Heart Health Revolution: Dr. Jeffrey Boone on Preventing Heart Disease and Transforming Lives

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Living the Dream with Curveball. If you believe, you can achieve. Welcome to the Live in the Dream with Curveball Podcast, a show where I interview guests that teach, motivate, and inspire. Today I am joined by Arthur and Dr. Jeffrey L. Boom. Dr. Boom, for 30 decades, or three decades, 30 years, more than 30 years, has been spending his time and focusing his mission on not only treating heart disease, but preventing it. He has focused on the role that stress plays in long-term health, stroke, metabolic risk, and he has worked as a consultant for cardiology prevention. Hopefully I'm saying that right. He's worked with elite organizations such as the NFL, you know, the San Francisco 49ers, the Denver Broncos, MLB baseball, Colorado Rockies, and the Atlanta Hawks. So he's got a book coming up, so we're going to be talking to him about how he's looking to not just treat heart disease, but wipe it out. So, Dr. Boone, thank you for joining me. Why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself?

SPEAKER_00 1:37

Well, uh, I grew up in western Kansas. Uh, you know, uh the type of land, wide open spaces, you can see the sunrise and sunset. So it's kind of a land of dreamers, and you know, I've always uh kind of felt that uh whatever you put your mind to, you might be able to accomplish. And so uh gradually going through my education, uh done a lot of different things. I think one thing uh that I'm sure you inspire people to do is whatever you do and do your best. And it wasn't until I was about 27 years old that I thought about going to medical school. And through the process, I'd gotten a master's in exercise physiology at Kansas State. And I'd seen what the benefits of exercise and lifestyle were for the health span. And I saw a lot of people just, you know, dying young and having problems that they could have prevented. Um, and then I saw the power of a medical doctor, but oftentimes 50, 40, 50 years ago, you know, doctors were good at taking care of you, but they weren't a really uh a vocal leader of preventive strategies. And, you know, things like exercise, nutrition, weight control, stop smoking, all that is very critical. So really got passionate about preventing disease. Medicine is usually very good at helping to fix disease, but preventing it, especially in this area, became very important because about half the time, the first time you ever know you have heart or vascular disease, this is exactly involved with strokes and kidney disease and all that. These organs can just be damaged beyond repair, and you don't feel a thing oftentimes until the end event of a heart attack, a stroke, or some catastrophic event. But usually the disease has been percolating for 30 or 40 years. You know, it starts in the 20s, and a lot of times people start dying in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s. Now, the older I get, even 70 sounds pretty dang young. When I was young, that is that sounded old, you live long enough. But I think there's a lot of uh life that can be injected into people uh by taking care of themselves. And then as my career has developed, a lot of the medicines, which used to be horrible, you know, 50 years ago I'd rather die than take a lot of the medicines available. But now the medicines even most of them have no side effects, they're very gentle, they prevent and reverse uh lifestyle and genetic issues. So that's kind of been our passion. And um not too many people were interested in that. You know, the insurance industry industry is mostly interested in, you know, the cost of your health and not your health. Um, and it's sometimes hard to think about paying for things before you get sick, but a lot of our work is that. And then the reason we have some interesting organizations working with us is people like the you know, the NFL, the NBA, the people other companies, people that have valuable employees want what we offer, which is not wait too late, let's get it early. But then ultimately, my final goal of my career with this book and other things is to get it to everybody. You know, there's no reason you have to be a player for the Broncos to take advantage of this. It's not that expensive. It's just no nobody does it. Uh, most of the hospitals, you know, everybody gets paid more if you just wait until the fourth quarter and throw Hail Mary. And that's where all kind of the money is spent and does well, but about half people having heart attacks have either died or had a heart attack uh irreparably, but the first time they ever know they've got a disease. So that's been kind of how we built our career. And then used to be just me, but now my sons and daughter, and you know, we got 50 or 60 employees and all kinds of people, even all over the world, that are kind of looking at what we're doing as a model that might be able to be adopted by everyone. Like I can't take care of everyone, but I can, through your podcast and other get the word out that you know, it's not about medicines or health, it's about do you want two more generations of life to hang out with your kids, grandkids, great-grandkids, and really enjoy life as you age, as opposed to uh even if you live, you know, surviving catastrophic uh interventions. So that's kind of our our career is focused on that. And appreciate you having us on to talk a little more about it.

SPEAKER_01 5:46

Absolutely, and I definitely appreciate the great work you're doing at the Boone Heart Institute and your your upcoming book, A World Without Heart Attacks. That's a bold statement. Uh, do you really believe that uh we can uh have a world without heart attacks in our lifetime?

