Senior Care Academy
Senior Care Academy is a podcast dedicated to providing valuable information and expert advice on navigating the world of senior care for both senior care providers, and families with aging parents. Hosted by industry professionals, each episode covers a wide range of topics including healthcare options, legal considerations, financial planning, and emotional support for caregivers. If you are a healthcare provider, have aging parents, or are a senior adult, this podcast is for you! Tune in to gain valuable insights and resources to help you make informed decisions and provide the best care for your loved ones.
Senior Care Academy
Building Resilience and Health with Dr. Feng
What if you could turn personal adversity into groundbreaking innovation in healthcare? Dr. Jim Feng, a visionary entrepreneur, joins us to share his extraordinary journey from Shanghai to Toronto and how his own experiences with sports injuries led him to revolutionize pain management and rehabilitation. Listen as Dr. Feng recounts his path from being a competitive wrestler to founding Fixable, a cutting-edge platform that integrates high-performance rehab technologies accessible to everyone, including elite athletes and seniors.
Have you ever considered how goal-setting can transform your life? Dr. Feng illustrates this beautifully using the metaphor of a graph where creativity and innovation are required to push beyond our limits. At just 23, he balanced school with a full-time job, meticulously planning every aspect of his life to achieve his vision. Learn how reflective goal-setting inspired by mentors like Josh Singer can help you manage stress and direct your efforts toward meaningful accomplishments, whether in personal health or ambitious business aspirations.
Are you ready to build resilience and enhance your overall well-being? In the latter part of our discussion, Dr. Feng emphasizes the importance of lifelong learning, physical health, and finding your guiding purpose. Discover Fixable’s innovative strategies that engage users in long-term rehab and physical therapy, particularly seniors. Dr. Feng shares actionable advice on incorporating exercise into daily routines and the significance of understanding deeper motivations, such as living independently and staying active with grandchildren. This episode is a treasure trove of insights for anyone looking to build a more resilient and healthier life.
Hey everybody, welcome to the Senior Care Academy podcast. Podcasts focus on aging at home, innovation and technology and industry insights from leaders. Today, we're joined by Dr Jim Fang, a mission-driven serial entrepreneur and an innovative founder and CEO of Fixable. Dr Fang has revolutionized pain management and rehabilitation through his virtual platform that uses machine learning, augmented reality and gamification. With over a decade of experience, he has also founded Form Function Health, an integrated healthcare model, and has directed medical teams for world championships and professional sporting events. Dr Fang's work exemplifies excellence in health tech innovation and entrepreneurial leadership. Dr Fang, thank you so much for being on the show today. We're super excited to have you.
Speaker 2:No problem at all, Axel. I'm super excited to be here. Thank you for that amazing intro.
Speaker 1:Yeah, of course I'd love to kind of get to know you a little bit more. I know that just from my knowledge you moved from Shanghai to Canada and I'd love to hear a little about, like your professional background and then maybe a little bit how sports played into your life and then kind of leading into Fixable. I'd love to get an intro on you.
Speaker 2:Absolutely man. Shanghai to China Great start Really. From the beginning, I guess, yeah, we moved to, I guess, toronto back in 89. Toronto back in 89. That's when the literally for those who knows like the communist revolution there. That's when the cannabis square incident happened, when that student stood in front of the tank.
Speaker 2:So my father actually was really adamant in getting the family out, you know, a few years prior.
Speaker 2:So he came here first, literally lived in the subway station, washed dishes in Chinatown and started sending money back to us. So we came here literally on a dime and slept on two chairs for the first three years of my life and that's how we started. So I guess, at the level of you know I think we're chatting before we talk about resilience, I think having a level of, I guess, having to be in that bottom of the bottom trying to fight your way up, really actually creates great resilience and hence why we do what we do now with Fixable. So I think that's kind of how our journey started on the entrepreneurial side of things, I think, ever since, as a kid just never had money or never had resources. So I was kind of chasing the dream and chasing you know what next, like how can we better our family and our life? And I think healthcare is what was it and I think really revolutionized something. That healthcare was really something that was embedded in me very early on.
