55 Years Without a Diagnosis | Can AI Solve The Undiagnosed Condition Blind Spot? | Haresh Patel - Founder and CEO, Sanare Health AI

Haresh Patel: Sam.

Ira Pastor: Mhm.

Haresh Patel: Um,

Ira Pastor: Welcome to another episode of Progress, Potential and possibilities discussions with fascinating people designing a better tomorrow for all of us. I'm your host, Ira Pastor. Welcome everybody again to another episode of the show. Bringing another really awesome guest for you today. Uh, on the show today, uh, we have the honor of being joined by Haresh Patel, uh, who is an entrepreneur, an engineer, uh, founder and chief executive officer of a company called Sanaire Health, AI as well as the author of a memoir, uh, entitled the Ghost in My Body. Uh, and um, Haresh has been on a really interesting journey. I mean after you know, coming from India, immigrating, earning electrical engineering degree at uh, Notre Dame, he went on to build an extremely distinguished career in Silicon Valley founding uh, Mercatus, a uh, really interesting private markets data platform that ultimately managed over one and a half trillion dollars of assets before uh, it was acquired by State Street. Uh, but behind all that business success is a uh, sort of a parallel deeply personal story. And that's for the last 55 years, Haresh lived with these unexplained symptoms, uh, navigating a maze of specialists and tests and conflicting diagnoses without ever receiving a clear answer. And ultimately uh, rather than accepting the limitations of the current system, ultimately applied the systems thinking of his previous career, uh, journey, uh, that made him successful in tech, uh, to ultimately focus on the health journey. And that experience led him to this really provocative conclusion that many patients don't suffer from a lack of doctors, but ultimately a uh, lack of data synthesis. And modern medicine, while it may excel at specializing in things, struggles to connect information across disciplines, uh, and timelines and experiences. And today ultimately that's uh, the goal of what Haresh is doing at Syner uh Health, ultimately using AI powered diagnostic intelligence designed to help patients with complex core chronic undiagnosed conditions uncategor these patterns within fragmented medical data and give physicians a more complete picture of the patient to empower individuals to uh, own their own health stories. And so it's going to be a really interesting discussion. Um, we're going to be getting into a lot of interesting topics. Um, Patel, welcome to the show.

Haresh Patel: Thank you very much Ira.

Ira Pastor: It's great having you. I'm really looking forward to getting to a, a range of these topics with you. I mean I really want to restart off by handing things over to you. I mean Obviously the last 55 year journey is what I'll call the 55 year mystery, sort of that ends with chronic uh, urticaria diagnoses. Uh, I mean it really took you, uh, on quite a path. We just love to hear sort of the background story here, you know, what life was like for you over those decades and carrying a condition that, you know, no one could explain for quite a while. Um, it takes down that path for a little while and then we'll, we'll head off into what you're doing.

Haresh Patel: I can start at the beginning or start at the end and work backwards. So let's, let's start at kind of the aha moment first of what inspired me to do a Sonari Health. I've been on my, I'm on my 12th doctor now. I know what I have. I still don't know why I have it. And this doctor, uh, based in Sacramento, is a holistic doctor. He practiced medicine for a while. Uh, he actually also is a vet, so interestingly runs two different clinics. And um, obviously I visited the human clinic and uh, he did something really interesting. The first part was standard. Give your insurance card, fill out the form. The nurse comes in, takes the vitals, creates a nice folder, puts it on his desk and moves you to his office. Then he comes in and then he does the most unconventional thing, which was, Listen, Mr. M. Patel or Haresh, I really don't plan on opening this folder. I also don't want to know why you're here. I want to know who you are. Start from the beginning. And he peppered me for two hours, which you don't get with a doctor. That's kind of clue number one. And at the end he kind of stood up and he went on his whiteboard and he said, listen, I've been filling in these eight quadrants. Everything you told me that we'll talk about with your listeners about my journey is called the energy quadrant. And the reason you're having a problem is because you have 12 doctors who reach behind the curtain and felt one part of the elephant. I'm playing Sherlock Holmes. I'm going to take the whole curtain off. And that whole story about your journey is the energy vector, but everything's connected and that's the problem. And when he drew those eight quadrants, I didn't care whether I had a urticaria. I just knew that I was going to build Sonari Health because the architecture of what he was describing was exactly what I solved at Mercatis. Mercatus was a fintech platform that helped private market investors and that invest in airports and bridges and toll roads and oil rigs and you name it, anything physical. They invest hundreds of millions if billions of dollars. They have Decades of data in data rooms. They have millions of financial models and they can't make heads or tails out of it. Privately, these folks, publicly, these folks are like people you see on cnn. Privately, they'll tell you, haresh, I'm flying blind. And that's in essence the story. So when I saw that architecture, I said, wait, this systematic methodology of looking at all of the pieces is what's missing. And I can build that same architecture. It's the same data flow that we gave our private market investors. What we allowed them to do was scenario analysis. Something M in the world changed. The straight of hormone was closed. Oh, it's opening now. Oops, no, it's closing again. Well, each of those events has an effect on the portfolio in the body. It's a symptom. The symptom is a new event and you need the whole picture to be able to understand where did that symptom start? That's the aha moment. And I look at it and say, uh, if I can, maybe my 55 year journey, which was painful, and my 12 year entrepreneurial journey, which is painful in a different way. As you know, startups will go through ups and downs. It's not a straight line. At least I can't make it a straight line. Maybe it was all worth it and if I build this and I can solve one person's journey and make it shorter, then it was all worth it.