SPEAKER_00 6:02

I really do. I think my my sons and daughter who've kind of listened to my discussions for many, many years, you know, they're thinking, oh, Dad, you're gonna die before you realize your dream. Uh first of all, it's not good if I die young of a heart attack, and then it looks like I don't know what I'm doing. So I hope to live a little bit longer. But ultimately, what we've done is at our clinic in Denver, we think literally, if you do everything we tell you to do, you'll never have a heart attack and stroke. So that's been realized. Now, the next stage is for everybody to kind of figure that out and learn about it. How you can, you know, create your own blue zone. You can create your own issue. Now, a lot of times you know how to check your genetics and your risks and measure the disease and then treat it. And oftentimes it does require medicines, but almost every medicine is getting to be generic, it has almost no side effects. Uh it's just you don't know you need it. So I think the, I think it is uh the opportunity. And then I think the most interesting thing, the thing that really motivates people is that if you clean out the heart and the kidney and you protect those, the same thing is happening in the brain. So I think that without knowing for sure, but suspecting that if we have success with the heart, the same blood vessels are cleaning out the brain. So I think we're probably on the verge of being able to help prevent most dementia, the aging brain. All of that is really just almost like a heart attack of the brain. The brain has about 30,000 miles of blood vessels in it. It's hard to believe, but you can stretch the blood vessels in your brain around the earth one time. And all those blood vessels, they feed 100 billion brain cells. So you've got 100 billion little cities living along that 30,000 mile highway of blood vessel. And most people can realize, ah, you know, if I clean those out and make them like a crystal clear mountain stream delivering oxygen to all these things rather than an oil slick that happens to most of us as we partake in the wonderful food available in America. If you clean that out, then the brain cells kind of come back to life. So we've, you know, in our little clinic, we've never had anybody progress onto dementia. And now we get people that have already got dementia, it's hard to get them out of it. But I think if you clean out the heart, you clean out the brain, and then it's a healthy hundred. And by the time you're a hundred, you know, you're probably your body's wearing out anyway. So, you know, really enjoying life. My father, who grew up in western Kansas, uh, lived to 99. And guess who wants to be 100? A 99-year-old, you know, and he enjoyed life even at 99, and then finally his body just wore out. But, you know, he grew up in the World War II generation, Battle of the Bulge. His favorite food was like spam and Vienna sausages. Yet he still was able to live to 100 with uh uh modifications and medications and other things and no side effects. And so I think that's possible literally almost for everybody. But the key is to get started earlier. Uh the the disease starts about age 25 and it just starts growing. Uh, and uh that's uh kind of our goal. We think we can literally accomplish that uh with the partnership of people. And I think people like you and I will overcome governments, insurance companies. Like the the impetus for this is not gonna be coming from doctors or hospitals. It's gonna be coming from patients who say, dang, what can you do to make sure that I don't die young? And how can I afford it? And how do I feel getting it? And are there any side effects? I mean, now those are the things I think over the next 20 or 30 years will be really growing to the forefront of medicine. So I think in 30 to 50 years, you and I'll look back and know there used to be this disease called premature heart attacks, and nobody has them anymore. Uh kind of like we look at the plague or tuberculosis or polio. You know, we don't have much of those anymore because we we used to, two out of seven people in the history of the world have died of tuberculosis, yet we don't have them much in America anymore with all of the advances not only in lifestyle, but medicine and otherwise. So I think the, yeah, the dream is possible. Um, but it's a tricky disease because when you die of heart disease, you look pretty good in your coffin. So nobody, nobody really complains of it until they do drop dead. You know, but if we can connect the brain to it, that's what gets people excited. That when your heart wears out, you don't notice it until you die. When your brain wears out, you can kind of sense it in grandma, grandpa, or even younger people. Uh just not enjoying life not being as clear. And I think we can prevent that too.

SPEAKER_01 10:35

Well, after 30 plus years spent in cardiology, what is the most frustrating thing that uh that uh frustrates you how we approach heart disease?

