I think insurance companies need to make a concerted effort to focus on preventative medicine to attack, among others, dominant illnesses such as heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s. There needs to be broader recognition that many of these diseases must be treated earlier. For example, cognitive decline can begin in one’s 30s. The institutional response — the medical community, insurance companies and government agencies — seem to be perpetually late to the party. An example with which I am quite familiar is treatment of testosterone deficiency. It’s typically treated with pills without properly exploring the root cause, hormones.

Dr. Donovitz is a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist whose hallmark passion for wellness is exemplified by his leadership of BioTE Medical LLC, a company he founded and is changing health care through bioidentical hormone replacement therapy.

Dr. Donovitz has built a 30-year career compassionately caring for his patients as a clinician, a leading innovator, and an international teacher of bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, a field in which he is a pioneer.

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I began my career as an OB/GYN and along the way, delivering 7,500 babies and performing numerous surgeries, I developed a passion for women’s health issues. In the mid-1990s, hormone therapy began to capture more public attention and I incorporated this into my practice, based in Texas. I was one of the first proponents to use hormone therapy as part of my practice. My company’s growing prominence attracted national attention and then globally as I lectured around the world. This fueled my passion for creating significant change in healthcare, as it does to this day.

I became intrigued by robotic surgery and in 2005, not only was I one of the first early adopters, I became a trainer for application of the Intuitive da Vinci robotic surgery systems. At the same time, I immersed myself in the application of bioidentical hormones, assessing the distinction of insertions versus other methods.

Despite a lot of skepticism in the early days about hormone replacement therapy, I was convinced this was a means to genuinely help people and treat a multitude of ailments, both physical and mental. It became crystal clear as I treated so many patients that bioidentical hormones were more life changing and a significantly better path than the synthetic alternatives — and that insertion in pellet form was more effective. Although pellets as a form of hormone therapy had been around the 1940s, mostly in Europe and Australia, they were not widely adopted here in the U.S. until the mid-2000s. The reason for the delay can be blamed in large part by Big Pharma, which was promoting — and still is — a one-size-fits-all product.

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