ADVANCED PREVENTION STRATEGIES
Dr. Levine practices advanced strategies for prevention of disease learned in his medical school training, UCLA residency program, advanced post-residency courses, and his advanced anti-aging fellowship training. During his training, Dr. Levine worked with many world-renowned and famous doctors that were responsible for new and progressive changes in medicine. Dr. Levine, curious and inquisitive by nature, questions medical dogma and scientifically tests medical recommendations on his own. Dr. Levine attributes his successes in preventing patients from developing heart disease, strokes, and kidney disease to resisting the medical dogma and national guidelines. (For example, medical practitioners are taught that diuretics are the first-line medications for treating high blood pressure. Dr. Levine sees this as a ridiculous, dangerous recommendation, and, strictly, a cost-saving measure for the country. “Why would you expose patients to a medication that can alter your potassium, increase your blood sugar and uric acid, and cause dehydration—any of which could be deadly—when we have medications that beneficially treat blood pressure that actually are healthy for the body and protect the heart and kidneys…in effect, acting like a vitamin for the body?” Dr. Levine also notes that for the past 50+ years, medical practitioners following national guidelines treated patients to a blood pressure goal of 140/90, yet scientific data showed for over 30 years that the goal for blood pressure should have been 120/80—which is how his patients’ BPs are treated. Most practitioners blindly accept national guidelines, failing to understand that the guidelines have placed a heavy weight on financial costs for the country and ignore patients as individuals. According to Dr. Levine, these decisions were unfortunately penny-wise and pound-foolish, as many people being treated to a blood pressure of 140/90 severely advance their risk of stroke, heart disease, and kidney failure. The cost of hospitalization and treatment for those diseases far exceed the cost of placing more Americans on blood pressure medication, and the non-financial toll and suffering that it causes for many people—simply following their doctor’s recommendations—cannot even begin to be measured.