Preface to Dr. McWherter’s New Book

Uncategorized / By /

My Promise to You

I have been a doctor for almost 50 years — nearly half a century of listening to patients, running tests, and watching what truly helps people. Now I want to share everything I have learned with you.

This is not a medical book full of big, scary words. It does not put down regular medicine. It is based on real patients, real results, and real solutions I have seen work over five decades of practice.

I have watched thousands of patients grow older. I have treated their children and grandchildren. I have seen what works and what does not. This book is my way of sharing that knowledge with you.

Why This Book is Different

At first, I was considering a title which came from an 84-year-old patient who greeted me saying: “I would rather be seen than viewed.” She meant she wanted to be alive and healthy — not lying in a funeral home. So, I named this book:

“Tis Better to be Seen than Viewed — A Tissue-Centric Approach to Wellness”

Whatever the final title will be, this book is digital so I can update it immediately when new medical discoveries are made. A printed book can be outdated before it even reaches your hands.

Most importantly, this book is not meant to replace your doctor’s advice. It is designed to work alongside your current care — giving you new tools to understand your health and how your body ages.

How This Book is Organized

Here is what you will find in each chapter:

  • Quick Takes: A short summary at the start of each chapter. Read this first for the main points.
  • Main Chapters: Each chapter explains a health topic in plain, simple language with real solutions.
  • Addendums: Extra sections with information about vitamins, minerals, and approaches that help protect your body’s inner environment.
  • Appendices: Detailed lists of specific products and health plans I personally recommend for my patients.

Products I Have Created and Tested

Over the years I designed several health products — called nutraceuticals — because I needed them for my own health. When you see “physician formulated” or “physician tested” in this book, that means I created these products and I use them myself every day.

One example is the MDMatrix Cream, which has a U.S. patent. I did not create these products to make money. I created them because I have serious health problems of my own.

I am not just a doctor — I am also a patient. My genes make me likely to develop metabolic syndrome — a cluster of problems including high blood pressure, high blood sugar, extra belly fat, and unhealthy cholesterol levels that together raise the risk of heart disease and diabetes.

Thirteen years ago, a heart scan called a coronary calcium score showed I had a score of 2,211 — a very high number showing serious plaque buildup inside my heart arteries. I also struggle with high blood pressure and weight gain, and diabetes runs in my family. Because I am both the doctor and the patient, my own life depends on whether my protocols actually work.

How I Combine Different Types of Medicine

I combine traditional medicine with functional medicine (a term coined by Dr. Jeff Bland) which looks at the whole body and tries to find the root cause of illness, not just treat symptoms. For my heart problems and high blood pressure, I take prescription medications including statins and blood pressure pills. But I also follow an aggressive supplement plan built around what I call the:

Basic ECM Stabilizing Protocols

Because of my family history of diabetes and my tendency to gain weight, I have been using the weight-loss medicines compounded semaglutide, tirzepatide for over four years with great success. I no longer have sleep apnea, which two sleep tests confirmed. I have also reduced my blood pressure medicines.

My most recent blood tests show my plan is working. My last hs-CRP — which measures inflammation inside the body — is undetectable. My LDL (“bad”) cholesterol is 39 — an excellent number. I have had no heart symptoms and have needed no procedures such as stents. I follow both my medications and my ECM Basic Matrix Boosting Stabilization Protocol every single day.

Many studies warning about statin side effects were done on people who were NOT also using health-supporting nutraceuticals. I am careful not to overuse prescription drugs, but I believe they have an important role when used wisely alongside natural health protocols.

My Medical Journey: From Physics to Medicine

My story begins in the early 1970s. I started as a research physicist — a scientist who studies how matter and energy work at the tiniest levels. But I wanted to help people directly, so I switched to medical school.

My teachers taught me something I have never forgotten: medicine is 50% science and 50% art. You must know the facts, but you must also truly listen to your patients.

I am a board-certified Obstetrician/Gynecologist, a Fellow of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and a Fellow of the American College of Surgery — meaning I have met the highest standards in my field.

Back when I started, doctors knew their patients well. If you went to the hospital, your family doctor visited every day. New mothers stayed three days after delivery — five days after a C-section. This gave mothers time to heal and learn to care for their newborns. Almost no one came back to the hospital with complications. Today, new mothers go home in one day. Many return with problems like high blood pressure. Why? Because insurance companies — not doctors — now decide how long patients can stay.

How Medicine Has Changed

In the early years of my practice, doctors made medical decisions. Insurance companies simply paid the bills. Now insurance companies make many of the decisions. Doctors spend more time at computer screens than with patients. Visits are rushed — often only 15 minutes or less.

