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Vicki is currently the Director of Performance with the PWHL Montreal hockey team. She joined Precision Longevity in 2023 as our Exercise Coordinator and is responsible for creating individual exercise programs targeting longevity performance outcomes for our clients. She was formerly a Lead Sport Performance Coach at Brock University where she worked with the Men’s and Women’s Hockey and Soccer teams. Vicki has worked with Hockey Canada’s Women’s National team programs since 2016. She is currently the Strength & Conditioning Integrated Support Team lead for all National Women’s Hockey programs and is also the lead S&C coach with the Senior National Team.
Outside of hockey, Vicki has been an S&C coach with Wrestling Canada since the 2016 Olympics. Vicki is currently pursuing her PhD that will be focused on identifying, measuring, and improving off-ice key performance indicators for linear skating speed. As an athlete, she was a member of Canada’s National hockey team and while she played NCAA hockey at Mercyhurst university, she was the recipient of the Patty Kazmaier Memorial Award as the top collegiate player in the nation in 2010.
Abbey is a Registered Psychotherapist with the College of Psychotherapists of Ontario. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from McGill University in Montreal and completed his psychotherapy training at the Transformational Arts College in Toronto. He studied acting at the Circle in the Square Theatre School in New York City and trained classically as a singer for over ten years. He has vast experience in mindfulness-based meditation and works with the Internal Family Systems model.
Abbey practices in Toronto, Ontario and also offers virtual visits with clients. Some of the conditions he works with include anxiety, depression, addictions, anger, sadness and shame. He works with individuals as well as couples. “I believe in the innate capability each of us has within us that, when explored, given space, and nurtured, leads us back to health. In our work, I listen to what your system reveals in the moment and go from there, following your natural road map, leading you along the path back to peace.”
As a therapist, Abbey offers a caring heart, the ability to hear you as you want to be heard, and an intuitive sense to know where you are stuck within yourself. He will rarely tell you what you should do but will ask questions that help lead you back to yourself. He has a well-rounded approach to therapy, drawing from training in psychology, the arts, and years practicing Vipassana meditation. In Vipassana, one learns to observe the reality as it is, not as one wants it to be. “This key tenet in mindfulness-based meditation, the ability to be present in the moment, is something I have experience with and will bring to our work together.”
Dr. Emilio Raimondo is the cardiology consultant for Precision Longevity. He has vast experience in lipidology and the most advanced cardiac diagnostics. Dr. Raimondo obtained his medical degree at the University of Western Ontario graduating cum laude. He trained in Internal Medicine at the University of Toronto and returned to the University of Western Ontario to subspecialize in Cardiology and Critical Care Medicine. In 1985, he began practicing in St. Catharines, Ontario. Dr. Raimondo has served as the head of the Critical Care Unit and the Department of Medicine in the St. Catharines hospital system and also has led the pacemaker clinic and ECHO lab. He presently focuses his practice on outpatient cardiology and non-invasive cardiology testing. He offers cardiac consultation, various forms of stress testing, echocardiography, and ambulatory monitoring.
Dr. Saeed Shaikh, M.D., F.R.C.P.C., is the Co-founder of Precision Longevity Inc. and Director of the Niagara Peninsula Arthritis Centre. A native of Toronto, Dr. Shaikh received his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Toronto and Doctor of Medicine from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. He completed his Residency in Internal Medicine at the Medical Center of Delaware, Fellowship in Rheumatology at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and a post-graduate Fellowship at the University of Manitoba. He has completed board certifications in both Internal Medicine and Rheumatology in the United States and Canada. He has served on the Board of Directors for the Canadian Rheumatology Research Consortium and is currently an Assistant Clinical Professor at McMaster University.
In 2018 I attended my thirty-year high school reunion at a suburban Toronto area country club. Given the passage of time, it was natural to be curious how people looked and to hear about where their lives had taken them. Not surprisingly, there were varying amounts of grey hair, some had stayed slim, and others had put on mid-life weight. However, all that aside, we were also there to celebrate a dear classmate who had recently passed away from esophageal cancer. He was a memorable friend of mine that was an integral part of my teenage years. Four months prior to that event, a close medical school friend of mine passed away after taking his own life. I asked myself, was there something that could have been done to catch the esophageal tumour earlier? Could there have been a way to identify the inner pain of my med school friend and a way to change his tragic fate?
