CONVENTIONAL medicine is only focused on curing symptoms, and not on regenerating your systems. Dr Arwa Alshaer and Dr Jim Bell of ATP Medical Clinic are proposing an approach to medical treatment that is a paradigm shift from the conventional system of drugs and surgeries. In this interview, the two experts share with the Arab Times some of the latest findings in medical science and how the answer to a real and wholesome health lies in just allowing our bodies to do what they were fundamentally constructed for: exercise. Read on and find out interesting facts about the positive effects of building muscle mass, including a titbit about a 108 year old man who clocked 22 seconds for a 100 m dash, bettering the world high-school average for the same distance.

Question: You have a very interesting and innovative approach to medical treatment. Tell us something about it.
Answer: Dr Jim Bell: The key thing that we are doing is educating people on the new way of practicing medicine. Medicine has never been practiced this way before. What we now know is that exercise is medicine. Nutrition is medicine. We have very specific sport medicine protocols. Non-invasive, no drugs, no surgeries... that can correct a lot of problems that people are having.
All your chronic diseases, disability, dysfunctions... all your heart diseases, pulmonary diseases, most of your immunological diseases, a lot of psychological disorders, skeleton-muscular problems, and all chronic disorders are caused by lack of physical activity.
So, if people don’t exercise enough, their physiological system degenerates. So, our protocols are designed to regenerate the physiological systems to bring the patient back to optimal health.
So, the key thing here is education and getting the word out. A lot of people in the US and Europe have realized that drugs don’t work. Drugs typically mask symptoms. They don’t cure anything. The idea is to have non-invasive cures without relying on drugs or surgeries.

Q: There is already a high degree of awareness on this issue of physical activity in Kuwait, where lifestyle diseases are on the rise. People are increasingly turning to exercise and diet. Now, how different is what you are saying from what people already know?
A: Dr Jim Bell: Firstly, my colleague, Dr Arwa Alshaer, is a world-class cardiologist. So, she deals with people with heart disease. The cardiovascular and the cardio-respiratory systems begin to degenerate because of lack of physical activity. Now, at that stage you might be out of shape, but you are not in a disease state yet.
Dr Arwa doesn’t get involved with patients until they have problems of heart disease. What we can do using our fitness centre part of the clinic is come up with very specific, very customized, very tailor-made medical and sport medicine protocols that will regenerate your system. Unfortunately, the gyms are not equipped to handle patients with medical restrictions exercise.
A gym can do an adequate job with a person who is out of shape and isn’t presenting with any disease. But when someone has a heart disease, cancer, rheumatoid arthritis or type 2 diabetes...

Q: You deal with cancer too?
A: Dr Jim Bell: The cancer we are looking at is related to the Multiple Insult Theory. If you ask me what Multiple Insult refers to, I would say there’s a phase when cells are replicating themselves when they are susceptible to damage. So, when an insult to the cell occurs during the replication phase, the DNA structure basically changes. It doesn’t replicate itself identically. There are some genes that malfunction in them. So, the Multiple Insult Theory is that if you are going to get one sunburn, you are not going to get cancer from that. If you smoke one cigarette, you are not going to get cancer from that. But if you are going to smoke 3 packets of cigarette a day, or if you are eating too much processed foods, your environment becomes acidic, that causes multiple insults to the cell. And that’s when cancers can occur.
What happens is most of your cells are very organized. They replicate themselves in a very orderly manner. Cancer cells don’t. They just replicate themselves like mad and tumours start to occur.

So, when benign tumours occur they may interrupt the physiological functions but then they are not destroying the system. Malignancy is when it starts to spread, and now they are destroying other cells. That’s when you have a good chance that you are going to die very rapidly.
With the right exercise, nutrition prescription, yes, if we can catch the cancer early enough, we can reverse the cancer. Because exercise strengthens the immune system. The immune system is charged with correcting the malfunctioning cells.
So, there are a number of different points of cancer. Number one is that they are preventative; in our sport medicine protocols we can prevent you from getting cancer, but if you do get cancer and we can catch it early enough, we can reverse it. Nutrition is very important. If you look at research, cancers only grow in an acidic environment. The goal of our nutrition program is to keep your body very alkaline. An alkaline environment is very anti-inflammatory. Our nutrition prescriptions will be to make your body alkaline.

