The Importance of Personalized Medicine With Steve Adams

Tiger Performance Podcast

The Importance of Personalized Medicine With Steve Adams, Founder and CEO of Tiger Performance Institute

00:00 / 00:23:38

Steve Adams is the Founder and CEO of Tiger Performance Institute as well as the author of Unleash the Peak Performer Within You and The Passionate Entrepreneur. As a veteran entrepreneur and former corporate banker, Steve is passionate about building and scaling organizations through disciplined execution, direct-response marketing, and culture creation. His mission is to help other entrepreneurs grow in their performance.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Steve Adams explains what personalized medicine is
What a personalized medicine plan includes
Steve’s testimony using a personalized medicine program
The health habits Tiger Performance Institute offers
Steve explains what makes Tiger Performance Institute unique from other health institutes
Who’s a good candidate for the personalized medicine program?
The requirements for this program

In this episode…

Is your physician saying you are okay, but feel you are not as healthy as you could be? Is there a greater issue? If so, how can it be resolved?

It’s imperative to consider a personalized medicine program that is customized and personalized just for you. Steve Adams shares his testimony of having a health-care professional run tests and ask him questions to gather unique information about his health. The results were able to identify health issues Steve was experiencing. Based on the findings of the test, a specific treatment plan was created. Because of his personalized medicine plan, Steve is now functioning at his best. Don’t wait until you are sick, be proactive about your health.

In this episode of the Tiger Performance Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz of Rise25 sits down with Steve Adams, the Founder and CEO of Tiger Performance Institute, to discuss the importance of personalized medicine. Steve explains what personalized medicine is, his testimony using a personalized medicine program, the health habits Tiger Performance Institute offers, and the ideal candidate for the program. Enjoy the show!

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Tiger Performance Institute.

At Tiger Performance Institute, we help high achievers eliminate burnout, stress, and sleepless nights using our Tiger Flow Method.

The Tiger Flow Method is a precise, DNA-based approach to performance and health optimization that helps high achievers all over the world reach a state of peak performance and focus — what we like to call “flow.”

At Tiger Performance Institute, we know that maintaining a state of flow drastically increases your productivity, creativity, skill acquisition, and so much more every single day.

That’s why we created The Tiger Flow Method—an integrated training program that helps you implement high-flow habits at work and at home.

So, what are you waiting for?

Visit tigerpi.com today to learn more, or visit https://tigerpi.com/freesession/ to schedule a free session with CEO Steve Adams.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:06

Welcome to the Tiger Performance Podcast where we feature high-achieving entrepreneurs and coaches and share their performance journeys. Now, let’s get started with the show.

Steve Adams 0:20

Steve Adams here founder and CEO of the Tiger Medical Institute, I’m the host of the Tiger Performance Podcast where I interview thought leaders about their unique stories, and the specialized knowledge they can offer the world. But before we acknowledge our sponsor, for today’s episode, I want to introduce you to Dr. Jeremy Weisz of Rise25, here who has done 1000s of interviews with successful entrepreneurs, investors and CEOs. And we have flipped the script and he will be interviewing me today for the Tiger Performance Podcast.

Jeremy Weisz 0:54

Steve, I’m excited because the topic today is personalized medicine. What that means what people can do, because, the bottom line is that we don’t have our health what do we have? Right, so we’re gonna go deep in this topic before we do, I always am curious to ask you what are some of the other episodes people should check out of the podcast?

Steve Adams 1:13

Sure. Well, Dr. McNamee, our chief medical officer at Tiger Medical recently did a podcast on Alzheimer’s no longer being the death sentence it used to be. I also interviewed an innovative Dentist Dr. Paul Goodman of Dental Nachos. Basically, he’s connecting dentists all over the country in a unique way to educate them. And then finally, Dr. Jeffrey Rediger, who is on staff at Harvard Medical School, and he’s the chief clinician at McLean Psychiatric Hospital in Boston, wrote a book called Cured and four drivers of spontaneous healing.