Speaker 1:I love that. Having that powerful backstory really inspires me. Hearing that, I'm sure it was a really strong motivating force for you to found Fixable, growing up, what was like the thing that kind of drew you into the healthcare space or maybe like the physical health space.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no great question. I think it's literally all the injuries I've suffered from. I was a wrestler at a pretty high level at the provincial and national level and wrestle internationally as well, and I just literally suffered probably every single possible injury. You can think of growing up and not understanding my physical body really well, but just going super hard all the time and then when it breaks down, it breaks down. So part of my motto as I age was like how do I prevent these things? First of all, like look at my other colleagues who have better support and how are they getting through the season without crazy amount of injuries? But at the same time I want to learn more about the physical body, how it works and how you're able to tune it. And I remember vividly grade 9 to grade 10.
Speaker 2:So first year wrestling I got my ass whooped by this girl named adida. She's gonna kill me if I probably release this. I won't remember her last name. Her legs were like tree trunks, like massive tree trunk, probably thicker than your trunk, but this girl's like she's at the national level. At that point just whooping me on my first year in, you know, high school again and I just vowed to myself I'm like this is never gonna happen again. So that summer I learned how to lift weights and I literally figured it out myself and back then there wasn't. You know Google search and, like you're talking to your coach, you're talking to your mentors at school, you know your teachers, I guess, and then people in the gym, right. So I gained about 15 pounds of mostly muscle coming back and I really relinquished that.
Speaker 2:But from there I kind of really understood like that's kind of my first gig and like how do I change my physicality if I'm not in a good place? And I think from there I've always been kind of tweaking, biohacking and of course I got into sports-based chiropractics back in 2009. And from there I built integrated rehab clinics with medical professionals uh, doctors, naturopathic doctors, physiotherapists and in like large gym settings. I worked from the national wrestling team for a while. I created medical teams for those for paralympics, working with national athletes still, natural level athletes still, and also consulting for the ufc and help get ufc sanctioned here in ont back in UFC 129.
Speaker 2:Wow. So all that kind of led me to high performance. High performance, high performance. But you got to remember, at the high performance level these people are more incentivized to get better and there's a bit of gamification. To get back to sport in order to do better for your sport. But what about for your nine to fivers? What about for maybe your kids or maybe remote areas in the world people don't have access to? And what about for now for seniors? We see a massive problem in the home. They're literally breaking down without the right support, knowledge and also, more important the engagement. So I really want to solve for that and that's why we created a fixable.
Speaker 1:That's an amazing story. That kind of leads perfectly I'm glad that you mentioned that latter part where aging at home is important the nine to fivers and that high level of performance at that elite level of athlete or person or job and they're more incentivized than maybe others For one of the few times on the Senior Care Academy. Today we're going to have a specific theme.
Speaker 1:Our theme is going to be resilience, the human resilience, the resilience of the mind, spirit, the resilience of the body. Fixable's mission perfectly aligns with this topic, and there's a quote that I've been thinking about, a quote that's kind of been on my mind as I've been preparing for this podcast. It's from Viktor Frankl. He said when we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. I really like this quote. I think resilience is a topic that's talked about but not applied very often. Or when the opportunity arises, I know for myself, I tend to forget how to be resilient or I tend to feel that I'm not resilient, that it's really hit me. I haven't bounced back. Tell me a little bit about what type of person you developed into as a result of your training and as a result of your work ethic. You're a very determined, straightforward person, which I love. I really resonate with that personality type. How has resilience played into your life?
Speaker 2:I think as an entrepreneur, you almost have to frolic in pain and you have to enjoy it, and you as an athlete, especially as well. We see so much benefit from doing the hard thing, that much benefit from doing the hard thing, that without it it's like is this worthwhile? And are you getting better at your craft? Are you getting better at your sport? Are you getting better at the thing that you're trying to achieve? Right? So without pain, there isn't the outcome. If it's too easy, we're not engaged right, we're not engaged to do more and better, and if we don't, we're not sitting in the same room as the best in the world. For me, anyways, this is the case. I don't tend to work as harder than I should be. I always like to be a slight underdog in the room. I'm always trying to surround myself with people that are a little bit better than me and I try to upgrade over time as well. I say you know, I leave those people alone, but I, you know people I've worked with in the past.
Speaker 2:But there are different types of relationships, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that Franco quote because ultimately, the things that are outside of our control, it's very hard for us to control, that it's very hard for us to get our mind to control around because there's no set goal for it and if we can't change the thing, all we do is spin within the problem and we just suffer, right.