Ira Pastor: And you know, you just mentioned one person's journey there. But you know, in looking at the, you know, the numbers here, um, quite staggering because you know, when I first sort of was reading about you, I thought at first this was going to be, you know, we've done a lot of episodes in terms of sort of the rare disease folks and you know that there's a number of 25 to 30 million Americans alone sort of in that segment. But seems different. I mean, well, obviously we had a Venn diagram and there'd be some overlap here, but we're talking about you, what's broadly defined as patients with medically unexplained symptoms. Um, I read a number somewhere again, something like 10 to 20% of all primary care visits Today I go into doctor's office, doc, I have some issue, falls into this category strangely, which literally, I mean millions and millions of patient exposures. And then when I go to your website, I mean you have all this, I mean the amount of just searches right on search engines and ChatGPT, everything else, hundreds of millions, if not billions happening. We have an issue and it's a big number. Um, I want you to talk a little bit about this space because this is just a few people that have some rare disease. This is a much bigger problem than I think a lot of people are aware of.

Haresh Patel: Right. So the person we're trying to serve, first of all, conventional medicine or modern medicine has its place and it works miracles. And nothing I say here takes away from what it brings. It has its place, but there are these clusters where one in every three Americans have this problem. And sometimes they overlap. Sleep, fatigue, kind of combined as two. Mental health, probably one of the biggest epidemics. Headaches, pain somewhere and inflammation. Diabetes is a form of inflammation. And those are the, uh, inflammation, autoimmune. Those are the tough ones to diagnose. There's 133 million Americans, I would say, living in diagnostic limbo, suffering somewhere between six to 12 doctors like myself, average journey four to eight years. For women, unfortunately, it's much, much longer because of bias. That's the plain hard truth. It's in your head. It's that time of month. Please go away now. These 133 million people spend, uh, $1.3 trillion in the medical system, which means insurance based. And then they don't find a solution. But they have to find a solution for those that said, listen, I can't live this way, go hunting. In the old days, they would go to a library and find something and find a doctor in some foreign country and fly over there. The Internet made it easier. Ah, AI is going to make it way easier to find out all kinds of options. So then they spend 134 billion. This is every year, by the way, is looking for what insurance doesn't pay for to try modalities that conventional medicines looks at it and says m not FDA approved, not scientifically proven. Harvard Medical School hasn't written about it. So we don't pay for that. That's the market we're serving. Those five areas that I described. People that have been spending time frustrated with the system. And what's been missing? Excuse me, what's been missing is the story. You have to look at the entire iceberg, right? What you see at the tip is a symptom. But you got to see what's at the bottom below that surface. Remember, iceberg, uh, 90 is below the water. You got to go see what's under the water. And that's not easy, by the way, for several reasons. Sometimes we don't want to share what went on in our lives. Sometimes we don't know it's Buried so deep, sometimes you just need a sympathetic ear to draw that out. So uh, that is where we think 70 or 80% of these ailments start. Not for everybody. There's genuine medical issues. But even in that pure medical world, the 12 specialists talking to each other, getting to the right specialist is really critical. If you look at one article that I read on paper, in the paper, somebody goes to a female, goes to a doctor, she has a rash and her elbows and she's been through three or four different specialists and really has the solution. One finally connected the dot and he goes, have you, because he studied a little bit deeper, the whole body is more functional. Doctor, he said, have you had an MRI M on your ovaries? Yeah, everything was clean. Can you please go back and have them relook at it? I suspect there's a little bit of growth there and that's what's causing your rash. Right. The dots aren't connecting. So she went back to her ob GYN and lo and behold there was a small polyp. Luckily it was not ovarian cancer. They were able to remove it and the rash went away. It's back to that elephant analogy. If you see a skin doctor, they're going to look at the skin. Brilliant people. You go see somebody around pancreas, they really know the pancreas. Uh, Mark Hyman recently had I think um, a ah, podcast with a ah, psychologist. And he goes, you know, it's interesting, um, you study the mind, I study the body. There's a neck in between. We don't figure out how to connect the two together. So the platform helps also connect dots. Right. As you unfold your story. And it's simple. If I say I have a headache, you go to anyone like you mentioned the uh, ChatGPT or Claude, we'll take some aspirin. If you ask, well, why do you have a headache? When did it start? Are there issues in your life that are going around? Did you get into a car accident? Did you hit your head on something? Obviously the more you answer, the richer of an answer. You're going to get more options. It's as simple as that. Because if you have more information, more time between you and the doctor, you can get to the root cause. Mhm.

