Dr. Teri Fisher
 All right. Hello, Dr. Frame, welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Gidon Frame
Hello there.

Dr. Teri Fisher
Great to have you here. I’m excited to speak with you today about anti aging and some of what’s involved with anti-aging. It’s a huge topic. So I don’t think we can get into everything today, but nevertheless, let’s first learn a little bit about who you are. What’s your background? Where are you from? What’s your story?

Dr. Gidon Frame
Right. Well, I came to anti aging quite honestly. After years of doing family practice, both in South Africa, far Northern Manitoba, and here in Burnaby and British Columbia. I realized preventative medicine is just not the way family practice turns out to be. It’s meant to be preventative. It’s meant to be promotive of health. But you’d never get down to actually dealing with that. So I branched off into anti-aging medicine, went off and studied at the American Board of Anti-Aging Medicine, and here we go.

And here we are. And so I want to have an opportunity to learn a little bit from you about what anti-aging is, and also have a chance to share that with the audience here. So, what does anti-aging mean to you? What is that concept? What is it?

Dr. Gidon Frame
It’s a complete misnomer. Anti aging could be anything from toothpaste to creams, and that’s in the public media. But serious anti-aging is a medical science which has been around about 25 years. What is really is, is the biology of aging, which we know a lot about and for which we can do absolutely nothing, for human beings that is. For mice, for nematodes, roundworms, flies, fantastic. We can anti-age them up the yin yang, we can make mice live double as long. We can adjust the telomeres. We can play with the genes. We can handle the mTOR pathways. We can hit the insulin resistance. We can slow down autophagy. We can give him all kinds of things. We can make him live much, much longer. Human beings -we have absolutely no idea. We’ve got all your theory. So for the biology of aging, I can offer you gornisht, almost nothing. I can give you a bunch of experimental supplements, drugs. Some of my more adventurous patients are actually taking experimental drugs. This is drugs that are legal and on-label for other things, diabetic drugs, blood pressure pills, cholesterol medications, cholesterol injections, immune modifying, for example, rapamycin, pCSK9 inhibitors like repatha. These are things that may have an effect on longevity, quality of life and lifespan, but we don’t really know.

So biology aside, let’s say we can’t do the biology. So what else comes with aging? Well is the diseases of aging. So we essentially, we fall apart. Things fall apart. Everything breaks down. Our eyes, our brains, our arteries, everything blocks up. Everything slows down. Those come with diseases and that’s what kills us. What kills us in the end? Cancer, heart attack, stroke. Those the big three. So if we can prevent those, to an extent, and we can, then we’ve dealt with the diseases of aging. And we can hopefully extend our lifespan. If a heart attack was going to kill you at 55 and you can discover at 40 that you’re actually predisposed to that, and you can prevent that heart attack and make it to 75 you’ve anti-aged yourself. You’ve lived longer. You’ve aged managed. So we have full assessments, medical assessments, which are comprehensive and use everything that we can think of investigating to help prevent the diseases of aging.

Now we’ve got the diseases. What else comes? Well, in the end, we don’t die of frailty. But we all get pretty frail. We decondition. We lose our vigor. We lose our vim. We lose almost everything. And the last 10 years of our lives, about eight to 15% of our lives, is not in a happy state. If we can improve that in your 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and improve your chances of not becoming frail, improve your diet, your lifestyle, your exercise regime, your bones, your muscles, your joints, your skin, and work on preventing degeneration of those and even maybe improving them, then we talking about anti aging in reality.

So, forget about biology, or try some experimental stuff that works on mice, and there’s lots of it. Work on the diseases, prevent them, do preventative medicine as best you can, and then work on the frailty.

Dr. Teri Fisher
Got it. You covered a lot there. So for the listeners out there, one of the things that I’m keying on here that they can proactively do is speak to somebody like you, and choose to take some of these medications to prevent a disease that they potentially are more susceptible to, given their genetics.

Dr. Gidon Frame
Absolutely.

Dr. Teri Fisher
Okay. And I think that’s a very actionable thing that someone could do.

Dr. Gidon Frame
Right. The prime example of that is Metformin. Metformin is a diabetic drug. Usually doctors will prescribe it when your diabetes is really bad. Not when it’s just warming up. The first 10, 15 years your blood sugars haven’t even gone up, your insulin is going up, but your blood sugars haven’t. Then comes a blood sugars going up, and then after another 10, 15 years of that, it gets so high that now it’s time for Metformin. They found Metformin makes, firstly it makes animals live longer, but it might do that for humans as well. So it’s probably our best candidate. And there’s actually a great study targeting aging with Metformin that’s happening at the moment as we speak in the States and we will find out in a few years’ time if it really is an anti-aging drug.

Dr. Teri Fisher
Oh, that’s interesting. Fantastic. What about theories of anti-aging? This is another topic that we were speaking about.

