HealthView, Inc. - Full Body Scanning - Psychology Today Radio Interview

Dr. Eisenberg, are you with us?

Yes, I am here.

Wonderful. Well welcome to Psychology Today. It's an honor to have you on the show. Now actually, I don't want to hide the fact that I've known you for awhile - at least years ago I knew you and I know your family, and admire you all very, very much. And then, much to my delight, I saw your name on the center of U.S.A. Today (I happened to be on an airplane at the time) and I said, "Wow! This is incredible. This is great stuff." And I know since then, you've been on Oprah Winfrey and I hear a rumor that you had something like 10,000 calls as a result of that. Is that correct?

I believe so.

That's amazing. So now, you have something very, very special to offer the American public...to offer the whole world. Tell us about this HealthView diagnostic system. What are the basics?

This was an outgrowth of a program that we presented to Congress about six years ago called Re-engineering the National Health Care System by myself and colleagues from MIT College. So we really looked into changing numerous aspects of the way health care was provided, basically suggesting it could be drastically overhauled by the use of high technology. One of the first major parts of the program was to shift the paradigm of medical care from being reactive, where we sit and wait for people to develop symptoms and then as detectives try to find out what's causing them and how to treat them, to shift the emphasis down to the early stages of disease where they are much more manageable and curable. This is something that is quite essential because symptomatic diseases usually equates to very late-stage disease. In fact, most of the killer diseases like heart attacks and strokes, in most people, the first symptom is the heart attack or the stroke. And cancer, by the time it's producing symptoms, has usually gone to a later stage than we want to be dealing with. Emphysema is the same thing, Alzheimer's develops for 25 or 30 years before the symptoms...so it really makes no sense to sit and wait for symptoms. When you deal with people in an asymptomatic stage, what you find is almost always curable, stoppable or reversible.

Now you're talking about a pro-active approach to medicine, and of course, we're all familiar these days with wellness programs, but you of course, are an accomplished radiologist You took a different approach to wellness. So what is this new diagnostic test?

The approach really has several components to it. To achieve a preventive medicine paradigm shift, you really have to do several things. The first one is you need to find the diseases at the earliest stages. You need to be able to do that. The annual physical exam (while it's a good concept) has been shown to fall very far short of that mark. The stethoscope and the examining end really are pretty gross tools in uncovering usually late-stage disease again. We now have the diagnostic tools with safety and very rapid capabilities, we can look through the body in ways that go beyond human vision, concealed, all the internal organ structures, finding diseases in the sizes of a few millimeters, as opposed to large masses. And uncovering plaque disease in arteries 20 to 30 years before it will show up on stress tests which require blood flow to be restricted before they'll register. That doesn't happen until there is a 60-70% blockage. And we now have learned that about 85% of heart attacks occur from plaques that are much smaller than that - quite suddenly rupture above the arteries. So, we need to be finding these diseases at their earlier stages.

Now you helped to develop some equipment, some software (some very special software) in California, in the Newport Beach area, and this is very, very unique. It's a very unique service. Tell us what happens when someone comes into your clinic. What do you do to them?

The first thing we do is try to make them feel at ease. Our lobby has been designed with a Zen motif. Then we educate them about the process we go through with videos they watch in the chair they sit in, in the lobby so we're already involving them in the process before we even begin the actual examination. The test itself is extremely non-invasive. It's an open architecture scanning device where they're actually looking up at the ceiling at a beautiful picture of Holland's tulip gardens - it's very relaxing. The scanning just takes minutes and you come out of the room in about ten minutes. Immediately after the scan, we sit them down in front of a large computer screen and take them on a very graphic journey through the interior of their body with three-dimensional color graphics showing them their entire anatomy and showing them the pathologies that are developing in their body. There always will be pathology. In the 15,000 patients we've done with this technique so far, we haven't seen one that doesn't have some pathology developing that they need to know about.

This sounds absolutely amazing. So your scanning basically the torso, is that correct?

Yes, we're scanning at the present time, from the vocal cord, down through the pelvis.

Yes. And you're looking at all of the vital organs, you're looking at the spine. You're looking pretty thoroughly at that entire area.

Yes.

And now, you're doing this non-invasively. Now, there is one aspect of this that to me, sounds unbelievable. I say this because I'm a member of an HMO. And you're saying that almost immediately afterwards, you're sitting down with them and going through the results, is that correct?

Yes. The first phase is, of course, to find the pathology, but the second phase (which is equally important) is to use the information to educate and motivate the patient. What my daughter has taught me as a behavioral psychologist (which I think she learned from you) (laughs) is that people don't make changes in their lives unless they want to. And our job really is to make them want to, in a very positive and very empowering, pro-active way. So, we actually have gone through the trouble of training our radiologists in motivational interviewing so that they really are prepared to deal with the presentation of the data to the patient in a reassuring, motivating presentation. And it's intimidating to do this, and most people (even the physicians that come in here) are a little apprehensive of what might be found. What we find is almost always going to be curable, stoppable or reversible.