Ira Pastor: And you know, you just brought, you said root cause. And you know, this is core to ultimately what um, you know, the scenario system is all about helping you know, figure out again, you know, you pointed to uh, a beautiful example. I was thinking of one about like, sort of like sleep apnea Right. I mean, I'm going to, I'm going to have hypertension and fatigue and brain fog and I'm going to be depressed and have memory problems and I'm going to go to a cardiologist that's going to treat my blood pressure and a psychiatrist for my depression neurologist for the other thing. Uh, but no one's going to diagnose sleep apnea. Uh, and so that's just one example. But I'd love, you know, again to sort of, you know, just lay out, you know, you're, the way you think about root cause versus symptom management. And then if we could, you know, take a little time because, you know, obviously you built Mercatus into an amazing work organization. You're, you're mirroring that here and you've put together, um, you know, it's sort of what broadly refer to as diagnostic intelligence. There's, there's many stages, uh, to this stack, let's say what you're doing from data aggregation and timeline reconstruction and all that take a little time I should do, to walk us through, um, ultimately your definition of root cause, but ultimately how you go about designing scenario to root out these root causes. Because this is a really important part of the puzzle.

Haresh Patel: Let's just walk through the day in the life. If you're, if you're on our platform, pick any, let's pick tinnitus or tenus. I think I, I think I pronounced it wrong. So apologies, sorry I said the wrong way to pronounce it. Um, that's something that I think 20 or 30 million Americans have. Right. Uh, and your first inclination is in my ear, let me go see an ENT specialist. Wrong. That's for only 20 of the people that actually have a middle ear problem. The problem is that your brain has a particular function that processes sound. And when it doesn't receive sound, it's generates sound to make it feel like it's doing work, doing what it's supposed to do. In the world of scenario or on the, in the conventional world, you say there's no cure to tinnitus. In the world of Scenario, you'll say, listen, I want to know what happened in the last 12 months. This is all about time travel, it's all about building the story. Because we've done the homework for the patient to say, if you have tinnitus, there are solutions out there if you're willing to keep an open mind. But first we need to know your story. So the first question we're going to ask is in the last 12 months, did any of these three things happen? We're time traveling. Have you had any severe hearing loss? And oh, by the way, if you're 65 and they're telling you exactly where you should be, that's hearing loss, right? If there's hearing loss, the brain is going to say, wait, I'm not hearing sound. I got to create some sound to feel good that I'm doing my work or my job. So you've got to have. There's a therapy for how you calm the brain down through sound therapy. Or you need to get hearing aids because a hearing aid allows your brain to receive the signal it's supposed to receive and it'll go. The tinnitus will go away. If you've had a serious neck or injury, displacement, whiplash, if, you know, if somebody rear ended you in the car, you slipped or fell, well, that also can cause tinnitus. And it usually happens 12 months after. But the problem is the ENT has not been trained to ask that question. It's people that left the industry or said, you know, I'm going to go deeper. They didn't leave the industry. They just, I'm going to go deeper. There's got to be a cure. M. Just that simple. Let's talk about what happened last 12 months. And unpacking that story, combined with all your medical records and everything else, you're going to be able to walk into the doctor's office in much better shape to say, here's this document that you can either scan your QR code and it can pop up on your phone, you can read it, take a few minutes to learn about me, giving them the same opportunity that I had with Dr. Reddy. The two hours. We're not going to change the 13 and a half minutes you have with a doctor, but if you can walk in with, ah, uh, I read this now. I've taken four or five minutes. I've taken a deep breath from my last appointment, so I'm running from room to room. I really get who you are now. You go back to tinnitus again. I explained to you, if you had hearing loss, what you. There are opportunities to do things that modern medicine says, no cure. But if you've had a neck or jaw displacement, you can go see a therapist, you can see a chiropractor that can realign. So there are options that you have to explore. And so that's what scenario is all about, helping you build that longitudinal timeline by asking the right set of questions. You're now carrying Your story with you as you go to doctor's office. And it's evolving, by the way. The next appointment, your recorder's on and it's, you know, recording the next doctor appointment so that it's helping you connect the dots. So because the movies, our life is always an evolving picture. Right. Frame. Mhm. So it's constantly building on it. So each time, you know, there's a cascade effect. So that's, that's the life of scenario. And then what it does is it opens up these options. It'll say, now what we're doing on the other side. The practitioners are also on the platform. And it acts like a dating engine. It gets you to the right practitioner, it gets you to the right specialist sooner. So the net effect is 13 and a half minutes. Feels like two hours. The effectiveness of two hours. But it's also getting you quicker too, because it knows your full story to say, you know, don't visit ent. You know, visit an ear specialist in terms of hearing aid, first hearing loss. Right. We think if you rule that out and so you're cycling through less specialists and hopefully getting to somebody that can go deeper and actually solve your problem. So we're not necessarily offering like, here's your solution, but we're saying here's. Here are multiple paths that you can explore that were not open to you before. So I'll stop there and I'll say, well, what was confusing about that? But it's as simple as our story is not being built. It's not being told, it's not being heard.

