The brain is a powerful thing, but exactly how powerful is it? Today, Dr. David Haase, the Founder and Medical Director of MaxWell Clinic, shares how he got started in the work he does with brain-related disorders. He also discusses his brain-centric approach to treating patients, including the range of tools he uses to help patients along their healing journey. If you want to learn more about how the human brain works and how it affects our overall health, tune in. You’ll be inspired by Dr. Haase’s passion for being the light for his patients to do their best and express the things that only they can express in the universe.
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Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
The Brain-Centric Approach To Wellness With Dr. David Haase
Dr. David Haase MD is a doctor, teacher, entrepreneur and innovator who is deeply committed to maximizing wellness for everyone. He received his medical training at Vanderbilt University and completed his residency in Family Medicine at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He is board-certified in Family Medicine and Integrative Holistic Medicine, and is the Founder of the MaxWell Clinic. He treats a wide range of conditions and has special expertise in fatigue and brain-related disorders including mood, attention, anxiety, insomnia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, seizures and head injury, as well as inflammatory and immune dysregulation, allergy and cancer support. His friendly manner, enthusiasm and humor make learning fun and light the way for a patient’s healing journey.
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Thank you so much for being here. It’s great to see you face to face again. In most of these interviews, I like to begin with a question like can you tell us a little bit about how you got into the work you do and what drives your passion for it?
First of all, thank you very much for having me on. Any time that we can spread some hope for people that have not yet had the life that they would like to have, that’s wonderful. First of all, thank you for doing this. How I get into what I do was my mom said I always wanted to be a doctor from four years old on. I fought that a lot. I didn’t want to do that, but I found my way into medicine because I love solving problems of human health. I solve puzzles everywhere. My driving passion is curiosity. I love dealing with issues that haven’t found help elsewhere and thinking differently about those.
It’s the way I made it. Understanding how you are made is an important part of thriving and accepting that you are not like everybody else. Every single person is a unique emanation of the universe or a unique consciousness. Being able to settle into that for me has been part of my own personal growth. That has caused the emergence of what is MaxWell Clinic, which I call my laboratory for figuring out what creates health. I started on a farm. I have an agricultural view of healthcare. I think health has to be grown rather than a militaristic view that diseases are something to be destroyed or conquered.
It’s interesting how your early life experiences create a set point for how you organize information and what you do. I give a lot of credit to my mom and dad. They didn’t think about it much. They had me on the farm. I went from the farm to Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The professor said, “You should check out Vanderbilt.” I said, “I told you, I don’t want any of those snooty East Coast schools.” I had never heard of Vanderbilt. I went down to Vanderbilt and found a real home there. They have a medical school that does look at the person, and there’s a lot more compassion present at least for the medical students. That was very impressionable to me.
While I was on medical rotations there for three successive months, I had witnessed patients that were on our service, but not my own patients, died at the hands of sub-specialists. They died because sub-specialists weren’t paying attention to things that were outside of their own specialty. That drove me into this passion for understanding cognitive dissonance or a cognitive bias. How can we not see things? It drove me towards being a generalist. Those were very painful experiences when I put them together. I went, “I don’t want to be in a profession that does that. How can I prevent that for myself?”
I went into Family Medicine, which was unique at Vanderbilt. It’s what almost everybody specializes in coming out of that school. I went to Mayo Clinic to do my residency in family medicine because I wanted to make sure I was excellent in the basic sciences, but also diving into a holistic view. I wanted to understand the human condition from womb to tomb.
What is this thing we call being a human? How do we better humans? I thought Family Medicine had great fundamentals for that and it does. It’s great fundamentals. While I was there, I started a journal club for evidence-based medicine. Evidence-based medicine was a new concept at that time. We got together with myself and a bunch of colleagues. We would pull together three journal articles every month and go through them and look at the basic science behind them to understand the basic science and how it applied to medical care.
That wasn’t the way doctors were operating at that time. We listened to our mentors or a textbook that was fifteen years old. After six months of that, I began to turn into a therapeutic nihilist. We had eighteen papers that basically showed us that what we are doing is not what we should be doing. A lot of the things that we thought worked didn’t have any evidence when put up against the double-blind trial. I became a little despondent. By the grace of God, I had this epiphany that I didn’t go to medical school to diagnose and treat disease only. I came because I wanted to figure out how we create health.
So much of our health has to do with our lifestyle and our choices.