Speaker 2:We just struggle and suffer and that is like mental 101. Control the things that you're able to control and then like really crush that right and then along the way, hopefully the other things you don't have control, you know, falter in place, right? So I think ultimately, resilience at the end of the day is being able to level up your ceiling right. Push up your ceiling of tolerance and ability to adapt. That is my definition of resilience. And you know all the things that you talk about and you know we talk about strength and training and maybe stoicism and training and like building up to that is really to push up that ceiling so it doesn't break you. Your room down here becomes bigger and larger and the area becomes larger where you're able to be able to be, you know, resilient and be stronger and adapt. So it makes you a stronger person in general.
Speaker 1:The imagery in my head kind of paints a picture of a graph. You progress and you grow in terms of how strong you are mentally and physically, emotionally and a problem can land underneath your limit or above your limit, and the ones underneath your limit tend to be the problems that you can solve pretty easily. I guess, for myself taking a test someone I'm 23 years old, I'm still in school, I'm working a full-time job like taking a test doesn'tas innovating in ways that are unique and creative. I love the idea that if you haven't done something, you have to do things you've never done. To get there, and in order to achieve something that's never been achieved, you have to be creative, and that is what pushes me now, and that scenario is different for each person. You've mentioned a couple of things that I'd really love to touch on, but I kind of want to focus a little bit on your personal interactions with others, like what's inspired you about others in terms of how strong they are? What do you see in others that inspires you to be better?
Speaker 2:That's a great question. I don't know if I can define that, to be honest, but I think really it comes down to what am I missing as a human and are these people? Are the things that they're portraying and it's not just your social Instagram portrayal, but actual deep down things that they've achieved are these the things that is that part of your life journey? Is that part of your goal in life? So I sit on a bunch of forums and basically it's like AA for founders and technology founders and entrepreneurs and healthcare practitioners. And every year I work on this worksheet and I have to give credit to Josh Singer actually he's the CEO of Cognitive Marketing, a big marketing firm, digital marketing firm. He got me on this probably about 10 years ago and really writing down what is your life goal to achieve, what do you want to get to, what is that main goal, and then literally everything else works backwards from there and then it breaks down to, like your family goals, what are the things you keep last, what do you want to do this year? A family to personal, to your your business right and personal includes, like health and all that stuff right. So I break literally break those down for myself and I do it by myself. I like to do do it like New Year's Eve, so it's a lonely night for me. But it's good at the same time, because I'm reflecting for the next year and people are like celebrating New Year, counted.
Speaker 2:I'm like working on my worksheet, a couple of glasses of wine, and I literally work through this work. I spend like four or five hours on this thing and it's just a great way for me to reflect on the last year. And then what am I going to plan for the next year? And in a day, my goal has always been the same when it comes down to a lifetime goal, right? So my lifetime goal comes back to the whole concept of building a health technology service or product that will put me in the record books for the next 250 years. That's always been the same for the last 10 years, essentially. So everything that I'm doing is kind of working towards that. Every quarter goal, every, you know, monthly goal I'm trying to get to and in all the ones and twos on the operational size, daily is moving towards that bigger picture thing and, of course, along the way, enjoy the process, right, but I have a bigger picture in mind as to what I want to get to.
Speaker 1:I think you've illustrated like an important point in changing the mental aspect of how you think and how you handle stress, how you handle day-to-day life, by goal setting. There was a study done I can't remember when, but they put humans in a forest and they had them blindfolded and told them to walk straight and almost every single one of these people that were told to walk straight ended up walking back to their starting point. So they'd go forward for a little bit and then they'd end up turning and turning and turning and they'd be back at their starting point. I love this study because it shows me that without like a fixed point ahead, without vision, you kind of end up in circles outside of goal setting and planning. Cause that's a huge, a huge thing to mitigate stress is knowing what's in front of you, knowing what's behind you, knowing what you're achieving. Outside of that, what other practices do you put in your life to continue growing and to continue changing your perspective?
Speaker 2:I think learning is a continual process. A lot of students I mean, you're still finished up school A lot of students, when you talk to them in either high school or university, and we've taken on, probably like all the different business I've been in probably 250 interns through the last 15 years or so and one thing's clear a lot of them actually think learning is done after university or after your college or whatever it is. Yeah, but it's absolutely continual, right, and you're always, always learning, upping your game, and if you're not upping your game, then you're falling behind. So I'm dying if I'm not learning, because everyone else is catching up to you.
