Welcome to the doctor's pharmacy. That's FAR, M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter.

I'm Dr. Mark Heimann. I'm here with an extraordinary man, a friend of mine from the Cleveland Clinic.

We're here at the Cleveland Clinic and we're here for a conversation that you will come to believe really matters.

Now, Dr. Leonard Calabrese is an extraordinary scientist. He's an immunologist. He's a rheumatologist.

He's leading some of the most important work in the world of how our lifestyle and the immune system are connected and what we eat and what we think and stress and our sleep and our food all play a role in how well our immune system works and can fight disease.

He's very been experienced in virus disease and HIV. He's the director of the RJ Fasten virus Center for Clinical Immunology, the Cleveland Clinic, which specializes in disease of the immune system.

He holds joint appointments not only in infectious disease but also in the wellness institute. He's focused on wellness and he's focused his whole career on changing the way we think about how we approach disease in general and particularly immune disease.

In fact, he came to us at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine and reached out and said, hey, you're here. Welcome. Very few people did that.

And with his colleagues have been key partners in helping us think about how do we move this field forward. So welcome Dr. Calabrese.

It's really great to be here, Mark, and been following the show. You've had some incredible people on. I'm flattered to be here and look forward to the chat.

Well, you're a giant in this world and I want to start out by talking about how you came to understand that the immune system was connected to our lifestyle and what we eat and our thoughts and beliefs and exercise and so far.

How did that sort of a hot moment happen for you? Because you were trained conventionally.

Okay. That's actually a good question. I don't have a sound bite answer, but there's a story. We got time. We got stories.

Well, you know, I'm a clinical immunologist. I take care of people with overactive immune systems with immune mediated inflammatory diseases, rheumatoid arthritis, muppus and vasculitis and the like. I also take care of patients with immunodeficiency disease, whose immune system is hypo functioning.

And when I started this business number of decades ago, you know, we had very few tools in the toolbox to deal with us.

Now, there are a few stories in medicine as satisfying as the development of biologic therapeutics for immune mediated diseases. And over the past 20 to 25 years.

The introduction of biologics has transformed patients lives. It's taken fatal diseases and made them nonfatals, taken progressive diseases and made them non progressive.

And I've been involved in clinical trials. And you're talking about drugs like I'm Braille and I'm talking about all of these type of drugs. And I was involved in the development of virtually all of them in terms of clinical trials.

Yet, at the same time, while we're doing this incredible job of controlling disease activity, I increasingly recognized that there was not a one to one correlation with making people well.

You know, you could control disease activity, you could reduce a biomarker, yet at the same time, you know, everybody has the same desire. They want to live a life that's well lived, you know, that's wellness and it's essence.

And, you know, I have a remarkable practice. I'm so privileged to be able to run the center and see patients from all over the world coming for rare and unusual diseases.

And sometimes we identify them genetically, sometimes we do tremendous therapies for them. Sometimes, you know, we make some progress.

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