You can’t control the hand you’re dealt. You can control how you play it.
Before he was a physician, Jeffrey Blue was an engineer. He earned a degree in electrical engineering from Tufts and spent four years writing software before medical school. Engineers measure things. They want a number, a target, and a way to know whether the system is getting better or worse.
Medicine, he discovered, rarely gives patients that.
Since 1998, as a board-certified family physician and fellowship-trained sports medicine physician, Dr. Blue has sat across from patients and walked them through their blood pressure, their cholesterol, their blood sugar, their weight, all the moving parts of their health. And he learned something frustrating: by the time they reach the parking lot, most of it is gone.
“When they leave the office, they only remember a tiny bit of what I told them,” he says. “They take everything and synthesize it in their head into I’m doing okay, or I’m a little better than last time, or this is really not good. They don’t fully understand their numbers, or what their health actually is.”
He doesn’t blame them. “There’s just too much data to track, and it’s too confusing. Most people have a hard time tracking even their glucose or A1c, let alone everything else.” A lab report is a wall of numbers and reference ranges, and “normal” only means you aren’t sick yet. Only about seven percent of American adults are in optimal cardiometabolic health.1 The rest hear “you’re fine” while their numbers drift the wrong way for years.
Dr. Blue had spent much of his career on the other side of that problem. As team physician for the San Francisco Giants, the San Jose Earthquakes, and the University of San Francisco, and today as physician for Cirque du Soleil when they perform in San Jose, he cared for people whose livelihoods depend on their bodies. Elite athletes know their numbers. They have a target, and they measure again. He never understood why that standard should be reserved for professionals.
In his office he uses a different kind of analogy. “Life is a bunch of unknowns. It’s like being dealt a hand of cards. Sometimes you get a really good hand, sometimes not so great. That’s your genetics, and you can’t control it. But you can still play the hand really well. With a bad hand the margin for error is smaller, so you have to play it closer to perfect. It’s not that you can’t win. You just have to know your cards.” And then the question he asks every patient: “How do I best play this blood pressure? How do I best play this cholesterol? How do I give myself the best odds?”
That is where the engineer and the physician finally met. You can’t play a hand you can’t read, and most people can’t read a lab report. But everyone can read a report card. Everyone knows what a B-minus means, and everyone knows what it feels like to bring it up to an A. So over three years Dr. Blue built the thing he had always wanted to hand his patients on the way out the door: one grade, A+ to F, measured against optimal rather than average, with your Biological Age and the single thing to work on first. Then you measure, change, and measure again. “When they come back with new labs and the score is different, they can say: I got better, I got worse, and this is what happened.”
He is clear about what it is and isn’t. “I’m not there to work out with them or pick their lunch tomorrow. I can give them tips, but ultimately they have to be responsible for their own health. What I can do is show them the scorecard.” There are no guarantees in medicine, and Body By Numbers doesn’t make any. It shows you your hand, clearly, so you can play it well.
Body By Numbers is the conversation Dr. Blue always wanted to have with every patient. Now he can have it with you.