Telluride Integrative Wellness Summit: Dr. David Agus

05 Sep Telluride Integrative Wellness Summit: Dr. David Agus

Dr. David Agus is a featured speaker at Telluride First Foundation’s 2nd annual Summit on Integrative Wellness at the Telluride Conference Center in Mountain Village. Other renowned presenters in the field of health and wellness are Dr. Deepak Chopra (streaming live on Sunday), Dr. Marc Siegel, Dr. George Pratt, Chris Crowley and Bill Fabrocini, and Dr. Alan Safdi, all focusing in their different ways on the subject of Looking Forward, Aging Backward: Frontiers in Health, Wellness & Brain Science. Singer-songwriter Jewel opens the weekend on Friday September 9. Tickets here. 

Please scroll down to the bottom of the story to listen to Dr. Agus’s podcast. 

Dr. David Agus, Saturday’s keynote at upcoming Telluride Integrative Wellness Summit.

Is it possible to solve aging?

Can people live healthily more or less indefinitely?

A hedge fund billionaire in Silicon Valley launched a $1 million challenge for scientists to “hack the code of life” and push the human lifespan past what in the scientific community is an apparent max of 120 years. (According to online sources, the longest known confirmed lifespan was 122 years.)

In 2013, Google started an initiative named Calico, short for California Life Company, whose mission is to reverse engineer the biology that controls how long we live and, according to its website, “devise interventions that enable people to lead longer and healthier lives.”

Human Longevity Inc. aims at creating a giant database of 1 million human genome sequences by 2020, which will include supercentenarians.

If we are biological machines, isn’t aging (or not aging) simply a medical problem science can solve?

One person to ask is Dr. David Agus.

When it comes down to how to keep people healthy as long as possible, Agus is one of the top go-to guys in the world. And he will be coming to Telluride for the first time to speak on Saturday, September 10, at Telluride First Foundation’s 2nd annual Integrative Wellness Summit. His talk will focus on key ideas around health and wellness, which Dr. Agus lays out in his three books: “The End of Illness,” “A Short Guide to a Long Life,” and the most recent, “The Lucky Years.”

In “The End of Illness,”  a #1 New York Times bestseller, Dr. Agus offers insights and access to breathtaking and powerful new technologies that promise to transform medicine in our generation. In the course of offering recommendations, he emphasizes his belief that there is no “right” answer, no master guide that’s “one size fits all.” Each one of us must get to know our bodies in uniquely personal ways, and he shows us exactly how to do that so that we can individually create a plan to live longer. This groundbreaking approach can change not only how we care for ourselves, but also how we develop the next generation of treatments and cures.

“A Short Guide to a Long Life” is a practical and concise illustrated handbook for everyday living. (Because Agus believes optimal health begins with tweaks to our daily habits. Others speakers at the event like Crowley and Fabrocini fully agree and their talk will focus on some of the adjustments that can make all the difference to how we age. )

“The Lucky Years” was written as a compliment to the two earlier books. It details how emerging technology can not only help diagnose disease, but more effectively prevent it with a much more individualized focus on treatments based on an individual’s DNA and blood proteins.

Medicine is undergoing rapid change. In the old world, we followed well-trodden general principles and doctors treated everyone based on broad, one-size-fits all solutions. In this new golden age, people will be able to take full advantage of the latest scientific findings and leverage the power of technology to customize their care. Only those who know how to access and adapt to these breakthroughs — without being distracted by hyped ideas and bad medicine — will benefit.

Imagine being able to get fit and lose weight without dieting; train your immune system to fight cancer; edit your DNA to avoid a certain fate; erase the risk of a heart attack; reverse aging; and know exactly which drugs to take to optimize health with zero side effects.

Welcome to the world of Dr. David Agus.

To learn more and to preview Agus’s Telluride Integrative Wellness Summit talk, listen to his podcast.

More about Dr. David Agus:

Dr. David B. Agus is a professor of medicine and engineering at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine and Viterbi School of Engineering and heads USC’s Westside Cancer Center and the Center for Applied Molecular Medicine. He is one of the world’s leading physicians and the cofounder of two pioneering personalized medicine companies, Navigenics and Applied Proteomics.

Over the past 25 years, Agus received acclaim for his innovations in medicine and contributions to new technologies that will change how all of us maintain optimal health. He has also built a reputation for having a unique way of looking at the relationship of the human body to health and disease. He explains:

“Sometimes you have to go to war to understand peace. My work on the front lines of the cancer war has taught me a lot about all things health related, much of which is surprising and goes against conventional wisdom.”

As a contributor to CBS News, he comments on important health topics regularly on TV.

Dr. Agus specializes in treating patients with advanced cancer. His clinical responsibilities include the development of clinical trials for new drugs and treatments for cancer, supported by the National Cancer Institute and other private foundations. (He has no financial ties to drug companies).Dr. Agus serves in leadership roles at the World Economic Forum, among other prestigious organizations.

After earning his BA from Princeton University and medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Dr. Agus completed his medical residency training at Johns Hopkins Hospital, a research fellowship at the National Institutes of Health, and an oncology fellowship at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

His first two books, “The End of Illness” and “A Short Guide to a Long Life,” were both New York Times and international bestsellers, with “The End of Illness” hitting number #1 on the list.