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    MY STORY

    It’s my 23rd birthday, September 19, 2008 in Ann Arbor. I’m fresh off a 30 country backpacking tour and a month into starting medical school.

    From the outside, life is great: full-tuition scholarship to a top 10 program, hip apartment, adorable new girlfriend.

    But inside, I’m falling apart.

    Racing to the bathroom between lectures my phone rings. Expecting ‘Happy Birthday’ wishes, I pick up without checking caller ID.

    An unfamiliar voice speaks. In an instant, my life and career path change forever...

    White Coat Ceremony: I’m officially in medical school.

    “The doctor reviewed your results and thinks you’ve an incurable disease. You need to come in immediately.”

    Hiking Machu Picchu at Sunrise.

    The year before medical school, I’m sleeping on the floors of strangers, cheap hostels, on freezing-cold buses. Seeking adventures, street cred, and answers to life’s big questions:

    Why do we suffer? How do we heal?

    I wander refugee camps, conflict zones, and ghettos. Sightsee world-class cities, ancient ruins, and holy sites. Befriend mystics, wisened elders, and everyday sages.

    By grace and fortune I survive a kidnapping, military teargas, multiple robberies, riots, a gun to my head, shamanic potions, and uncountable diarrheal illnesses.

    But these heroic tales and inspiring gifts are hard to appreciate because between classes and endless studying, I double-over in gut-piercing pain and scramble to the bathroom every hour and a half.

    Mornings I wake up shaking. Sweat-drenched sheets and a pillowcase littered with premature balding. Restless nights, unbearable days. Barely enough energy to endure my life, nevermind enjoy it. An irritable, inflamed insomniac.

    Desperate for help I seek the University’s best specialists who order thousands of dollars of tests and procedures.

    Life is Looking Up.

    Two weeks after my birthday it’s pouring down rain and I’m anxiously waiting in a dreary lobby. Nervous but confident I’ll soon have answers. A treatment, a pill, a cure. Something. Anything.

    Overhead calls me to my exam room where I wait and wait. Finally, a doctor I’ve never met comes into my room and calls me the wrong name. Heavy-set with bags under his eyes he looks more exhausted than I feel.

    For several minutes he stares at his computer screen, interrupted by his beeping pager. Suddenly he blurts out, “You don’t have Crohn’s or Ulcerative Colitis. It’s only Irritable Bowel Syndrome. We see it all the time. You don’t need surgery.”’

    “Good news,” I sigh. “What medications treat this?”

    “We don’t have any treatments,” he says getting up, his hand on the doorknob.

    “What do I do?” I despairingly ask.

    “Learn to live with it. Call our office if you need an appointment.” He leaves.

    I’m angry and afraid because my intestines are twisting, burning, cramping in knots, sweat dripping from my forehead, and I’m alone and abandoned. I’ve got answers, but no hope of a healthy future. I’ve got a diagnosis, but no directions to get well.

    I rush to the bathroom. Trembling, I sit down. Movement, but no relief from excruciating pain.

    Suddenly, in this moment of absolute desperation and despair I hear a voice emerge from the center of my heart...

    “You will learn to heal yourself.”

    Healing with Real Food and Connecting with Nature.

    Right then and there I vow to become a different kind of doctor. A doctor who cares about people, who will travel any distance required to help them find solutions to their most troubling questions and challenges. Whether those solutions are in research papers, the minds of mystics, the wisdom of ancients, or in the center of their very own hearts and souls.

    My journey of self-healing takes me on a journey over 8 years, training with hundreds of physicians, practitioners, and healers, reading hundreds of books, thousands of research papers, and countless self-experiments. I’m beyond grateful to now have a perfectly healthy gut, a lean and muscular physique, and the ability to eat everything I love.

    I’m on a mission to empower you to become your greatest healer and the sovereign of your domain, to reclaim your lives, to realize your wholeness, and to create the most beautiful and brilliant reality you can imagine.

    In Radiant Love, Dr. Ben

    PS: 8 years later I finally figured out what the doctors couldn’t. It turns out I had parasites from all my travels. This is why I’m committed to empowering you to figure out your health in a fraction of the time.

    “Separation is Dis-ease. Connection is Cure. Optimal Health is Connecting Scientific Medicine with Nature’s Intelligence.”

    ABOUT DR. BEN

    Dr. Benjamin Robert Kaplan-Singer, MD is on a mission to extend the healthspan of people and regenerate Planet Earth through sustainable systems-level change and a collective raising of consciousness that realizes all life thrives when we live harmonically with nature’s intelligence.

    Dr. Ben is a physician, independent researcher, consultant, and healthcare evolutionary. As an expert in integrative/functional, regenerative, and psychedelic medicine, he’s shaping the future of healthcare by combining leading-edge technology with scientifically-based lifestyle medicine for optimal wellbeing and longevity.

    Earnestly seeking answers to humanity’s growing health crises at a young age, Dr. Ben (then known as Ben) started his work at 15 years-old as a full-stack biomedical researcher at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD, where he focused on breast cancer metastasis and therapeutic peptides. He continued his research until co-authoring and publishing his first peer-reviewed paper at age 19.

    By then, he was already seeing the limitations of reductionism in medicine, an important tool for pharmaceutical and technological breakthroughs, but ultimately an incomplete paradigm for dealing with the emerging threats and challenges currently facing people, civilization, and the planet. At this point he left bench-based research and began devoting himself to understanding and developing a new science of medicine, one founded in diverse philosophies and disciplines such as first principles, holism, evolutionary theory, community organizing, anthropology, deep ecology, and complexity to inform actionable health practices for individuals and communities.

    His unconventional path combined with his academic commitment, rewarded him with two full-tuition academic scholarships to top 10 medical universities. He graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in 2013 with the highest distinction in clinical skills (and what he imagines to be a sigh of relief from a few handful of concerned administrators). He completed his residency in Family Medicine in rural Virginia in 2016, where he also co-founded a community-based farm to provide affordable, nutrient-dense, and chemical-free produce.

    As an independent researcher, Dr. Ben has worked for founders of multi-billion dollar tech companies and “transpartisan” think tanks. He enjoys rigorously challenging status quo beliefs, and exploring generally controversial “3rd rail” topics, while staying grounded in practical applications and scalable solutions.

    As a consultant he advises companies in consumer health, biotech, and digital health industries on product development, clinical strategy, research, ethics, and scientifically-based educational marketing.

    His concierge practice provides personalized, predictive medicine and health optimization to highly successful executives, investors, entrepreneurs, thought leaders, athletes, and performance artists.

    email us at concierge@doctorben.co