Welcoming Riordan Clinic’s New Chief Medical Officer

Riordan Clinic [00:00:00]:
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Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:00:56]:
Well, welcome everyone. Dr. Ron Hunninghake. Welcome to another episode of the Real Health Podcast. And today I’ve got an announcement. So Dr. Drew Rose is our new Chief Medical Officer.

Drew Rose, DO [00:01:10]:
Yeah, thank you very much.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:01:12]:
So maybe people have already seen you on the show, but I think what we’re wanting to do is kind of talk about the evolution of how it came to be that you are now in this position. Also to let people know that I’m not leaving.

Drew Rose, DO [00:01:25]:
Right.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:01:26]:
Definitely, I’m staying. But there the evolution of the Riordan Clinic as such. We’re finishing our first 50 years and now we’re preparing the foundation for the next 50 years. And so, Dr. Rose, you were in Salina when we found you or you found us, however that goes. And I came from Salina too, so we were just talking on the way over how good Salina has been for the Riordan Clinic.

Drew Rose, DO [00:01:55]:
Salina has been fantastic for us. It’s not just us either. At least one or two other employees within leadership that are, you know, have Salina roots. So it’s kind of cool.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:02:05]:
Yeah. Well, for people that maybe have not. Hold it. Heard the whole story. So you’re from Wichita, Correct? Wichita State graduate.

Drew Rose, DO [00:02:14]:
Correct.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:02:15]:
And you went to osteopathic school in Colorado?

Drew Rose, DO [00:02:18]:
Yeah, Parker, Colorado, a southeast suburb of Denver.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:02:21]:
And let people know why. Is osteopathic really a good foundation for a Riordan Clinic job?

Drew Rose, DO [00:02:28]:
Well, I think at its core, Dr. A.T. still, who founded the philosophy of osteopathy in the late 1800s, by the way, Kansas boy. So always going to mention that,

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:02:40]:
you

Drew Rose, DO [00:02:40]:
know, the tenets of osteopathy that are the core of the philosophy are, first and foremost, every person is a unit of body, mind and spirit. You have to be able to balance all three of those in order to find your real health, which obviously resonates with the philosophy of Riordan Clinic. The other things that osteopathy is founded on is that every body has self healing and self regulating systems. So when we’re talking about nutritional health and doing all of the functional medicine labs, it’s not like we’re finding the one magic here or anything here. The whole point is to give the body the building blocks in order to self heal and self regulate and find that normal, that. Because that normal is different for every person. So I think taking the philosophy of osteopathy, it very much parallels that of how Riordan Clinic was founded and has evolved over the past 50 years as well.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:03:37]:
So when I first started, Dr. Riordan had me go take a course in holistic medicine. And really the tenets of holism is very much similar to what you’ve just said. And so now on the other side of the coin, because we are really talking more and more these days about integrative medicine, because that, that I think is the way of the future. The idea that not only do you have this holistic osteopathic philosophical foundation, you actually kind of went through the trenches in terms of your training, right? In terms of conventional.

Drew Rose, DO [00:04:12]:
Yes.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:04:12]:
So tell us a little bit about Chicago and what actually you had to do in Salina that really gave you quite a true foundation in conventional medicine as well.

Drew Rose, DO [00:04:24]:
Yeah, I kind of feel like I volunteered myself for a lot of this. So, you know, going all the way back to medical school, even I did an extra year there in osteopathic principles and practices. It was a teaching fellowship. And of course that’s an extra year of commitment. When you’re talking about medical school, that is quite a bit. And then in Chicago, I chose to rank them as my number one choice. It was Swedish Covenant Hospital because of the diversity that you saw there in northern Cook County. And the hospital that I trained at actually would speak anywhere between 62 to 64 languages a year. So it was global medicine on a daily basis. It was very much a. And I hate using this term, but I mean it with all the affection of my heart. But it was a very much sink or swim kind of residency where the residents themselves were very much in charge of the entire service and at the. Especially at night, very much in charge of the hospital. So it’s you. You had to kind of lean on your education and your other residents and really kind of drive that forward from day one. And then come into my third year, I was asked to be chief resident there. So being able to take that leadership role on in that kind of residency, it was a lot. But I really do feel like that gave me a great foundation, not just in the conventional medicine, to be able to be efficient and accurate in what we were doing and staying on top of the standards of care, but also being able to be the leader in that, to, you know, educate the next couple of generations underneath me.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:06:09]:
So was the. And one other part that we. That I didn’t mention was that you also have spent quite a bit of time in Africa.