Jeremy Weisz 1:52

Steve, did he ever talk about why it’s called Dental Nachos?

Steve Adams 1:57

So that people would remember the name. That’s it.

Jeremy Weisz 2:01

Makes me kind of hungry. But yeah, so I will remember that name. So we’ll get into personalized medicine. But I do want to mention the episodes brought to you by Tiger Medical Institute. And I know the focus is on mid-career dental professional C suite executives, entrepreneurs, really anyone Steve who feels depleted and it feels they’re not showing up as a best version of themselves, right and hard-charging entrepreneurs founder CEOs fall into that category and medical professionals who are burning at both ends sometimes. So Tiger system is a personalized root cause approach to health optimization. And the Tiger system is a one-year help transformation journey that empowers you so you can show up as the best and healthiest version of yourself. You can go to Tigermi.com, to learn more, and check it out. So personalized medicine when you say that, and we talked about that Steve, what does that mean to you?

Steve Adams 3:01

Well, let me start with the problem that is kind of fostering this movement. And that is our standard local health care model. Now I want people to hear me now when I say this, I am not saying a single thing bad about a provider, a physician, these people work their tail off, they love people, they’re trying to help people. So I’m talking about the system but the system is built for sick care. Me and you talked about this before we went on, you’re a doctor of chiropractic, you had to say these things to people as well. And the system is set up to be really good of taking care of people once they get sick. All right. But the people that we are working with are people who arrive or are about to arrive at middle age or they’re solidly in it or they’re even moving into the fourth quarter of life. And they don’t want to take aging sitting down they want to attack it and be proactive. The problem in our local healthcare system nationally now is there’s no reimbursement for proactivity in health care, that doctors can’t get paid for it. And the testing is limited to what they will be reimbursed for. And that testing is generic. It’s based on averages. Okay, not on optimization. And so, the problem I experienced personally what led me to this Jeremy and I’m going to answer your question, I promise is that, I had excessive stress for too many years. It was turning into a low grade level of anxiety. I was having trouble sleeping. My energy was depleted. I was mentally exhausted. I was gaining weight around the center for no reason, libido was becoming a problem. I had an inability of focus and my performance was just, I was having to work harder and harder to get the same kind of performance and when I would go to my local physician using the tools at his disposal, it would say, you look, okay, you’re in the averages range, but I wasn’t okay.

Jeremy Weisz 5:13

You want to hear that, but you don’t want to hear it, you wanted to go, I found something little that you can solve not everything was great. Well, I don’t feel great. That doesn’t reflect how I’m feeling.

Steve Adams 5:25

That’s correct. That’s right. And that was my case. And that’s what we’re hearing every day at Tiger Medical is people with similar stories. And I also had acid reflux for almost 25 years and scope after scope, no answer, take the purple pill, that was the answer. And so I met Dr. McNamee, who is our Chief Medical Officer now at Tiger. And he said, there’s definitely things we can do. He goes, you’re not feeling that way for no reason. And so, what he did was, he started to test me without the limits of insurance, because I was willing to invest in ways that gave him much more advanced data than what my local doctor was working with. He did genetic testing to understand how I was made uniquely. Okay. And it was through all of that, that I got a customized, personalized restorative medical plan. That’s what I got. That’s what personalized medicine is, is when you run a genetic panel, and you test in an advanced way, and you find unique information, and then you target the entire treatment plan around the person’s unique set of circumstances. That’s what personalized medicine is.

Jeremy Weisz 6:50

A lot of times people probably seek this out, because, pain is a much bigger motivator than pleasure, right? And so, I feel like, you could correct me if I’m wrong, but family history motivates people, let’s say, their dad or mom had heart attacks before age 40 or 50, or whatever it is, and that scares them. And sometimes the first sign of a problem is a heart attack. Or when they go in to go, hey, when they find cancer, it’s like you’re in stage three. Well, what happened? That was growing inside someone long before someone discovered it before it caused any symptoms. So I feel like all you mentioned Alzheimer’s, before. It’s always a family history. They don’t want to wait till it comes upon them. They want to be proactive. So I’m wondering, what does a customized plan look like? Some examples maybe of testing or things that people would go through?