Ira Pastor: Mhm.

Haresh Patel: And if that's built correctly, which means you have to be the CEO of your own health, you've got to take the time to put the story together and you got to find people that are willing to listen or move to the next. Next practitioner or next doctor. Mhm.

Ira Pastor: Yeah. I mean, again, you know, in reading through what you put together there, you know, so many things came to mind. And in terms of the different categories of possibility, obviously, um, there's the whole rare disease area, there's the, the mazes of current. You know, we mentioned autoimmune before, which we forget is this basket of, you know, 70 some odd different dis diseases. We know about the big ones, right. Rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis and all that. But there's dozens of other ones that, you know, very few people know about. Um, there's the new diseases like Long Covid. Right. That weren't around a couple years ago. Uh, and then the, you know, Whole area of, you know, as you were talking about mental health and then obviously case like yours, right? I mean the uh, uh, just call it sort of the Haresh case. You know, something that last decades. Obviously if you had the scenario system 10, you know, 50 years ago, uh, you know, you would have solved this problem pretty quickly. Um, any, I mean the tinnitus. Tinnitus. Tinnitus, whatever. I say it wrong too. That's a great example. Any other interesting uh, cases, stories like that you could share with us? Uh, I mean obviously there's so many. I just didn't know there was any other top of mind. Obviously, you know the tennis one is great but um. Any other things I'd like to share?

Haresh Patel: Share 1. I'm going to be very careful to keep it as anonymous as possible.

Ira Pastor: Please do it.

Haresh Patel: Um, I actually got a random call from a vendor that wanted to get my business and I assumed the salesperson was asking for status update. And I just said yeah, we haven't raised our money yet. We're in the process. When I do, I'll give you a call. He said no, no, no I'm not. I've got somebody I think you can help. I said okay, we'll make them an introduction. So we put them on the scenario platform. It was a gentleman in the Middle East. He uh, has a 32 year old daughter. She's in comatose state now. I'm beginning to feel like a doctor, like holy crap, how am I going to help this person?

Ira Pastor: Right?

Haresh Patel: That's extreme. From tinnitus is a kind of every day. This is pretty catastrophic. And um, I said well let's give it a try. I'll come to the punchline. She's not cured yet. But I'm going to get you the through the story she's been through. She had started, her symptoms started at age 10 with epileptic seizures and they got progressively more frequent and more violent. And he had the resources. So he took her uh, to two of the best institutions in the US medical institutions. Two in London, two in Dubai and one in India over the 22 years. And we know what our final state is today. They haven't obviously been able to happen having to solve her problem. So uh, I said first of all, have you centralized your health records? No. Can you do that? So he took about two weeks to realize how hard it was to get. But he got me a. He got the platform into the platform, all the data over those 22 years from those six major institutions. So that was step one. We were able to synthesize that and kind of find two practitioners that we thought might be able to help go further and deeper through use, uh, of the platform and the live interviews. Because we think some of these, what I said, extractions of stories and history needs that human touch. It's not just AI as much as I love AI, AI is a piece of the puzzle. You can't substitute the warmth of a person. So, uh, he's filled out as much as he can online on our platform, and we put him through because he has to speak on behalf of his daughter. And then ultimately we asked the mom to come on board. And she has been so traumatized, she doesn't want to talk to anybody. So it took a lot of convincing, saying, hey, listen, we got to help our daughter. So she also came on with answering as many questions as she could, combined with the. With the human interview. And these are things that were asked that the six institutions missed. Where was she born? How was she born? Those have huge effects. Where did she move in life? Which countries did she live in? What were some of her hobbies? Did she have any pet? And interestingly, we found out she was born in. In Nairobi. She was swimming in a particular river, and she had two kittens. Only in that city is there a virus that affects the brain. M. That happened when she was a small girl. There's an opportunity now to go figure out what to do with that. That's a door that's open. M. There's no vitamin B12. Test done. I ran, re ran again and again. I even took it outside to another AI platform outside of ours. Can you please double check? There's no misspelling. Vitamin B12 is the most important vitamin to ignite the brain and keep it going. There's another door that's open. Mom revealed that she had the same symptom. When she was 10 years old, she took ayurvedic medicine. She doesn't recall what it is, but it solved her problem. There's door number three. Door number four. Again, going back to mind, body, spirit. When she was pregnant with this girl, she lost her what would have been her older sibling halfway through the pregnancy. And we asked what happened? He goes, well, I cried a lot, and I cried a lot. I was in grief like any mother would be. So imagine the trauma that transfers from her, if you believe in mind, body to the fetus. That's another whole therapy. Gut was never inspected. I'm going to the door number five. What was in her microbiome? The gut is a second brain it speaks to the brain and vice versa. So the whole microbiome was never tested. So we've now opened five doors by extracting her story. What I found most heartwarming was a message from her father to me on, on, uh, instant messaging or WhatsApp. You know, Mr. Patel, we had no hope before, and now we've got five rays of light. The. The answer is in the story. That's what Sanar is all about. But you've got to take control of your health records. You've got to be able to keep it with you, travel with you and share it and let it build, because you're going to have a different symptom a year from now. And if you have everything in one place, it's a lot easier to analyze. So that's just, that's probably the most extreme case. And tinnitus is, I would say, the daily case. Right.