SPEAKER_00 10:47

Very good question, Curtis. Very good question. Uh it puzzled me back in medical school in the in the late 70s and 80s, and then as a young doctor uh trying to fight this disease, it's one of the few diseases we don't measure. That is, you know, women get mammograms because they're looking for breast cancer. Uh men get rectal exams because they're looking for prostate cancer. Uh we get colonoscopies to look for colon cancer, and those are important diseases, but 10 times less deadly than heart disease. But heart disease, what do we measure? Cholesterol? Cholesterol's not the disease. Blood pressure, blood pressure's not the disease. Blood sugar, that's not the disease. Those are risk factors, but that would be like looking at my saliva to see if I got lung cancer. You know, there might be some people who would find lung cancer in my saliva, but ultimately you need to image the lungs. You got to take x-rays to find that. And so it's puzzling to me that we've never measured heart disease effectively in everybody. That is, instead of you knowing your cholesterol level, I'd like you to know your plaque score. Like how much plaque do you have? And very simply, with an ultrasound of the arteries of the neck that are about as big as your finger, easy to see, you bounce sound waves off it, you can see plaque. And if you got plaque in here, it's like I-70. You know, if you look at I-70, 10 miles one way is like 10 miles the other way. You know, it looks pretty much the same. So whatever's in your neck that's easily affordably looked at with a little ultrasound is in your brain and your heart, which are more expensive to look at. So I'm a big believer of we've got to find for you and I, do you have plaque or not? And if you have plaque, then your cholesterol comes into line, blood pressure, blood sugar, and ultimately that uh that's my biggest frustration. Now, part of that is economics. The hospitals, cardiologists, they get paid, everybody gets paid more just to wait for you to come to the hospital and have all your troubles. Now that doesn't make them evil, but that's what the system is paid for. Now, in the gastroenterology for the uh uh, you know, you might not be old enough, but a lot of us have to get colonoscopies. Well, it's amazing that they would talk us into being almost put to death. They they shove a six-foot-long hose up of us and look around for colon cancer, and then they bring us back to life, and we act like that's kind of normal. And, you know, 40,000, 50,000 people a year die of colon cancer in America, but million die of heart disease. Yet we measure colon cancer, rightfully so, and that should continue. But why don't we measure heart disease? So I'm a real pioneer in finding out how we can measure things. And this simple artery-neck, this neck artery plaque test with an ultrasound, that can be measured quite easily. So you could line up everybody in Denver, and within six months, you'd have everybody measured, whether they got plaque or not. And if you got plaque, then you need to treat your cholesterol, your blood sugar, your blood pressure more aggressively. So I think the biggest problem is that we haven't measured the disease. And now here at Boone Hart, everything from the simplest measure all the way right now, we've got the most cutting-edge way to look at it, which is a coronary CTA, CT angiography. So with a CAT scan in like 20 minutes for radiation about the same as a mammogram, we can look at that. Now, I think, Curtis, in 20 years, that'll be like a colonoscopy. Like you or anybody else, when they turn 40, will have a scan of their heart that'll cost $100 and it'll line up the rest of your life's health care. And then if you treat it, you'll eradicate heart attacks, stroke, and every other disease that comes from the clogging of arteries, which is our biggest menace. Most of history, we died of something else before this got to us, you know, whether it's the plague, the flu, bear claws, tomahawks, you know, tigers, whatever killed us long ago isn't killing us anymore. So we sort of live long enough where this is the killer disease. Um, and even during COVID, the biggest killer was that it would attack the blood vessels and the brain and the heart and the kidney would be the thing that would die uh along with the lungs. And it wasn't as much the COVID as it was our vulnerability of our blood vessels that, you know, made us more. Even the influenza is just as dangerous as COVID to the heart. Um, but it's the people that treat the heart and blood vessels well that even survive those viruses at my age.

SPEAKER_01 15:18

Well, for somebody listening who feels fine, talk about the silent warning signs of cardiometabolic risk.

