Dr. David Haase is the founder and President of the MaxWell Clinic. He is passionate about finding and addressing the complex underlying causes of disease and thereby nurturing the Creation of Health. His expertise touches a wide range of specialties from personalized computational systems medicine, brain performance optimization and more. Dr. Haase is also the author of the best selling book Curiosity Heals The Human.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- What it means to ‘create health’
- Why his new approach to overcoming diseases can be considered as a paradigm shift
- What does a systems medicine physician do?
- Dr. Haase shares a conversation she had with a colleague and how to answer the question, ‘What is a good doctor?’
- How we can create health
- Dr. Haase recalls his childhood and how it has impacted the choices that led him to do what he is doing now
- Dr. Haase talks about an influential time at the Mayo Clinic
- The moment Dr. Haase decided that it was time to create health
- How to connect with Dr. David Haase
In this episode…
Diagnosing and treating diseases summarizes the standard practice of medicine. But what if you want to not just cure a disease? What if you wanted to create a healthier version of yourself?
Dr. David Haase explains that diseases can be treated but the best part is that they can be avoided altogether and the way to do that is by creating health. But wait a second, how do you ‘create health’? What does it even mean?
In this episode of Super Humanizing, podcast host Dr. David Haase sat himself down as the interviewee in his own show as he answers questions posed by seasoned podcast host Dr. Jeremy Weisz. They talk about what inspired Dr. Haase to venture down the path he is in, what it means to create health, and how important it is in today’s society. Stay tuned.
Resources Mentioned on this episode
Sponsor for this episode
This episode was brought to you by CreatingHealth.com.
Creating Health is a movement that was started in order to tackle today’s medical challenges and the way that people look at disease.
At CreatingHealth.com, you’ll also find a collection of nutritional supplements that Dr. Haase has formulated over the years. They were manufactured with the highest standards of quality, and all have been formulated with my own patients in mind.
The website is also a great place to get scientific information about supplements. On each page where a supplement is featured, you will find research about all the compounds used in it.
Episode Transcript
Dr. David Haase 0:00
Hello, I’m Dr. David Haase. And this is Superhumanizing, where we explore the human condition, and how it can be better for each individual person. As a physician who sat knee to knee with thousands of patients, I’m convinced that each person’s potential for being a better version of themselves is just a bit of knowledge or a few new tools away. Over the years, I’ve grown more and more frustrated by not having the time with each individual patient to fully dig into the topics that I knew would help them the most. on this show, you get to sit in on my conversations with some of the greatest experts in today’s healthcare revolution. Doctors, researchers and entrepreneurs who are looking beyond the brute force suppression of symptoms to discover and address the underlying root causes of sickness and dysfunction. So please join the conversation by following me on Facebook or Twitter at David halsy, MD. To learn more, visit DavidHaaseMD.com, where you can subscribe to my mailing list and be the first to know about important developments in this exciting world of systems medicine. And with that, please enjoy today’s episode of Superhumanizing. Dr. Haase here hosted the Creating Health podcast where we explore how new developments in systems medicine enable us to work with our bodies, not against them to treat those complex chronic diseases and to create health from the ground up. I have Dr. Jeremy Weisz here. It was a done thousands of interviews with some of the top health and longevity experts and and we flip the script and he’s going to be interviewing me.
