During her talk at DOC 2025, Dr. Nicole Sirotin, CEO of the Institute for Healthier Living Abu Dhabi, recalled an experience as a patient during a routine medical checkup.
The checkup included multiple health tests, an electrocardiogram, and a full workup. As a physician Sirotin is more than familiar with medical exams and with her own medical history.
After the doctor ran her ECG four times, she was told she might have a serious heart condition, and should go to the emergency room. That’s when Sirotin inquired about his specialty: He was a urologist.
“There’s a clear role for a urologist,” Sirotin said, “but it’s not reading my ECG.”
The interaction stayed with her and later helped shape her thinking about the need for a more standards-driven approach to longevity medicine, one that clearly defines what longevity medicine is, and what it isn’t. At the core is the importance of delivering accurate information and translating complex health data into guidance that patients can meaningfully apply to their care.
Sirotin spoke about the first draft of these standards during the session, “Longevity: Signal, Noise and Snake Oil.”
The standards were developed through a joint effort from the Department of Health – Abu Dhabi, the Institute for Healthier Living Abu Dhabi, and the Healthy Longevity Medicine Society, where she serves as the Council Secretary General.
Today, Sirotin sees these frameworks as essential to ensuring that longevity medicine is practices with the appropriate expertise, evidence and clinical standards.
“We actually are trying to help people stay healthy,” she said. “We should be thinking about all the levels of science and knowledge that we need in order to do that.”
You can hear more from Dr. Sirotin in her video or read our lightly edited transcript below.
TRANSCRIPT:
Dr. Nicole Sirotin
Good morning everyone. I loved the commercial, and it really was, a spontaneous idea from Jordan that I wholeheartedly encouraged. It came out fabulously. I am going to start us off with a story that I think helped me really crystallize what our problem is right now. This is a true story. Like many of you, I’m sure, are extremely curious about what people are doing in these clinics, not just what their say they’re doing, but what’s actually happening.
So I went, I’m often mystery shopping, but I do it. Full disclosure I’m a physician. I work at Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi. I am also leading a healthier living, health care company. I feel like that’s the only fair thing to do in these, in these interactions. I went in and I had a full checkup through this clinic, and it was I thought, well done.
The physician spent a lot of time with me, asked me a lot of questions. We went through a series of tests. One of those tests was an electrocardiogram, and the nurse took my test. Four times. She printed out four EKGs, and I said, Okay, we’re going to have a conversation now. The doctor comes in and he says, very seriously, I think you need to go to the emergency room.
I’m sitting there perfectly healthy and also, not having any chest pain, no symptoms. And I just politely said, I understand I have a normal variant on my ACG. Would you feel comfortable if I just talked to my cardiology friend and he gave you the reassurance? We did that. He was reassured. We went on with our visit, and then I realized I didn’t know what kind of doctor he was.
At the end of the visit, I asked him, What kind of training do you have? He told me he was a urologist. Now I love urologists. I have many urology friends, but I think they would all agree they’re not the first one to read an ECG. They have a role in this kind of medicine. How do you keep us healthy? There’s a clear role for urologists, but it’s not reading my ECG. So I walked out of that visit and I thought, we have a problem. We have people who are not qualified to do the things that they’re doing.
In addition, we have the testing and the supplements and, and many things that are just not proven. So why would we lower our standards? Why would we have a different approach to keeping you healthy as we do to when we take care of you being sick? I very clearly had this thought that we need to make a different approach.
What we did in the Institute and what we’re really encouraging at this conference is for us to think about how do we make sure that we have what is necessary in order to practice this kind of medicine. We don’t yet have a name for what we’re doing. We’re keeping people healthy. We’re expanding health span.
There is a movement to call this, precision medicine. We’ve had many conversations around how do we get people to understand what that is. And the concepts here are let’s put standards in place and let’s think about how is it that we can really think about what happens inside the health care, inside the health care system, what happens outside.
We know that this is really what our health system is, at the moment. We have this tap that is flowing and it’s overwhelming. We’re mopping up the floor, and we really don’t have anyone who’s turning off that tap. Part of our goal here is to think about how do we turn off that tap and how do we empower people with information that’s actually accurate, that they can use.
What we have been discussing is, number one, everyone does not do everything. We have to have standards. We’ve written the first standards with the Department of Health Abu Dhabi and the Healthy Longevity Medicine Society to try to take a stab at this. We now have standards published by a government that say, this is longevity medicine, this isn’t longevity medicine.
We used healthy longevity medicine as the name of it at that time, which again, is still part of the debate. But what we would love to think about and talk about together is, what is it? What are we talking about? How do we make sure that that is at the level of the standards that you would expect when you or your loved one goes to see a rheumatologist or a cardiologist or a general surgeon.
I think our message here is why would we lower our standards when everyone’s lives depend on them? We actually are trying to help people stay healthy. We should be thinking about, all the levels of science and knowledge that we need in order to do that. So I’m going to leave you with this, and will pass over to Eric.