Dr. Frank Lipman joins the Stark Naked Radio podcast to discuss what he learned about the aging process from both Western and Eastern medicine throughout his career as a doctor. Here are the top 3 things to take away from the conversation.
A problem which commonly arose throughout Dr. Lipman’s career was the cultural bias from the two different philosophies in the world health and fitness. Soon after becoming a full-time doctor, he realized some of the practices he was taught in his career were wrong. His realization came when he found himself trying to fix common, everyday lifestyle problems that happened to his patients. The problem? He didn’t have a solution to their problems. And most of the solutions he offered, didn’t help them either. There was a hole in his perception of proper health.
Dr. Lipman didn’t ditch one side of the argument for the other, and neither should you. To generalize, what he later discovered was that his formal upbringing in the world of western medicine was incredibly effective at treating big, full-scale problems that occurred in people’s health, while Eastern practices tackled a completely different issue all together.
He found that Eastern medicine answered many of his patient’s health problems that came out of everyday life. Things that kill you slowly, and not suddenly. The answers had to do with things like sleep, balance, and how to eliminate stress. There were great tools to use to help measure your body and how it was aging, but there was no magic pill to make you age gracefully. It was simple everyday lifestyle choices which helped you progress on your journey through life. While everybody is unique and should be treated differently, his definitively answers to the question, “How do you prevent someone from aging poorly?” were focusing on proper sleep, exercise, and a healthy diet.
An interesting point that Dr. Lipman made was on the question of when in life you should start focusing your health on preservation. Of course, the answer is different for everybody, but he found that this transition usually happened to people around 50. With age, your body is not the same as it use to be, and your attention should start to focus on preserving, rather than growing, in order to get that most out of your health. Dr. Lipman recommends mediation for maintaining cognitive function, and yoga to maintain mobility.