Drew Rose, DO [00:06:17]:
Correct.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:06:17]:
Was that during the medical school or was that during residency, or how did that fit in?

Drew Rose, DO [00:06:22]:
A little bit. So two years in resident. No, excuse me, two years in medical school. So I did a global track, which was an honors course in medical school. So three months of my clinical rotations in the last half of medical school had to be done internationally in order to get a global medicine certificate. And one of the trips that was arranged by Rocky Vista, the school that I went to, was in South Central Kenya, and we went there to work with the Maasai tribes. And being an OPP fellow, it very much kind of put me in a different light when I went there to be kind of the person to do a lot of the manipulative medicine and actually lead a couple of classes while I was there for the other medical students. So I did two trips there in medical school. And then recently while I was in Salina as a hospitalist, I went there in 2024 and actually last year.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:07:16]:
Okay, so you’ve got a. A bigger perspective on world medicine as well as. Oh, yes, what’s going on here in the United States. And then moving into Salina, you ended up as the head hospitalist there at Salina Regional. But tell me. I guess it was a rough start.

Drew Rose, DO [00:07:38]:
It was a bit of a rough start. So I graduated residency in 2019, started at Salina Regional Health Center, September 5, which happened to be the day after I took boards. I have no idea why I did it that way, but six months later is when the pandemic hit.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:07:54]:
That’s what I was going to get to.

Drew Rose, DO [00:07:56]:
Yeah, yeah. So fresh out as a new internal medicine physician. Six months later, the pandemic hit. And just the landscape of healthcare in general, especially from a hospital perspective, because there was so much fear about what COVID was and how you got it. There was so little that was known at the time. I was approached by admin and my director at the time because of the credentials I had and able to do more procedures than the others. They asked if I would kind of be the COVID doc, essentially. And what that meant is, you know, the people who were suspected to have COVID, I would round on them, have all the ppe, all the garb and everything. But trying to minimize exposures, that meant I worked for. It was 88 out of 96 days. I think the 88 days I actually did in a row, I think it was. It was 92 days out of 100. So 88 days in a row. And then just geographically, just how things happened, it kind of burned some of us out. And then we didn’t have a lot of redundancies then that summer is when we only had one true intensivist covering the icu. We had to get some sort of model moving forward. So I became the person that ended up covering the ICU whenever that intensivist was off. And that’s what I did all through the pandemic.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:09:22]:
So needless to say, that was an overall intensive experience for you. And. But also there was leadership here. You did. How many. How many hospitalists did you eventually were you overseeing?

Drew Rose, DO [00:09:36]:
So after 2020, I think moving into 2021, that’s when I was approached to be the medical director for the hospitalist group. There were eight days, two nights, plus then we included the icu. So roughly about a dozen hospitalist that I was director for for two years and then two. Well, one of those years as well, is also the Department of Medicine chair, so oversaw the entire medical side, not the surgical side, but the medical side of the medical staff.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:10:09]:
Right. So hopefully our. Our audience, in listening to this, kind of starts to see that, yes, you’ve got some fundamental leadership skills that you seem to find your way into that position.

Drew Rose, DO [00:10:19]:
And like I said, it feels like I kind of did it to myself. But honestly, I see the need and I have the ideas and I’m not afraid to speak up. So if we can do something to not just better the way we do things, but also better the health of our own staff and emulate that health, that’s kind of one of those philosophies I’ve always leaned into.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:10:39]:
Yeah. And I. And I would have to say, since you’ve been here and since you’ve been exhibiting more of a leadership quality and that that has led us to ask you to be this chief medical officer. I would also say that even here at the Riordan Clinic, you have done very, very good at taking the different components, like our nursing staff, the lab, the front office, the medical part of this, all of this has to be coordinated here at the Riordan Clinic. Because we are a very diverse operation and you have stepped in and been able to kind of coordinate that. And we’ve been having more regular meetings and of course we were trying to get a new software package in and that was difficult. We’re still in that process. But all of that required someone who was willing to step up and lead. I mean, and the part that I’m probably most impressed with is it’s leadership without being excessive leadership. It’s kind of like coordinatorship.

