SignalsAZ.com Prescott News Podcast - Metabolic Truths: A Conversation with Dr. Brian on Healing from the Inside Out

Episode Date: July 28, 2025

Send us a text and chime in!In this insightful premiere episode, host Megan McClenahan sits down with Dr. Brian from Arizona Metabolic Health to dig deep into the root causes of today’s most pressing chronic diseases. With over 25 years of experience in internal medicine, Dr. Brian explains why traditional healthcare often falls short by treating symptoms instead of addressing metabolic health at its core. From diabetes and obesity to the rising cost of elder care, this episode explores how lifestyle changes, community-based care, and a more personalized medical approach can change lives. Home | Arizona Metabolic HealthCheck out the CAST11.com Website at: https://CAST11.com Follow the CAST11 Podcast Network on Facebook at: https://Facebook.com/CAST11AZFollow Cast11 Instagram at: https://www.instagram.com/cast11_podcast_network

This is a friendly reminder that we are here for entertainment purposes only. Check with your healthcare professionals before making any lifestyle or medicine changes. What we're talking about is our clinical experience in what we've seen. You can consult me as a doctor, or you can consult my guest and get all of your questions answered. But we can help to educate you a bit and allow you to think a little differently. Again, always consult your medical professionals before making any lifestyle changes. Thank you. Well, good morning. I'm Megan McClanahan. Welcome to back to Cast 11. I've got Brian from AISMetabolic

metabolic health with me this morning. Welcome. Megan, thanks for having me. Absolutely. Tell us a little about what you do. Well, I focus a lot on metabolic health. I'm an internal medicine doc. I've been in practice for almost 25 years. All my gray hair show that. And I started to realize how the system was so crazy that we were just throwing meds at everyone and not looking at the root cause of illness. So over my research, I started looking and saying, gosh, there's a lot of stuff they didn't teach us in med school about all these illnesses. Every chronic disease on treating has to come back to metabolic illness. Obesity, diabetes, hypertension, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's disease, joint pains, arthritis. It says chronic inflammation that we're dealing with. And so instead of throwing a

drug, a lot of times lifestyle can help. Now, I do do medications. I prescribe antibiotics and I do have a prescription pad, but I try to simplify the medical regimen as much as I can. Right. Tell us what your main focus is. My main focus is adult medicine. You know, primary care. I've been primary care for like almost 25 years. And so I love that building that relationship with patients and following. And really, someone will come in with ulcers, headaches, back pain, and they're going through a divorce and say, well, this is pretty normal. When you're stressed, all these things happen. So my focus has really been on these metabolic diseases like diabetes has been the big one because when I first

started practice, I was so stressed whenever I had someone with diabetes because I knew the long-term consequences. Diabetes is the number one cause of blindness, number one cause of kidney failure, number one cause of heart attack, number one cause of disability. And you look at that and say, gosh, we could do better than just throwing medications. Why do we get to be diabetic and what can we do to reverse that process? And even up to a few years ago, the American Diabetes Association, said this is a chronic irreversible disease. And our clinical experience says it's not, you know, that we can intervene and we can reduce, at least reduce the amount of insulin you need. If you're type 1, you need insulin, but type 2 is a lot of times we can get them off insulin pretty

quickly, especially if they just got diagnosed. So how would someone get in contact with you? The easiest way is my website, Arizona at Metabolichealth.com. I'm on social media, on X and Instagram, things like that. But really through the website, it is the best way because we have all of our resources there also. Sounds good. You also have big local podcast that you do. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, one that I started years ago.

This is probably eight years ago now called low carb MD. And we were really talking about cutting out processed food and sugar, really focusing on the nutritional aspects. But a lot of times when we had a guest on who lost 80 pounds or reversed their diabetes, We start talking about other things like faith, right, about lifestyle, stress, sleep. And people said, we don't want to hear about those things. We just want to hear about the nutrition aspects. But you realize it's a big picture.

All those things matter. We can't just eat the right thing and think we can be a jerk to everyone and be stressed out and not sleep and think we're going to have benefits. So all these things raise these stress hormones, cortisol, insulin. And so addressing those things, I started talking about them and people didn't like it as much. So I said, okay, I'll start another podcast called Life's Ben. medicine where we talk about everything else. We talk about nutrition aspect of it, but we talk about people's motivation in life and really what matters in life ultimately. Our health is so important. And our goal, really, one of the biggest things is to have your lifespan equal your health span.