Jeremy Weisz 1:45
So I’m excited. Thank you for having me. I want to give a little intro to you Dr. Haase. And Dr. Haase, he’s a well renowned medical educator whose expertise touches a really wide range of specialties. He’s the author of the best selling book Curiosity heels the human and presenter of a TED talk in which he describes how treating dementia starts by changing our paradigms about health and disease, and also dimension. He received his medical training at Vanderbilt University and the Mayo Clinic. And there’s a laundry list of other accolades, which we don’t have time to go into all of them. But I’m very excited to chat about a few things. And Dr. Haase, I wanted to start with why creating health
Dr. David Haase 2:30
care Well, why creating healthier as a medical doctor? You know, it doesn’t really sound paradoxical, but it is in some ways, you know. So, as I’m a medical doctor, I went to Vanderbilt for my medical schooling and as you said, mayo clinic for residency and training thereafter. And what a medical degree allows you to do is to diagnose and treat disease. That is actually what The practice of medicine is you’re, you’re supposed to understand what’s wrong with the patient to name it, you know, give it a diagnosis. And then from that point on, you treat that diagnosis. And that really is the legal definition of the the practice of medicine. And so it’s all based upon pathology. It’s all based upon something having gone horribly wrong, bad enough that it’s undoubtedly it deserves its own name. And in when you start to treat every person that walks in the door as a problem, and you want to shut down this disease process, you know that that can be really helpful if you’re looking at an acute infection. But if instead what you’re wanting to do is for that person to thrive at the highest level possible. You want that individual to attain their maximum wellness. You can’t go after it in just that way. Instead, you have to look at the other side not just treat disease but create health. Instead of looking at just what we call it pathogenesis, you have to look at saluda Genesis. So not just a creation of disease, but the creation of health. And what’s really fun about this is the body is designed to heal. And so my medical practice has been growing. And I’ve been pursuing this question about what creates health for over 20 years now. And it has led me down some really interesting pathways with some great clinical outcomes. And really just a love for the practice of medicine that goes beyond just treating disease which is exceedingly important, but also to be curious about what creates health for that person and the joy That I have around the practice of medicine and some of the unexpected results that have occurred is taking a different approach has led me to really want to share, you know, to encourage other people to start thinking differently and to embrace this understanding that your bodies are designed to create health. We are actually designed to overcome the challenges that are present every day. And so that’s the theme of this podcast. You know, we want to dive into all of the experts and the ideas that can drive us forward. In this process and understanding of creating health.
Jeremy Weisz 5:45
It seems like a different paradigm. Right. From what you started off on this journey,
Dr. David Haase 5:53
yeah, it’s definitely a different paradigm, your paradigms. It was a paradigm we throw that word around a lot, right? But it’s it’s really Really that infrastructure for how you see the world, it is that in kind of the water you swim in is your paradigm. You’re not really aware of a paradigm when you are going through your everyday life, right, just as the background, right. And I think they’re really sneaky. And so a paradigm shift is where the ground kind of shifts under your feet and all of a sudden, you’re in a different place. You’re seeing things from a new perspective. And absolutely, looking at a human and the potential they have to be the fullest version of themself is through the eyes of creating health is very different than looking at through the eyes of just treating disease. And interestingly enough, if one focuses on creating health, you can treat disease quite effectively. So think of it this way. So the paradigm shift with if it’s very simple understand, if you cut your hand, what happens? I mean, you get a cut. And how do you get better, you don’t get better because you know, you take a particular medication you don’t get better really because of a surgery. Now, sutures may help bring that skin together so that it’s not moving or moving too much. But what really occurs is your body through its miraculous wisdom, knows how to create repair, right, it makes new blood vessels new fiberglass, new nerve endings start to reveal with each other and pull itself together. The body is designed to deal with the onslaught of damage that we have every day. And that is, and that is a really definable process, we can understand the DNA, the RNA, the metabolomic The, the microbiome x, you know all of these large data sets of understanding about how the body works. And if we look at it through how it works rather than just its end states of massive dysfunction that we call disease, we have a new way of seeing how we can overcome disease, but not just overcome disease but live more fully, and experience greater levels of health and productivity along the way. So yeah, it’s absolutely a paradigm shift. And once you make it, you can’t see the world through just the eyes of disease anymore.
Jeremy Weisz 8:44
Dr. Jose, I’m sure you get this question a lot. But what kind of doctor are you?