Diagnosing and treating diseases is very important. We are very good at that in Western medicine. The problem is we also need to take care of the other side of the coin, which was how do we create health? I started to apply new and basic science and medical science to that question. How do I understand what is human thriving? How do we ask those questions? What are the determinants of a person thriving? What does it take to help an individual heal better? It’s been a wonderful journey, and then that has gone on. I have been involved in health coaching since way back in the year 2000, way before health coaching was known or interesting.
I recognized if we are going to change health for people, so much of our health has to do with our lifestyle and our choices. I would get angry at the other doctors who would say, “Patients don’t want to change.” There’s nothing that makes me angrier than that. I think that’s a lie. I haven’t yet found a person who had adequate support, had a reason why to do it and thought that they could do it that doesn’t want to be the author of their own change.
That was very powerful for me to go, “It’s a lifestyle.” How do I help people? How do I encourage, educate and support people to make these changes? Here I was. I had a great basic science, good medical school, and I got great training. I came out of medical school thinking I was some hot stuff for residency. I went and did primary practice in Cresco, Iowa, a little tiny town in Northeastern Iowa for three years. I thought what I wanted to do is to be a country doctor. That’s where I was going to practice because that’s where I grew up.
I was humbled there because, for the first time in my life, I got feedback. Before, when a patient came to see me, what would happen is I would give them some advice, they did something and they didn’t get better, they would just go away. They wouldn’t come back. I would not get negative feedback so I would change my practice. That’s not the case when you are a doctor in a small town. If that patient doesn’t get better, you are going to hear about it at the grocery store, at the football game, from their cousin, from their aunt.
All of a sudden, I went, “Again, I know way less than I thought I did or that I wanted to know.” I dove deeply into biochemistry. The field of functional medicine was just forming at that time. I was there at the formation of that. I’m board-certified in holistic medicine and integrative medicine. Leading all up to that, we are trying to do these lifestyle changes with people, and there’s one thing that always hit us in the face. It became so obvious. It’s that if somebody had good intentions and good information, and they had the resources to do that, and they had support, why yet are they not able to follow through and make these lifestyle changes?
It could be dramatic to change everything about their physiology, reverse autoimmune disease, reverse heart disease, and slow dementia. Why are they not? It’s because they had a brain problem. Several years ago, I become a brain-centric physician. I started to think about health has to be created brain first in many ways. It started me down an entirely different path. That was a very long answer to your question. I have never given that full answer before. Thank you, because how being this brain-centric for the creation of health came about, finding problems that were not yet solved, and trying to find some new ways to help people if they hadn’t yet gotten the help they needed before.
What does it mean to be brain-centric in your approach? How does that guide your work differently than the standard medical doctor or a psychiatrist?
When a patient comes to me, they will sit down and I will usually pull out a big piece of paper. If somebody who’s reading this can imagine doing this in their head. I will draw a little brain in the middle of that piece of paper. I’m going to say, “All of your symptoms are brain symptoms.” You wouldn’t be aware of any of your symptoms if you didn’t have a brain. They all get filtered through your brain. Pain for one person is different than pain for another person because the brain sorts all of that information and brings that information in. Most of our quality of life is also about our brain, our joy, energy, focus, and ability to plan and pay attention.
Brain Centric Treatment: Health has to be created brain first in many ways.
Many medical issues stem from it. If you had a well-functioning brain, then that would not be as much of an issue. You would also be able to make and keep lifestyle changes. The brain is a very slippery organ to understand. It’s our organ of bias. If you go to a psychologist and you start talking about your brain problem, they will be interested in your story and they will write a story. If you go to a sociologist or somebody who studies life patterns, the family of origin, and work-life balance, they will be interested in your setting to try to deal with this one brain symptom, and pretty soon you are going to see I’m a pathological alliterator.
If you go to a pastor or priest, they are going to think, “This is a spiritual problem. Let me dig into the ideas of spirit.” If you talk to a geneticist, they will draw another string of DNA. They are going to be interested in what are your genes? Do you have single nucleotide polymorphisms? What are the variants? Is it a genetic issue? If you go to a psychiatrist, their bias will be to say, “What are your symptoms? Those symptoms go through a Chinese menu. You get a diagnosis and that diagnosis usually gets a drug. If you go to a health coach, they are going to explain your brain symptoms by your style of life. What are your health choices?