Health span is when you're able to be independent. So a lot of people I see, they're in nursing homes. And if we can keep them healthier, we can prevent that. You know, going through that with my parents and seeing them as the age, you realize, gosh, everything, just, just, to give someone medicine in a in a skilled nursing facility is a thousand dollars a month out of your pocket you know i didn't never realize anything until now if they need to be pushed down to have breakfast it's another thousand dollars a month so a lot of family members are being stuck and if we can delay that you know hopefully never have to go into an assisted type of living but if we can prevent that or delay it that that's a big deal for our families incontinence and mental you know mental

illness and there's so much we can we can help that's crazy i know that even for like my parents personally you know they're getting older um i know that we have such a need for the medical professionals right now and we are so lucky to have you here and um i really want to help you focus on your local audience here you know can you tell us a little bit more about what you're trying to do for the local community here in Prescott. Gosh, you know, Prescott, when I was moving here, I'd ask people, what are the good and the bad? I always like to look at the risk and benefit of everything I do. And the biggest complaint everyone had was there's not enough doctors. And I said, well, I'm not too upset about that as a physician. But coming in and realizing, you know, how long it takes,

I talked to my neighbors and it takes five months, six months to see a new doctor. And sometimes they can't get an appointment for three weeks or four weeks. By then, you're either better or you died, You know, so it's a crazy, we have a crazy shortage of doctors here. And for me, my type of medicine is direct primary care. So it's a monthly $100 a month, say. And they can see me as many times. I don't want people to not get treatment because they're afraid of paying every time they come in. So it's kind of like you pay in it.

It's like you go to a resort or something. There's no co-pays, right? And we can address these things. Call any time. And I'm available. And so I went from having 2,500 patients at my old practice to, to I'm limiting to three to 400 in this practice. So it allows you to have that individualized care.

So we can sit down, find out what the problem is and say, let's fix these problems. Then you don't have to see me as often, too. But it's an upfront investment for me to say, look, I'm betting I can make you healthier and you won't need me every week. But if we have wounds and things like that, if we don't control diabetes and these other health problems, it's way more. You know, in my old practice, some people we'd see every week. or every two weeks because they were so sick that they couldn't function without seeing their doctor.

And so what I love now is people come in for their annual. They go, I feel great. What do we want to talk about? So it's fantastic to really talk about the kids or grandkids and just be able to have that human connection and know our patients rather than just being a number. Absolutely. And it's so nice to see that progress that they've been making as they've been with you. That's got to be the best rewarding part of it. I love it because if we do certain labs, like a fasting insulin, for instance, we can prevent.

event. We have that, that number increases and increase. It means your body is resistant to insulin that you need more and more to get that same effect, right? As we get older, we get more visceral fat, which is fat around the organs. And we're finding if we see that creeping up, we have 10 to 15 years before you get diabetes type 2. So it's preventable. And we can intervene. If we work together, we can intervene and block, you know, prevent that from ever happening. Because people don't realize once you get all these diagnoses, when you want to get your life insurance, it's hard to get in. They'll say, no, you have diabetes, you have hypertension, and they know you're a higher risk. So if we can prevent those things or reverse them, it helps people in the long run, for sure. The big problem with what I saw in standard medical care is the doctors get paid more for the sick or the patients get, right? Because if I can give you a bunch of diagnosis codes, then I get paid more for that business because it's more complicated. But what happens if we prevent those things, right? So that was one thing that when I left this system, the head of the HMO where I worked in San Diego called me in and we had a meeting, really nice meeting.

And he was asking about us having a midlife crisis because he knew how much money I was making it, the old practice. But I said, our values are different. Right. Listen, and in HMO, I have 12 minutes with a patient to 15 minutes. I said, do you know how many of those patients? I can document that we either reverse their diabetes or prevent it. And that was in the hundreds of that time, right? This is back in 2020.

Wow. And he said, well, I said, I'm saving your system a lot of money because, again, number one cause of dialysis, blindness, heart attacks, amputation. Diabetes is the key to all this. Right. So he said, you're actually costing us money for the system. And I said, how can that possibly be by preventing diseases what we're supposed to be doing? Right. How can I be costing you money? He said, well, because the more diagnosis codes the patient gets, the more we get paid by the federal government. So Medicare is getting destroyed right now because we have so many sick. people. But ones that we can keep people from getting these illnesses and not need to be the experts at prescribing more and more medications and just stacking them on. You know, I see patients routinely on their first visit and they're taking 20 to 25 medicines. Wow. You just think, gosh, and a lot of those medicines, they don't even need the first medicine anymore. And the second medicine was for the side effects of the first medicine. Right. And they're like, what are we doing here? Because doctors are afraid to deprescribe, take away medicines. Because if something happens, they'll say, well, you

took the medicine and then they had an issue. But I was fortunate enough to be part of the study where we were the first doctors ever to do a scientific study on deperscribing medications. How do we safely get people off of insulin? How do we safely get people off hypertension medicines? Heartburn medicines, once people get on there, they're on it forever. And then you have problems with osteoporosis, increased risk of dementia, increased risk of infections. So you think, why don't we limit those meds? Right. Even antibiotics. The more you take, the more it affects the gut microbiome and other things that can affect our health long term. And your body can also build up an immunity to them.

Exactly. If you take them for too long, correct? Exactly. And the bugs can develop immunity. Yeah. Yeah. So it gets more and more complicated, the more antibiotics that you actually take. It's so dangerous.

Well, Brian, thank you for coming in this morning. I really look forward to our next episode. And we'll go ahead and say thank you for being here. And we're going to go ahead and wrap up. talk to you soon. All right, Megan, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.