A peek into the future of spa medicine

I spent today going through medical tests at the WellMax Center for Preventive Medicine in La Quinta, California (near where I am vacationing and, yes, trying to resist the temptation to call my office). We met Dr. Dan Cosgrove (pictured at right), its founder, five years ago at an event here in the desert that Spa Finder hosted at Le Vallauris, a restaurant in Palm Springs. It was shortly after my husband, Peter, and I got involved with Spa Finder and at about the same time Dr. Cosgrove opened WellMax, his new-concept medical-spa, at the La Quinta Hotel and Spa.

Truth be told, we thought Dr. Cosgrove was a bit “full of himself” that first evening we met. He kept going on and on about this new kind of medical practice he was introducing, and let’s just say the conversation seemed uni-directional. Well, a great deal has happened in the five years since that encounter. Having followed WellMax’s growth and progress, we began to suspect that Dr. Cosgrove’s eccentricity stemmed from genius more than self-obsession. Recently we heard it had become almost impossible to get an appointment with him personally anymore. So we decided to invest (and I do mean invest…more about that later) in the WellMax “intensive physical” to see what all the fuss was about.

Suffice it to say that a few months after our initial physical in February, we are now more than impressed with Dr. Cosgrove and his “new medical spa” concept. Dr. Cosgrove discovered a growing mass on Peter’s kidney, which was successfully removed through surgery just weeks later – preventing a potentially serious condition in which he might have lost the kidney. And for me, while nothing of immediate critical concern was found, some interesting discoveries were made – including results from Predictive Genomics that are causing me to make some new choices.

I think we have glimpsed the future of spa medicine. And wow, is it ever exciting!