This is certainly interesting. I have a colleague, a psychology professor at the University where I teach, who recently discovered he has a brain tumor which is already the size of a lemon. And it was discovered when it was already the size of a lemon. They're calling him "lemon head" now and he's cracking jokes about it as best he can. You're saying that here, looking at the torso, you're going to find things presumably (plaque deposits, irregularities in the spine, spurs, you're going to find things LONG before they would be detected in a regular physical examination. Is that correct?

Yes. We're looking for tumors and we hope to find them the size of a BB, or at least a small grape, not the size of a lemon or sometimes, people come in with watermelons that have no symptoms and have just passed an annual physical examination.

Yes.

People have a great misconception about their bodies. Physicians often do as well. People think that their body will tell them when they're having a problem. They think there are mini alarm systems built-in that will automatically tell them when they have a problem. When we get the flu we know it immediately. But with the killer diseases, the body compensates for them for a long time - often 20,30 or 40 years - before the symptoms will occur. This disease is growing, it's accumulating up to the point that the body can't handle it any more, and then we're in the state of decompensation. At that point, your treatment is going to be far more invasive and less likely to succeed.

Now let's talk about the second part of this. So you've done the scan. You're helping someone basically look at the inside of their body. You're finding irregularities. You're saying basically you always find some irregularities - 15,000 patients and at least one irregularity in everybody.
Now what happens, because presumably, you need someone to react in some pro- active way (boy, that's a strange thing to say) - or react pro- actively. But, you need someone to change their behavior in order to reverse these problems. How do you get them to do that?

Well, once the patient is visualizing the pathology inside their body in a way that they can understand it, and we're explaining that to them as we go along with tools that show them what "normals" are and what "abnormals" are, and showing them exactly what the process is that we're dealing with, we're dealing now with a "seeing is believing" concept. We know in behavioral medicine for example, that if you talk to patients and tell them that because of these tests or those tests, they're likely to have problems or to even have problems, that they now need to change their lifestyle, the compliance rate (according to the statistics of behavioral medicine) are around 15%.

Yes, that's correct.

It's really NOT very good. But if they've been scared, by having chest pain or some other symptoms, suddenly their compliance will jump up to 90%+ range for a time, and then they'll settle down and slide back into their old ways. And that's just not adequate. And as physicians, that's probably the biggest problem we face. As we move into a managed care system where the patient is lucky to get five minutes with a physician, the whole concept is even impossible. So, it really takes us about 45 minutes to an hour with each patient to go through this process. And we need every bit of that time to achieve what we're after, beginning with the visualization and the explanation of the pathology and it has a tremendous impact. Patients come back a year later and I give them a paper and pencil and tell them to draw for me what they saw... (yeah) ....they can do it.

Oh, I'm sure (laughs). I have no doubt.

The seed has been planted, but again, the seed has not been planted as a seed for fear, it's a seed of motivation.

Of course.

Even show just how this problem got there and what it is they can do to basically stop it or reverse it and in the case of cancer, we're going to need to take it out. But the answer to cancer is really quite simple: find it early.

Sure.

Find it early and you find a cure in almost all cancers. Then plaque disease, again the process is potentially reversible. No matter what stage we find it at, if the patient hadn't had that heart attack, then we basically have done them a great service because we now can protect them in a number of different ways. That doesn't mean a bypass or an angioplasty - in most people we can do that through these lifestyle and medication and metabolism changes that need to be effective.

I was very impressed by the comments of that reporter from U.S.A. Today, Robert Davis, because apparently he went up to your center and had one of these scans done, and was a little nervous before-hand, and again, you said that that's not uncommon, and then he said he really was deeply moved, very moved, by what he was seeing inside of his own body.

Well that's the typical response that we get. In fact, there are very few exceptions to that. No matter what we find, the knowledge of what is there and what is not there is very empowering to the patient, particularly since they now have a path that they can clearly go down that will really protect them or get them out of the trouble that they're in. And that's true again, in almost all cases. So, this is really empowering, is the way to describe it. Knowledge is truly empowering if it's presented correctly to the patient.

Have you yet been able to collect any data looking at the impact behaviorally or medically of this diagnostic system?

Well, we're in the process of doing that and from the very first patient that we did, before we even began the service, we brought in some top behavioral medicine and epidemiology professors to construct an outcome analysis form that the patients all enter into that study as they come in. But as you know outcome analysis studies take a very long time and we have published some of that data to date, particularly as regarding heart plaques. But, we are in the process of really doing it from other organ systems. But it will take us time and we're even concocting a study to do this on a very large scale, and this will be necessary. But in the meantime, we're quite certain from our own experience that there isn't a day that goes by that we don't have some life-saving experience.

What's been the reactions from the medical community? The U.S.A. Today article, they managed to dig up a bunch of critics, and I'm wondering what do you see from your prospective?

Before we even turned on the service for the patients we invited some doctors in to go through it and to get their opinion (these were largely physicians that we didn't know). To date we've had about 350 physicians go through this and these were really all different types of specialties ...

...you mean come through it as patients?

