Why Leaders Need An Executive Health Exam
With Executive Health Exams, high-achievers such as CEOs, senior executives, and pro-athletes can gain a comprehensive understanding of their health, longevity, and performance. Ultimately, these leaders are able to obtain knowledge about their current underlying health issues as well as those they may be at risk for in the future that goes well beyond that of a traditional or concierge-level health program.
The knowledge gained from an Executive Health Exams is essential for those who help drive their organization’s success. Businesses suffer when physical or mental health challenges limit leaders from making the best decisions, performing well, and remaining a strong presence in their companies.
When high-achievers best understand their health needs, they are equipped to create an effective treatment plan with their care team to stop issues before they progress into more serious ones.
A leader who travels first class, drives a luxury car, and enrolls their children in private school, yet still uses traditional family doctors or standard concierge medicine, isn’t protecting their most important asset: their health. An Executive Health Exam is the answer for those who need to protect their ability to keep leading and performing to their highest potential.
What Should Executive Health Exams Include?
While there are numerous concierge medicine programs out there, the vast majority are only marginally improved versions of the traditional, broken health system. Essentially, these programs provide a dressed-up, routine physical that includes slightly more tests and time, with improved customer service and text/email access to a doctor.
Though the treatment you receive is a minimal improvement from that of a conventional health exam, the included amenities make it appear as if these programs are a gigantic leap forward compared to most hospitals and health providers. Therefore, most people who use these programs never think to expand their health outlook and instead remain stuck in the same outdated health care cycle.
One of the issues with traditional and concierge medicine is that it merely looks at the surface of your health in that very moment in which you are being examined. However, your health is an ever-changing, complex system and should be treated as such.
Alternatively, in Advanced Executive Health Exams, a vast array of your data can be gathered over time, allowing you to better identify your risks and opportunities to optimize your health. If your current healthcare doesn’t include comprehensive data collection and an emphasis on preventative care, you may want to reevaluate how you approach your wellness.
Here are the top 10 things that should be included in your Executive Health Exam:
1. Full Body MRI Imaging
MRIs are one of the most effective ways to gain a comprehensive overview of the inside of your body, yet many people go their entire lives without ever receiving one. MRIs produce no radiation compared to traditional X-Ray technology and they enable you to see things happening internally that you might not be aware of.
An MRI can detect a number of abnormalities and issues, including brain tumors, lung cancer, heart disease, spinal deterioration, liver cancer, colon polyps, peripheral vascular disease, pulmonary lesions, and more. By undergoing a full-body MRI, you can gain awareness of your body’s internal workings, providing you with an opportunity to treat issues before they become too serious. Even if your MRI doesn’t reveal anything concerning, it still equips you with a valuable baseline for later comparison as your body changes over time.
Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words. In healthcare, that picture is an MRI. Without a baseline full-body MRI, you are flying blind when you could be leveraging a powerful medical technology that gives you 20/20 vision into your health. Executive Health Exams should include MRI imaging so that you can be confident that you and your doctor know what is going on within your body.
Care Evaluation Question:
- Do I receive full-body MRI imaging as part of my current care?
2. +100 Advanced Blood, Cell, and Lab Tests With Analysis and Education
When done thoroughly, lab testing is one of the best ways that doctors can obtain a comprehensive understanding of your health. Through extensive testing, a wide range of lab markers are collected that can help you identify potential health issues, identifying opportunities for using diet and lifestyle changes to optimize your health.
When you think back to your last physician’s visit, did they only test a few markers or maybe even tell you that everything looked normal? At any point, did your doctor take the time to educate you on the results of your tests, which way they are trending and how your lifestyle choices may be affecting them?
Your physician may be failing to provide you with the information available and necessary to achieve your optimal health. Moving forward, you will want to establish a baseline from your lab results and work with your provider to determine what dietary and lifestyle changes you need to improve them.
Care Evaluation Questions:
- Approximately how many lab tests do I currently receive?
- Do I know how I am trending?
- Do I receive education on how to improve each of these results?
3. Genomics – Full Genome Sequencing, Epigenetics, and Pharmacogenetics Testing
Genomic technologies provide in-depth information about both your mind and body. With full genome-analysis maps, you can capture 100% of your genome. This gives you 10,000 times more information about your body than basic consumer tests such as 23&me. These providers only capture <1% of your genetic information.
There are a number of different types of genetic analysis that help give a holistic perspective of your health:
- Full genome sequencing: Genome sequencing provides you with a comprehensive picture of your individual genetic profile. An analysis of your genomic information can be evaluated against all the latest scientific research to identify challenges or insights to your health based on your unique body.
- Epigenetics: This type of genomic testing looks at your unique lifestyle and environment in order to determine how they have impacted your genes. This analysis gives you a personalized picture of your health based upon how you have lived your life.