Drew Rose, DO [00:11:45]:
Yes. I view it as it’s kind of like conducting a symphony where even going back to the whole body, mind and spirit of, you know, approaching patient care, it’s everything I view is there’s so many intricate parts that are interrelated and have to be working in and of themselves in order to other parts to work as well. It’s not just from a patient care standpoint. I think it’s from a leadership standpoint. And like you said, with an unconventional clinic such as Riordan Clinic, we have like three major arms here with the lab, the retail store that has an extensive inventory and then the medical side of things, they all have to work in unison in here and seamless communication in order for everyone to be on the same page and for, you know, just the workflow for one co-learner to come in. From the check in process all the way through the different areas all the way to the checkout process, everything has to work in in unison. So being able to step back and learn all of those intricate details, that’s something that’s always helped me become a better physician and just a better asset for the team anyways. So that’s just kind of something I’ve always leaned into whenever I go into a new job or new rotation, whatever it may be.

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Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:14:03]:
Let’s take this opportunity to talk a little bit about some of the new research opportunities that we’re going to be pursuing here at the Riordan Clinic that you’ll be pretty much involved with that. So we’re talking we. And this was. We’ve we’re trying to introduce a new therapy for long COVID. Tell me a little bit about that.

Drew Rose, DO [00:14:26]:
So Hematogenous Oxidative Therapy, otherwise known as HOT or HOT UBI, we do not heat things up. I just want to make that very clear. Is a form of ultraviolet blood irradiation which has been around for greater than 100 years now. It is specific to 254nm light frequency, which is supposed to be specific to the spike protein of what is created by COVID. So it’s thought to be a therapy that can help decrease the overall burden of microclots and therefore spotty hypoxia throughout the body. There’s a lot of research in the integrative part of the world and I just attended the American Academy of Osteopathy Convocation earlier in March. But from the osteopathic standpoint, a lot of research going into the microcirculation and how the microcirculation not even just from a COVID standpoint, but from an anti aging standpoint, how important it is to understand the microscopic mechanics of capillary systems. And they’re in. So the HOT UBI I think is an incredible asset to the repertoire of therapies we have here that has potential to, you know, bolster that microcirculation, get better blood flow to all of these different tissues and decrease the amount of chronic kind of that low level inflammation and overall fatigue.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:15:59]:
Right, right. And combine that with the fact that we are currently living through a time where there is an epidemic of what’s called the metabolic syndrome.

Drew Rose, DO [00:16:09]:
Oh yes.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:16:09]:
And so there’s. That’s a new area that we’re going to be focusing on here in the next several months and tell us a little bit about how the metabolic syndrome plays out in chronic illness and how this may in combination with things like the HOT therapy. Looking at this, what we’ve always done at Riordan Clinic, which is a very careful nutritional profile as well as also looking at toxicity, chronic toxicity. Then where in all of that does the metabolic pattern program fit?

Drew Rose, DO [00:16:43]:
So I think the metabolic profile of the United States in general is pretty well known to be pretty poor. Unfortunately, all the way from our food chain system down to just convenience. I think we’re a society of convenience, unfortunately. Just the way we go to work and we’re constantly just churning and burning and then there’s very little time left over for ourselves, let alone, you know, having the capacity to sit back and meal prep or even wanting to meal prep and have the same thing every single day that we know is healthy, but you know, lack thereof as far as flavor or variety. And I think it’s, it’s pretty easy to get in that fast food mindset of, hey, I’m just gonna go grab this real quick on the way from one errand to another. And it becomes a stress related response, in my opinion. And there’s a lot that goes into that because the metabolic profile is very tightly woven into the hormones as well that we deal with either being out of balance, you know, high in stress, low in, you know, other things like testosterone and estrogen, it affects mood. And then you couple things like long COVID or just chronic fatigue in general, which could be caused by so many different things. You know, it’s layers of an onion. I, I use this analogy multiple times a day, but it’s just you’re adding on these layers and think of your overall health as at the very center. We’ve got to peel back these layers here and you know, combined with things like hrt, combined with, you know, the Riordan approach of doing the functional testing and seeing what your biochemistry looks like, see what the nutritional deficiencies are and how we can correlate that to the symptoms that you’re experiencing. I think getting a little bit more in depth with the metabolic program here as far as weight loss and not just prescribing GLP1s necessarily. And all the research that’s coming out with GLP1s and coming soon, GLP3s, even the other classes of medications that could help with weight loss. But looking at it from a lifestyle standpoint, that is where you see longevity, that is where you see more success. That is where you see more patients coming in who have found their true health. Not just one on the scale necessarily. So I think Riordan is absolutely primed to look at every co-learner from all these different perspectives. You have to again, conduct that symphony appropriately to find that true health.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:19:18]:
Yeah, so, and I’m, and I’m, I was glad to hear you were interested. A lot of what I’ve looked into is the, the underpinning of thyroid disorders and that’s another metabolic issue. Adrenal burnout could be another one, stress management, all these different things. And then it all also fits in with, we have some very talented naturopathic doctors that are working with a more comprehensive approach to cancer.