Q: In this part of the world, type-2 diabetes is a major cause of worry. What is your approach to tackling that problem?
A: Dr Jim Bell: There is a world-wide pandemic of type-2 diabetes, but the Middle East is particularly hit hard with it. In a research I saw that 71 percent of deaths in the UAE are attributed to type-2 diabetes. In Bahrain, it’s 85 percent of the deaths. From talking to other healthcare experts in Kuwait, it seems the numbers are exceedingly high here too.
If we can catch type 2 diabetes early enough, we can completely reverse it.
The medical community has got it entirely wrong. For metabolic syndrome, type-2 diabetes, obesity, the focus of conventional medicine has been on fat loss. That’s been a mistake. What we are showing now is that the way to reverse type-2 diabetes is by increasing muscle mass. So, we have very specific protocols that can increase muscle mass very rapidly.

Q: But increase in muscle mass means reduction in fat mass, which is fat loss, isn’t it?
A: Dr Jim Bell: Yes, the increase in muscle mass will automatically reduce fat mass. Because as you increase muscle mass, you increase metabolic rate. So, with more muscle mass on your body, even when you are sleeping, you are going to be burning more calories. The key thing is that the protocols we have here are designed to hit every single metabolism in your body, every single physiological system in your body. So, the endocrine system improves automatically.
The endocrine system is often overlooked. It controls every system in the body. It is the messenger system, it’s the communication system. When you lack adequate exercise, your endocrine system also degenerates and it is not producing a lot of the energy molecules that you used to have when you were younger. Dr Arwa is an endocrine specialist as well. And between her expertise and the expertise that I bring to the clinic, we can take care of that problem.
We just want the people to get enough energy to get into this office, and we can take care of everything else.

Q: Do you have any case studies of recoveries using your protocols?
A: Dr Jim Bell: Well, the Journal of Endocrinology published a research material showing that increasing the muscle mass is the only way of reversing type-2 diabetes. Of all the protocols that cardiologists have at their disposal to determine your risk of dying of heart disease, it was not triglycerides, not HDL, not blood pressure, not any other typical models that you use, it was your timing to walk, jog and run. How quickly you can complete a mile is your determining factor of how risky you are of dying of heart disease.
So, if it takes you more than 15 minutes to complete a mile, your risk is three times greater of dying of heart disease than someone who takes 8 minutes to complete the same distance.

Q: This is irrespective of everything else?
A: Dr Jim Bell: Yes, irrespective of everything else. That is the number one determining factor. We have very specific protocols here that if your time is 20 minutes to complete a mile, if you work with us within six months you will be less than 8 minutes in a mile. So, basically, in six months we will improve your chances by 300 percent of not dying of heart disease.

Q: Recently, I happened to talk to a medical doctor, and he told me that waist circumference was a determining factor for a lot of diseases including heart diseases. So, why this discrepancy in your studies, and how can we know which is more credible?
A: Dr Arwa Alshaer: Metabolic syndrome includes many factors. One of them is waist circumference which is obesity. The most dangerous obesity is the abdominal obesity. High blood pressure, high glucose levels, hyperlipidemia... all these are part of metabolic syndrome.
When a patient comes to you presenting these problems, just by increasing his muscle mass, the patient can improve his insulin sensitivity. Visceral obesity is an organ, it’s not just a fat tissue. Visceral obesity creates a lot of inflammatory factors, which can lead to cancer and heart diseases.

Q: Visceral fat is fat around your internal organs, isn’t it?
A: Dr Arwa Alshaer: Yes, when you have abdominal fat, it means there is fat around your heart, liver and so on. So, as I was saying, increasing muscle mass is the key to curing metabolic syndrome related diseases. From age 50 to 70 you lose 30 percent of your muscular mass. So, with age you lose muscle mass. The most intense organ for metabolism is the muscle. If you lose your muscle your metabolism rate slows down and you start to gain weight.
An international study showed that people with low cardio-respiratory fitness have 70 percent chance of all-cause mortality. This means they can die of any cause, cancer, heart attack and so on.
In our conventional healthcare system, after a patient recovers from a heart attack, we just give him medicines, but never work on rehabilitating him to prevent another attack. We should have a holistic approach to treat patients. We have to spend more time with them. It’s not just a matter of medication, but it’s also diet, exercise and checking their fitness level.
There is a study that shows that regular exercise is as good as a Stent for stable angina. This was published in a reputed medical journals.