Speaker 2:You know, with the advent of ai, information is ubiquitous, right, you can get to that like this. You can get an answer like this, right, you know? So these days I don't write emails to chat gpd, you know, and other tools that were out there, right? So, yeah, that information is really easy to get to. So how do you make yourself better in order to be different from the noise, right?
Speaker 2:And then, is that all that model, all that learning? Is that getting you better at your craft to reach your ultimate goal you're trying to get to right, and that's being different from every person and that goal, remember, can always change from your yearly reflections. Right, and that's okay, because you'll learn new things and maybe you'll reach these goals as well. I mean, you're opting for something else, so I think continual learning is really important. Looking up to good mentors, having those mentors that are steps ahead of you not too far, but just far enough, so you're within reach. I think that's really important for you. At first it's just like it's very innate to do that right, but over time it can be more strategic to do so. I feel like every four or five years, I come like up in my ante when it when it comes down to the people who I'm looking up to, right and who are mentoring me.
Speaker 2:I mean, sometimes it could be, you know, the mentor could be a book. The mentor could be a podcast person that you really love. Could be the andrew hubert minford health could be, yeah, my first million for all the business guys out there. He could be one of those guys, and that's okay. You can learn from them as well, and that might change over time, but you're always up in the ante. And that same goes back to the whole resilience thing, right? So where's your roof? Where's your ceiling? And are you pushing that ceiling up continually? Because the ceiling is always falling as you age. Your age is your biggest comorbidity. It's the work, it's like the thing that is making you less effective over time. Right? It's really important to always up your ante on the ceiling. Right? You're always pushing that ceiling up.
Speaker 1:I've never, ever thought about age being like a deteriorant of your efficacy in life.
Speaker 2:After 25, you're dying After skeletal maturity life. After 25, you're dying After skeletal maturity you're incrementally dying. So what are you doing to make yourself more efficient? More effective, definitely. I've heard a lot about I've heard a lot about.
Speaker 1:I guess this is kind of helping us transition into Fixables mission, but I've heard many people over 40 talk about how, like, the number one thing that they tend to focus on is their physical health. So, working out is huge, eating is huge. What's the science behind that? And then let's talk a little bit more about getting something started for yourself. What are things that we can do to apply physical activity to ourselves? And maybe what can caregivers provide to the people they care, give to in order to get their clients ready, active and healthy again?
Speaker 2:You can start anytime, anytime, anywhere, anyhow, there's always something you can do, always a finger to lift and do the minimum. The whole adage of resting just passive resting, bed resting is such a bad thing for your body and the more and more you see even the post-operative care like knee replacements, asl repairs you know you're walking ASAP, you're moving ASAP. It really reduces the amount of time that you're down for in post-operative care. But this applies to just about anybody and for me, I feel like there's a massive mental health crisis right now we're talking. You know we're 2024. We just went through COVID. Hopefully we're out of COVID.
Speaker 2:Covid caused a massive mental health crisis. Right now we're talking. You know we're 2024. We just went through covid. I hopefully we're out of covid. Covid caused a massive like.
Speaker 2:You know what they say about adage about. You know tough times create strong people, right, and we times create a lot of weak people and these weak people create tough times. So we had a lot of good times, like prior to 2020, and we built a lot of weak people and then, during this period of time, it broke a lot of people. That tough time broke a lot of people. So we're going through a major mental health crisis. We're getting better over this as well. But what's the better step to start with? Maybe therapy and medication, or or Do something that you already kind of know how to do, like going for a walk. Maybe increase that walk to a 30-second faster walk, a two-minute moderate walk, and then increase the intensity. Get into your first run right, that's an easier way and we know that creates endorphins, enkephalons that make your mind feel a lot better. Right, and the amount of patients that we brought from a really bad place, where they're on ssris and not feeling good in the house, and to just moving to correct. That is really important, not to say that the other stuff is not important, it's a good adjunct. And then I think it's a really important to see no help when that's the case.
Speaker 2:But nothing better than start with the physical self. Start there at a baseline can be a simple thing, as like literally going for five, five-minute walk to start and progress from there. Right, there's many progressions, all the way to like kettlebell swaying, to, like you know, turkish get-ups and all that fun stuff, and we've had literally our 75-year-olds doing that, getting to a point where they're able to do that with, like you know, a quarter of their weight and it's really, really empowering for them at that point. But you start somewhere and it's not so much about starting for the purpose of getting a physical outcome. It's starting for the purpose of creating a habit and you've got to build that habit.