Drew Rose, DO [00:19:46]:
Oh yeah.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:19:46]:
And so you and I are not directly involved with that, but we are involved in the sense that we help people coordinate their own laboratory testing and oversee the intravenous therapies as well.

Drew Rose, DO [00:20:03]:
Oh yeah. And making sure that they’re able to get in an appropriate amount of time. Do the IVC titrations identify any barriers? I mean, that’s really what our job is, to make sure that, you know, people who can come in with such scary diagnoses, you know, they can see Dr. Dunn or Dr. West, but then they need to schedule those days to come in and get everything done seamlessly. I mean, that is ultimately, we’re always looking for avenues to make this more accessible as well as a pleasant experience in such a scary time of your life.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:20:36]:
So let’s just finish up with just the. This, the last concept that I want to talk to you about is probably what I consider the most important thing that, that Dr. Riordan gave to the world. And that is the idea that when you come to the Riordan Clinic, you’re not a patient, you are a co-learner. So what does that co learning mean to you based upon your training and your experience here thus far?

Drew Rose, DO [00:21:01]:
So co-learner, I like the term because I’ve never felt I’m the person who’s curing disease. I’ve never felt that any one provider is the person who has the answer. I’ve always said from the get go. Even when I was a phlebotomist before I went into medical school, medicine is such a team sport. It takes so many different people to be engaged in finding the health of any other kind of patient, co-learner, what have you. But it really also takes the co-learner to take ownership of their own health and their own journey as well. So there’s a lot of coaching to that. There’s a lot of trying to understand where they’re coming from from their perspective. And it’s, it’s conversations, it’s, it’s being able to listen to somebody and understand what they’re saying from their perspective and not just from what I’ve seen in my own training. So I view myself as just part of the orchestra, so to speak. I think having the co-learners be at the center of it and being able to call the shots and say that this is what I can do right now and Coming up with a plan together. I always tell people, we’re going to figure this out together. It’s not just me. It’s not just them. It’s not just another person. It’s everyone all together. So medicine truly is a team sport, and I’m happy to be a part of that team.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:22:28]:
Yeah, it’s empowerment. And so many people that come to see us have gotten lost in the wilderness of modern medicine. And when they come to the Riordan Clinic, they feel like they’re on a firmer ground now and they’re beginning to feel their own power, their own ability to work together with what we have, the information that we have, and helping them discover a pathway to better health. And so, so again, I’ve been here going on 37 years. I’m planning to stay here, but I’m going to be working on more of a halftime basis. So most of our new patients will be seeing you. Unless there is an overload. I’m not, I’m not going to stay away from new patients, but. But that’s going to be mostly your area. But I just want to just tell our listeners we are very fortunate to have gotten Dr. Rose as our new CMO. And so hopefully you’ll be thinking about coming to the Riordan Clinic and finding out a little bit more about how you can empower yourself, grow, find the roots of your disease, get better, and make a new co-learner friend. Dr. Drew.

Drew Rose, DO [00:23:39]:
Absolutely. I’m here for it, everyone. All through the journey, from the beginning to the end. So happy to be here. Thank you.

Ron Hunninghake, MD [00:23:46]:
Thank you so much.

Riordan Clinic [00:23:49]:
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