

00:33:17 Anthony: So before your appointment, you fill out extensive intake form. And the intake form asks about of course, your medical history. It also asks about your current lifestyle. It also asks about your personal health and wellness goals. Like what are you specifically trying to achieve. It assesses your readiness to change. And it also asks for a three day food diary. And the doctors go over all of that before they ever see the patient. We also ask that if a patient has had any blood work done within the past year, that they upload that to their patient portal before their visit as well. And the doctor will take a look at that. So then by the time the doctor and the patient connect in their session, they can both see each other and speak with each other. And the doctor has already reviewed all of this, and then they can start asking, kind of clarifying questions and start working on the goals.

00:34:17 Anthony: And then they get pretty quickly into a lifestyle treatment plan based on what that,  what that patient is looking to achieve. But since this is fully licensed medical care, they can also order tests if a patient requires blood tests, we have national accounts with both Quest and LabCorp. And if you don't have a Quest or LabCorp close to you, the doctor can give you a written order that you can take to any other kind of lab service center to have your blood work done. If you require medications, of course the doctors are always trying to help the patients. Hopefully it's deprescribing or adjusting medications, but they are physicians first. And if a patient does require medication, then the doctor will be very, will be very.. they're very responsible and professional and they will be prescribing medications when they're required.

00:35:09 Anthony: And those prescriptions get sent right to your local pharmacy. And usually by the time you get off the call with your doctor and drive to the pharmacy, it's already in a bag waiting for you to pick up. So it's a real medical appointment, just like you would get in person. The only difference is the doctor can't touch or can't feel you. You can go over your lab reports, they will share their screen, they will go over things with you together, but since they can't touch or feel or listen to you, there are some conditions that they cannot responsibly treat by telemedicine. And this might be like a persistent cough or a suspected infection or something where they would want to culture your throat. And for those cases, it is very important for everyone to have a plan on where they would go to receive local medical care.

00:35:56 Anthony: So for myself personally, I know that there's an immediate clinic down the street, and if I ever had a really sore throat or persistent cough or something, I could go there. They could do my swab, they could listen to my lungs with a stethoscope, they could tell me what's going on and that kind of care. I wouldn't go for Telehealth, but certainly everything related to diabetes care, to cardiovascular concerns, to obesity, to hypertension, cholesterol, all of these things that we're all suffering from. I think the average American has four or more chronic diseases. All of those things can very responsibly be treated using Telemedicine with a really in-depth, in detail conversation with your doctor where they can go over your lab results and your test results and all of your reports from local imaging centers that they might want to send you to if you need some kind of a scan or MRI or things like that and they can do all of that conversation very effectively over Telehealth.

00:36:57 Maya: Right. I can see how  Love.Life Telehealth can compliment what the patient is already doing with a primary care physician. So if they already sort of have someone, and they're insured, they have insurance and they have a primary care physician for those,  other conditions that you just mentioned, sort of like a cough or some upper respiratory issue, something where they actually need to be seen physically, they can either make an appointment with their physician or go to a local urgency place. What are those called?

00:37:33 Anthony: Like a urgent care center urgent or an [crosstalk] I think the one that I go to is not even called urgent care. I think it's just called an immediate care. Basically, you don't need an appointment. You just walk in and you just say, Hey, I'm having a cough, and you wait 10 or 15 minutes and you can see a doctor for another two or three minutes and then you, then you're on your way. Right?

00:37:52 Maya: They're so common now, they're almost at every corner. But the difference is that while you can see your local physician, your primary care physician for 10, 15 minutes, and then they can quickly assess what's going on with you. That's one thing you just listed. Chronic conditions that require a qualified individual to understand not just prescribed medication, but to understand how you can support your own health by making changes. Your primary care physician may not know what foods to prescribe.

00:38:27 Anthony: Right. And it's really the total lifestyle. The other thing is, I'm glad you mentioned the time, the shortest appointment at  Love.Life Telehealth is 30 minutes, and that's a full 30 minutes with your doctor. The preferred appointment time is one hour, and especially for a first appointment, but even for many follow-up appointments. But truthfully, we leave that up to the patient because the services are paid out of pocket. It's $175 for a 30 minute appointment, and it's $350 for a one hour appointment. And we would never want someone to say, "Well I can't afford to go see them because I can't afford the one hour appointment." So even if you just want to see the doctor for a half hour, they will work really hard for you. And it's still probably about five times more, five times the amount of time that you would spend with another doctor, especially when you consider the time that they spend in advance, going over your intake form, your medical history.

