The Best Medicine

DR. MARK LIPONIS '80 preaches uitrapreverition.

A 7-inch tumor changed Liponis' life. As a doctor in Montana practicing family medicine, he lived a healthy lifestyle—running, eating well and raising two young kids with his wife.

Then one day in 1996 Liponis spotted blood in his urine. An ultrasound revealed the slight pain in his kidneys was actually a tumor. "The oncologist sent me to a pathologist. He thought the tumor had been growing 10 to 15 years," says Liponis, although the tumor exhibited none of the usual symptoms described by the American Cancer Society. Surgeons removed not only the tumor but also a kidney, an adrenal gland and lymph nodes. The experience changed Liponis' views on practicing medicine.

"Long before a disease can be diagnosed, decades before, there are signs," he says. He determined to figure out what factors to watch for that tend to lead to disease later in life. "What we used to think of diseases are processes that affect the body in different ways—cancer, diabetes, asthma, heart disease, liver disease, Alzheimer's—these are the top killers of all Americans, and even though they may seem like different diseases, they have similar if not identical roots."

Liponis found three trends emerge repeatedly in his patients that are reflected in American society at large: lack of daily exercise, excessive consumption of refined foods and neglect of basic self-care. "When you're 20, you can get away with that, when you're 40, you can't wait any longer," he says. "You're gaining four to five pounds a year and your health is already suffering." Liponis created a preventive medicine clinic devoted to getting his mostly sedentary patients to exercise and to examine their diets.

The success of his program led Liponis to Lenox, Massachusetts, and a job as corporate medical director of Canyon Ranch health resort, where he is spreading his ultraprevention doctrine. He has found an even wider audience through recent appearances on CBS' The View; NBC's Today Show and CNN News and the publication of Ultraprevention: The Six Week Plan that Will Make You Healthy for Life. For details, go to www.ultraprevention. com.