- Pharmacogenetics testing: Pharmacogenetics enables you to understand the pharmaceuticals that are most fitting and effective for your unique body. For example, if you ever need surgery or pain medication, you will know which medications are best suited for you in order to ensure relief and decrease chances of addiction.
Combining your genomic testing results with advanced blood and lab analysis allows you to tailor your care to your unique body and lifestyle. Without thorough genomic analysis, traditional health exams miss out on collecting detailed and comprehensive information regarding your individual mental and physical health.
Care Evaluation Questions:
- Do I receive full genome sequencing, epigenetic, and pharmacogenetic analysis?
- Is my genetic information combined with my blood lab results for an improved analysis?
4. Sleep Health Analysis – Deeper Than A Consumer Wearable
Sleep is incredibly important to maintaining one’s longevity and performance, but how often is it included in traditional healthcare?
I have tracked my own sleep with Oura Ring and other products for many years. However, gadgets like these are only basic, non-medically approved consumer devices. While most people experience sleep troubles at some point in their lives, high-stress careers can magnify the issue. From firsthand experience and interactions with thousands of CEOs, I know that the responsibilities that come with leadership are incredibly stressful.
It’s no secret that stress impacts sleep. While occasional sleep struggles do not necessarily signal a concerning problem, sleep challenges can cause a number of serious health issues.
The bottom line is that sleep is extremely important. Those who regularly struggle with sleeping can experience problems with their central nervous system, their cardiovascular system, their endocrine system, their immune system, their respiratory system, and more. These complications can contribute to weight gain, memory and concentration issues, as well as diabetes and heart disease.
Premium Executive Health Exams should include clinically-approved home sleep tests to diagnose and discover potential causes of sleep issues such as sleep apnea. These tests help ensure that you are equipped to achieve optimal sleep each night. If you would like to learn more about why sleep is so important, I recommend reading Why We Sleep.
Care Evaluation Question:
- Do I receive an in-depth sleep analysis with a medically certified device?
5. Personalized Diet Analysis and Instruction
We all know that there are so many different approaches to a “healthy” diet—which is one of the reasons why it can be so confusing to determine which one to follow. An Executive Health Exam should provide you with customized diet plans based upon the quantitative data and analytics from your advanced biomarker and genomic testing, as well as the qualitative data that is taken from your diet and lifestyle questionnaires.
Together, this information can be used to determine opportunities for improving your mental and physical health. For example, based upon your exam results, you might be provided with strategies on how to decrease your body fat percentage. Your customized diet plan will provide you with personalized instruction on what foods you should be eating to help prevent disease and achieve your optimal health.
A doctor who simply tells you, “Eat fewer carbs and sugar, drink less, and don’t smoke,” is not giving you the complete guidance that you need and could benefit from. While their advice may be helpful, it’s merely general information. Advanced Executive Health Exams go beyond this traditional treatment to provide you with personalized and effective instruction on how to best approach your diet.
Care Evaluation Question:
- Do I receive a customized diet plan based upon my biomarker lab data, genetics and health goals?
6. Personalized Exercise & Lifestyle Recommendations
Exercise and lifestyle choices are just as numerous as dietary ones. With so many conflicting approaches to choose from, it can be nearly impossible to know what would be best for your unique body.
An Executive Health Exam should utilize quantitative analytics and qualitative data to equip you with a personalized exercise and lifestyle routine that enables you to improve your health and performance.
Exercise and lifestyle approaches should work cohesively with your genetics to help you maintain optimal physical and mental health for your career and life. It’s important that you stop doing things that aren’t giving you the results you want that also could potentially be putting you at risk.
What’s better for your body: high intensity workouts like sprinting or more repetitious exercises like running a marathon? Your genetics will give you insight.
If your doctor only provides you with basics such as BMI—body mass index score—and they make general comments such as “You are overweight, you should exercise more” or “Everything looks good,” then you are not getting the personalized and most valuable care you need.
Care Evaluation Question:
- Do I receive personalized exercise and lifestyle recommendations tailored to my biomarkers, genetics and health goals?
7. Mental Health & Performance Analysis
Mental health is just as important to your longevity and well-being as physical health, yet it has been detrimentally overlooked in traditional healthcare. When it comes to a high-achieving career, like the role of a CEO or senior executive, the state of your mental health should never take a back seat.
While there are many factors that lead to mental health issues—including your genetics, brain chemistry, injuries, physical illness, and lifestyle—the stressors of your life and career can add an extra layer of pressure to an already taxed mind.
Through regular preventative testing and the use of various tools to better understand your mind, you can identify how your brain is performing and aging. You can also uncover potential mental health or performance challenges, as well as opportunities for areas to improve in. By taking proactive measures, high-powered leaders can reduce the impact of their mental health struggles and optimize their wellbeing for their family lives and careers.