00:39:27 Anthony: And your previous lab work. So they really want to have an in-depth understanding of you, the patient and what you are looking to achieve. And then they can work with you exactly as you described, to develop a plan that's individual for that person. because we can have a program where we tell everybody to do the same thing, but the problem is not everybody might want to do that, or not everybody might be equipped to do that. So the doctor really needs to take time to know the individual so that they can help that individual. Like, let's say I don't have control over my breakfast, lunch, and dinner or my breakfast and lunches, then they're may be gonna start with dinner meals. If food is something that's on the plan, they will also help with breathing exercises to help control things like hypertension.

00:40:16 Anthony: And you can do those frequently throughout the day to really make to make some improvements. They will help to make sure you're getting an adequate night's sleep. They wanna make sure you're managing your stress well in a way that's not being detrimental to your physical health. So they really take the time to do all of those things with you in an appointment. And it's fascinating. I mean, I get to hear from patients and it's honestly my favorite thing in the world. It's hearing from patients who have, who have been able to achieve something that they haven't been able to do otherwise by working with one of the doctors at  Love.Life Telehealth.

00:40:51 Maya: I mean, when I think of the fact that people spend money in different areas without understanding that it could all come together in one package. So someone might hire a fitness instructor or a dietician, to help them learn how to eat healthy, or they may go and do yoga for stress management. It doesn't mean you don't have to do that anymore, but to have a practice like  Love.Life Telehealth that can kind of see you kind of talk to you about how all of that comes together to support your health, I think it's so much better because your yoga instructor may not know anything about nutrition. So it's just all very separate the way that we practice self-care.

00:41:34 Anthony: Exactly. And to also have all of those things working in harmony, because what more likely happens is people do have fantastic health coaches or dieticians or other yoga practitioners or exercise, you know, coaches that they're working with, but oftentimes then they go to their conventional doctor and their doctor tells 'em, oh, that's not gonna work. That's not gonna help your diabetes. Oh no, that's not gonna help your hypertension. Or, oh no, that, you know you need this medication. That's the only way you're gonna be able to do it. And you know, personally, that I know firsthand that that's deflating. We read books, we have coaches and we have other kind of guides that are helping us to do work on things. And then just to be kind of shut up in the moment. It's sad, and I'm not saying all doctors do that, but it's happened to me several times and I've heard it happen with other people. And that's exactly the opposite of the experience that we're wishing for patients at  Love.Life Telehealth.

00:42:36 Maya: I'm looking at your website and I love it. I have had some of these individuals, some of your physicians on my show, Dr. Suzannah Bozzone, I hope I said her last name, right?

00:42:51 Anthony: Yeah, you did.

00:42:52 Maya: She's bilingual and Dr. Colin Zhu who also has a podcast. And so I might even consider bringing more of the physicians on the podcast because I think that the more comfortable we talk about Telehealth, the more comfortable people will feel, especially when they can actually hear from the doctor, get an idea of their personality, their knowledge. I think it's a matter of marketing this, right?

00:43:21 Anthony: Well, It's marketing and it's helping to communicate because it's exactly the same with this whole food plant-based lifestyle, right? It's really hard to tell people what it's like. You would never been able to convince me by just telling me, Hey, you know, if you eat mostly fruits and vegetables, you're gonna lose all that weight and you're gonna feel better than you ever felt before. And I'd be like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. But now that I've experienced it personally, I'm like, of course. You know, you know. Exactly. And it's very similar with working with different kinds of medical professionals. When you work with a lifestyle medicine doctor, like one of the ones that  Love.Life Telehealth, the experience is almost hard to explain, but it's really all of that. I mean, these are all licensed and board certified physicians in their own right.

00:44:14 Anthony: Then they're also board certified in lifestyle medicine, right? So, you've got someone who's been practicing conventional medicine now learned about a better way, and now is practicing lifestyle medicine. They are all 100% living this lifestyle themselves, and they know how to help patients to overcome even things like awkward social situations or how to deal with family members because they've all doing that themselves as well. And they can help you to understand exactly what you can realistically expect, not just in general, but for yourself as an individual. So if someone says, I wanna get off this medication, you know, the doctor is gonna look at all of your data, they're gonna help you with a lifestyle plan that will work you towards that, but they're also gonna tell you very medically responsibly, whether that's an achievable goal given your situation or not, and when to reassess along the way to decide if the goal does need to shift or change.

00:45:15 Maya: Absolutely.

00:45:16 Anthony: And just as passionate as I am in talking about my own personal story and other, like, they love talking about the conditions and how they're helping patients as well. And,  they all have slightly different kind of areas of expertise. Some might be a little bit better with autoimmune conditions, others might be a little bit better with like diabetes or with weight loss or with women's health and hormones and all of these other conditions. But the beautiful thing also, so we have 10 doctors and combined, they have licenses so that we at least have one doctor available in every single state of the US. So everyone in the US can see a doctor at  Love.Life Telehealth. Also, they do international consultations. So we have a lot of patients coming from Canada, from the UK, from Ireland, from Australia, from Mexico, from other countries.