SPEAKER_00 16:47

Yes, now the silent warning signs, that's a good point as well. I love it if everybody gasured and ask your doctor to somehow measure it. Even on a mammogram that women get looking for breast cancer, if you look at calcification in the mammary artery, the artery that feeds the uh uh that feeds the breast, if there's calcification there, it's as good as a heart scan. So there's a lot of what they call opportunistic imaging. But looking backwards from that, Curtis, if my any one of my relatives ever had heart attack, stroke, stent, bypass surgery, TIA, any one of those had, you could figure out the age of that, and then 10 years earlier than that, the youngest person ever had it. So if Grandpa Joe, in my case, had a heart attack at 50, I better start worrying about it at 40. Uh and then the same thing, your own risk factors. If you've ever had any of those, you need to be more aggressive. So then probably by age 40, everybody needs to start saying, what are my risks? So then that's where cholesterol, blood sugar, blood pressure, those all clotting, those all become very important. So the assumption, if you don't image plaque, then assume that if my cholesterol is not perfect, I've probably got plaque. Assume that if I'm a little fat around the middle and I've had some diabetic relatives, like my mother had diabetes. So I've got insulin resistance and diabetes, you know, by the time I'm 40, even though you don't feel it. And then blood pressure, blood pressure goes up. The more stressful life you have, the higher your blood pressure. And then genetically, if you've got relatives that had high blood pressure, you're gonna have it. And now the drugs are so good to treat those. You know, ask your doctor, uh, let's make my cholesterol perfect. Let's make my blood pressure perfect, let's make my blood sugar perfect. We've got like 10 incredible diabetic medicines that do nothing but good. You see great commercials on the TV about Jardiance and Farzega and Ozempic and Manjaro. Those are really life-saving drugs. And the more we can get on them, the better. Now they're a little for sicker people, but getting after it earlier is important. So I always think that in your 20s, just take good care of you. Don't smoke anything, don't drink too much, eat as much natural things as you can. In your 30s, you need to start thinking, what's really going on with my genetics? By your 40s, you need to be aggressively pursuing health, not so much because you're worried right then, but you want to be a healthy 70 or 80-year-old. You can't wait to 65 to be a healthy 70-year-old. And then by your 50s, you ought to be wondering, why am I not on a medicine? You need to start asking yourself, why am I not? Am I something special? Because I started all these medicines when I was like 51, and I should have started them 10 years earlier than that. But when I was 51, 25 years ago, there weren't as nice medicines. Now the medicines are nice, very rare side effects. Uh and then lifestyle, uh, obviously very important as well. Uh, exercise, nutrition. But I used to be able to keep my weight down by one and out the door and run 10 miles, but now I eat like I used to eat, but I can't run as fast and burn it off. So it's always a challenge as we get older uh to uh uh you know to eat healthy and all that. But that'd be kind of my approach. And once you're 50, then you need to probably be looking at should I be on a medicine? And certainly through that process, how could somebody actually image my heart? Now there is a heart scan that looks at calcium in the coronaries, and most of the time in almost every city, every hospital, you don't even need a doctor's prescription. You get something called a coronary calcium score. And often, especially in the month of February, which is heart month, you can get it for cash for less than a hundred bucks in most hospitals. And if you have any calcium, that's the disease. Now, the big debate in high-level medicine is sometimes you can have a zero scale and still have the disease, but if you have any calcium, then you got the disease and treat it. So hopefully that gives you a rough idea of how I would look at life from the 20s on. And even my kids, you know, my wife's father died at 57. So my kids are already on medicine in their late 30s. Uh, and not because they're sick, they just don't want to get sick. And they're incredible medicines, they don't even notice they're on them. But once you get old enough, you got kids, you think, I really do want to live longer, and you just need some doctor to tell you, you know, let's get on it and certainly exercise, eat right, do all that. But uh let's, to me, lifestyle is like a trapeze act, but you're gonna fall as you're learning to run a trapeze. So the medicines and even supplements like baby aspirin, you know, omega-3 fish oils, vitamin D, multi- all those are like safety nets. So when you fall off the wagon and have a bad meal, uh, you know, you're not ending up crashing onto the ground. And so I look at lifestyle as kind of building your safety net, but it's so hard, man. Food in America, the closer you get to the real food, the better. So processed stuff, the more you can avoid process stuff. That'll help you out. But the most natural things are kind of expensive and don't last long. You know, the fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean meats, uh, you know, that's kind of the diet for uh for health almost everywhere.

SPEAKER_01 22:12

Yeah, well, well, you've written extend extensively about stress medicine. So talk about how significant stress is. Stress versus uh, you know, traditional risk factors like uh cholesterol and blood pressure.

SPEAKER_00 22:27

Yes. Interestingly, when I started this work, everybody would say, in the world, the medical societies would say mental stress is not a risk factor at all. But now it's one of the leading risks. Now I think stress is kind of the opposite of exercise. Exercise kind of makes everything better, stress makes everything worse. So if you think about the God-given stress response, part of our adrenaline response is that the heart rate quickens, the blood pressure goes up, the shearing stress on the arteries go up, the clotting of blood goes up because we're sort of ready to do battle, and so we want blood that clots quickly. So mental stress affects everything in a negative way. And then the worse your job, the worse your marriage, the worse your environment, um, I think uh uh the worse stress will be. So I think stress is a major. Your contributor, but we all got to make a living. We all got to work hard. You know, there's all kinds of correlations. You know, the number of sirens in your neighborhood, you know, the number of people per square mile, all that adds to stress. So be aware of it. And then it almost becomes a psychological, spiritual thing to be able to handle it in the middle of tough environments that you just can't get out of. You know, everybody'd love to be floating in a sailboat in the Caribbean all the time, but you just bear most people can't make it through life doing that. So it is a big risk, and you need to address it. And then what I tend to address is there's a whole nother world of the psychiatry and psychology of stress, which is critically important. But I tend to look at more the cardiovascular consequences of the stress. So how can I cushion myself against the stress with clotting medicine, cholesterol medicine, because all risk factors are accelerated. Cholesterol gets worse, blood pressure gets worse, blood sugar gets worse. So then oftentimes, if I can't get out of my stressful environment, I can medicate or supplement-wise control the things that my body is changing in a negative way because of the stress. And so the counseling and the psychiatry and psychology of getting out of stress, very important to talk yourself through the process. But then the physiology to cushion yourself. And I'm like that as well. I've got I've had a great life, but it's pedal of the metal all the time. And even good stress, even if even if things are going well, that can be damaging. And then oftentimes the heart stress is one you don't feel. Other things like migraine headaches and ulcers and you know, the palpitations and other things you kind of feel, but some of the toughest people don't give in to the stress, but they can die from it. You know, so rather than having a panic attack or depression, some people that fight through it often need even more cardiovascular prevention and protection because they don't they don't get the feedback of the stress. They just keep plowing forward, and that's that's an important thing. And then working with these pro athletes, I mean, you've watched games. I mean, can you imagine if you're a you know a baseball manager and your pitcher's blowing a save in the ninth, or you're a you know, you're a basketball coach and it's coming down to the end of the game. I mean, those guys uh just watching them on the side look like they're about ready to explode. And we fortunately get to work here with a few of those guys, and ultimately they almost are.