Speaker 2:It takes that 21 days to be continual in that game and incrementally set yourself to win. You've got to win incrementally, get that quick win, really Get that positive reinforcement, retrain yourself, retrain yourself, retrain yourself and set yourself up to win. Then eventually the task and the challenge becomes a little bit tougher and you have to do a little bit more to get there. But start with little incremental wins. It really helps that feedback loop wins.
Speaker 1:It really helps that feedback loop. Personally, I'm going to start applying that into my life, that incremental win system. I like to tell myself after the end of each day like, okay, what did I do today to make myself 1% better and sometimes it's really hard to recognize that and that incremental growth is a really positive way of viewing challenging situations. How does Fixable work with senior care agencies or seniors themselves to implement this type of thinking to get them healthy.
Speaker 2:With Fixable, we started as practitioners but we always knew we wanted to create a platform to empower others, that we're already working with people that are out there struggling because we can't get to everybody, nor do we want to do that. We want to instill and educate and also provide a solution. Where you're working with a thousand seniors, I know that if it's 85 plus, the majority of them are at risk of falls.
Speaker 2:And so we have a falls program that we're building AI into that can incrementally change sets and reps and movement pattern. We're using machine vision to look at movement patterning. So we know there's no good feedback. That's like your baselines. Your bergen best has to know how, outcome measure wise, how are they doing from the start and how are they getting better over time with the programming.
Speaker 2:And any psw that's already in the home working with an agency can deploy this on a path. And not only does it help you with more ability. You know chronic care ability as well as you know remote monitoring and also even private. You know p, private PT type of billing that you can do. You can increase your business there. So we support the ecosystem to be able to not only deliver additional services but a better service to help people age at home and help them live and stay at home longer and be more resilient. So it's a win-win for all. So I really see this as a win-win for all. So the platform essentially has the ability to create templated programs video based or evidence-led outcome always embedded in so we know how they're doing over time right, and then it makes it easy dashboards or different healthcare practitioners, care coordinators, nurses, psws or doctors. They can come in and see how they're progressing.
Speaker 2:You know there's integrated devices in there for vitals, right there are many incremental things that we're adding into this in order to make it super tight, easy to use, easy to get outcomes. And then also, incrementally, how do we push that human, push them along to increase that resilience, right, yeah, push that ceiling up even further, without hurt, you know, and hurt or harm. I think that's really important. We built, like recently built we had a contract with the canadian space agency as part of the whole artemis project that's going to the moon, to mars one day. We built a whole advanced medical pod wow, fully autonomous. There's robotics in there with triage systems that will hopefully integrate into our system soon.
Speaker 2:So imagine talking to a robot. I'll send you a link. But talking to a robot gives you feedback, gets you a proper sequential base, sequence based type of triage. It could be as if it's an emergent situation automatically in our telemedicine solution online, and then you can talk to a practitioner. If it's a minor injury, it'll send you a program of care right away, right, wow, so things like that, advancing technology, we even have an AI-based echocardiogram that you can. It feeds to US2.AI and it gets a report in real time, sends it to the fixable application for the patient to view and as well as for the practitioner to work on, to get to a case if you can't touch the unit. So a lot of the care staff you guys work with also are in remote areas. A lot of us need remote areas and hard to get to clinics. So how do we make that process a lot easier and how do we make the service, your service, service to expand the geographic location we typically treat Right?
Speaker 1:That sounds amazing. You've mentioned so many things. I love the dashboard. I love the connectivity to healthcare providers, whether that be a doctor, nurse, clinician, caregiver, whoever's in charge of you, whoever's in charge of your health and whoever's working with you in your health. I guess you're in charge of how you feel, but whoever's helping you out in that is connected on one platform. And then being able to work on the Artemis program and advanced technology in that sense seems to be like a remarkable experience. I can't even imagine what those conversations are like. Being able to say like, hey, we want X, y and Z in this pod, we want a triage system, we want a telehealth system. We want these people who will be part of this program to say like, hey, I'm experiencing this, what goes on, and then being able to provide that using technology and that blew me away. That honestly blew me away.
Speaker 2:Some of that stuff is still on the rollout, but we're really excited for what future looks like for my parents and your parents. We got a little sneak peek of Fixable's five-year plan?