Ira Pastor: Right now, I. Look, I mean, it's a. And I, I'll put that one into sort of the diseases of, you know, you know, consciousness, you know, disorders of consciousness, basket. But it shows sort of the, um, even something as dramatic as, you know, someone being in a coma, obviously that there's a root cause somewhere over here. Right. I, uh, mean, as you're pointing out and yeah, I mean, I think this is extremely exciting and elegant the way you put it together. And you know, this is, um. We talk so much about artificial intelligence on the show, as you were just mentioning, you know, your views on, you know, obviously augmenting rather than replacing. But here's, you know, beautiful set of cases where, you know, this is. We're not waiting for any really new data to come on board here. Obviously stories, as you're mentioning, so crucial in the big, big picture here. What is the scenario atlas all about? Because it looks like you're taking a rather holistic approach in sort of all the types of data that you can put together. Because as you were saying, you know, this goes beyond just, you know, typical medical information. Um, talk a little bit about, you know, what you're doing now as we're sitting here, you know, we're talking here in June of, of 2026. Um, what is happening in terms of growing the, uh, organization, the um, the products and say a little bit of the business model on what's happening next. Our audience can get a better understanding here.

Haresh Patel: Well, like every other platform, it's free to use. Right. But there's opportunities, uh, as a business, we have to make money. So, um, on the patient side, you can build your Story. Mhm. But if you'd like to write a check instead and say, gosh, I don't have the time, but can you do it? We will offer that as a white glove service where we can, you can give us access to username, password, we can scrape all that data and get it organized. We can also have, uh, and you can talk to, you know, um, the platform. No different than you talk to another AI platform. But it's asking what's embedded in there is the, the art of the questioning.

Ira Pastor: Mhm.

Haresh Patel: And, um, and then, but, you know, we offer the ops the opportunity to say, would you like to talk to somebody about your story and, and have a conversation. That's an upsell. So those are ways for us to make money. We will also offer what I call medical Sherpa because you have a problem and you leave the doctor's office, you're so back on your own. What's the next step? What's the next step? I don't understand this. Can you help me interpret. Can you go deeper in the research on this? We had an individual, uh, that had a symptom, um, and they live in Northern California and they moved to, um, Barcelona, and somehow all those symptoms disappeared. Now we, the medical Sherpa that we had, that's a human, spent a lot of hours going through and looking at what's the difference between air quality and water quality and, you know, food, you know, coloring and everything you could to find that smoking gun. Right. So that's, that's what I mean by you can have a. Somebody help you with that. So those are all upsell opportunities. And that'll be like on a subscription base where you can have, I would say, concierge for the masses, where we'll offer that, uh, but where we make money is at the end of the day, it's a matching and dating service. When we know more of your story, we can say, here are five potential doors, like I pointed out in either tinnitus or in case. And here's some practitioners that you should go to. And when that transaction happens, then the practitioner is sharing that revenue. It's no different than the way Airbnb is set up. Um, or any of the sharing platforms, any of the travel agencies. Same thing. When, when they bring a, uh, somebody to a hotel, there's a transaction that happens. Same with the travel website. So we're a marketplace. And what happens on the practitioner side is that they struggle with, um, two issues. Like any business. They want more patients and. But more importantly, since this is a Word of mouth business and a review business, where that really matters. A bad review or no review is equally bad. They really want qualified patients, so they this as a qualification engine. So what we're capturing for them is what's an ideal patient look like for you? Because they're sitting there nervously like, I'm about to charge some money and it's precious money. I got to really feel confident that I'm taking on the right patient. He may or may not be. So we take their criteria of what is a perfect patient and what is not a perfect patient and we use that into the platform to do the matching. No different than when I say, hey, I want to go to Spain, I want an oceanfront house, I want three bedrooms. It's matching against the homes that are with those criteria. It's the same principle, but here we're matching, matching symptoms and possible root causes to the right practitioner. We're making that journey more efficient as opposed to myself or you navigating. And like I spent too many years going through a dozen doctors. I probably could have short circuit that to maybe three or four. Yeah. Does that make sense?