Steve Adams 7:54

So I’ll give you my story of how Dr. McNamee reengineered my health, okay, because it really was a reengineering. So I got to biome, got biome tests, he tested my hormones, he did a micronutrient test to look and see if I had nutrient deficiencies. I had to do a brain scan, I did a cardiovascular scan. I did a blood panel, that was ridiculous. There were like, 13 vials of blood they took there were smaller vials. So it wasn’t like I couldn’t, I could walk out of the lab.

Jeremy Weisz 8:26

You really keep taking on my blood.

Steve Adams 8:28

Yeah, right. And I’ll give me an example, this blood tests, it measured six separate inflammation pathways, markers in the heart cardio system alone, okay, you don’t get that in a standard panel with a local practitioner. And from this, this mosaic of data that he pulled together, I also had to fill out. It took me almost an hour to fill out a health history with all the medications I’ve ever taken. And all the supplements I was taking. He wanted to know everything. And then I did about a 90-minute intake where he asked me about my parents, my grandparents, my brothers, all of the family history. And I should say he actually did that first, then he actually sent in my lab request because he customized my testing to what answers I gave him the health history intake. And so when somebody works with us at Tiger, the customization starts right up front with the kind of tests that he does. I’ll give me example in the blood where he has up to 37 adjustments he can make to the blood panel. So he does that for every single client. So we did all of that. And so the things that were my big problem was I wasn’t sleeping well. I was anxious. And I was depleted energetically and I had reflux and IBS and I also had constipation problems that was all related. And here’s what he found. He found that I had a genetic deficiency and production of serotonin and dopamine, which then he said that links directly to why you’re anxious, why you have a lot of fear-based thinking. He said, you also have a genetic marker for hanging on to stress longer than everyone else, to the average person. And so he said, the first thing I want you to do is I’m going to give you this over-the-counter natural substance called 5HTP. That’s going to help produce serotonin. I’m going to have you double your gratitude and meditation and diaphragmic breathing practice time. He said, I found in your genetics that you don’t break down starch. And so eating starch all your life has created something called leaky gut. So that has spiked your inflammation markers, which is going to create problems for your cardiovascular genetics, which are also bad because your dad’s had all these heart attacks. He said, you have the same genetics even though you’re built differently and never had a heart attack, because you’re at just as much at risk as he is. So we got to get this inflammation now. So he prescribed a very targeted specialized probiotic called saccharides boulardii, which was helping to improve the amount of something called Secretory IgA which was missing. It was part of the army in my gut that protects my immune system and then he also I had to eliminate starch. So basically, anything white bread potatoes, right, not easy to do. But I had so much discomfort, GI discomfort, it was worth it within eight weeks, all of my GI issues that I had suffered with for 25 years were resolved, gone. I was off medicine. I was having regular bowel movements. I had no IBS, no cramping, and I had no reflux, no nuisance cough anymore. Unbelievable. 25 years and eight weeks that was gone.

Jeremy Weisz 12:08

Did they find any other intolerances besides the starch?