Speaker 1:I guess In a previous podcast I listened to, you mentioned the concept of engagement hacking, and just now you talked about how it requires 21 days to build a habit and the incremental growth. What does Fixable do, or, I guess, what do you guys provide to ensure users or clients remain committed to their rehab programs or their training programs or their physical therapy programs?
Speaker 2:Going back to that topic, we found our seniors and one of the reasons why senior is an ideal customer for us was that first we thought, okay, seniors, they hate technology. How are they going to onboard? They can't even see the tabs and people keep giving me feedback like we hate technology. But from our experience it took longer to onboard these people. It took two and a half sessions on average to onboard. But their lifetime value is so much longer. They are so used to pressing that button to go to that session with their practitioner or go to the program than my millennials that we worked with in the past with other insurers.
Speaker 2:We prefer provider insurers as well with other insurers or preferred provider insurers as well. It's because I think a lot maybe the exercise routines maybe are programming or more ubiquitous to maybe the younger folks right, they know they can get content from Peloton. They're more focused on, like I would say, exercise. And it's also a problem set because as you age we just talked about comorbidity, aging is the biggest comorbidity, so it's more of a problem set that they have versus and the younger folks probably get better faster as well. So the utilization of the platform is a lot more important.
Speaker 2:So engagements actually getting them onboarded. Two and a half sessions, get them onboarded on a daily basis. You got to have those reminders, so at the right time. That's really important and that should learn over time. And then, more importantly, how are you engaging them in and changing the program over time to progress them? So once you're done one program, what is next? And I think a bit of foreshadowing along the way is really important to to keep them on the roll. And then, of course, along the way, they should see how they're doing right if you don't know how you're doing. But where are you again, you're spinning right. There's no north star, you're walking in circles, as we were talking about before.
Speaker 2:Right yeah so I think that's really important to get to and having a physical outcome. So, for instance, be able to stand on one leg for x amount of time right, engage in the right muscle to create stability for a false prevention program that we run right and then using the right muscle. So your, you know, balance is a byproduct of stability. Right hip stability. It starts at the need and your feet. So we implement that, we do a test for that and then afterwards we're testing along the way. So they're always kind of gearing up for that test, right, they're gearing up for that, like that incremental step the next step is like, if I get through that, then it's the next.
Speaker 2:You know engagement, but it all plays back to like why and their why is I want to live at home for longer. I don't want my kids to put me away in a home. I want to be able to play with my grandkids, I want to be able to pick up my grandkids, I want to be able to be there, right. So I think that's incredibly important and there's some new research to show that the physical component you're able to build so you, to show that the physical component you're able to build so you know, when it comes down to dementia, when it comes to alzheimer, one of the biggest part of the body that's shrinking is the cerebellum, right. So those are two little brain stems here. They're little, two nodules that sit like that and then your cortex sits on top. So that's the thing that's actually shrinking and yeah, I'm just amyloid plaques and all that, but that part is the actual part that shrinking and we actually know that physical exercise can support with that. So when they see their actual physical outcomes getting better over time, attached to other imaging and things are getting over time, that's really good, positive reinforcement to continue on the program, right, but nuances there, engagement, activation, even a basic phone call sometimes.
Speaker 2:You know we put these programs together. We have a 100-person program being launched in the Halton region here in Ontario and we're implementing an outcome-based thing where they actually like. Once you're done these things, there's going to be like a congregate dining. So real-life things, right. They start with disability inability to go out by themselves, inability to be mobile on their own, to being able to do a congregated dining together as a group somewhere in the city, right.
Speaker 2:So something that's super tangible like that as an outcome and your service provider not only help you get those people in the right direction, but also it speaks volumes. Imagine a media publication around this, right, when you're doing this for your community, and then the feel good vibes around this of your practice and your business. So, yeah, all those little things, I think. Get creative around and listen to your humans, you know. Listen to feedback design, you know number one, right. So UX research and listen to those people and listen to what they're saying in between the lines and not just what they're saying at you, but in between the lines and then challenge them a little bit and see what they actually are looking for, to get them to that next step right.
Speaker 1:Wow, I think you've provided a great list of things to do. You get them engaged by showing them results, showing them where they come from and where they're going, goal setting and planning, keeping up with them with phone calls and then what you just mentioned by you know, cultivating this excitement around what they're doing, helping them remember their reason why. I love that. I think that's a very powerful system, a very powerful and effective way to engage anybody, not just older adults, but anybody. If you can show them where they're at, where they're going, why they need to be there, and you coach them through it. You don't abandon them. After you show them all this, they're going to be engaged and disciplined enough to do these things.