If you go to a chiropractor, they are going to say, “This is a spinal issue. It’s issues of alignment.” If you go to a functional medicine doctor or somebody who is very interested in your underlying biochemistry, they will say, “This is a problem with your soup. You can metaphorically cut that brain open and see what oozes out your neurotransmitters, hormones, inflammatory markers or infections. You can go to an electrophysiologist and their bias is going to say, “It’s a problem of your spark. It is the electrical organization of your brain that explains what’s going on with you.” We do quantitative EEG and brain mapping.
When we have that written out in the paper with all these -ists surrounding the brain with these different biases of how to understand this thing called brain, I asked people, “Which one of these is right?” As you’ve been nodding along as we have been having this conversation, you recognize that every one of these things has some validity. Every one of these could be a portion of the root that leads to the trunk and that’s an RCI. Our question as we travel together in what we consider to be a sacred clinician-patient relationship is, what is likely to work best for you now?
Usually, a patient has a bias. They have already entertained and investigated certain areas of approaching their brain, but they haven’t often looked at things that they don’t yet know about, don’t yet understand or don’t yet have a bias towards. We’ll step back and say, “Let’s come at it from either one angle that we think has high validity given your particular situation.” Maybe you had a head injury. In head injury, we see remarkable changes with quantitative EEG and neurofeedback, changes that we don’t get to see using other modalities. Using high dose omega-3 fatty acids and some nutritional things helps with head injuries and behavioral training. All of it is important.
That’s the beautiful thing about the brain. The brain is designed to learn. It’s a learning organ. That’s what it does and it learns its way out of problems. That’s what it means. This is a system neurology viewpoint. If you asked me what we do, it’s the systems neurology view of healthcare. If the brain is healthier, people can start making choices that support their bodies. They can start having a different story about their being and their experience of life. I always think that health is a spiral. It’s going to go up in one direction or it’s going to come down. We have momentum with regard to our health. Getting positive momentum in a person and seeing, “I did make a difference. I have self-efficacy. I can make a difference in my own life.” You can take a very small step and that small step can lead to an amazing next step and the next step after that.
After you draw out the brain in the center and all these -ists all around that piece of paper, what’s your next step? How do you make a determination with the person in that sacred relationship you are talking about which is most critical for their incremental move forward?
That largely is through listening. When people come into our office, it’s close to a 23-page intake packet. We ask a lot of questions. A systems approach to health care is about recognizing that people are complex, and trying to do our best to find what are the hallmarks of a particular patient story that would lead us down one path or another. This is what I’m training our other clinicians to do. It’s not a linear process. I hate the idea that because you have a hammer, everything becomes a nail. We are not a neurofeedback clinic. We are not a nutritional clinic. We are not a natural medicine clinic. We are pioneering a new therapy for Alzheimer’s disease called therapeutic plasma exchange.
The brain is designed to learn. It learns its way out of problems.
People fly in all across the world to be treated here for Alzheimer’s disease, but you were still not a plasma exchange clinic. We are a human clinic. The first thing is we listen and then we test. We have a tremendous number of diagnostic tools from imaging to electrophysiology, biology and neuro-psych testing. We try to do our best to focus on what testing is going to give us the most likelihood of benefit. There’s no substitute at the present time for a learned clinician or somebody who has dealt with their own bias and who has had some experiences of being wrong. Those are powerful things. I would much rather have a doctor who learned from their mistakes than one that’s new.
How about one that has never made a mistake?
If I find one of those, I would run screaming.
The other thing about what you are saying is you’ve got 23 or more pages of questions. It’s the quality of those questions often that holds the real value. Rainer Maria Rilke would say, “We need to learn to live in the question without demanding an instant answer.” In that state of that opening question and living in the question, we might live along someday into an answer.
May I share with you one of our questions? I would like to hear what you think about this because I think this would be of use to anybody reading. One of the questions that we come back to and I will ask this and then re-ask it. Sometimes I have asked the person the same question 6 or 10 times during the course of our relationship. I asked them, “Please think and feel back to when you were last really well, and then what happened.”
It’s such a useful exercise for all of us. Whatever challenge that is and really well, people go like, “I have never been well.” That’s a good answer too. If somebody can’t remember an anchor point of being well, we have a different work to do together. Somebody goes, “It was December 14th, 1987. Everything was flying high.” It’s easier to know causation when you have a timeline to help you along, and then you always want to address your underlying cause or the effects of that cause as much as possible. I love that question, “When were you last well and tell me about that?” It’s amazing how few questions get asked of patients.