Dr. David Haase 8:53
Well, I hate that question. I really hate that question. You know, and all the good marketing firms tell you you need to have an elevator speech, you know, I have this one little thing put out towards you. And you know, so I can tell you about what kind of doctor I am. But I am really the end output of you know, over 20 years of learning post medical school and residency. You know, it’s fascinating in today’s world, it’s really the mashups that provide value. It’s when you take disparate pieces of knowledge and shove them together, and you create something new, that you have new discoveries and new opportunities and, and because I’m a pathologic learner, you know, I just can’t stop. I you know, I love everything about the age we live in, where we can have access to the world’s information at any moment in time. I’ve continued to learn so I really started out as a family doctor, you know, I went to the Mayo Clinic to be trained to be authentic. Dr. Know, isn’t that odd, right? And I did that because I really want to have excellence in medicine. I want to make sure we looked at the whole person. And, and then from there, I realized, well, if we look at the whole person and and while I was at Mayo, I kind of had my creating health conversion experience. I, I recognize this underlying truth that is not really wrestled with in the world of, of, of my of the standard practice of medicine. And so I started learning so what do I what am i right now? Well, I’m a systems medicine physician. And as a systems medicine physician, I recognize that we are, we are human is made up of systems of systems. We are complex, dynamic creatures. We have genetic systems, we have neurologic systems, we have organ systems. We have psychological systems, sociological systems. And it’s the interplay of the systems that if wrestled with and if we attempt to understand them, we can find tipping points that can enable the entire organism to become well. You know, and so my curiosity has been how do we create health? What are the barriers? What holds a body back from being able to create health? And what are the things that it’s missing that if added in could enable that body to create health and the nice thing? Yeah, so I mean, what kind of doctor am I, you know, I strive to be a doctor that listens deeply, that learns voraciously. And that applies the safest and most advanced science to the problem at hand. And so it does depend upon who Me What kind of doctor I am? Because I do go into my mind, I think, you know, well what kind of an answer could help that person on their journey? You know what? How can they better understand the miracle of health and disease that they are? Even in that answer. So it’s a lot of fun to grapple with the reality of what does make someone ill, and what does make someone unwell and what is it that can create health? So, the joke was that I was a saluda genic and Nick mythologist. And as saluda genic means say that 10 times fast, exactly. saluda. genic means creating health and enigma. otologist means a scientist of the mystery, a scientist of the question, and I think that I’m an absolute I’m voracious when it comes to asking new and different questions. And I love a day when I change my mind. You know, I think that you know, we’re, when we’re presented with better and new information, we should be open to changing our mind. But all too often when you become an expert, that’s the hardest thing to do. Because you become a, you become
your ego actually becomes part of being an expert. And so if you make a statement as an expert, it becomes very hard to change one’s mind. So I think another part of that doctor I am is the doctor that’s willing to change his mind is willing to look differently at a problem and to even look differently at how that information that has already been obtained could be understood differently if we put it together and good data structures and recognize the interrelationships that that exist. So, so how is that at the worst answer ever about what kind of doctor are just
Jeremy Weisz 14:06
when you thought it was going to be a simple answer. It’s not but that’s, that’s what makes it fun.
Dr. David Haase 14:13
You know, I’m gonna go I’m gonna take one more dig at this, okay, really because I’m gonna take one more dig because one of my heroes is Dr. Deborah German. And Dr. German was my Dean of Student Life at the Vanderbilt medical school. And she went on to do amazing things. She actually was the founder of the University of Central Florida medical school, one of the one of the it’s really the only MD medical school that’s been built in like the last 35 years. And she started from the ground up and rethought everything about medical education. And she has turned that place in the space of 12 or 13 years into one of the leading institutions in medicine by rethinking what is medical education or what is it to be a doctor and how do we do better and in The reason she was able to do that is really her mindset. And on the first day of medical school, she created this problem for me. I blame her for not being able to answer this dang question. And she asked me, she said, There she asked the entire classes were sitting there shortly after getting our white coats and for the white coat ceremony, which kind of was a ceremony to allow us into this field of medicine and to welcome us in. She asked this question is profound. She asked, What is the good doctor? What is the good doctor? And, you know, as we all sat there, fresh bright I’m newly entered medical students. We started to answer her question. We start throwing out characteristics like caring and thoughtful and smart And decisive and, and wise and, and generous and, and and all of these terms started coming forth and she was writing them all on the blackboard. And you know, it really didn’t take more than about 10 minutes of this where we all felt absolutely overwhelmed at this oh my god she’s like, right if that’s the definition of a good doctor, we are hosed. Right. There’s just no way we are going to be able to live up to that as an idea. No way on earth we’re going to be able to and in its but the question of what is the good doctor has haunted me and inspired me since that time. And I think that to be the fullest version of ourselves is part of the it is the quest of being alive is to discover enable and enjoy that aspect of who we are. And that’s this wonderful task, but I have with my patients so you know, when that person comes in, and we want to have personalized healthcare, we have to know who that person is. And that is no less true, then you have to go to that same exploratory experience when you want to know what kind of a doctor Are you you have to know the person that is there, because the person has so much to do with who the doctor is. So I think my exploration and trying to understand who I am as as a doctor, had everything to do with that amazing question, you know, what is the good doctor? And in have that ongoing question and quest to answer that for my patients where they happen to be, and to you pursue that pursue that idea, and it was that idea what is the good doctor? One of my answers to that is the good doctor pursues the creation of health. And, and this that she was really the start of my paradigm shifting when that one question.