In the next couple of years, several other men I knew around my age had heart attacks. A couple of them did not survive and the ones that did were unable to return to youthful things like high exertion sports. People’s lives were changing and the common explanation I got was that this is what happens with age. I found this terribly disturbing. Does the natural process of aging mean we must have a chronic disease, be it atherosclerosis, hypertension, obesity, or being pre-diabetic? Does it mean we lose the ability to do activities we find highly satisfying? Meanwhile, in my mid-fifties, I was feeling no different than when I was thirty. I felt physically strong and energetic and had not stopped lifting weights or playing hockey with competitive players several decades younger. Performance sport, particularly hockey, was a big part of my early life and that was later translated into general fitness and coaching. In late 2022, I decided I would start training for masters level sprinting and approach it with the right coaching and some sport science to try maximize my potential. What was my motivation? Well, I knew what I did not want. I did not want to be slow moving, weak, or frail, or slide down the path of transitioning to chronic diseases that would reduce my quality of life. I was also aware that my family had a genetic predisposition as my father and his seven siblings had type 2 diabetes mellitus and atherosclerotic heart disease.
After 20 years in practice as a rheumatologist, it became very apparent that treating conditions like rheumatoid arthritis became much easier because scientific innovation had advanced to a point where we could treat this disease with effective pharmaceuticals. By far the biggest challenge in our clinic became lifestyle related diseases such as obesity, hypertension, type 2 diabetes mellitus, mental health issues, and what we refer to as general deconditioning (or lack of fitness). We could treat rheumatoid arthritis, but it was those other problems that were robbing people of their health and shortening their lives.
Then COVID-19 changed our collective lives like nothing we had ever experienced. The pandemic affected everyone differently and for some people it was a time of loss and struggle and for others, it was a time for reflection and focus. It was well documented how exercise levels were reduced and alcohol and drug intake increased in many people. However, for some people, including myself, self- exploration fueled the pursuit of a greater sense of purpose. I chose to read more, self-educate, and engage deeply in longevity-based health. Meanwhile our health system in Canada was cracking at its seams. Patients were sicker and COVID infection had become a massive risk for death and hospitalization in those that had chronic diseases and weakened immune systems. Often these were elderly people, however, younger people who were less healthy were also affected much more by this virus. To make matters worse, access to healthcare became a major challenge. I decided I needed to make some fundamental changes to what I did as a medical doctor because the status quo of our current health model was clearly not working. Patients were sicker and not much was being done about highly preventable chronic diseases. The concept of Precision Longevity started taking shape in 2021. Biotechnology had been advancing at a rapid pace yet little of that was being translated to health practice. For example, the first mapping of the human genome cost 3 billion dollars and now we can have it done for a few hundred dollars. We had a lot more knowledge of molecular and cellular processes involved in aging, and finer details regarding tactical lifestyle behaviours, nutrition, supplements, and the use of pharmaceuticals that were not being translated to our patients. If we were to wait for government or practice guidelines to change, it may be several more decades before substantial progress becomes available for patients. The idea of building long-term care facilities and adding more support workers for the elderly is merely putting band aids over bullet holes. We need to support healthy aging and build a more independent elderly population. Precision Longevity became a reality after lengthy conversations with a longtime friend and colleague of mine, Derek Haaland, who is a brilliant physician and visionary. Our ideas progressed at a rapid pace, and we both now collaborate with a global ecosystem of Longevity leaders, sharing best practices in a rapidly growing field. I value personal health and my amazing family and close confidantes as the highest priorities in my life. I am passionate and dedicated to advancing health for as many people as possible and look forward with excitement at the future possibilities of maintaining an enriched life and helping advance the science and art of health.
Dr. Derek Haaland, M.D., M.Sc., F.R.C.P.C., was born in Sudbury, Ontario. He attended the University of Guelph, where he did a B.Sc. in Biomedical Sciences and an M.Sc. in Nutritional Sciences. He then went on to do his M.D. at Dalhousie University. He completed his residency training in Internal Medicine at McMaster University, a combined fellowship in Rheumatology and Clinical Immunology & Allergy, and a year as a Clinical Scholar as the Geoff Carr Lupus Fellow. He is an Associate Clinical Professor at McMaster University and Assistant Professor at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine in Sudbury. He is the Founder and Medical Director of the Waterside Clinic in Barrie and co-founder and Co-director of Precision Longevity.