That expands sometimes exponentially as you move into clinicians who are trained in an integrative or functional medicine model. I was talking to Dr. Jodie Skillicorn. She’s a psychiatrist who got out of school and realized, “There’s more to do than just give meds to people.” Now, she’s quite expansive in her training. We were talking about the Adverse Childhood Events or ACEs questions. One of the points she made was it’s so valuable to have those questions in the intake packet.
People have them on paper to look at, and then have her ask about them. She says that it’s amazing how many people will write it down, but they won’t tell you about it, or they won’t put it on the piece of paper, but when you are talking to them, they will bring it out. You go back and look at the paperwork and they haven’t marked any of that, but here they are in your question and answer session and they are letting you know. It’s good to work both ways.
Curiosity Heals the Human: How to Solve “Unsolvable” Medical Challenges with Better Questions and Advanced Technologies
That’s a great point. We use ACEs and every single patient coming in gets an ACE score evaluation. We are always astounded by, “What power that gives a patient to start recognizing that their past does matter.” Because their brain is an organ of learning and because their brain has a massive capacity for adaptation and change, they don’t have to be stuck there. It’s going to be hard for them to get out. If you don’t know what box you are in, it’s hard to crawl out of it.
The other aspect of that is that when you identify that a person has had these adverse childhood effects or childhood traumas, and then you start looking at how it has changed their neuro-development and their patterns for responding to the environment, either over-responding or under-responding, then you can teach them skills and training to change that for the better.
We have such a capacity to learn. I ask those questions. I said, “If there are head injuries, one of the things we think about is neurofeedback.” Neurofeedback is a mechanism for that person to answer a different question. With neurofeedback, we put a cap on people’s heads and watch their brain’s electricity, and then we are giving them a puzzle to solve. They watch a movie and when their brain waves figure out this three-dimensional electrical combination lock or pattern that we want to reinforce, the movie plays bright and loud. As the brain figures out this puzzle and neurons that fire together or wire together, it learns its way into a different electrical pattern.
It’s always interesting to me that I think of neurofeedback as a question. We are going to pose this question to you. We are going to be curious about your brain’s electricity and see where that’s going to go. I’m profoundly in a phase of realizing how humans have basically learn their way out of almost every problem that they have. Learning is at the centerpiece of almost everything. Even when we are thinking about diabetes, the body learns its way out of being diabetic. If you eat a whole bunch of sugar and don’t sleep and have high cortisol, the body’s answer to that question of that environment is diabetes.
We are going to stop letting so much sugar inside ourselves and we are going to adapt. We are going to store more fuel rather than having the blood sugar be high and damaging tissue. The body learns all kinds of adaptations to the question of the environment as it’s supposed. I have been profoundly aware of how learning is at the centerpiece of every healing and asking better questions is at the heart of it. I’m saying this. I’m going like, “It’s new for me.” I wrote a book called Curiosity Heals the Human. It’s not a new thought for me, but it hit me afresh how humans learn their way to health. That’s always the most wholesome thing because whatever we learn, we get to keep.
It’s not like a drug. We force something. You give somebody a drug, which is usually a well-dosed poison. That’s why you have to have a license to prescribe because they have a therapeutic window. Too much of it is almost always harmful because drugs are anti-this, blocker to that, inhibitor there, and they serve a great purpose and we use every tool that is wise to use. I don’t have anything against drugs if that’s what’s needed, but if you learn something, you get to keep it. The mark of a great therapy is that the longer you use it, the less you should need it.
In the range of tools that you offer your patients, what are the top 3 or 5 that you keep coming back that you find most of your patients benefit from?
It’s going to be a hard question. It’s slippery because we try to be specific in what we do. It’s not most. It’s a terrible business model. Let me tell you that. A good business model is where you do the same thing to everybody that walks in the door. We do try that individualized care. Number one, we have already mentioned listening, but then we have a couple of nutritionists on staff. Food as medicine is a very important part. I have several projects going on to understand how we can more precisely optimize nourishment for individuals, along with nutrition. Nutritional supplements can be profoundly helpful in individual cases. We do have to remember that they are called supplements. They are supplemental to a diet. You cannot pill your way out of a rotten diet.
If the brain is healthier, people can start making choices that support their bodies.