00:46:15 Anthony: I mean, even as far as.. we have one, well, last I checked, we had one patient who is a regularly seeing a doctor from Japan and so the accessibility problem isn't out solved. The other thing that these doctors do is they get together twice every month to talk about cases and to help learn from each other and to share positive experiences that they've had with patients. Oh. I had a patient who was really tricky. They were dealing with, you know, so and so, and you know, I recommended this and they're doing really well, and now they say that they feel so much better, right? So now they all learn collectively from each other's experience. So really no matter which doctor you're seeing, you're really getting the collective knowledge of all 10 of these doctors. Because if you have a tricky condition that the one doctor doesn't have as much experience with, now they're gonna tap into everybody else. And they're gonna say, Hey, you know, have you seen this? What have you done? What has worked, what has not worked? And that alone is I think,just incredibly valuable for all patients.

00:47:21 Maya: It really is. It's a network of trained individuals that can collaborate in terms of sharing information to support their patients. This is very exciting. Do you offer us  Love.Life Telehealth, any kind of webinars or anything live for individuals just in general for your patients?

00:47:43 Anthony: Yes. So we're very conscientious that the patients are paying out of pocket. I just wanna add one more thing to that. After the patient has an appointment, we do provide a superbill. And the superbill is already for the patient to submit for reimbursement to their insurance company. And many patients are fully reimbursed, but it depends on your deductible and it depends on your out of network benefits. So there are also many patients who are unfortunately not able to be reimbursed. I just wanna be very fair with that. But to also balance that through the paid appointments. We do,  the doctors do Facebook live chats.  Well, it's, I say Facebook Live, but it's Facebook and it's also on YouTube. So for people who don't use Facebook, they do those twice per month. And these are live Q and A sessions. Now, of course, the doctors cannot practice medicine during these sessions, but they can certainly answer questions. And if a patient says, you know, or if someone who's watching one of these live chats writes in a question that says, you know, I'm dealing with condition A, B, and C, do you think that's something that you might be able to help me with?

00:48:48 Anthony: They will very honestly say, you know, you need to see a specialist. Or, yes, that's absolutely something that we've helped many patients with. So, all you have to do is go to our website, love.life/telehealth, go all the way to the bottom, and you'll see a little... you can stay in touch with us, like join our community kind of form. You just fill out your first name, your last name, and your email address. And then before every live chat, we send an email reminder the day before so that you can join and you can type in your questions to ask.

00:49:19 Maya: Okay.

00:49:20 Anthony: Ask the doctors.

00:49:21 Maya: This sounds so exciting. I can't wait to share this episode with listeners, because I think it's so important to continue to encourage people that, hey, just because we don't have physicians that are trained in this field that are local, it doesn't mean that we have to fear telehealth.  Especially, you know, that's one opportunity that we had during the pandemic to do a lot of things remotely like you said. But today it's, it's one other way that people can be supported. So why not? The coach that I've been working with for two years is remote, and I just met her for the first time last month after two years. 

00:49:58 Anthony: That's incredible. 

00:49:59 Maya: And I'm telling you, the work that she has done with me is profound. So I'm a firm believer that I don't put limits just because I'm interacting with someone via Zoom.

00:50:09 Anthony: Right, exactly. And I think, you know me because we got to meet in person. I love in-person connections and contact with people, and I do think it's so important and it's honestly something that's very valuable to me, but you're a hundred percent correct.  A lot can really be done using these remote technologies and if there's not an alternative close by, then we would love to be there for patients everywhere. And we literally have thousands of patients and I need to do a better job of capturing their testimonials and their stories so that, so that others can understand the successes that these patients are having. 

00:50:44 Maya: And that's, it's so funny because I, too, I'm redoing one of our websites and I reached out to my Facebook group asking for testimonials because the people redesigning my website said, where are your testimonials? And I thought, I don't know why I'm not collecting them. I should be doing that. But, you know, Anthony, those are the things that we remember, just like documentaries, right?

00:51:07 Anthony: Exactly. And we're, and I'm sure we're all getting be much better. I know that I'm getting much better at them, but, yeah, because they're really... why I'm here. I know that they're why you're here because we want to be helping other people. And that's what all of these doctors who I have the privilege of connecting patients with or doing themselves, yeah. We're all just here to help people.

00:51:29 Maya: And it's, again, I kind of go back to the fact that we don't market enough. And I say market advertising, promote whatever, you know, just putting it out there. But you, yourself said earlier that you love hearing those stories of the patients. I have people come up to me all the time and say anything from, guess what? I'm fully plan-based now to I, your podcast has helped me. And so all of these things that people are constantly telling us, we just need to put 'em on a larger platform for others to hear, because that's what keep, you know, these kind of testimonials keep me going. And they definitely feed into that passion that you have as well, Anthony. So, yeah, this is wonderful. Is there anything else you'd like  to share with my listener that I probably didn't ask?