Jeremy Weisz 18:15
Thanks for sharing that. That’s amazing. How do you mention this before? How do we create health as humans?
Dr. David Haase 18:23
Creating health? Yeah. So, number one, we just happens, doesn’t it? Isn’t it amazing? You look at the challenges that you’ve had today, Ryan, look at the challenge any of us have in any one day we’re fighting gravity. We’re fighting erosion, we’re fighting the rusting of our molecules with oxygen oxygen assaulting them. I’m scared now. Yeah, right. Yeah, you should. Yeah. You should be It’s amazing. I just can’t believe we don’t just spontaneously combust when you when you really step back and and wonder about this mitochondria, which are energy factories inside the cells that enable our body to run. I mean, they are just, they’re just furnaces that are running at an incredible, incredibly high rate to enable this thing we call life. And so our bodies are creating health every moment of every day. Every you know, all I heart just has to stop for four minutes and you are brain dead, right? It’s it’s, we are dependent upon that energy, that self healing process on a moment by moment basis. But if we want to boil it down to kind of simple way of understanding how you create health, you start by recognizing the body is able to do it. And the miraculous intelligence which made the body is what heals the body. Then you you then you start to query, and you say, all right, there’s four main ways that I have found that we can enable this body to Create health better, right? And I call these experiments right. And when patients come in to see me, I’ve never met two people that are the same, right? They have different genetics, different environmental exposures, they are different human beings that come to me. And as a result, everything those people do in their life is an experiment of one. And that experiment of one that action, that behavior that is either going to create health or create disease, it’s going to either create more damage or repair more damage. And so my job as a personalized systems medicine specialist, is to help people create the most wholesome experiment that one that they can possibly do in their life. And to say, you know, what is going to give them the most bang for their buck, what’s going to get them the most return on their investment of time, money and energy and effort. And so as we do that, we have to say, Well, how do we create these experiments? How do we create the experiment to create more health? And and there’s four main ways one is not and I’m up, you will learn, all the listeners will learn I’m a pathological obliterator in my life. So, yeah, so I mean, we, we can either remove something that is damaging to the body, and or we can replenish a needed resource the body needs to heal, we can retrain the body to function in a way it had fallen out of normal function, or we can reset and shake the body up from multiple different ways and allow it to come back to a new level of normal. Now those are four really big concepts will go through them in a bunch. But in in essence, let’s just focus on the first two to begin with, and how do you create health? You know, you want to find what is toxic and traumatic in that individual, what is perpetuating the fact that they can’t get? Well, you want to ask, you know, when were you last well, and and then figure out how well What happened? What, what what challenging thing was brought into your life either biochemically or psychologically. And And is there a way that we Is it still persistent and can we remove that?
You know, and then we also look to replenish not just, you know, certainly doing lab tests and figuring out well, what may you be deficient in biologically as important? What kind of vitamins are you missing or nutrients or minerals? But, you know, if you’re not if you have sleep apnea, your Not getting oxygen. And oxygen is a really important nutrient. And the deficiency there of causes a lot of problems. What if you’re not getting enough relationship or sunlight or movement or a particular compound that because you have a genetic uniqueness, you’re not able to create health in an efficient way. You need a whole lot more of that particular compound than other people would. So to remove and replenish, I really the first two steps of how we create health, but as we recognize that the body has this remarkable ability to heal.
Jeremy Weisz 23:42
I love that. Um, I want to talk a little about the journey. Right? Um, so anybody want to go back to your upbringing? Mm hmm. Talk a little bit about you know, the young Dr. Haase.
Dr. David Haase 24:02
My mom will tell you I always wanted to be a doctor. Really? I don’t I don’t remember that at all. I really don’t. But I so I grew up on a farm in South Dakota. Now, how many people do you know from South Dakota?