I started medical school nearly a quarter century ago. After a good grounding in all things granola and holistic at the University of Guelph, I commenced “drinking the Kool-Aid®” of modern medicine at Dalhousie University in 1999. Don’t get me wrong, it was a delicious and satiating beverage indeed. It was a time of revolution. Notably, infliximab (Remicade®) was licensed for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis that year, ushering in the “biologic” or “advanced therapeutic” era in modern medicine. With a fascination for the causes and cures of autoimmune and autoinflammatory diseases, I pursued training in Internal Medicine at McMaster University, followed by a combined fellowship in Rheumatology and Clinical Immunology & Allergy, and thereafter a year as a Clinical Scholar as the Geoff Carr Lupus Fellow.
They say Barrie is as far south as a person from Sudbury can go, and still feel comfortable. I seem to fit the mold, and following clinical scholarship, I established the Waterside Clinic in Barrie, Ontario. Since that time, my team and I have had the absolute privilege of treating thousands of patients with complex inflammatory, immunologic, and other systemic conditions. It has now been 20 years since I left Dalhousie. My father would joke with me, “When are doctors going to stop practicing and finally be competent?”. Indeed, it has been the practice of medicine over the last 13 years that has taught me much about the greatest advances in medicine but much more about the human condition and the failings of our current system. This is not to criticize the current system itself. It is, however, to point out the clear fact that modern medical practice represents an important facet of optimal health and wellness but is by no means a totality. Biologics and other advanced therapies have represented absolute paradigm shifts in both our understanding and treatment of modern ailments. However, I have learned that no combination of the best medication ensures good success, let alone optimal outcome, in the absence of a truly holistic approach. The need for a new scientifically and medically grounded holism has never been more obvious. What follows are some of the other reasons founding Precision Longevity was critical for me:
I have observed medical science grow exponentially for decades while medical practice has grown linearly at best. Although our current medical model offers more promise than ever before, the gap between medical science and medical practice has ironically never been greater. While expressing gratitude to modern medicine’s clinical trials (my team and I are involved) and a plethora of new and emerging approaches, we can also acknowledge some limitations of the standard approach. Although critical for proof-of-principle (that is – can a given approach work in the ideal scenario?), the current approach ignores outliers, excludes the complexities, and depends on extrapolation of “the average patient” to you, a living, breathing, infinitely unique individual. This “average patient” represents an imaginary patient that never has and never will exist, by all odds. It is time to invert this approach and study and optimize the actual patient – you. There is absolutely nothing wrong with modern medicine per se; it is just that at times, it conflates or confuses what it is (a system of inquiry and an approach) with what it thinks it is – a totality, a “whole truth and nothing but the truth”, to borrow a phrase.
In practice, “modern medicine” is nearly completely blind to the massive gap between “disease-free” and “optimal health”. By depending on a “disease” to emerge (following typically years if not decades of dysfunction) to “diagnose and treat”, it systematically misses a massive opportunity for prevention by design. Worse, it never even brings the possibility of optimal health into focus. I have observed computer technology and artificial intelligence, including machine learning, come to the forefront in many domains of modern life. Yet decisions about human health are made considering only a handful or two variables at a time – the number our brains happen to be able to juggle at once. Yet tens of thousands of variables are relevant to optimal health and longevity for each of us. Dozens and dozens of variables are likely to apply to each particular consideration. Consider memorizing a ten-digit phone number and now a one hundred and one-thousand-digit number, and you quickly get the point. The time is nigh to integrate modern computer technology into decision making about health & wellness, and the optimization of healthspan & lifespan. I might argue most excitingly, the era of Longevity Medicine is truly upon us. We have all had the idea of “slowing aging” or perhaps “delaying the ravages of time”. This is so entrenched in our day-to-day perception of reality – “all things must pass” as George Harrison said. However, indeed, the reality is that the relationship between “time” and “aging” is strong (the way sunny summer days are strongly correlated with hot summer days) but not absolute.
Modern science can attest that the mechanisms of aging itself are being unravelled. Indeed, aging is not simply a progressive decay of the living system over time; rather it is a set of highly coordinated phenomena. The opportunity for intervention is upon us, not just to “slow aging” but ultimately to reverse it. The age of Longevity Medicine is here and now!!!
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