Those are a couple of tools we use a lot. I’m sitting now in one of our IV rooms. We do a bunch of IV therapy. When we are looking for underlying causes of disease, we recognize that it’s usually either an infection, toxin, allergen, injury and nutrient insufficiency. Many of those can be pulled along by IV therapy. We have the MaxWell Clinic and clinical research center. We are part of the largest precision medicine study in the reversal of Alzheimer’s disease that has ever been done, a large randomized placebo-controlled trial, looking at lifestyle, IV therapy and everything. We are saying, “How much can we move the needle with regard to Alzheimer’s disease?
We are also studying many of these modalities that we have that unfortunately don’t have a drug company to sponsor the research. They go, “There is not a lot of research. Where all the papers for that?” There is. There’s quite a bit of data. Most of it comes from other countries because they have less of a financial model, but IV therapy is amazing.
We have been doing neurofeedback in our clinic for many years, neurofeedback and quantitative EEG measurement. Because the brain is our organ of bias, we need to do everything possible to examine it objectively. The quantitative EEG, measuring the brainwaves, and comparing a person’s brainwaves against normative databases is astoundingly useful. It’s not just to help a person understand their brain and prescribe the right neurofeedback for them. It’s also helpful for people to see their brain as an organ.
A lot of times we blame our soul for our problems like, “I must be bad” or “I’m broken.” We start to look at our sense of self in a toxic way. If we can help people say, “Your brain is struggling. You are a sacred being. You are of infinite worth. You have all kinds of potential, but your brain has some real challenges here electrically,” that release of shame and grief has been therapeutic at a level I never expected when I started doing this work.
People can start to look at their brain as an organ just like their heart or their stomach and say, “I need to care for my brain as opposed to me being the one that’s broken.” It’s very useful. Therapeutic plasma exchange is one of the things that we are pioneering. Therapeutic plasma exchange has been around for a very long time before the treatment of severe auto-immune disease. There has been a very large trial showing it’s effective in slowing in even reversing early Alzheimer’s disease. It’s a profound trial. It’s called the AMBAR trial. It’s a multinational, multicentered, double-blind, sham-controlled trial looking at moderate to mild Alzheimer’s disease.
It essentially cleans the blood of these individuals approximately 18 times over 14 months. There was a 60% decrease in the rate of progression of moderate Alzheimer’s disease. That’s a 60% decrease over fourteen months. In mild Alzheimer’s disease, those individuals had improvement in their memory and attention, which is not just better than placebo but better than the individuals in the treatment arm it started with.
We are gathering data about that. That’s part of our emphasis. When I became aware of this data because I’m trained in apheresis in doing this particular procedure, not many people are, it was unethical not to start trying, and we have been blown away. People are stabilized. People are on a continually downward trajectory and they have stabilized and some have gotten better. It makes us very interested in who is this going to help more.
The next major tool that we have are our testings. We use over 35 different laboratories scattered across the world. We work with several different research organizations. I’m a very big advocate of “Test, don’t guess,” especially when doing something like plasma exchange. We check for a broad range of auto-immune brain disorders. There is a lot more auto-immune dementia than what is recognized. We measure misfolded proteins. Is there evidence of damage in the brain? What’s going to be the likelihood of benefit? That is always my big question. Is this therapy the best match for this person at that time?
Brain Centric Treatment: Our knowledge of our own life and being alive is such a precious gift.
We also have hyperbaric oxygen therapy. We have tools for measuring microcirculation. We have got a wonderful craniosacral therapist and a spiritual psychotherapist. We have about nine clinicians. MaxWell Clinic is a happy place. We participated in a dance marathon, which was pretty awesome. We were doing it as a part of a fundraiser for a local nonprofit. It was awesome to see all 30 of us with a disco ball going and jamming down. Health is so much more than the absence of disease. Thanks for asking. When I started to think about all the tools that we have here, I forget that it has taken about twenty years to accumulate them.
I heard you said you have nine clinicians. What is the range of specialties of those clinicians?
We have 4 medical doctors, 3 physician assistants, 2 nurse practitioners, and 2 nutritionists. It’s an interesting range. All of us are trained in integrative and functional medicine. I’m one of the core faculty for the Institute for Functional Medicine. I lead the part of the certification for clinicians on energy or bioenergetics. I teach mitochondrial, health, and neurodegeneration fatigue. All of them are also going through that certification through that training.
We make a big point to collaborate. We cordoned off an hour and a half every week, and everybody’s schedule is cleared and we have a mandatory meeting where we all share our cases, we learn and we support each other. We are very committed that we are MaxWell. None of us can do this work alone. If we do, we start getting caught in our cognitive bias. As soon as that happens, my central quest of doing whatever I can to not get caught inside the trap of my own cognitive bias won’t be successful.