Jeremy Weisz 24:15
wine? Actually, Is that me? Surprisingly, yeah.
Dr. David Haase 24:21
But yeah, I’ve been able to be made from South Dakota. So I mean, our farm was eight miles out of the metropolis, Scotland, which was 800 people, right. I graduated from a class of 31. And I went to kindergarten was 17 of those people. You know, it was an incredibly stable community, agricultural at its core. We raised all a bunch of different land crops we raise chickens and be are in cows and pigs and we had a dairy farm. We we repair all of our own machinery. My dad was just an amazing welder and mechanic. And so I grew up in this environment where, you know, your efforts really determined your outcome. You know, if you if you were committed to putting effort into your life, and you know, your business, your farm land, you would repeat different reward based upon your efforts. It wasn’t entirely determined by your efforts, certainly the wind and the rain and things like that had a lot to do with it, but efforts and commitment to actual results mattered deeply on the farm. And then, you know, one of the other things is that I saw plants growing, I saw animals growing, and and you know what they just happened. And especially the weeds, the weeds would just grow on their own, you know, they never needed any help, but life, life happens. Health is created. In life perpetuates. And this just fundamental paradigm is so deeply ingrained in myself. That’s where this whole idea of creating health happened. I mean, how do we actually cultivate our bodies as if they are land that we are going to enjoy for centuries. And that’s what you do on a family farm, as opposed to a big corporate operation lead a small farm that’s in the house, been in the family for over 135 years now. And so we know that and you really hope that land is going to stay in the family so you care for it with a mind towards the next four or five generations, you know, you don’t want it to road off you. You don’t want to poison the land with chemicals that you know, the net the following generations of the family will have be impaired by And likewise, you know, I always think of kind of like every year of a human’s life is you know, much like Generation on the family farm. You know, every year we’re planting work, we’re cultivating. We are nurturing our harvest for that year. And that was a very different paradigm than the idea of treating disease. Now we treated disease in the farm to certainly if there were, you know, animals that were sick, we would give them antibiotics. And if there were really nasty weeds, we’d use poisons to kill them off, because there’s no other way to do that efficiently. But that wasn’t mostly what we did in the farm we cultivated we nurtured. We made sure the right crop was in the right place at the right time. We interplanted. We tried to create synergy we build wind breaks out of trees, we will try to grow a healthier environment and that’s My paradigm. That’s that’s the that’s where the young David Ozzie, you grew up into Dr. halsy. And, and I didn’t realize for years, just how incredibly profound that view of the world was how I just can’t, I can’t see the world differently. And it’s probably led to why I have I practice differently, because I really believe we have huge potential for growing a better health outcome. And it’s a I’m very thankful for being one of the very few people that got to grow up in South Dakota.
Jeremy Weisz 28:38
You mentioned a very influential time at Vanderbilt. What was the influential time at the Mayo Clinic for you?
Dr. David Haase 28:47
Yeah, well at Mayo. Well, that one thing was Premarin. So, I remember this very clearly. It was a time when giving when prempro is all the thing to do, which is a medication of, of horse estrogens, and a, a modified progesterone that really wasn’t nothing like progesterone anymore. And, and the idea was that if we give all women these hormones, they’re going to be healthier and they’re gonna have less heart disease and all kinds of things and and even then, before the Women’s Health Initiative trial came out and question those assumptions. I recognize it, golly, these are really high potency hormones and, and they’re new to nature molecules. And we’re giving them to women hand over fist and someone want to become sick. Remember a woman developing a blood clot shortly after starting on those medications for their health. And I know several things about that. Were interesting to me. One is that these were, you know, called Franken hormones, you know, they were they were truly drugs. They weren’t original manufacturers replacement parts, right? You know, hormones are very specific in the body. And you would never think of giving a man Methyl testosterone, which is a kind of a pharmaceutical form of that hormone, because it would, it’s causes all kinds of liver problems, but that’s still a medication given to women nowadays. And so I got this is this deep questioning of why are we choosing therapies that are not native to the human body? You know, when we give insulin, we’re was a big advance to go from pig insulin to human insulin,
Jeremy Weisz 30:43
right?