Ira Pastor: That makes perfect sense.

Haresh Patel: Yeah.

Ira Pastor: Uh, Ghost My Body just came out. I think it launched in April. Um, you know, talk a little bit about, you know, what it was like writing the book. Were there specific parts of it that were, you know, harder to tell than others, how, you know, it's been greeted? Um, you know, what you hope patients to take away from it and then just a sort of a subset of to that. Um, recently, uh, a couple weeks ago did an episode of a similar story to yours. A young man diagnosed, you know, 40 years ago with chronic eczema and similar sort of story, not undiagnosed, but, you know, we forget that those numbers you mentioned, the one in three and all that, there's a lot of pediatric patients out there and um, you know, obviously scenario is going to be able to fit that model as well. But, um, can you also go back and just talk to the 10 year old Haresh, uh, and sort of tell him a message as well because, you know, uh, children understand this stuff a little differently than we as adults do and love to sort of hear your pediatric message as well. While we have here today, I would

Haresh Patel: say the message is the same whether you're early age or mid age or late age. I made that mistake. You have to take control of your own health. You've got to build that story. And you have to be curious to find out why the what is not is part of the Journey. Yes. Yep. Uh, it took me 10 years to get to what, which was I had uricaria. I didn't have a food allergy, which is what we thought. That solved the problem is that we knew how to treat it. But I was curious to say, but why do I have it? That's a critical turning point. So I would say, you know, we all need to take the painkiller because you got to end the suffering quickly so you can get back to life. But what shouldn't happen, the mistake I made is I didn't stay curious to say, okay, but why is this happening? I didn't dig, ah, deep enough. I was comfortable either taking pills or shots or something. And so getting to the why is very critical. That's the advice I would give. Stay curious and stay open minded. Steve Jobs said it better than I did at the Stanford commencement, which is stay hungry and stay foolish. Same thing, right? Stay curious, keep an open mind. Because sometimes a solution that we have dogma around, um, becomes science later. Think of the people that said the world was round. They were laughed out of town, if not hung in town square. So, you know, there are 5,000 year old modalities of medicine that we've kind of forgotten about or our conventional medicine doesn't want us to know. Um, but people that are kind of in this diagnostic hell find solutions and they're willing to spend the money, um, because they need to end the suffering. But it only comes if you stay curious to get to the why. You keep an open mind and you take control of your own story. Those are the three lessons I can give. And that's the same for somebody that's my daughter's age. She's 23 there. That age group is much more conscious than my generation. She wants to avoid what dad went through, right. So she's spending money to figure out what's in my past, what's in my DNA. Right. By doing DNA testing, all the new things that are coming out to say, what do I do now? Uh, to avoid and live longer. Not just live longer, but live longer, healthier. They just come at it from a different lens, but the solution is still the same. Take control, find out the why and keep your m options open in terms of what modalities are out there. Now. I'd love to share with your, um, listeners the, the story that brought me here. I, I told you what the ending, which is the aha, like, oh, wow, I went to solve a problem of why I had uricaria. But, uh, we'll get to how we solved it. But, um, took one doctor in Costa Rica that was. We were there serendipitously on a vacation slash real estate hunting trip. He happened to be recruited from India, from one of the top, uh, wellness centers in India. So I just out of curiosity told my officer, we've got this Indian couple like you and I in the middle of a rainforest, jungle, forest, and an Indian doctor that everybody talks about like he walks in water. We should at least meet and say hello. That was the only intent back of my mind. I was thinking, well, let's see what he does, you know. And he piqued my interest. After we had our cup of coffee after dinner, and I signed up for his paid program. And, uh, he did a couple things similar to the doctor in Sacramento that I m met, Dr. Reddy. He asked me to get my records in order so that he. Because there was no way for him to. For him to give me the medical tests that I needed. Because it's a wellness center. I learned how hard it was to get my own records. And, um. But he plotted it out, which is what we did at Mercatus. I didn't, I didn't. It didn't register at the time, but he had manually plotted things out to show that, you know, my problem started a long time ago. It's just you don't realize a horror film when it escalates. You don't realize when it starts escalating. Um, and then he gave me two hours, which is again, back to the time deprivation. First hour was medical examining the records, understanding more, going deeper. Second one was psychological with one question that made the difference. Everybody in the medical industry asked me, are you stressed now? Yeah. Got kids, wife, bills. Startup's not doing all that well today. Okay. No problems, right? Nothing unusual. Body's keeping score. But he asked a different question. When's the first time in life you were stressed? Think m about it. That made me think, okay, yeah, middle school, New Hampshire, only Indian kid. When you look different, dress differently, your lunchbox smells different, you're going to