If there’s another aspect of either the clinic or the work you do, or what drives your passion for this work that we haven’t asked you about yet. You’ve mentioned spirituality once or twice. As we are getting close to the end of our time here, what is it that you want to make sure we put in here along with how people contact you and the clinic.
To contact us, you can go to MaxWellClinic.com. That’s the best way to access us, to see and engage. I will tell you our mission statement. It says, “We exist to wholesomely transform the health of humans and healthcare systems by creating a haven for called healers to discern and deliver what is wise and works, to maximize human potential and well-being one sacred seeking person at a time.” That last bit, “sacred seeking person,” matters. People ask us often, “What diseases do you treat?” We don’t treat diseases. We partner with humans that are seeking their highest potential. It’s a mindset issue.
We will not accept all of the patients that apply to be patients here if a person is not willing to own their health, is not willing to be responsible for the changes that need to take place, and is not willing to wholeheartedly go for it. We are not at a shortage of people to take care of. We want to make the biggest difference in the world possible. Not just on an individual scale, but our goals are larger. We see a need for the transformation of our healthcare system. One that becomes patient-centric, honors systemness, and supports this sacred clinical patient experience.
I use the word sacred. It’s odd for me. I’m a very science-based guy. My job as a physician is to be a fulcrum for people to become their best selves. I’m not a proselytizer. I don’t have a set of beliefs that people need to have in order to be well. I have come to this very deep understanding of how being a human is. I can’t stop using the word sacred. Think of what is the difference between sacred and profane. Profane obviously is twisted, dirty, bent or something that isn’t as it should be. Sacred is the opposite. It’s something that’s glorious and it has full of light and potential.
The mark of a great therapy is that the longer you use it, the less you should need it.
If you think of what makes something valuable, one of the key characteristics of something being valuable is its rarity. Think of yourself that you are made of a bunch of stardust and starlight jammed together. You have this moment in time from across all of eternity and across the entire universe. The likelihood that Timothy will occur again is none. You start thinking of that rarity and that fact that you can understand that you are aware of all the rest of this world we live in.
When we are lookout at the horizon, we don’t think that horizon knows it’s there. We know we are here and we know it’s there. Our knowledge of being alive and our knowledge of our own life is such a precious gift. It’s almost everything potent. It can be used in a way that creates harm or care. It can be things that bring great joy or sorrow. It is a remarkable gift to be alive. It is a sacred thing and it’s never going to occur again. This moment that you and I get to chat is never going to happen again.
One of our core values is that every moment is sacred. That is something we think about. We try to be aware all the time. Everything that we choose to do with our moments is the use of those moments that we possibly can have. When that comes to the realm of healthcare, that’s everything. We are often not asking, “What do you want your health for?” We try to be mindful of asking people what they want their health for and how can they discover, enable and enjoy what we call their MaxWell. It’s what we think is a better term for health.
If you ask, “What is health?” Most people will come back with some variant of, “It’s the absence of disease.” Some people will think it’s body, mind and spirit being healthy. MaxWell is a very personal definition. What is your individual best expression of your genetic and spiritual potential? How can you best discover, enable and enjoy that to pursue your dreams, chase after your goals, and enjoy the process?
I’m going to be listening back to that answer quite a bit. Thank you for that. It’s an honor and a pleasure to meet you and to hear some of the philosophy. I’m also going to go back and transcribe the mission statement. Is that available on the website?
We don’t talk about it a lot. We probably will now that I have talked about it. That would probably be good for people to know the why behind what we do.
It’s a beautifully stated mission statement.
One of my favorite phrases is, “Why not?” People put barriers up in their minds about, “This can’t be or that can’t be.” Why not? Why can’t we have a better healthcare system? Why can’t we have a life that we can increasingly learn to enjoy? At the end of our days and all of us will have an end to our days, how do we best look back and say, “Life well-lived.” I want to be salt and light for our patients so that they are able to do their best and express best the things that only they can express. Nobody else in the universe could be or do what they can do. It’s an amazing thing to ponder.
You get me a little choked up. When I started thinking about this, I feel so incredibly fortunate to get to do what I get to do and to work with such an amazingly wonderful group of people that care so deeply. Thank you for the opportunity to share that. I imagine you are an amazing fulcrum for change. You create an amazing, safe and potent presence. Thank you.