SPEAKER_01 25:58

Well, that's that was my next question. You know, working with, you know, people like the Denver Broncos, San Francisco 49ers. Uh, what's the what uh have you learned about cardiovascular wrists and elite at athletes that surprise people?

SPEAKER_00 26:12

Well, it's an interesting group. The the coaches, the older people, are just like me. They're just susceptible to the heart attack and stroke, and they need to be evaluated and treated with our best approaches uh that we use here at Boone Heart. The players, on the other hand, are almost invulnerable. You know, they're just such strong, amazing athletes in all these sports. And we've gone, we've worked with baseball, basketball, and football. Now, what we're looking for in the players is often the kind of thing you read about in the players, some like Hank Gathers or somebody dying of now, usually the player that dies is does have a genetic weakness, a hole in the heart, or a susceptibility, a thickness of the heart. So here in Denver, and I know it's across the country, a lot of organizations doing this, we started something called the Every Heart Foundation. So any high school athlete we test for free, meaning we look at the muscle of the heart. The heart's really four tissues. It's a muscle, the valves, the electricity, and then the blood vessels. So those are the killers. I call them the four horsemen of the heart. Now, most of the time they're good and they wear out as we get older, but in some people, it's the biggest cause of death in playgrounds in America, meaning that a kid will just die. And why is that? Well, most of the time, about 85% of the time, we could have discovered it. So here in Denver, uh, any kid that wants to get tested, you know, if you go to the hospital, it might cost 5,000 bucks and everybody's mad because most of the time you don't find anything, insurance doesn't want to cover it. So we just do it for free. And so we've tested a lot of athletes over a couple thousand, and you're you're looking for the thick heart or the electrical abnormality that they just inherited. So that's what we look at in kids. And then we try to use it also as a platform for those kids who pass our testing, most of them do, to then be aware of the carrying this data forward that this is a good evaluation for them to look at lifestyle long down the road. And then the NBA or NFL or Major League Baseball or hockey players that we work with, you know, they've just been led a charmed life, the ones that are the most successful. And I just hate to hear about their parents dying or them dying young. So a lot of times the player has to be aware that when they quit playing, they really need to adopt aggressive strategies. Now, what happens is usually the doctors and everybody else thinks they're invincible still. Big people, powerful people are dominant until they're 40 or 50, but you don't see too many six foot eight guys walking around the beaches of Florida in retirement. You know, they've died. So the big man, the big woman, you know, in many sports, you don't have to be big, but you're blowing up your heart with how hard you're working. Uh, even most four-minute milers in the history of America have atrial fibrillation by the time they get older because their heart has stretched so big to be powerful to run a four-minute mile, even though they're thin and skinny. They have electrical dysfunctions in the heart. So, as an athlete, as a doctor, it's dangerous to look at them as still really healthy. And you got to shoot straight with them. You know, a lot of times I don't want to be your friend, I don't want to get three tickets to a game. I want to tell you, you're not invincible. You need to do this, you need to have even more protection than the average guy. So I think there's three levels. There's the coaches, the old guys, they're sick like anybody else and needs early detection. Same thing we talked about earlier. We got to find the disease. We're going to spring training next week and talking to working with the uh, you know, the Colorado Rockies baseball team and coaches, and the Chicago Cubs want to talk to us about what we're doing there because what we're doing is getting more um more of the interest of people. So the the players were interested in them. A lot of them are from Dominican and Venezuela and Puerto Rico and may have grown up without good health care. So some of them may have valve diseases and others. So we chest all the players, and we're looking for those genetic defects as well. Coaches, but then the retired players. You know, I'm really old, but the best work might be still ahead of me. You know, my best work might be when I'm 80 or 90. But an athlete, the best work, the most famous thing they'll ever do, they might have been 21 or 22 or 25. And it's hard to look at life when everything else is going to be less than that Super Bowl was, or less than that Grand Slam was. And that doesn't mean you can't shift, but it's a huge psychological shift for those guys, even the most successful of those people, to really look at life and how can I get the best out of life, but it's a psychological shift. So that's sort of three different levels. The young athlete making sure they don't have something wrong with them. The retired athlete who's got to deal with a whole new psychology, and then the old athlete who's just like any other old person, they just have to be happening to be bigger and maybe more famous. So that's kind of how we break up the athletes and each team, each group we work with, we sort of pioneered the NFL alumni program. And Curtis, we've now got, we've got a company called Heartflow, and they're offering this CT angiogram that's a couple thousand dollar test. Anyone who ever played NFL, NBA, NHL gets a free scan at the Boone Hart Institute. Now we're opening other centers around the country. So if you in your home know anyone that ever played in those leagues, and they didn't have to be a star, if they just got to spring training or, you know, the NFL camp, they get a free test. And that's been, I mean, uh, Muggsy Bogues is just now uh kind of advertising that this is available to all former NBA guys. Um, because most of them, they might have plenty of money, but no doctors telling them to get checked. And then uh Erlacher was running around the Super Bowl advertising the NFL version of that. And you know, again, this company's paying for it for free. Uh, it's a good way, and then I think that's a good example for all of us men to get tested, you know, and it's it's the same thing I think could be said for the prostate and other things, to get tested and embrace this. So we've got these projects with these major leagues, not so much that it's only for them, but it's for everyone. But they're uh they're a good voice or a good example of what we ought to do.