get picked on. Kids are mean, you know, um, and so there was a lot of stress at the time. And then you probably had dandruff and dry elbows. Yep. Right. Stress and, and dandruff go together. Let's go back further. Let's go back further. Now. I felt like I was in a psychologist here, and he brought me to age 6, which I wasn't planning to share. And he said, um, he asked another question. How emotional are you? I said, well, that's the running joke of the family. I don't laugh. I don't cry when during movies. I don't understand why people do that. I watch it, I enjoy it, and I'm like my mom. And he said, well, tell me about your mom. I said, well, she passed away in a car accident. We were moving east while everybody moves west. My dad had gotten a new job. He had just graduated, and he had a job in New Hampshire as a professor of physics. And we were. We decided to make a vacation out of it. We didn't. The car and, uh, us didn't survive the first day of the journey. And she passed away, and she got thrown from the car. My dad and I walked away relatively unscratched. Um, and he dug deeper rather than expressing sympathy. Okay, Barry, did you cremate? Did you perform last rites with the Catholic priest? Did you do a Hindu puja that, you know, we call puja's prayer? Um, did you the Hindu rights? And we. I answered all the questions. And he closed his book. We're close to the end of two hours. And he said, bad news. Um, I don't have a cure for you. I can give you certain ayurvedic medicines, maybe that make your rash better, or urticaria, but if you will have an open mind. Going back to the open mind, I do have a solution. And he said, uh, my thesis is. And by the way, I just need to say every one of my medical doctors always said there was an oxygenation issue. Low iron sleep apnea, snoring, the body's not getting enough oxygen. That may be the breakdown of your immune system. The beginning of the breakdown. So that was the medical diagnosis. His diagnosis was, well, people that die tragically, um, have a very high propensity of being stuck on Earth. There's their soul. In your case, Mom's holding on to you so tightly. That was the ghost in my body. Uh, and she's holding on to you so tightly, you can't breathe. The same diagnosis, but just from a different angle. And you can't, uh. Since you don't express emotion, you're boiling. So no one. Do you have a rash. So if you go to India, you go to this particular town called Bodh Gaya, you perform this very particular prayer there. The portal is very thin, and her soul will rise and you will be cured. And I'm like, I've got two harasses. One on one shoulder saying, that's a bunch of crochet. And the other one weeping, saying, he's opened up A gash of grief and buried trauma and guilt as we left her buried Colorado, Kansas border and kind of moved on and had been gnawing at me and he opened up that wound. Now I, I, he's piqued my interest but I'm not convinced. I waited three years until I had a opportunity when I sold the company to go to New Delhi. Still wasn't planning to go but I didn't, I didn't quite believe. Um, and I was taking shots by the way, $3,000 a piece. Luckily I wasn't paying for them. This is, my insurance was paying for it, um, but somebody was paying for it. But I was, I retired to a leash. I couldn't go anywhere in the world. I have to come back to, to Stanford to take the shot. Very finicky. Um, so uh, after the going away party my wife is seeing me look at a travel website because ah, uh, you're thinking of going to Bodgaio. I said yeah, well I'm just looking at it. I didn't realize it's only a one hour flight. They only have one flight a day into that very small town and one flight out. So based on temple time and the time a priest is available, we probably have to spend two nights. So two nights in a hotel and 200 bucks and a hundred dollar ticket for both of us. So 400, why not? Let's try it. I went there and I can guarantee you there was no parting of the ocean or some rain cloud or a rainbow or it was just a very disappointing experience. The priests were trying to shake us down for more money than we had committed or they had asked for. So I walked away very dejected and disappointed. Finished the rest of our vacation in uh, Sri Lanka and London and went back home. And it was time for my shot. And I didn't feel the normal tingling or the itch that would start. So I called the doctor's office and I said, uh, can I postpone it because yeah, it's in the freezer here. We have it from CVS pharmacy, specialty pharmacy. Um, just text us whenever you're ready and call us if you get stuck in traffic. We'll put it back in the refrigerator. I've never gone back again. So um, I would say for maybe some people might turn them off saying this is very woo woo. I uh, in my book I wrote about this in excruciating detail the whole journey. And I ended with, you know, it could be placebo effect which is something that science doesn't understand. It could actually Be what? He said, if you believe in mind, body and spirit, um, it could be that my body just happened to repair itself at that very moment. But I, I chose, uh, Einstein's, uh, as the quote from my epigraph, which is basically, you know, you've got like, my dad, a physicist, scientist, brilliant mathematician, probably the, the corner case of, you know, science and technology. And he said, we can all believe in the mysterious. But, um, anyways, that's, that's the story, that's the journey. Um, but it got to the why, right? We addressed the why. We addressed the root cause. It was the, the trauma. And again, 80% of the modalities I talked about, which is sleep and fatigue and inflammation and petache, headaches, pain stem from some form of stress or trauma. It never gets examined. The mind never gets examined.

