Attendees swarm Tony Robbins at the Fountain Life Houston grand opening and ribbon-cutting in Park House.
JACOB PARISH POWER/for Fountain Life Houston
A Ways2Well lunch and learn at Hotel Granduca.
Jonathan Emmanuel/for Ways2Well
Devorah Rose, right, hosted a Ways2Well lunch and learn at Hotel Granduca pictured here with Chief Clinical Officer Danese Rexroad and Chief Strategy Officer Amanda Fedro.
Jonathan Emmanuel/for Ways2Well
An imagine machine at Fountain Life Houston
Courtesy of /Fountain Life Houston
A treatment room at Fountain Life Houston
Courtesy of /Fountain Life Houston
Brigham Buhler has become somewhat synonymous with celebrity weight loss. He’s been credited with helping Jason Bradley DeFord, the rapper-singer-songwriter better known as Jelly Roll, drop more than 200 pounds. And the actor Russell Crowe shed 30 pounds. And is a regular on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
Ways2Well, the longevity-focused care clinic that Buhler founded out of his Garden Oaks home in 2018, was created with a more ambitious mission than just helping famous folks and the ultra-wealthy shed weight. Or even live longer. He wants the average, hard-working American to have more accessible and affordable options for comprehensive healthcare than he feels are available under the current, conventional primary care model.
Today, the main facility is in Austin. A new clinic soft-opened in the Heights earlier this year.
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“Most of our clients are everyday people trying to find answers to their questions and live their best life,” Buhler told the Chronicle. “Clinicians are fighting tooth and nail for their patients. They’re doing the best they can. It’s a broken system.”
A boom of longevity and optimization centers has recently opened in Houston. They offer a private healthcare model centered on prevention and health optimization to extend each client’s healthspan, or years spent in good health. There is some scrutiny from the scientific community regarding the evidence supporting the effectiveness claims of certain treatments and interventions.
The trend has sparked discussion about which local healthcare needs may remain unmet, despite proximity to the Texas Medical Center, the world’s largest medical complex. Changes to health insurance costs have intensified the debate.
With a platform of more than 303,000 followers on Instagram and virtual care offered nationwide, Ways2Well may be one of the better-known of its kind.
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Dr. William Kapp, Tony Robbins, Peter Diamandis, and Dr. Robert Hairi at the Fountain Life Houston grand opening and ribbon-cutting.
JACOB PARISH POWER/for Fountain Life Houston
Fountain Life is perhaps the most splashy. The longevity brand, powered by artificial intelligence, opened its fifth U.S. location on the first floor of Park House Houston in April. A packed house attended the River Oaks launch; the crowd swarmed co-founders Tony Robbins, a best-selling author of self-help books, motivational speaker and life coach, who attended alongside his business partners and co-founders Peter Diamandis, Dr. William Kapp and Dr. Robert Hariri.
Memberships start at $10,500 per year for the Core plan and $23,500 per year for Apex. Clients on an advanced longevity journey who were previously enrolled in the top-tier Epic plan for $85,000 are now priced on a case-by-case à la carte basis. Under the Apex family membership, adult children aged 18-30 can also access a la carte testing and Zori, an AI agent that analyzes medical data and answers health-related questions, for $12,500, or approximately $1,000.
HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: New spa-like longevity center opening in River Oaks will offer memberships up to $85K
Fountain Life’s medical team credentials require that longevity physicians are board-certified and also include licensed physician assistants and nurse practitioners.
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At a minimum, Ways2Well providers are nurse practitioners. Some are family nurse practitioners; others are adult-gerontology nurse practitioners. All have been formally trained on injection techniques and ultrasound guidance, according to a company representative.
Outside the 610 Loop, there’s Advanced Longevity in Bellaire, Memorial Longevity and resTOR Longevity Clinic in the Memorial Villages.
Where Ways2Well and Fountain Life overlap is at the zeitgeist intersection of celebrity culture and the questioning of costs associated with conventional medical care systems and insurance companies’ premiums.
“When Fountain Life was founded 5 1/2 years ago, what we wanted to do was start to change healthcare diagnostics so that we could detect systemic diseases sooner, to reverse those diseases and extend the human life span,” Kapp said. “Eighty percent of what we treat today is chronic disease; that doesn’t become symptomatic until it’s late stage. We have the technology to detect (disease) really early, which is much less expensive and the first step to longevity.”
‘CEO of your health’
Born in Dallas and raised in Houston, Buhler spent 10 years covering the Texas Medical Center as a pharmaceutical sales representative.
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“What spurred Ways2Well was working with some of the best and brightest for a decade. Clinicians are working as hard as they can, but they are limited by insurance companies and the big pharmaceutical companies. They have a lot of influence over what diagnostics and tests (doctors) can run,” he said.
He and Chief Clinical Officer Danese Rexroad want to uncover root causes. They believe the best way to prevent chronic disease is to never allow it to develop in the first place. And that an affordable option for exhaustive health optimization should exist in the market.
