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Modern medicine is a miracle of diagnosis and cure. A patient no longer has to visit a physician to consult one. The advantages of this revolution in medicine are obvious. It saves a huge amount of time while extending coverage to people who live in medically underserved neighborhoods. The disadvantage, which has become a staple of patient conversation, is that patients are no longer guaranteed a family physician, someone who knows and treats the entire person, body, and spirit as well as their ailment.
You wouldn’t necessarily expect to find in a brain surgeon, who operates for hours at a time under critical circumstances, a doctor with time to address his patients holistically. Yet this is exactly what you would find in renowned brain surgeon Dr. Jacob Rosenstein.
Brain surgery is a physically and mentally demanding occupation. At times, the surgeon must stand on their feet for ten hours or more at a time. During this period, they must maintain razor-sharp concentration; there is no room for error. As Dr. Rosenstein grew into his fifties, he started to experience the effects of aging. Instead of working around the small and inevitable incursions of age, Rosenstein turned his attention to the process of aging itself to see if it could be stopped, and even, miraculously, reversed.
His research, which took him through the prevailing recommendations on diet, vitamins, and exercise, eventually led to the discovery of telomeres, the string-like appendages at the top and bottom of our DNA that control aging. Rosenstein studied how as one ages, the telomeres shrink. Using himself as a subject, Rosenstein found that one could shrink telomeres and slow, even reverse, the process of aging with tailored adjustments to food intake, exercise, and blood and organ management. And with this reversal would come significant changes in overall mental and physical well-being.
Initially, Dr. Rosenstein shared his findings and recommendations with patients and eventually decided to found the Southwest Aging Intervention Institute. The SAII is a center open to all interested in his radically new and effective methods of dealing with aging.
Conceived as a way to address the individual needs of each client by recording their reactions to standardized tests, Rosenstein and his staff constructed the following protocol: an intensive intake interview with Dr. Rosenstein himself, followed by 90 biomarker bloodwork, fitness assessments, cognitive assessments, blood vessel evaluations, iDXA total body composition scans, and other measures–all designed to facilitate the construction of a customized regime specific to the biological and cognitive needs of the individual.
From the beginning, Dr. Rosenstein has had very concrete views about why he founded SAII and what he wanted to accomplish with it. His core belief is that “God has given each one of us a unique gift, a skill. Something that feels natural to us and that we are really good at so that we can use it to help others. Something that we were meant to do.” In his case, the initial gift was “using my innate three-dimensional skills and hand-eye dexterity and coordination to perform surgery.” However as time went on, Dr. Rosenstein realized that a deeper mission was to be “first and foremost a healer. I heal the world one patient at a time. It makes my soul feel good.”
Since “Patient outcomes are very personal” to him, Dr. Rosenstein strives every day “for perfection and excellence.” He sees his job at SAII, as well as in surgery as “nonstop intellectual stimulation, problem solving and endurance.” To keep the mind primed and body strong,” Rosenstein adheres to his own version of the SAII regimen. His appearance and energy at the age of 68 illustrate the effectiveness of the SAII regimen and implicitly demonstrate to its high achieving, results-oriented clients that “When you live better, you live longer.”
To find out more about this intriguing man and his philosophy and methodology, check out Dr. Rosenstein’s book, “Defy Aging: Make the Rest of your Life the Best of Your Life,” and his Southwest Age Intervention Institute’s website.