Speaker 1:I kind of want to backtrack a little bit, but I really love what you said earlier about helping people get off of track a little bit. But I really love what you said earlier about helping people get off of SRRIs Not that they're a bad thing, but that you're able to help them kind of grow mentally, because I know that SSRIs often treat ADHD, anxiety, depression, they're reuptake inhibitors and they're a powerful solution to problems that people can't solve themselves. I know you've mentioned in the past opioid crisis and the role of non-pharmaceutical treatments. How does Fixable position itself as a viable alternative to opioid-based pain management? I think we're the first step.
Speaker 2:This really goes back to our motto of, or, I guess, our tagline of where healing begins. Right, I think this is really where it begins. It's like, what are you able to do in your day-to-day life in order to build your resilience? That's your physical resilience or your mental resilience, and for us, for me, in my background, the patients, like tens of thousands of patients that we've worked with it started at the physical side and they have that built better feedback loops for their mental health.
Speaker 2:And in addition, we're not saying get off your SSRI, do not do that. Talk to your medical professional for sure. But there are some research to show that it's not as effective as you think recent studies, actually. But the first thing, the thing you can do, is actually build your physical resilience. If you're able to do that incrementally over time and you're able to get to a really good result, then talk to your family doctors to be able to get start winding yourself down right and you're into anologist, to kind of wind yourself down and test and test and push back, you know to, to see how you're able to do this. Naturally right. But there's always a time and place and it's incremental time and place.
Speaker 2:I mean the first step of not feeling good and not feeling tired, feeling a little anxious, is not probably to take a bunch of medications, probably to do the basic things of exercise, movement, mental meditation, right, quiet time, yoga. These things are the obvious things that we have good research on to show one plus one is two, and sometimes if you add these other things together it's like two plus two is five or six, right? So if you do those basic stuff that's already in the literature, right, we know to do the same, equals results. Do that first.
Speaker 2:I know humans are lazy, but ultimately look at the other results of too much medication and go on the lines of just putting a Band-Aid over a problem, right? The solution ultimately for all these health conditions is building a stronger you, building a more resilient you, building a higher ceiling so you're able to again building it. You building a higher ceiling so you're able to again be with you know larger surface areas to defend against infections. To the physical you know physical pain, to mental resilience, right. So I think if you're able to do that, I think you're in a far better place and, of course, if you still can't figure that out with your healthcare practitioners, you would have other solutions right, and it's an incremental level up as you need stronger solutions to kind of get there right.
Speaker 1:I love what you said You're the first step. That's a wonderful thing to be able to say that you've been the first step in people's health. You've been the first step in helping them see their issues and helping them move past them. Kind of wrapping up here, I kind of want to ask you, of all of your experience and all the mentors you've had and all the people you've worked with, what's been the piece of advice, the statement, the quote that's kind of stuck with you throughout these years?
Speaker 2:I think a key thing goes back to the same topic that we're talking about. Right, you need to challenge yourself, but it's really difficult to challenge yourself when there isn't some kind of North Star that's guiding your way right, there isn't some kind of North Star that's guiding your way, right. So first find that North Star and then really push yourself and surround yourself with the best people in the world when it comes down to that, right. So I think that's a really key thing. And, as a human, we're the dominant species on Earth for a reason. Right, we evolve to get here.
Speaker 2:Our bodies always change. Our physicality is always changing over time, depends what you believe. But I think there needs to be an added level of stress and hormesis to build a stronger you. So just feeling relaxed, feeling always in a relaxed state, always for comfort, and looking for euphoria is not how you grow right. You need to challenge yourself continuously as you age, as you go into retirement. Retirement doesn't mean you stop doing, it's actually. It modifies you what you do. But you should always have a level of control, stress in your life and that's going to make you on your tippy toes, make you better.
Speaker 1:I really love that. It's not to find euphoria, but it is to challenge yourself. That's amazing. I can't thank you enough for being on the show today. Everybody this has been Dr Fang on human resilience, both body and mind. Please check out Fixable. Their solution is the first step. Fixable helps tens of thousands of people seniors to millennials overcome their physical and mental challenges by invigorating them to start today. Do something today to help yourself grow, to help yourself be better. I'm really inspired by Fixable. I'm really inspired by you, dr Feng. Thank you so much for today. It's been an amazing session.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.