Folks, one of my goals is to prepare you to care for aging family members, so you can navigate our broken medical system with your loved ones.  We are not designed to rust away; we are not designed to get old and just break.  Helping people improve their quality of life and their passion for day-to-day living—enjoying every hour—is my gift back to this world.

We love our families and would do anything for them. Becoming a caregiver to an elderly relative is one of the most stressful things a person can do. Watching family members decline mentally and physically is a horror movie. People build additions onto their homes and hire in-home nurses to avoid expensive assisted living centers; however, the caregivers themselves can become sick, burned out and depressed.

Two Distinct Paths for Aging

What’s burned into my memory is two different parts of my life and the stark differences between the elderly folks I met. Part one was taking people to an assisted living center and watching them deteriorate while cared for by strangers as soon as they were taken away from their family. They lost hope. I learned later that the stress of being alone lowers immune surveillance, so sickness creeps in and takes over. This was so sad to me as an 18-year-old, seeing this pain in good peoples’ eyes.

Part two was when I was Director of Research for a compounding pharmacy. I helped set up anti-aging centers from Boca to Beverly Hills. My job was to train the physicians on the use of our nutritional medicine and hormone replacement products.  At these anti-aging centers, I watched people in their 70s, 80s and 90s living amazing lives, working out every day, playing in the pool, going on vacations and still having active sex lives.  It was beautiful to see.  It felt so much better to be a part of the solution.  That job was way less intense than responding to emergency calls and I needed to dial back my stress because that job took a toll on my health.

A Disservice to Our Distinguished Elders

My passion to help people with this time of life didn’t start with my family, it started while working in Winter Park Hospital as a high school student and then working for Herndon Ambulance in the early 80s. Before I was a paramedic, we would pick up 8 to 12 elderly people a day and I would ride in the back of the ambulance with them.  I received a wealth of information just by listening to these men and women in their 70s, 80s and 90s. Their outlook on life, their thoughts on the world and their memories of family were a gift to me. It was like having a crystal ball for my future that told me what I could expect and what I could do to stay healthy. 

I remember so clearly these beautiful people telling me, “My life is now a series of doctors’ appointments. Every day it’s a new doctor and a new pill.”  Many were on 10 different medications and saw four different physicians who never talked to each other. Many of these people would say, “I’m done, I don’t care what happens; I’m not taking all these drugs. They make me sick. I can’t even go to the bathroom.  These doctors never tell me what to eat or what vitamins are good.  They just tell me to take this drug to feel better, but I never do.”

That was in 1983 and today I’m helping families with personalized advanced treatment protocols they would never get from conventional medicine with its one-size-fits-all treatment, which leaves the elderly and their families searching for answers.

My Family’s Story

My mother was diagnosed with dementia and my father with diabetes. It took me three years of research and consultation with multiple physicians to get them the best personalized medicine.  My programs at Scala Precision Health started out of the mind-bending frustration and painful journey I took trying to keep my mother and father healthy.

My mother would get lost while driving to the store and she’d be gone for hours; her medication was not working.  I developed a program that tests the three different estrogens (estrone, estradiol and estriol), progesterone, testosterone, thyroid hormones and the microbiome. The reason we test the microbiome (i.e., the gut-brain connection) is because as a person reaches their 50s, the intestinal tract starts losing its ability to pull critical nutrients out of food.  The body then starts mining these same critical nutrients from muscle, bone, heart and brain tissue.  With the help of just one of my mother’s physicians who understood the research I presented, we optimized her nutrition and hormonal levels to slow the symptoms of dementia. Our family saw the difference within weeks.

My father was told he was going blind because the arteries in his eyes kept rupturing.  He had several laser surgeries on his eyes to stop the bleeding.  High blood glucose is toxic to the microvasculature in the eyes. I found research on how optimized testosterone levels and lower blood glucose help the walls of the arteries (called the endothelial lining) release nitric oxide. This gas keeps the arteries dilated in the eyes. 

Here’s something you’ll never hear from conventional medicine: total testosterone lab work tells us nothing; free testosterone is the most biologically active form.  Free testosterone ranges from 3 to 25 in males.  When we started, my father’s free testosterone was 9.  When we got my father’s free testosterone to 21, his blood glucose and insulin levels came down and the bleeding stopped. Every diabetes patient should be on hormonal replacement.  They’re not because of compartmentalized, dogmatic thinking.

Now with our facility in Winter Park, FL the Scala Precision Health team is helping people across the US to better care for their family members. I’ve taken hundreds of calls over the years and direct people to the Russ Scala YouTube channel to learn what they will not hear from their physicians. We are developing advanced therapies that you can’t get at the Mayo Clinic.  So, if you found this story helpful, please share it. Let’s create a community of knowledge together.