Q: You mean gym-pumped muscles when you say muscle mass?
A: Dr Jim Bell: You lose muscle mass as you age. You are either losing muscle mass day by day, or you are doing some exercise to build it. There is no in between. You are either losing or gaining. Most people don’t know this. As their muscle mass goes away, their metabolism goes away, and they are gaining fat. So, their legs and hands may look much bigger, but they don’t have much muscle there.
Now, I am not saying you should look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, but I will say that when you are looking at a healthy, sexy body, know that it’s got muscles. It’s not that the fat magically forms in the right places to make you look great; it’s muscles that give your body form.
Our bodies are designed to move. One of the curses of all this technology that we have is that we don’t have to move anymore. The human body is the only machine ever constructed that gets better with use. The more you use it, the better it gets. If you don’t use it, you lose it.

Q: Would you recommend the usually recommended exercise patterns like walking half an hour a day and so on? Or do you think that’s not good enough?
A: Dr Jim Bell: We have very specific protocols. Gyms may be recruiting some of the best personal trainers in the world, but you need to go through very intensive training to become a medical fitness specialist. So the knowledge, skills and abilities that you get in our clinic is far superior to anything that you get in a personal trainer. A medical fitness specialist will have to know what the risks are with a patient who is taking drugs.

Moreover, the fitness industry has not made proper strides in learning biomechanics. I can take you through a far harder workout than a usual gym. Yet, our workout is far safer. Because we are going to make sure that your movement is perfect so that there’s not going to be any stress on your joints. We target muscles not joints. When people walk out after a workout in a gym, their knee hurts or their elbow hurts or their back hurts. We are going to make sure that our people do the ideal amount of intense training so that it’s the safest, most effective workout. You are not going to get injured, but you are going to see the gains very, very rapidly, 400 percent more rapidly than in a regular gym.
Dr Arwa AlShaer: Diabetes in Latin means to siphon off. It is so named because this disease sucks out all your nutrients. So, when a diabetic suddenly hits the gym, most of them suffer from low magnesium levels. And they have other deficiencies as well, but let’s take magnesium. If you send such a person to gym without due nutritional evaluation, you can expose him to danger. If they workout with low magnesium, they can suffer from a bout of arrhythmia, which is irregular heartbeat which can potentially cause defibrillation and death.

So, we do a medical evaluation, fitness evaluation and also nutritional evaluation. We measure their vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fatty acids and also their energy cycle or the ATP Cycle. This is where we took our name from. ATP Medical is an acronym for Advanced Treatment Prevention, but medically it stands for Adenosine Tri Phosphate, which is produced by mitochondria, the power-house of the cell.
We optimize people’s biochemistry by improving their ATP cycle. This is a holistic medicine, and I think this is the medicine of the 21st century. It will focus on improving the biochemistry. It is an in-depth, individualized evaluation and analysis of current health status and by clinical trends to unlock every individual’s health by screening the body from head to toe. This is the corner stone of ATP Medical Clinic.

We combine prevention with the earliest possible diagnosis of the disease using the most advanced equipment and methods so that treatment can be minimally invasive and most effective.
One missed disease in your body can result in poor health. Any disease starts with biochemical imbalances in your body, and we discover the imbalances before the disease takes hold of your body. This is how we approach our patients and clients. I say clients because we lay much emphasis on prevention, and we are open to not just patients, but also normal individuals. Our method of examination is also very different. We combine eastern philosophy with western technology.

Jim bell: Just to put things in perspective, the world record holder for 100 ms dash is held by Usain Bolt at 9.56 sec, which is a superhuman speed. The average 100 m speed for high school students is about 25.5 sec. There is a 60 year old man out there who can run 100 m in 11.2 sec. And there is a man who started walking 4 decades ago because he had a heart disease; at age 108 he ran 100 m in 22 seconds flat. He is British. It means he can outrun most of the kids in high school around the world. Remember, he is 108.
The protocols regenerated him. Chronologically he is a 108, but physiologically he is probably just a high school kid. His physiological age is several decades younger than his chronological age. People are prematurely ageing because they are not physically active.
So, people who feel they don’t have the energy to work or exercise, need to get here, because we will regenerate you. It’s not just physical, but with proper exercise your IQ, attention and focus goes up. You can be a more successful individual in life.

biographies
Dr Jim Bell has a PhD in Sports Medicine and is the Founder and CEO of International Fitness Professionals Association (IFPA). He has authored 12 books on Sport Medicine. Dr Arwa Alshaer is Consultant Cardiology and Internal Medicine (PhD) at ATP Medical Clinic. She has a Master’s Degree in Metabolic and Nutrition Medicine and is on the American Board of Regenerative and Functional Medicine.