SPEAKER_01 32:34

Well, if you could change the way that primary care physicians screen for heart disease today, uh what you know, if you can make a change, what would that be?

SPEAKER_00 32:45

Yes, I I think what's happened is uh the primary care physician has I think lost uh lost their way a little bit. We've let you know, when I was young, I don't even remember if we had insurance, but insurance has kind of changed the game. So most primary care doctors are are just uh inundated with too many patients, too much going on. A lot of my lectures, like last night I was in Los Angeles, you know, lecture lecturing to doctors, to empower them. Why'd you go to med school? You went to med school to be the best, not to do what somebody else told you to do. So I think the physician imaging plaque, that's what they've got to do. And that can be done very cheaply, and then be aggressive with the drugs. There's a new drug called Rapatha, it's an injectable drug that's been on the market for 10 years. It cleans out the arteries like amazing. And I was in New Orleans at the American Heart Meeting, and they've now proven that about 80% of New Orleans needs to be on this drug. And it's gonna it'd be the cornerstone drug to eliminate heart attack and stroke. And you could almost give it to every 40-year-old in New Orleans and you'd save tons of disease. Well, it's kind of expensive, and hardly any doctor even uses it. Um they're just now thinking about it because of this research. So it tells me how things are so far from the cutting edge of medicine. And that's the thing I like about our clinic is that it's my clinic, it's our clinic. We got now nine doctors who work here, and we can do anything we want because there's nobody telling us what we can do. Now, we don't even take insurance at our clinic, but things cost a lot less. So there's got to be a realigning of what gets paid for. You know, a lot of people pay a lot of money for insurance, but they don't get anything, they're not happy. So something's got to be realigned in that process where the money actually lines up with your health. But right now I had a I had a patient that wanted to pay for an MRI for his brother, and he was an oil man in New Mexico. And so I went, and he wanted to just pay cash. First place I went, they wanted $10,000 for it. The next place I went, they wanted $5,000. The next place $2,000. The next place $1,000. And then one of my best friends, the radiologist, they did it for $585. And we're happy to do it. So it ought to cost $585. Now that's not cheap, but it's not $10,000. So medicine, the problem is when you go to the store, things cost what they cost. But when you go through the hot the whole system, it's just fouled up. Um, now it's still pretty darn good. And if you get really sick, it's really good. But prevention, really bad. It's got to come from the patient wanting it. And then somehow figure out how it gets paid for. And how I often encourage even my patient, my parents who are in western Kansas. I said, you need to look for ways to spend even more on your health care. You know, you don't want insurance to cover everything. You want you to cover your life. But if you did it that way, everything would be pretty cheap and it'd be pretty inexpensive to accomplish this. So I think we've we've lost the power. The primary care physician needs to be empowered to lead this charge. The last thing that I need to stop heart disease is a cardiologist or a hospital. That's the last thing I need is a hospital or a cardiologist. I need a patient and a really basic primary care physician. Even one doctor could run hundreds of nurses and treat all of Kansas City if anybody wanted to do it and do it very cheaply. Now, the other thing is who do you trust? Now, I'm just a guy and I'm passionate about this, but do you trust me? Everybody trusts me, but how could that extend to the whole world of doctors? And then that's why the end result, you never hear anyone in healthcare hardly talking much about wiping out a disease. Everybody talks about the cost of the disease. I'm one of the few people that I've ever heard that talks about my only goal is to wipe out a disease. And then we'll figure out what how to pay for it and how I can earn a living doing that, or how the patient can afford it. But the most important thing is how do we stop the disease? And we all stopped asking that question. We started asking from the public to the politician to the doctors to the hospitals, how do we pay for the disease? Different problem. Different problem. And if I'm running any one of the healthcare companies that are involved, from the drugs to the to the insurance, my goal is to please my investors, not your health. And that's a problem. They should turn all of healthcare over to like the boys and girls clubs or the salvation army, where your health to me shouldn't be a profit center. People working hard at it ought to get paid well. I'd rather eliminate insurance and double the double the salary of nurses and respiratory therapists. And when I get old and in some nursing home, I want somebody who loves their work, taking good care of me and well paid for. But that's not often happening. And that so the money needs to line up with you getting well cared for, and it doesn't. And I don't know how to do that, but I know it needs to happen. And I know in our little clinic we've done that, and now we think we can wipe out heart disease, and we think everybody could get it for way less than we're paying to try to treat heart disease.

