Dr. Vassily Eliopoulos: From Fighting Burnout in the ER to Thriving in Cutting-Edge Holistic Medicine
Burned out in the ER
Ten years ago, Dr. Vassily Eliopoulos was in the middle of a night shift in the emergency room of a level one trauma and stroke center in Colorado. It was a tough night, and he was feeling burned out. He had several patients who he worried wouldn’t see the morning.
A new patient popped up on his screen. A woman with a cough. “This is going to be a quick, easy one,” he thought. “I’ll write her a prescription for a Z-pack, and we’ll get her out.”
Unfortunately it wasn’t so cut and dry. The patient had an unexplained, chronic health problem, and no specialist had been able to help. The cough was keeping her awake, so she arrived at the ER at 2:00 AM, frustrated and desperate for answers.
Dr. Vass couldn’t give them to her. She’d already done all of the tests he would’ve recommended. This was the ER, not a specialist’s office. He was tired too. Couldn’t she see that people were dying here?
He explained as nicely as he could, but she wasn’t interested in any of the temporary relief he offered. She was fed up. She wanted answers. Their discussion got heated. Vass struggled to keep his cool as she demanded something he couldn’t possibly provide.
At a certain point, he realized that he needed to stop the conversation. “I feel like I’m about to punch this woman in the face,” he remembers thinking. And then, “I need to find a way to get this energy out in a healthy fashion.”
The next day he started looking for a way to get back into his old passion: wrestling. It wasn’t long before he found himself in a Jiu Jitsu class at Easton Training Center Boulder.
Finding clarity
Finding a physical outlet helped. But the biggest benefit he found at Easton was an unexpected mindset shift.
“For me it was pivotal,” he says in his recent appearance on the Easton Community Podcast. The Jiu Jitsu community and the ethos around it made him start to look at his career differently: “If you don’t like what you’re doing, why do it?”
He describes his emergency room job as a set of golden handcuffs. The group of ER doctors he belonged to was successful and growing. His career trajectory was looking great. But he was miserable. His mental health and his family life were suffering. He needed to get out.
Making the switch to private practice
When he told his colleagues he was leaving the ER to start a regenerative medicine practice, they thought he was crazy. How could he leave behind all that success and his steady paycheck? For stem cells?
But in 2017 he did. He and one of his fellow ER doctors left their group to start Rocky Mountain Regenerative Medicine, where they offered cutting-edge treatments and holistic consultation. They shifted their focus from the life-and-death hole patching of the ER to the personalized care and wellness optimization of a boutique private practice.
“To be clear,” Vass explains, “I would have been better off financially if I had stayed in the system.” But for him, the tradeoff was worth every penny. Taking a different path brought him different kinds of wealth and abundance.
Mental health and meditation
One of those less tangible forms of wealth is his mental health. He’s done a lot of work on himself in the years since leaving the ER. Getting out of the “hamster wheel” of the standard medical system gave him the mental space he needed to grow and develop as a person.
The process was incremental. Jiu Jitsu training gave him access to the mental peace of the flow state. It was a place to channel his energy and lose himself in the present moment. It was the healthy outlet he’d been looking for to work through his pent-up rage. That flow state eventually became a gateway to meditative practice.
When Vass began learning more about meditation, he realized that channeling our emotions through exercise may be healthy, but it can also be a way to distract ourselves from them. The harder part is learning to recognize those strong feelings and sit with them, accepting them and asking ourselves what they can teach us.
[Before, During and After the Zone: Flow State in Martial Arts]
In search of a new kind of education
This search for personal growth aligned with Vass’s passion for studying the new frontiers of health science. He says that way back before opening Rocky Mountain Regenerative Medicine, he first heard about stem cell treatments from his training partners at Easton. When he arrived at his first stem cell conference, he was shocked that something so promising fell so outside the purview of the medical establishment.
Because regenerative and longevity-focused medicine is such a new field, he found himself obligated to undertake his own education. He says he was his own first patient, self-applying stem cell therapy after an injury.
After that first foray, he dove headfirst into the field, learning about cutting edge treatments, from IV stem cells to peptides to psychedelics. He studied how the mind and body function together as a complex system, constantly looking for ways to help his patients find optimal health and balance.
Longevity Health and the future
With that goal in mind, Vass recently opened a new practice: Longevity Health. Since leaving the ER, he’s focused on shifting away from the paradigm that grounds the traditional medical system and medical education. While that system focuses on diagnosing and treating illness, Vass wants to prevent it.
His long-term goal is to completely change the way our health system works. At Longevity Health, Vass and his team help people optimize their health using a fully holistic approach. They gather and analyze a wide array of health data for each of their members, looking for the most effective levers to pull to dial in their “true health” and extend their healthy lifespan.
Though Longevity Health is a boutique practice and their services are currently designed as a comprehensive package for high net-worth members, Vass says that this is just the beginning. The next step is to make this kind of healthcare more accessible and affordable. Eventually, he wants to make it the new norm in the U.S. healthcare system.
That day may be decades in the future, but Vass says that we’re looking at the next “quantum leap” in terms of extending the human lifespan. So it seems we’ve got time. And Vass wants to give us more.
Check out the full conversation on the latest episode of the Easton Community Podcast!