Steve Adams 12:12

No, not really it wasn’t a gluten issue. I mean, he said, I had a little bit of a dairy intolerance. But he said, once we get this inflammation down and your leaky gut healed, you’ll be able to have ice cream once in a while, and I won’t bother you. And that was true. So I had to go super strict for about a year. And now today, what I do is if I want pizza, or pasta, or rice or bread, I have it on the weekends. And as long as I can just do the weekend, I’m okay. When I go on vacation, sometimes I’ll go for four or five days like that, and then I’ll start to feel it and then I just clean it up and I’m fine. So what’s really cool is as the inflammation went down as we treated the serotonin problem, as I doubled my stress management in a proper properly and so we have eight health habits, I can unpack that if we have time, as I did all of that what I found was my anxiety went away, my reflux went away, the fear-based thinking went away, and my energy went through the roof and my sleep was restored. And it was all from that next generation next level of customized testing, where he was actually able to get to the root cause of what was causing these problems. And Jeremy, I’ve seen this play over and over and over and over the last three years with our clients. It’s the same story, just different story. They have their own unique path to healing and restoration.

Jeremy Weisz 13:42

Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot to unpack here, because I know, even under each of these categories, there was a lot that was done from the initial intake to the gut biome, to the hormones to the nutrient to the cardiovascular to the blood panel to the brain scan. So maybe we go over in a separate episode, kind of the eight health habits, because there’s a lot of detail in that as well. And that kind of gives people at least an overview and an idea of what you went through in some of the fixes. And once you do all this, it sounds like you could have a really targeted approach to helping these things.

Steve Adams 14:21

You do like one of the eight health habits we have is targeted supplementation. So he basically gets people to go off all the stuff they were doing, because a lot of times he finds people are wasting money on supplements. And based on your exact markers. he prescribes a supplement regime that supports those weaknesses genetically or in your markers. And amazingly 10 to 12 weeks later, all of our patients say they feel so much better because they’re supporting the right thing. But this is an overarching comment, it’s the combination of the medical approach with the implementation of these eight health habits and by the way, we assign a health coach for a year, every two weeks to meet with you to help you implement these, because you will not do them on your own. You just won’t do it. But what we’re trying to do is set you up as your own best health coach after that year and beyond. Now, about half our clients stay with us and our long-term program, but others go I got it. You guys helped me, I’m on my own. So either way works for us.

Jeremy Weisz 15:28

I mean, Steve, I consider myself pretty disciplined. And, I have a personal trainer that I work out with. And there was one week where she couldn’t meet. And I’m like, I was like, listen, I’ll come any time. She’s like, listen, here’s the exercises, go do them. And the accountability has to be there. And I’m like, okay, and then I saw her the next time, she’s like, did you do it, I’m like, I did two. So even with the coach with them, giving me the program, I still wasn’t able and did not execute on what I knew I should execute on. So my belief and even you look at the top performing athletes, business people, they all have specific coaches for a sector of what they want to improve.

Steve Adams 16:17

and that’s really what makes our Tiger Medical unique. I went out and studied all of the major executive health providers. And where they leave off, they do a great job on the testing. Now, some are allopathic, sick care kind of disease screening models, others are more proactive, like ours, but where they stop is once they provide you the information, that’s where it stops. And so I wanted to build this last model, not the last model, last mile approach. Like our coaches study under every month under a PhD level behavior, psychologist, teaching them how to unlock behavior change in people. I have a 25-year executive coach, mindset expert on staff who works with our clients, if they’ve got some challenges up in the head that they need to have worked on.

Jeremy Weisz 17:09

I mean, the information is helpful, but then what do I do, what’s the plan and then executing on that plan, there’s like several steps beyond just the information.

Steve Adams 17:19

So we basically what we say to our clients is you’ve got a problem, we’ve got a plan, and we’re going to be your guide. And we’re going to take you on a journey for a year. And we’re going to hold your hand every step of the way. And what success looks like is full restoration, total solution of your health challenges. And failure, if you don’t follow through without looks like is, you’re not going to show up as the best version of you.

Jeremy Weisz 17:45

We talked about why people come, why you decided to go on this journey, while other people do, they’ll maybe experiencing a health issue, maybe they’re worried about a health issue. They’re experiencing fatigue or other digestive issues, and probably numerous other things. Who is a fit for this?

