At Medical Transformation Center, Carl Paige, MD, has found his model of healthcare
LOUISVILLE Diagnosis isn’t always simple. Sometimes it takes time, experience, analysis, and trial and error. For Carl Paige, MD, his decision to become a doctor was spot on, but once immersed in the conflicting and confounding interests of the U.S. healthcare system, he became increasingly frustrated and realized he wasn’t doing the work he wanted to do. That was his diagnosis. The cure was creating a new way of providing healthcare.
“I feel the way we have now is a better way to take care of patients,” says Paige, who co-owns Medical Transformation Center in Louisville with his wife, Terri. “We don’t bill or collect anything from any insurance company. I tell my patients, I work for me to feed my family, and I work for you to make you healthy. Those are my commitments.”
Paige was born in Homestead, Florida, but his family moved to Kentucky when he was young. He grew up in Muhlenberg County, where he and Terri would become high school sweethearts.
Planning to be a doctor all along, Paige attended the University of Kentucky for his undergraduate work, as well as medical school at the UK College of Medicine, before completing his residency in internal medicine and pediatrics at the University of Louisville in 1992.
Soon thereafter, he set up practice in Oldham County, where there was no full-time pediatrician at that time. The rural setting proved to be welcoming, and Paige’s patient base quickly expanded from pediatrics to the whole family.
“Within a year we were ridiculously busy,” Paige says. “Back then I could see 50-60 patients a day. It was the rural area between La Grange and Cincinnati, where there was essentially no healthcare. I was their primary care doctor and had to be their front-line specialist. The patients didn’t want to go another hour into the city to see somebody.”
In the Beginning
Initially, the practice consisted of Paige, a nurse, and Terri, who did the billing and administration, such as it was back then. The practice was thriving and grew to include other physicians, but it wasn’t fulfilling for Paige. He found insurance companies’ billing tedious, and needing prior-approval for tests or treatments was obstructive. He believed there had to be a way he could practice medicine the way he felt was right. So, he sold the practice and started Medical Transformation Center (MTC) in 2013.
“I went into the cellular medicine space,” Paige says. “How could we make the cell run efficiently and be more flexible from an energy standpoint? If you can achieve that, the organism will function better. A lot of the information that we use in cellular medicine comes from the human performance and athletic world. They translate well to aging and chronic health problems. Given the right tools, in most cases, the body can heal itself, especially if you’re more active.”
With Terri as his co-partner and CEO, Paige has found success and, more importantly, satisfaction at MTC. He has patients in 38 states. They come to see him in person once a year, and any other appointments are conducted remotely.
“I didn’t know I would end up here, but I knew where I was, and where the healthcare system was and I didn’t like it,” Paige says. “I didn’t think it was performing optimally for my patients or intellectually for me.”
“It was an organic evolution in how we changed the business model,” Terri says. “We don’t bill, code, or collect insurance payments at MTC. We have a membership fee, but we are not a primary care practice. We refer for labs and tests where people can use their insurance, but we got out of that system so Carl can have the latitude to use every tool that he has.”
Optimizing Health and Wellness
Paige treats a variety of conditions by focusing on different ways that the body heals itself and how patients can tap into those natural remedies. For many of his patients, it’s not a matter of being healed, but more a matter of optimizing the body’s healing powers and potential.
“We tell patients up front that they should maintain their primary care physician relationship,” Paige says. “We don’t do cough, cold, fever anymore. I think other physicians thought we would steal their patients, but we want patients to keep their primary care. We are just here to offer access to types of care that you cannot offer in that setting.”
Approximately 64 percent of MTC’s patients are women. The primary reasons patients come to MTC are not gender based, however. Instead, it tends to be a desire to maximize the body’s potential in terms of performance, healing, and aging.
“It’s not anti-aging, it’s optimized aging,” Paige says. “People want to be at their top form.”
To help them get there, Paige educates his patients on the human anatomy, particularly at the cellular level.
“The science is there to support this,” Paige says. “We approach it from what’s wrong at the cellular level, the immune level, and the gut level and address those issues to get patients optimized.”
Gut Level Patient Education
Patients are initially educated on gut health and the environmental factors that affect the body.
“Lifestyle, nutrition, and exercise are always the base of everything,” Paige says. “Then it’s gut health and stabilizing and optimizing immune function and energy production at the cellular level. Once you clean all that up, then you get into what is specifically broken and didn’t get better. It may be nutritional supplementation, a specific diet, or limitations in food you are exposed to. We use traditional prescription medicines and a lot of repurposed pharmaceuticals that have many benefits when you understand the mechanism of how they actually impact the cell.”
Paige further educates his patients on how their bodies function. He helps them identify their paths to managing and maximizing their health.
“You’re basically modifying how your genome interacts with the environment,” Paige says. “That’s going to be food, lifestyle, and exercise. Then you get into the bio-regulators and small molecules and peptides that literally enhance the signal.”
MTC’s happy patients have spread the word, leading to MTC’s growth and probable expansion. With help from Terri, who is a certified life coach, Paige is helping teach other practitioners the things he has learned. He hopes others will experience the same success he has seen in his own practice.
“I get personal satisfaction from being able to offer these things and to have patients come back in and say they have never felt so good or that their symptoms are so much better.” There is always a better way. And Carl Paige is glad he found it.