When doctors only ask a few questions such as, “How have you been feeling? Any depression, anxiety, or addictions?”, they are merely scratching the surface of a critical aspect of your health. If your current provider is not thoroughly testing different areas of your brain’s health and mental performance, consider exploring alternatives.
Care Evaluation Question:
- Do I receive comprehensive mental health and brain function evaluation and analysis?
8. Unbiased, Unaffiliated Referrals To The Best in the World
If your exam uncovers serious health challenges, your provider should be able to immediately give you unbiased and unaffiliated treatment options. They should also be able to connect you with the best physicians in the world to give you a second opinion, as well as potential treatment options outside of their health system, brand, or revenue-generation methods.
Unfortunately, due to incentive structures, many concierge medicine programs do not provide patients with the best recommendations for them. Bureaucratic structures encourage them to uncover and encourage expensive revenue-generating procedures within their own network. Instead, they should be like a fiduciary for your health. It’s imperative that you find a provider who is trustworthy and will truly seek to provide you with the right care.
Care Evaluation Questions:
- When challenges arise, do I receive an unaffiliated, unbiased list of who is able to treat my specific issue best?
- Am I able to connect with the best within 48 hours?
9. In-home Care
Many traditional health programs provide one location for you to come to for testing, forcing you to travel to them—often from a great distance. However, this is an outdated way of offering premium care.
High-achieving leaders, business executives, and pro-athletes are some of the busiest people in the world. Ask yourself if traveling to your current provider is the best use of your valuable time. Executive Health Exams should be able to be conducted in your home, business, or at a convenient location near you.
After being tested, you shouldn’t have to travel at length to discuss your results with your doctor and team. Secure and easily accessible tele-medicine can give you the ability to take control of your health without sacrificing your valuable time to do so.
Care Evaluation Questions:
- Am I offered in-home service across the US or around the world?
- Am I provided with tele-medicine?
10. A Clear Investment in Advanced Technology and Preventative Care vs. Spa Like Real-Estate
The last critically important thing to consider is what you are really paying for and how your provider is using your money.
Here are two red flags to look out for when evaluating your Executive Health Exam:
- Expensive looking 5-star spa wellness facilities: Be very cautious to invest in providers with expensive facilities that don’t actually do anything to improve your health. While the amenities may seem nice, allowing a provider to use your money to invest in facilities does not result in better information, testing technology, or even health outcomes for you.
- Large hospital centers that are focused on emergency care and surgery: While hospitals are very good at specialization and fixing you when things go wrong, they are not incentivized to keep you out of their revenue-generating system. They are also not incentivized to provide you with all the best technologies offered by competing brands for a higher level of care. Focus on ensuring that your care being administered is not simply reactionary, but actively preventative as well.
These two red flags have little to do with uncovering your personalized health challenges. Look for a provider that does not have to carry all the unnecessary real-estate overhead and is not distracted by their core emergency or surgery business.
Care Evaluation Questions:
- How much of my fee is actually going to advanced technology applied to me vs. unnecessary facilities?
- Is my money spent on emergency and surgical facilities that focus on reactionary care rather than preventative care?
- What is the core focus and specialization of the organization?
Wrapping Up: What You Should Expect From An Executive Health Exam
High-achievers such as CEOs, senior executives, and pro-athletes are some of the busiest, most productive people out there. It is imperative that they maintain both their physical and mental health.
With a shift in mindset and approach to your health, you can uncover challenges early, know your risks, and align your diet and exercise to your unique profile in order to get a head start on optimizing your health.
Executive Health Exams should be able to identify and treat your potential health issues as well as help you develop a plan for maintaining and improving your longevity and performance.
EDISON BIO Executive Health Exam
EDISON BIO Executive Health Exam is the most advanced service ever offered. The exam offers in-home and in-office testing with the application of the most leading medical technology. We perform full-body MRI medical imaging and advanced blood, cell and laboratory testing. We use a wide range of genomic technology, sleep assessments, and diet analyses. We provide you with exercise and lifestyle recommendations, as well as mental health and performance testing.
EDISON BIO can generate a list of the top physicians in the world for specific conditions and connect you with them within 24-48 hours. With your Executive Health Exam, you will immediately receive direction toward the best option for you or your family and get the care you need when serious challenges arise.
After our Executive Health Exam, our members experience peace of mind concerning the current state of their health and their future risks. They rest easy knowing that they now have a complete and personalized health plan matched to their unique body and aligned to their longevity and performance goals.
About EDISON BIO
Most of us worry about our health. EDISON BIO advanced, comprehensive, and convenient health screening uncovers hidden disease and health challenges early. You’ll be confident about your health and primed to perform at your highest potential.