Dr. Gidon Frame
Well, they are so many of them and they usually apply to animals and we can help you translate some of those theories into something that you can do on an experimental basis. But it’s a bit of a wing and a prayer. But they are, and there are a number of them. Metformin fits into some of those theories. There’s the theories of autophagy where your body is repairing itself and it’s taking away excess end products that you use when you metabolize. You produce waste products and if you don’t clear those, then your cells fall apart. So there are supplements that will help with that. You have anti-aging genes, which we can test for. You can even try in the future may be modify. An interesting anti-aging intervention is rapamycin. And there’s been lots of podcasts on rapamycin, a lot spoken about rapamycin.

For those that don’t know what that is. Can you maybe explain that a little bit?

Well, exactly. No. Most of us doctors don’t even know what Rapamycin is. You know, who uses Rapamycin? Yeah, if you’ve had a kidney transplant and you want to prevent rejection, you go on Rapamycin. But the interesting thing is the mycin, every drug gets called a mycin of some sort. But rapa comes from the Easter Islands. There’s a fungus there. It’s called rapa and Rapamycin becomes the fungus from there that’s been shown to modify mTOR pathways. So mTOR? Mammalian target of Rapamycin. So the pathway that Rapamycin works on is an anti-aging pathway.

Dr. Teri Fisher
Okay. There’s the key.

Dr. Gidon Frame
There’s the key. So Rapamycin is one of those that work, and then there’s other supplements that also work on that.

Dr. Teri Fisher
Great.

Dr. Gidon Frame
So now we’ve made you feel younger, function younger, prevent diseases that are going to make you older. Of course you want to look younger.

Dr. Teri Fisher
And that brings us to the next topic exactly. Because you’ve got this anti-aging clinic, which I am now fortunate to be working at. And here you offer a whole bunch of services, including what you’ve just described, the whole anti-aging from medical perspective, but there’s also other aspects to it.

So take it away. Let’s hear the story about the clinic and other ways that we can anti-age.

Dr. Gidon Frame
Right. So about 25 years ago, when I got into anti-aging medicine, did that for a few years and that was really exciting. It’s difficult to make a living out of it. It just, you know, people have to, people will spend money on their car. They’ll buy new ski equipment. They’ll buy tires for they car. They’ll drop a thousand bucks in a flash. No problem. Ask them to spend a thousand dollars on their own health. “I’m not sure I want to do that.” So, yes, so we have the committed few that are really keen and they come to us for the medical side.

But in the anti-aging world going to conferences, we noticed that there was a new focus on anti aging cosmetics. And that was 20 years ago it started to come. And my wife’s the visionary. I’m just the doctor. I see the patients. I help them with their medical stuff. I investigate. I inject. I make you look beautiful, make you look younger, make you look less tired, but who’s got the vision of the clinic? That’d be the wife. Nadine. She spotted that this was a niche that this was going. And so we started to transition and luckily we did. Because 20 years ago, the field of cosmetics, what was there? There was Botox and there was Restylane. There was not much available and there were one or two lasers. So, of course we bought those, started up a clinic in Kerrisdale, outgrew that over the next 10, 15 years, moved to our beautiful new location in Kitsilano, expanded, got more staff, more injectors, more doctors, more nurses, and here we are today. We offer the full gamut of nonsurgical from all the types of injectables, the fillers, the botulinum toxins, the platelet rich plasma, the regenerative stuff, the injection of growth factors, the lasers and machines and ultrasound and radiofrequency devices that can make you smoother, better tone, tighter, all three. The holy grails and not just the face. We’re talking about the neck, the hands, the body. You want to build muscle? We have a machine that’ll build muscle. You want to reduce fat? We have two machines that’ll take away fat. You want to grow hair? We can grow hair. You want better erections, better vaginal control? We have machines for those too.

Dr. Teri Fisher
Unbelievable. It’s a real pleasure to be here. I’ve had the opportunity to spend some time with you here in the clinics. Incredible. The staff is incredible. And like you say, there’s so many different services here.

I think for the sake of time here, unless you have anything else to add to that, I think it might be a good place to wrap up and maybe you can just share with the listeners, if they’ve heard something that is intriguing to them, or they want to learn more about that, what’s the best way to get in touch with you or to approach us for these services?

Dr. Gidon Frame
Easiest way, Google either Dr. Frame, anti aging or anti-aging Vancouver. Anti aging Kitsilano, and you’ll see our clinic. That’s the simplest way. Just Google, or you can phone us (604) 261-9121.

We’re everywhere, we’re on Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok etc., but simple, just Google Anti-Aging Vancouver.

Dr. Teri Fisher
There we go. Fantastic. Well, I want to take a moment and just thank you for spending some of your time chatting with us today so we can all learn a little bit more about anti-aging. I really appreciate it. And I’m sure we’re going to have you on here many more times over the next months.

Dr. Gidon Frame
It was fun to be here. Thank you. And it’s a pleasure working with you, Teri.

Dr. Teri Fisher
Thanks so much.