Your Financial Future Has a Plan. What About Your Health?
by Chuck Svendsen, MD
I was a medical student when I first heard the phrase ‘invest like a doctor’. That isn’t a compliment. Doctors are notorious for their poor investment strategies. They fall for get-rich-quick schemes, and they tend to manage their money poorly. Just because you are smart in one area, healthcare, doesn’t mean that you are smart in all areas. That phrase is one of the reasons I obtained my MBA from the Carlson School of Management during my surgical residency. I wanted to make sure I was never one of THOSE doctors.
That doesn’t mean that I manage my own finances. Could I? Maybe. Should I? No. Many successful people have a financial advisor, an estate attorney and a tax strategist. But who do they turn to for their health?
In my own career, I was so busy trying to ensure I was financially successful that I fell into the same trap as many other professionals. I was ignoring my own health. When I turned 50, I woke up to the problem that I had created. I was on track financially, but my own health was a disaster. I was over-fat and under-muscled. I had high blood pressure that was rivaled only by high cholesterol, and my aerobic fitness was a disaster. I have long maintained that healthcare, and especially surgery, are diabolically designed to kill you. You are trained to believe that your own health comes last. The work is stressful, the hours are horrendous, and no one goes to a hospital cafeteria because the food is so delicious and healthy.
So did I hire a health advisor, a health attorney and a health strategist? It turns out that isn’t so easy. Yes, I have a primary physician, but corporate medicine isn’t set up to design a personalized strategy. A 15-20 minute visit once a year just isn’t sufficient. I determined I needed to stop ignoring my own health and get a plan in place. Sounds easy. I’m a surgeon who has helped thousands of people get their metabolic house in order. Turns out I was overconfident and underinformed. That’s not my fault! I promise. It’s not my doctor’s fault either.
Today’s Medicine Isn’t Built for This
Doctors aren’t taught about exercise, diet or sleep in medical school. They might learn some of it during residency if they are in a specialty that emphasizes those topics, but it is mostly on-the-job training. Doctors often aren’t incentivized to prevent health problems either.
We have access to more financial information than ever before. Low-fee brokers, LLMs that can analyze complex spreadsheets of financial data and a never-ending news cycle. It is overwhelming, so we pay a financial expert to distill the information and help us process it. We also have a data problem in healthcare. Continuous glucose monitors and wearables (think real-time stock quotes), do-it-yourself labs with AI-generated reports (think robo-brokers), and ChatGPT advice (think ChatGPT advice). It is paralysis by analysis. Yes, you can do it yourself, but should you? Fragmented healthcare advice is just as dangerous as fragmented financial advice [1]. Fragmented medical care is associated with worse outcomes for patients with chronic illness. A precision health plan can be just as valuable as a precision wealth plan.
A Better Model
So what does a better model look like? Let’s extend this analogy between wealth and health. The goal of saving for retirement is to build a financial cushion sufficient to prevent you from running out of money before you die. It has been shown that once you start using those savings, you can safely withdraw approximately 4% each year to live on. The financial advantage is that you can usually determine when to start. Health is similar, but the withdrawal starts much earlier. Muscle mass, which is strongly correlated with survival, begins to decline by 3-8% per decade beginning at age 30. The pace then accelerates after age 60 [2]. The same thing happens with VO2 max, a measure of your cardiovascular engine. This decline is even steeper at approximately 10% per decade [3]. But both declines can be lessened by regular exercise [4]. At some point, you just might run out of savings if you didn’t put enough away. Once your strength and VO2 max become depleted, you are no longer able to live independently. Your choices become limited, and you become dependent on others, just as if you had run out of savings.
To make it more challenging, physical decline isn’t a steady slope to the end. It is a slow decline punctuated by sharp drops from illness or injury. Think of the older person you know who has broken a hip or had a serious illness. The person who enters that crisis with reserves survives and recovers. The person who enters already depleted may never regain their footing.
What Can You Do?
If you are a successful professional with the resources to hire the best financial advisor, but you are still navigating your health, one wearable at a time, can you really afford not to hire a health advisor? This might be the biggest unmanaged risk in your life. And this is exactly why we built Astride Health. We focus on an integrated, personalized plan that addresses several areas. I work with our members to develop a Precision Health Plan to manage all six vectors of health: exercise, nutrition, sleep, stress reduction, social connectivity and medicine & supplements.
It’s time to start building your health account. Regular exercise that builds strength and cardiovascular capacity is like a deposit. We have talked mostly about exercise in this article, but a good plan takes all six vectors of health into account. So when are you going to start your plan? When are you going to make a deposit into that fund? Not when you get your 10-page summary from your Executive Physical. It’s not going to happen until you have a partner to hold you accountable. A partner who can adjust your plan for market downturns throughout the year. A partner like Astride Health.
References
Joo JY. Fragmented care and chronic illness patient outcomes: A systematic review. Nurs Open. 2023;10(6):3460-3473. doi:10.1002/nop2.1607
Volpi E, Nazemi R, Fujita S. Muscle tissue changes with aging. Curr Opin Clin Nutr Metab Care. 2004;7(4):405-410. doi:10.1097/01.mco.0000134362.76653.b2
Fleg JL, Morrell CH, Bos AG, Brant LJ, Talbot LA, Wright JG, Lakatta EG. Accelerated longitudinal decline of aerobic capacity in healthy older adults. Circulation. 2005;112(5):674-682. doi:10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.105.545459
Rogers MA, Hagberg JM, Martin WH 3rd, Ehsani AA, Holloszy JO. Decline in VO2max with aging in master athletes and sedentary men. J Appl Physiol. 1990;68(5):2195-2199. doi:10.1152/jappl.1990.68.5.2195