https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/web/ei47ji/PodcastAudio_Ep172.mp3



“The model of medicine where you base treatment of patients on statistics and epidemiology- what works for most people- we felt like we could do better as a society and as a group of physicians, and that’s what took us down the route of creating Wild Health and focusing on precision medicine.”
- Dr. Matthew Dawson, Wild Health CEO
 
Can human performance be optimized by tailoring medical care to each patient’s unique genetic makeup?
Matt Dawson, MD and Mike Mallin, MD are the co-founders of Wild Health, a healthcare clinic using a genomics-based personalized medicine approach.
Dr. Dawson has been a life-long athlete focused on optimizing performance.  He received scholarships to play two sports in college even with self-professed "minimal talent" because of his voracious reading and implementation of any fitness or nutritional techniques that would give him an edge.  He continued that obsession into medical school at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine, and as a physician he has won numerous national awards for education, innovation, and leadership.
Dr. Mallin has been in medical practice for 10 years, but obsessed with health, physical performance, and longevity his entire life. He attended the University of South Carolina School of Medicine and currently practices in Bend, Oregon. Dr. Mallin is board certified in emergency medicine and has completed a fellowship in point-of-care ultrasound.
Dr. Dawson and Dr. Mallin met during their Emergency Medicine residency in Salt Lake City, Utah, where they bonded over their life-long passion for optimizing performance.  Throughout their residency, they continuously self-experimented with nutrition, fitness, and recovery techniques to give themselves a competitive edge.
Together they have gone on to grow several businesses, create apps, and author two textbooks.  Most recently they founded Wild Health where they use a medical approach rooted in the lessons they learned during their time self-experimenting as residents.
Wild Health utilizes a team of medical professionals to look at an individuals unique genetics, lab results, microbiome, and lifestyle factors in order to craft a precision treatment plan that fits the patient's health, fitness, and longevity goals.
I recently had the opportunity to appear on Dr. Dawson and Dr. Mallin’s Wild Health podcast, and I was excited to catch up with them at their home base in Lexington, Kentucky to have them as guests on Pursuing Health.  We talked about how they became interested in genomics and personalized medicine, how using an objective Health Score can motivate patients to make lifestyle changes, and the processes they’re implementing to make precision treatment plans the future of medicine.

In this episode we discuss:

Dr. Dawson and Dr. Mallin’s backgrounds in health and fitness, and why they decided to go into medicine
How Dr. Dawson and Dr. Mallin met and some of the adventures they shared during residency
The nutrition and biohacking they experimented with as they went through their medical training
How Dr. Dawson and Dr. Mallin came to recognize that genomics were integral to practicing medicine
What personalized medicine/genomics-based medicine means
What the patient process looks like
* Using an objective Health Score to help motivate patients and give them a way to track progress
* How Wild Health uses health coaches to be more hands-on with their patients
* The