Dr. David Haase 30:44
Using original manufacturers replacement parts when you’re trying to replace right that’s one of the ways we recreate health we replace is a very important thing to do. And so I was confronted with Wow, we’re giving women Really high doses of a new to nature molecule. It’s not necessarily causing benefit, is there something we could do differently? And lo and behold, I got read a paper while I was at the Mayo Clinic, from one of my Vanderbilt professors, Dr. Hargrove, and he had done a nice study looking at the blood levels and the symptoms of women who got he put together a compounded medication of bioidentical hormones. So that’s just a fancy term for meaning, the actual hormones, the same chemical composition that was in the body in the first place. And he put this mixture together and had it women put drops on their skin and have it go through their skin. And lo and behold, that improves symptoms substantially. And we go on to learn that these hormones that go through the skin rather than as a pill, have less likelihood of having blood clots, and I thought, wow, isn’t this a Interesting, we could use the lowest effective dose or this person for this woman instead of a single solitary high pharmacologic dose of a, of a foreign molecule. And, and it seemed to me that made sense in the paradigm, how do we create health if and even outside of any data, and I love data. I think we need to have more and better studies, but there are principles that transcend data that goes on with just a single molecule. The principles that you know, the body is really intelligent, and it’s better to work with the body than to work against the body. And and I think a better way to work with the body. At that time. I started prescribing these compounded bioidentical hormones and while I was at the Mayo Clinic, and had some great discussion And actually a couple of doctors started to do the same. You know, doctors are wonderful people. I love my colleagues, I want to say that, you know, physicians, as a whole are some of those caring and compassionate and intelligent people I’ve ever met and presented with new data, better data. You know, they do make changes. It’s just hard to get the field to move as a whole. So anyway, that was my, it was this idea that we could use that what we should do would be better from the principle of creating health would be to use the lowest effective dose of original manufacturers replacement parts. And and so here, I was doing this, and everybody thought, oh, what why are you doing that? Why don’t you just give them prempro? And then the Women’s Health Initiative study comes out then we realize oh, guess what? prempro causes more heart attacks and more strokes in a lot of them, and it’s not so beneficial. And so everybody freaked out, oh, hormones are bad. But you know, that study, they didn’t even test hormones. They tested pharmaceuticals. And so here I was then then the pendulum swung right past me. Here I am giving a low dose and and the pendulum swing right back me and all these women get taken off of hormones and just rash terribly, just just are suffering with massive hot flashes, night sweats, and what we now know is they lose a huge amount of bone own and they can run a loss, you know, coming off of hormones, estrogen really quickly is not a great deal. And so here I was just and staunchly, where I usually am as a radical moderate, sitting in the middle and now it’s happening. Is that pendulum swinging back again. And we recognize that while there really is some good utility for hormones, especially at certain times, but I think that, you know, my, where I came from and the way I see health, shape, everything that I see, I think we have this opportunity to rethink healthcare, not rethink medical treatment, but rethink health care in these in these ideas of
how we create health, you know,
Jeremy Weisz 35:31
thank you for hosting. So thank you for going through why creating health? How do we create health as humans and a bit of your journey? I encourage anyone to check out the other episodes where you go more in depth with some of these topics, and where should we point people towards online to learn more about you and maybe the other things you have going on you go to creatinghealth.com
Dr. David Haase 36:00
If you’ve made it this far, you’re a curious person. And if you’re curious, you probably have questions. And if you have questions, my type of audience, so to ask those questions, while using email, when you can put it somewhere the whole community can see. After all, you never know what bit of information may end up improving someone’s life. If not saving it. Just head over to Facebook or Twitter and post your question. If you tag me at David Haase, MD, and use the hashtag Superhumanizing. I’ll do my best to answer it, and then share it on my own page where everyone can discuss it. Please keep in mind that I’m only one person. So I may not get to every question but your questions are very important to me, and I’ll always do my best to answer as many as I can. If you want to learn more about my clinical practice in the Nashville area, go to MaxWellclinic.com. To browse the hundred-plus supplements I’ve formulated for my patients over the years, visit creating health.com You can get a copy of my book, watch some videos or listen to more of this podcast by heading over to David halsy md.com. There you’ll be able to subscribe to my mailing list and receive up to date information on regenerative plasma exchange, and systems medicine approaches for dementia. Thanks for listening
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