Ira Pastor: Yeah, I mean, I, I, I, we, we just literally last week we did this whole episode on psychobiology and again, you know, we're talking about root causes. Um, the mind, I mean, it sits above pretty much everything else. I mean, DNA and cells and epigenetics and all that stuff are fine. But, um, you know, when we don't think of the connection and we, we break those connections, um, again, we're, we're blind. We're the blind man looking at the elephant. Um, and yeah, it's, um, I, I'm completely, you know, um, in line with everything you're saying here. I, I love what you put together. I mean, I think, I think it's again, very elegant. Um, what, what else is happening, um, that we should know about? Obviously, you know, you're growing the company. It's going to be as successful as Mercatus. You got the book out there now. Um, anything else, uh, while we have you today that we should know about, um, in terms of you, the company, anything else that I missed? Um, please.

Haresh Patel: I think the, the thing I'd want you to take away, if I can just say again, is this whole take control of your health, you're the CEO of your health. Nobody else is going to. Yep. You've got a caregiver, right. They're here to support you. But you've got to take control. You got to stay curious, you've got to get to the why, you've got to be open minded. I mean, that's kind of the table stakes of, uh, kind of my core message. Um, but I think you also have to be resilient, right? You have to learn how to bounce back when you get into a dark spot. You've got to figure out how to find that silver lining. That's the part I forgot to tell you about why I wrote the book even. I wasn't even planning to write a book. But in 2009 I got fired. And uh, 2009 was not a good time to get fired. Right? I was like on an empty riverbed watching this raging river come. I couldn't go in either direction. I was screwed. So I just said, I'll start my own company. I don't know what it's going to be, but I'll write a book one day. The best thing ever happens. Getting fired. I had to create my own silver lining. And then a few weeks later, after I licked my wounds, I said, oh, there's this idea that I got and like wax. Scratch it, scratch it. That became Mercatus. Uh, but it took that, that I would say the inversion of a bad thing and try to make it positive. So um, those are kind of my, kind of my core messages. Um, I think that you know, the platform is unique. There are a lot of good platforms out there that do something similar including if you want to just stay with, you know, OpenAI or Claude or Google or any of the search engines, they're all great. But what makes us greater is we ask the right questions and we dare to go where they don't go. Dare to go. We're not pushing anybody through a door saying here you got to go to. You know, Harass's situation might be very unique, but that's not your situation. You may have your Dakaria for a very different reason. Your door will be different than mine based on your story. And so it's the, it's the art of building your story and it's the um, optionality that you know, we're going to take you to that if you're curious enough, open minded enough that you're going to say, I'm going to knock on that door, I'm going to go explore that and uh, we'll take the horse to the water but we're not going to force them to drink it. Um, that, that is what makes us unique. I think all the other platforms are great but they replicate the flaws of the current system which is. Quick snapshot, Treat the symptom, come back again.

Ira Pastor: No, it's. Again. Um, I appreciate what you put together there. I think it's very elegant. I love the principle of becoming uh, a CEO of your own health. Um, yeah, I think it's extremely impressive. Um, and, and rooting you on um, to, to have the success with this initiative as you had with others. Um, again, for everybody, um, out there that is going to be listening, uh, to this episode across the various podcast networks, or who will be, uh, watching on the YouTube channel, um, you've been spending time with Haresh Patel, founder and chief executive officer, Sanaire Health AI Also pick up a copy of his book, the Ghost in My Body, available on all major booksellers. Um, Haresh, again, I want to thank you for taking the time out of your schedule to come talk to us for a little while about what you've been up to. Uh, thank you for what you do and helping people, uh, down this extremely important path of understanding, uh, especially the millions that have undiagnosed conditions. And as we say here on our show, you know, thanks for helping create a better tomorrow for people via what you do and what you're developing. It's a great story and I look forward to helping you spread the word.

Haresh Patel: Thank you. I've got. I've got one offer that I would like to extend to your listeners. We are going to be looking for our first thousand, um, beta clients to really test the platform. And, uh, we would like to extend that offer through a special promo code, uh, for you guys to use because it's valuable to get user feedback and we'll have some very exciting, uh, incentives for people who were first to finish their story.

Ira Pastor: Excellent, excellent.

Haresh Patel: So we'd love to offer that to your listeners.

Ira Pastor: That'd be great. That'd be outstanding. Great having you rush all.

Haresh Patel: Uh, right. Thank you so much.