Ways2Well offers a cash-pay service. A baseline bloodwork package costs $599, which includes two comprehensive panels and two expert reports.
A client checks into Ways2Well’s newest location in the Heights.
Daniel Ortiz /for Ways2Well
“Our average patient spends less than $100 a month,” Buhler said. “For $599, we can manage to a person’s budget, and you’re getting a 45-minute deep dive with a clinician. Most of the time, the feedback is ‘I’ve never had a doctor spend that much time with me.’”
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People go to Rexroad for stem cells, peptides and general health optimization. She says she has treated various orthopedic injuries with regenerative stem cell therapy and without surgery.
Stanford Medicine Children’s Health defines stem cells as human cells, either embryonic cells donated for research or adult stem cells from fully developed tissue, with the ability to develop into different cell types, including muscle and brain cells.
“I compare what’s normal versus what’s optimal to predict potential outcomes,” she explained. “A normal range for insulin is two to 15. And optimal range is two to five, which allows for some actions to prevent the higher end of that range from developing into diabetes.”
To make those recommendations, Rexroad examines 64 biomarkers to provide a full picture of each client’s health. A typical primary care provider may order three or four tests when the client requests a comprehensive panel, according to Rexroad.
From there, Rexroad builds a foundational approach to address concerns with sleep, nutrition or anxiety in the most natural way possible, she said. Sometimes that means prescribing peptides, which she likens to naturally occurring, short-chain communication that already exists in the body with clear, expedited language.
“I think of them like text messages,” she says. “If I send a three-word text message to my husband saying ‘We need milk,’ he understands the inferences: drive in his car, bring his wallet, etc.”
Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center defines peptides as short chains of amino acids, the ‘building blocks’ of proteins, that act as messengers instructing cells when to produce hormones, repair damaged tissue, and reduce inflammation, among other essential functions.
Federal regulators and medical experts have raised concerns that claims for some stem-cell and peptide products exceed the current evidence of their treatment effectiveness, sparking debate and ongoing scrutiny about safety and oversight.
Rexroad suggests the controversy surrounding both stem cells and peptides is rooted in misconception.
The only stem cell products currently FDA-approved for use in the U.S. consist of blood-forming stem cells derived from umbilical cord blood, used in patients with disorders that affect blood production.
Some FDA-approved prescription peptides, such as insulin and GLP-1 medications, are widely used. Others, such as certain compound peptides and peptides approved for research only, face varying regulations, often state-specific.
Devorah Rose hosts a lunch and learn for Ways2Well at Hotel Granduca.
Devorah Rose hosted an informative lunch-and-learn at Hotel Granduca in Uptown Park last month, where the discussion and some debate continued. She became a Ways2Well client following two chance encounters with friends who had recently joined the company or become members.
“I really believe in serendipity,” Rose said. “I signed up because to me, it’s about protecting the quality of your life while you’re here. I want to be proactive and not reactive about my health.”
At Ways2Well, an unofficial philosophy is pro-government regulation, anti-government restriction. Rexroad shared that the products Ways2Well uses are not FDA-approved, though the company only uses FDA-sanctioned and monitored labs.
“We just want people to know that they have options,” she added. “They shouldn’t have decisions made for them. Everyone should get to be CEO of your health.”
Preventive health data collection
Kapp, who underwent his orthopedic training in Houston, shares Rexroad’s sentiment.
“We’re big on data collection,” he said. “Everything is FDA approved or in an FDA trial.”
The average age of a Fountain Life member is 50. Approximately 55% are men; 45% are women. Most sign up with two goals in mind: to get a better sense of their baseline health and to be at the top of their game, cognitively and physically.
“They want at 60 years old to be able to hike Kilimanjaro,” Kapp said.
The Fountain Life difference, he said, lies in a focus on precision health rather than population health. Kapp’s team analyzes a member’s cellular function to inform them how to address the 12 hallmarks of aging, a scientific framework for the biological drivers of age-related deterioration.
Fountain Life facilities in River Oaks.
He stressed that not all cases require treatment; close monitoring is often sufficient.
“We all know those people, we hear about them,” he said. “We had a marathon runner who died of a heart attack on the way to a conference about Fountain Life in Miami. And a biohacker who wants to worry, well, because his neighbor died of a heart attack.”
While Fountain Life centers don’t attract many prospective members who are sick or chronically ill, its functional clinicians often identify conditions that traditional medicine has overlooked, he said.
Membership costs are steep, though Kapp said more than 100 people prebooked across all levels in the month since the Houston outpost opened.
The word he hears most frequently is “optimize.”
“One of the reasons I like Houston is because of its very dynamic and vibrant economy. It’s one of the most entrepreneurial cities in the U.S.,” he said. “Houston has a world-class medical center. What we really need now is a world-class preventative health platform.”