Thank you so much. I also have the same feeling about being blessed by all of the gifts that I have been given and the people like you that I get to meet. It’s an honor. I thank you for sharing your time, and I look forward to following the work.
Thank you. Be well.
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Dr. David Haase MD is a doctor, teacher, entrepreneur and innovator who is deeply committed to maximizing wellness for everyone. He received his medical training at Vanderbilt University and completed his residency in Family Medicine at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He is board-certified in Family Medicine and Integrative Holistic Medicine, and is the Founder of the MaxWell Clinic. He treats a wide range of conditions and has special expertise in fatigue and brain-related disorders, including mood, attention, anxiety, insomnia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, seizures and head injury, as well as inflammatory and immune dysregulation, allergy and cancer support. His friendly manner, enthusiasm and humor make learning fun and light the way for a patient’s healing journey.
He is the Founder and CEO of MaxWell Clinic which was established in 2003 and now has two locations in Tennessee. He is the Cofounder of MDOmics, a company that analyzes complex data sets to enable more precise clinical care, and a nonprofit organization that helps youths make healthier choices for their bodies and their communities at TheFoodInitiative.org. He is the Chief Medical and Innovative Director of XYMOGEN, a leading professional nutraceutical company, as well as Chief Medical Officer for TrendShift, which specializes in personal risk factor monitoring, health trend tracking, and healthcare cost reduction for large employers. He is passionate about making better health accessible to all people and uses his innovation and creativity to bring new diagnostics and treatments to the medical field for the betterment of medicine and health.
Important Links
- MaxWell Clinic
- Dr. Jodie Skillicorn – past episode
- Curiosity Heals the Human
- TheFoodInitiative.org
- XYMOGEN
- TrendShift
About Dr. David Haase
David Haase, MD is a doctor, teacher, entrepreneur, and innovator who is deeply committed to maximizing wellness for everyone. Dr. Haase received his medical training at Vanderbilt University and completed his residency in Family Medicine at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He is board certified in Family Medicine and Integrative Holistic Medicine.
Early in clinical practice, Dr. Haase realized that something very important was missing. He went to medical school so he could better understand and address the root causes of illness and dysfunction – and thereby facilitate the creation of health for individual patients. Instead, he found his training was largely limited to naming disease (putting the patient into a “box”), blaming disease (the context had nothing to do with the problem), and taming disease (often with powerful drugs not tailored to the unique genetics of the individual).
To fill the void he sought out additional medical training and certifications in nutrition, integrative and holistic medicine, functional medicine, health coaching, neurofeedback, systems biology, genomics, bioinformatics, and precision medicine. By identifying and treating the unique root causes of their conditions, Dr. Haase saw remarkable improvements in his patients’ health.
Dr. Haase treats a wide range of conditions and has special expertise in fatigue, brain-related disorders (mood, attention, anxiety, insomnia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, seizures, head injury), inflammatory and immune dysregulation, allergy, and cancer support. His friendly manner, enthusiasm, and humor make learning fun and light the way for a patient’s healing journey.
Dr. Haase is the Founder and CEO of MaxWell Clinic, which was established in 2003 and now has two locations in Tennessee. Dr. Haase is the co-founder of MDOmics, a company that analyzes complex data sets to enable more precise clinical care, and a non-profit organization that helps youths make healthier choices for their bodies and their communities (www.TheFoodInitiative.org). He is the Chief Medical and Innovation Director for XYMOGEN, a leading professional nutraceutical company as well as Chief Medical Officer for TrendShift, which specializes in personal risk factor monitoring, health trend tracking, and health-care cost reduction for large employers.
Dr. Haase serves as medical advisor to Evoke Neuroscience, a company that delivers technologies that promote brain health, and Metabolon, which develops metabolomics diagnostics for precision medicine. Dr. Haase is a sought-after lecturer and teaches internationally about the root causes of disease and innovative, safe treatments through his faculty position at the Institute for Functional Medicine and as an adjunct professor at the University of South Florida, University of Miami, and Western State University.
Dr. Haase integrates nutrition, metabolomics, neuroelectrophysiology, genomics, environmental factors, and lifestyle medicine to help his patients get better and he shares these concepts with other medical professionals for improved patient care. Dr. Haase is passionate about making better health accessible to all people and uses his innovation and creativity to bring new diagnostics and treatments to the medical field for the betterment of medicine and health.
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