Steve Adams 18:03

What we find are the so just some basic things are 45 to 70 years old, like we have people that are 72, 73 in the program. Obviously, their motivations are different than the 45-year-old, but it’s in that group, if you’re younger than that, it’s probably not a good fit, you just haven’t gotten enough miles on body yet. So that’s one thing. Secondly, you’ve got to have a health investor mindset, meaning, a health care consumer says I’m only going to do what insurance will pay for. Health care investor says, I’m going to invest proactively because it’s going to cost me 10 times more later to fix this problem if I wait. The third thing is they’ve got to have a really strong why and we help you with that, if you don’t know exactly what it is, but you got to have a strong why because you can’t make significant behavior change unless you’ve got purpose and commitment and discipline toward it. And you got to be teachable and coachable. And you got to be intellectually curious and want to learn. Those are really the good fit things. And because this is private pay, you got to have the discretionary dollars to make the investment.

Jeremy Weisz 19:17

I don’t know, if you get this question, there’s a money piece, okay. There’s going to be an investment. But there’s also a timepiece, is there something that you tell people you should be prepared to dedicate every week as far as the time goes?

Steve Adams 19:31

We do. We say, if you’re already margin dollar and you’re going to try to squeeze this on top, you’re not a good fit, okay? This has to become a priority for you. Now, we’re not saying you got to leave your job or anything like that. But it’s not that it’s like a set amount of time every day. It’s just that like, in the first 90 days, you got to do a tremendous amount of testing and you got to come to Seattle one time and do the brain scans and the heart scans and meet our doctors. So you’ve got to fit all of that in. And then yeah, there’s the daily eight health habits, it’s probably an hour a day, you know, not all at once. But it’s about an hour a day. And so you have to be willing to make that priority investment in your life. Because the thing about it is we tell people, you’ve got to become patient, number one in your own life. Most successful people we work with got there, and Jeremy, you’re the same, because I’m the same way, you have taken care of everybody else, your kids, your wife, your employees, your vendors, your clients, everyone first. And you maybe haven’t taken care of yourself. So self-care is huge. And so that’s what we say is the motivation. But yeah, there is definitely a time investment.

Jeremy Weisz 20:54

For from what I’ve heard from people talking about this as well, you could spend $1 here, but if you get sick, you’re going to be spending $5 trying to fix the issue later on.

Steve Adams 21:09

You will. The other thing is you get into your mid-life, you’ve accumulated some wealth, now you got some time again, and what a rotten time in life to now get sick, because like my dad’s 81 now, and I could give him $5 million tomorrow, and he wouldn’t go do anything with it, because he doesn’t have the mobility or the energy anymore. And some people get there in their 50s and 60s. And so a guy, I can’t remember his name now, Bill Perkins wrote a book Die With Zero. And he talks about this concept of the health wealth trade-off. And you want to push that day out further and further and further in the future so that you can enjoy what you’ve worked so hard for with. What we tell people is we’re not guaranteeing them greater longevity. Now, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that you’re stacking the odds in your favor of greater longevity if you do all this. What we’re saying is, what we can tell you is we’re going to expand your health span, the number of years that you’re energetic and healthy.

Jeremy Weisz 22:16

Steve, first of all, it’s always a pleasure. I appreciate you sharing this. We want to point people to a wish we play global to online to check out more.

Steve Adams 22:26

Yeah, so we’re actually transitioning our website right now but go to tigermi.com, like the Michigan, mi for Michigan, so tigermi.com and go to the learning center. We have videos there, I did a video called the eight most common questions people ask about the Tiger Program. And I got another video there, the five top fears of people who sign up for the Tiger Program. And in those videos, I answer almost all the questions anybody’s ever asked me in the last three years about what this entails.

Jeremy Weisz 23:09

Thanks, so to check out more episodes of the podcast, check out tigermi.com and look forward to seeing you next time. Thanks Steve.

Steve Adams 23:18

Thank you Jeremy, thank you.

Outro 23:24

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