Come through as patients. (Yes) And experience it. So from family practitioners to medical school deans, to presidents of the American Medical and American Heart Associations, we do satisfaction surveys from these physicians at the end and they've been quite excited about it. We really found a widespread acceptance of this and most of their reactions are that they feel like the medicine that they're practicing is antiquated and this is the way it will and has to go.

What are the skeptics concerned about?

The skeptics are concerned about two major areas. They're worried about cost effectiveness and screening (as always) raises the question of cost effectiveness. But if you look at screening, if we were doing this test just to pick up kidney cancers for example, we probably wouldn't find enough of them to justify the overall cost of the exam. But then you throw in the pancreas and the liver and the adrenals, and the lymph nodes and the lungs and all of these other areas that we see cancers in - the prostate, the ovaries, uterus, etc. - and then you throw in the heart, and then you throw in the back and the lungs and emphysema, and it just keeps building up, to the point where it's an extraordinary cost-effective process, and that's the first one. And we're still evolving this technology. We actually have some major advances coming here within the next year. But the other one is does it generate unnecessary questions or unnecessary fear in the patient? The fear issue is really an issue of how you handle the patient and that's why we train our people to do that properly. Again, we don't look to generate fear, we're looking to generate motivation and change. The issue of spinning off unnecessary tests has really not turned out to be the case. About the worst we encountered is that many people have little nodules in their lungs (often quite tiny) and in 99+% of the time they're going to be due to things like air-born fungal infections, which you can't differentiate them from an early cancer. So what we do is, since they're usually so tiny (about 1.0-0.5mm), is we just track them over a period of time. There is time, we believe, to play with these things. If there is a growth pattern, then we'll get more aggressive. Usually one can make the distinction in that simple way. Otherwise we'll move them down the hall to an ultrasound machine which very inexpensively and very quickly can answer questions that are raised. Occasionally, we'll put them back on the table and do dye injections to get the definitive answers that we're looking for. And that's usually the way it goes. It's been a very unusual event where a patient has gone on to an unnecessary, invasive procedure based on what we have seen. It does happen, it will happen and there is no screening process that will never not have that outcome occasionally associated with it, but I think overall we've done quite well with it.

Is there any particular reason why at the moment you're not scanning the head and the legs?

The particular technology and techniques we're using really aren't giving enough yield in the types of pathology as we would want to find in the brain, so we don't want to give people a test that just says we looked at the head without feeling that we've looked it in a way that would have found the important diseases one would want what to find. If we want to do the head, we give the patient the option of having an open magnetic resonance MRI exam. It does of course add to the cost and time, but we offer that as the option.

What is the basic cost of the procedure?

The whole process that I described - the patient is charged $795.00 for, and that's if the patient comes in off the street and is paying out of pocket.

Sure. And I assume that some insurance probably covers this, and probably some does not, is that correct?

Yes. Yes. There is a lot of variation in that. If the patient has a physician referral, we usually can get them covered. Unfortunately, the insurance industry has perceived that screening is something that they don't want to pay for, and that's a bad perception that will be proven to be quite wrong in the long-run, but that's what we're dealing with at the present time.

I would think that the demand for this is extremely high and I heard - I don't know if it's true - but I heard, that you are booked up for almost the entire next year (laughs)...is that more or less correct?

Unfortunately or fortunately, that is correct (unbelievable). Ninety-seven percent of the people that go through our center send in other people, the satisfaction is that high and we are scrambling now to add additional machines to the center and put up other centers. We really were waiting for our next version of the technology which is a big advance, but we really don't have the opportunity do that because the public is absolutely demanding this now.

Well when are we going to see these on the street corners, the chains, you know? I think we need more of these even than McDonalds.

Well, we do. This is an inevitable paradigm shift. We knew it was true during the health care debates, with all the raging battles that went across the table, the one thing that the heath care professionals really did agree upon was the need for this type of health care paradigm shift. What they didn't really have was a way to do it. We now have a real way to do it that works; it's just the beginning; it's going to evolve into a much higher level of accuracy and sensitivity, so this is really just the beginning of this. It is the way medicine will shift. Probably the nicest phone call that I ever got was from a physician who called me up, telling me that she had been pretty much disgusted with the way her medical practice had been going and the kinds of practice she was being forced into by managed care, and this reminded her of what she went into medicine for.

Yes, absolutely! Absolutely! Now, you think this is five years, ten years, twenty years? How long before we see this shift in everyday medical practice?

Well I think we're going to achieve this within the next three to five years.

Marvelous. Now where can people get more information about this?

We have a web site - www.healthview.com and that's where we can begin the process of letting people know about this.

Dr. Harvey Eisenberg, Chairman of the Board and Medical Director of the HealthView Center for Preventive Medicine in Newport Beach, I want to thank you so much for joining us on Psychology Today - it's really an honor and I think you 're a pioneer in an extremely important area and I applaud you.

Well it's my pleasure. Thank you very much.

Thanks so much. This is Psychology Today. We 'II be right back, after a short break.