SPEAKER_01 38:27

Well, how do you see AI, advanced imaging, and personalized medicine changing preventative cardiology in the next decade?

SPEAKER_00 38:36

Yeah, you are really good because all the everything you're asking is the right question. Now, these CAT scans that we do, the ones that the uh HeartFlow is paying for NFL, NBA, uh, NHL alumni, those scans are powered by AI now. So we've got our own scanner. It's got the it's got the radiation of a mammogram, so hardly any radiation, and the artificial intelligence scores it. So I was at the Society of Cardiovascular Imaging and CT scan in Montreal six months ago. And everybody's talking about this new technology. And it's too expensive, too hard. The doctors have to work too hard to fit to figure it out. But the AI reads it for them. And so by the end of three days of the conference, everybody at the conference was saying, wait a minute, we could do this on every, we could do this on 100 million people at a very low cost per person and find heart disease in everybody. So I could see at that end of that three days that everybody there was thinking, you know, this could be for all mankind because of AI. Now we're working right now with at least five AI companies because we're front of one of the few clinics that has this ability. And all of them are getting better and better and better. So I, as a doctor, can sit here at my desk and look at your scan, which you did in 20 minutes, and you're at my desk. The AI scores it in 20 more minutes, better than a hundred doctors could score it. And I can tell you right away if you need to stand where it needs to be put. Better yet, I can find the early plaque and treat it so you never even go to the hospital. So that's happening. And I think that scan will be ready for everyone in 10 years. Now I could see these world leaders starting to stroke their chins thinking, you know, it's possible for everybody with AI. Now then the other part of it is I would say that at the American Heart meetings, which is more about medication, we've now got the medicines to wipe it out. So if you put the imaging together with the medicine, both empowered by AI type of assessments, you put those together and you'll eliminate half of the kidney disease, half of the strokes, half of the heart attacks, half of the disability in Medicare or in America in a couple years, in a few years. So I think the time is coming. And harnessing AI, so far, I've got nothing but good to say about it in my world because it's it's reading these images like nothing you've ever seen. Now, it's interesting when I read a good paragraph, I wonder who wrote it. I always like it when I write it, you know, because ChatGPT can write it well. So we still got to cover that and watch that. So I've still never done AI for any of my stuff because I just I always like to know what really came out of your brain. Uh, but not to say that isn't great. And that's gonna help as well, because patients can be as smart as doctors and ask the right questions. Um, and that'll help, I think, as well. Like I don't have to depend on me remembering everything about your health. You can come with your own AI and tell me, now, Doc, why am I why haven't I taken this medicine? Or what am I doing for my colonoscopy? Well, it'll tell us that. So I think I think it's gonna be fantastic and it's gonna continue to get better and better. And then the final thing, though, is a human to be trustworthy to use it correctly to help everybody.

SPEAKER_01 41:53

Well, tell us about any upcoming projects that you're working on that listeners need to be aware of.