00:52:14 Anthony: No, I mean, I would just say please visit our website at love.life/telehealth. And if you have any questions, there's a phone number right at the top. You know, even though we're a tele telehealth organization, it's not that you have to do all communication through, you know, email or for through typing or forms on the website. Like, you can call and someone will answer the phone most times of the day. I mean, they're, they're not answering overnight. We don't have 24 hours on the number, but you'll speak to someone who's also living the lifestyle. We have wonderful patient care coordinators. Their names are Savannah and Susan. And you can call and talk to them and ask them any other questions that you have, or you can write in, if you have a question for me, there's a form on the website, you can just write into the email address and we're all just here to help.

00:53:00 Maya: Yeah. Oh, I do have one other question, because when you were originally plant-based telehealth, I used to promote it here on the podcast too. So how has it changed? Is it just the name, you did say that your providers switched over, so it, has there been a change in how the technology is used? You did say also that you wanna mimic more of what it's like to have an in-person doctor visit, but is there a difference?

00:53:29 Anthony: So that's been our mission from day one is always to be as close as possible to that in-person appointment experience for the patient and for the doctor. So that has not changed. So literally the only thing that has changed is the name. It's the same doctors, it's the same appointment types, it's the same costs for an appointment. We used to have jackets that said plant-based telehealth, and everyone is really on me now to get new jackets that say  Love.Life telehealth. But that's the only thing that we're gonna be changing in the short term. Now going forward in the future, being part of love.life, which will be unfolding now in the next year, everyone will understand what that larger project is. But this is basically John Mackey's passion project to help change the way healthcare is practiced. And we will be able to offer additional programs, additional additional services, additional health and wellness assessments, and all kinds of additional things in the future. So it's only, we know we're the first ones, we're just changed the name now, but we're only gonna be expanding from here to be able to offer more to help patients to realize, really true health and the most important is the highest possible quality of life. 

00:54:46 Maya: Wow. You're, I'm very excited. It's almost like you're giving me some insight, like some there's more to come is what you're saying. 

00:54:55 Anthony: There is some more to come, some of it very soon. But,  yeah, it will all be unfolding and we'll be talking about it as much as possible. 

00:55:02 Maya: So exciting. 

00:55:03 Anthony: And so I would love to see some of the doctors come on your show, and I'm happy to come back with some updates whenever you, whenever you think it's appropriate.

00:55:09 Maya: Absolutely. I would love to have more of your providers on the show or your physicians definitely because I want my listeners to become more confident in hearing these physicians just sort of like, if I can just add Anthony, sort of like how we had so much exposure in the past to Dr. Clapper and Dr. McDougle in all these videos. And you see the doctors, I feel like I need, we need that with the practitioners that are also providing telemedicine through your program.  Just so that people can understand, especially you mentioned women's health issues and our hormonal issues. We wanna talk about how we can work with a practitioner that is qualified and works with us remotely. So definitely building more confidence to encourage people to join your program. And also, I just wanna say congratulations on this new endeavor because it sounds like there will, you know, there's more in the future. So congratulations on what you're doing and how you've been able thank you to now impact the world in many ways we're,

00:56:13 Anthony: Well, I'm working really hard on it, We all are and that's what, you know, I'm excited to be doing that together with our team at  Love.Life and also with our community, you know, which is the work that you're doing and so many others are doing in this area. I mean, the way that we're going to be successful is to be collaborating together. And that just... it feels great and it's incredibly exciting to me as well.

00:56:37 Maya: Yes, absolutely. And yes, I would love for you to come back to give us an update as things develop. But thank you so much for spending this time and talking to our listeners about the new love.life. It's love.life/health. 

00:56:52 Anthony: Yes. Telehealth, love.life/telehealth. 

00:56:56 Maya: There you go.

00:56:56 Anthony: Yeah, it's a little bit of a mouthful, but it's gonna start to feel very normal soon. It's still only been one month now.

00:57:02 Maya: Right. When I take the dots and everything, when I take the url out and just say, love, life, telehealth. I love it. I think it's a wonderful name. 

00:57:10 Anthony: Thank you. 

00:57:11 Maya: Thank you, Anthony. 

00:57:12 Anthony: You too. Bye. Okay.

00:57:13 Maya: Take care. 

00:57:14 Anthony: Thanks. 

00:57:15 Maya: You've been listening to the Healthy Lifestyle Solutions podcast with your host, Maya Acosta. If you've enjoyed this content, please share with one friend who can benefit. You can also leave us a five star review@ratethispodcast.com slash/hls. This helps us to spread our message. As always, thank you for being a listener.