SPEAKER_00 41:59

Yeah, good point. I think the the one thing I'm kind of interested in is we're on we're we're kind of at both ends of it. We're at the uh, you know, the the Super Bowl level of an analyzing patients, but then how do you get it to, you know, the Pop Warner kids? You know, how do you get them using a football analogy? How do you get it to everybody? So I think the next decade will be how to get it to everybody and how to get the trust of everybody. You know, the one of the new drugs will last a year. If you inject it, it'll wipe out your plaque over a year. How could you get every inner city church to be the place where once a year you get your little shot, just like you get a flu shot? And this will wipe out heart disease. That drug is already on the market, it's going to be cheap in a few years. But if I was, let's just say in an inner city, most people there are getting bad health care. And if I was um, you know, a person of color, I wouldn't trust doctors as far as I could throw them. Because most of history we've delivered poor care, bad drugs, cheap drugs. The poorest people need the best drugs. They need drugs that have no side effects because ultimately society's gonna pay for the poorest people, from homelessness to dialysis to stroke care to dementia. And if we could get trust, now who do you trust? I don't, you know, I don't know a politician I trust. Now, if one of my sons run for president, I would trust him, but he's still my son. So I don't know who to trust, but I know I can be trusted, and I know if we had the church or a barbershop be the place where, you know, there's a uh Ozempic, you can get that once a week. You know, you get that, and that's a great drug. You could get that to be cheap as dirt, and every every week you get a haircut, you get a shot of Ozempic. And again, it would now uh Manjaro, I mean there are many new drugs, not just a brand name like that, but the uh but the injectable drug. We were talking one of our doctors from Bangladesh, and you talk about trouble. You go from Bangladesh all the way across the Indian subcontinent to Pakistan, and heart disease is just people are dying at weddings in their 20s. It's horrible there. You could have the government of India, Bangladesh, Pakistan buy a company like Novartis, give every 40-year-old this drug, and you'd wipe out half the disease in India. And they are going to die of this disease, you just don't know which one. So I think there's a world of possibility. We could screen all of Nigeria. We got some people talking to us about Boonhart Rwanda, because every continent is on the verge of all this. And so I think they're just now becoming like America was in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. And the answer isn't more hospitals, more cardiologists, more ambulances. It's getting it early. So I think the uh uh that would be what I'd be looking would be how do you get the trust of people to get it to everybody and not just the people that can come to Boonhardt and Denver.

SPEAKER_01 44:58

With the electric contact info so people can keep up with everything that you're up to.

SPEAKER_00 45:02

Yeah. Now, interestingly, my uh my daughter, who's uh you know, great young lady, she filmed me one time and said, I'm gonna put this on social media. We got 1.5 million looks the very first time she put it on. So go into any of your social media, boonheart.com, and there'll be a bunch of little videos, vignettes like you and I've been talking about here, little one-sentence things. And the first one we put on, you know, we've gotten five million people just looking at this because they never hear doctors talking like this, which I think is helpful. It's not just for our clinic. And then uh boonheart.com gives you a bit about our, you know, our clinic here. Um, and then the new book, you know, uh A World Without Heart Attack should be another good venue. And all that is not to make me famous, but it's to make this idea famous and to move it on. And that's where your brilliant questions and your uh leadership in these cutting-edge worlds is going to be helpful too, uh, to get it out to the people you influence.

SPEAKER_01 46:00

Well, last question. What is the most common misconception that you see people having about when it comes to heart attack and stroke?

SPEAKER_00 46:09

Uh waiting for symptoms. I even had a cardiologist in Chicago yesterday was telling a patient, well, wait until you have chest pain, then we'll get started again. And we'll give you, we'll give you an angiogram every year and a couple more stents every year. Wait, do not wait for symptoms. Uh now, be aware of those symptoms. You have chest pain, palpitations, be aware of it, but do not wait. By the time you have symptoms, meaning I feel bad, the disease is probably in its late stages. So look to catch things while you feel fine. The best time to start a heart disease with prevention, and the best time to stop heart attack, stroke, kidney disease, brain disease, dementia is when you feel fine. Like when you don't feel any negatives. So that that would be my advice to people. And then you've often got to oh uh push your doctors, push the system to join you in that quest. I'm trying to get doctors interested once again in being the best they can be and in joining their patients' desire to get the best. You know, you didn't go to med school to be their financial advisor. You went them to med school and tell them what's the best they can do and do that. And then you can work backwards in the work backwards from that to what you can afford.

SPEAKER_01 47:24

All right, ladies and gentlemen, Booneheart.com. Go check it out, pick up that book. You guys know that heart disease is a real big problem here in America and probably all around the world. So follow rate review, share this episode to as many people as possible, and uh check out everything that the Boon Heart Institute is up to. And also check out everything that Living the Dream with Curveball is up to by visiting www.curveball337.com, following us, leaving us a review, signing up for the newsletter, and sharing the website and the show to everybody you know. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. And Dr. Boone, thank you for all that you're doing trying to wipe out heart disease, and thank you for joining me.

SPEAKER_00 48:08

Thank you very much. Great to be with you.

SPEAKER_01 48:10

For more information on the Living the Dream with Curveball Podcast, visit www.curveball337.com. Until next time, keep living the dream.