But I still follow the paraphrased wisdom of Dr. William Osler, one of the greatest doctors in history:

“Listen to your patient. If you listen long enough and closely enough, they will tell you the best treatment.”

The World I Started Practicing In

In the early 1970s, America was a younger country. The baby boomer generation was still young. Most people over 60 simply accepted they were “old” and rocked on the porch. The biggest medical victory of that era was defeating polio. Before the Salk vaccine, polio spread like a plague. My parents would not let me go to public swimming pools. Classmates wore leg braces from paralysis. Hospitals had rows of iron lungs — huge machines that helped polio victims breathe.

Doctors used what worked perfectly for infections: find the one germ causing the disease and create one medicine to stop it. This “one germ, one drug” approach — approved by the FDA — cured infections like rheumatic fever, diphtheria, and wound infections.

When Everything Changed

Starting in the mid-1980s, I noticed the “one germ, one drug” approach was not working as well. Why? Because my patients were getting older — and older people get diseases of aging. They get chronic diseases that last for years or a lifetime. Diseases like diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and arthritis became more and more common. The usual medicines might ease symptoms for a while, but the diseases kept getting worse.

I began to think: what if preventing these diseases is better than treating them after they start? But back then, no one was teaching doctors how to prevent or reduce the risk of contracting chronic diseases.

Thinking Outside the Box

My physics training helped me look for patterns and think in new ways. I explored what was then called “alternative medicine” or “integrative medicine” eventually transitioning into functional medicine and today called “longevity medicine or biohacking”. I attended my first course, the Dr. Brody Barnes Symposium on thyroid problems, where I met other forward-thinking doctors asking the same questions.

Over the years I studied with organizations like ACAM (meeting future media-famous doctors like Barry Sears and Nicholas Perricone) and the Institute of Functional Medicine with Dr. Mark Hyman. In the late 1990s, I attended the second IFM preceptorship course given by Dr. Jeff Bland in Gig Harbour. At that time, we attended functional medicine courses for approximately 1 week followed by returning to our respective practices for 4 weeks and then returned to Gig Harbour for a final week of lectures. During my formulative years which spanned from the 1980s through the 1990s, I learned about advanced nutrition, bioidentical hormone therapy, energy medicine (NAET), chelation therapy, anti-aging medicine, and nutritional immune support — among many other approaches.

As my knowledge grew, other doctors invited me to speak at national conferences about bioidentical hormones and breast cancer. I became chairman of AMMG for two years and received their highest honor — the Alan Minz Award. But I never stopped seeing patients. That hands-on experience over decades is the foundation of everything.

What Makes My Experience Special

  • Nearly 50 Years of Practice: Almost half a century of seeing what works and what does not.
  • Over 40 Years in the Same Location: I have followed some patients for their entire adult lives — 20, 30, even 40-plus years. This long-term view is impossible to get from a doctor who only sees patients briefly.
  • Surgical Experience: Being a pelvic surgeon helped me understand the root causes of women’s conditions, not just their surface symptoms.
  • Fertility Center Success: I helped start a successful IVF (in-vitro fertilization) fertility center, endorsed by the Society for Assisted Reproductive Treatment, giving me deep knowledge about how hormones work together.
  • I Am Also a Patient: The Basic ECM stabilization protocols I recommend have been tested on me first. I use these approaches daily to manage my own heart disease, high blood pressure, and metabolic syndrome.
  • Combining Old and New Medicine: I use the best of both worlds: proven scientific medicine plus newer approaches that reduce the onset of disease and support the body’s natural healing.

The Big Idea Behind This Book

Traditional medicine focuses on the cell — the tiny building block of your body. When cells go wrong, you get sick. Doctors give medicines to fix sick cells. My approach does not ignore the cell, but it focuses on the environment surrounding every cell. Think of it this way:

A fish lives in water. If the water becomes dirty or polluted, the fish gets sick. You could give the fish medicine — but if you do not clean the water, the fish will stay sick.

Your cells are like fish. They live in an environment inside your body called the Extracellular Matrix — or ECM for short. “Extra” means “outside” and “cellular” means “cell” — so the ECM is simply the space that surrounds and supports your cells. It contains the water (interstitium) your cells swim in.

When this environment becomes unstable or “polluted,” your cells cannot work properly. You feel sick. You develop symptoms. Over time, symptoms can become chronic diseases.

 The ECM has been described as the playground for functional or integrative medicine. When you alkalinize or detox your body, you are really working at the level of the extracellular matrix and its microenvironment.

My health plans are designed to stabilize and clean up the ECM. When we do this, symptoms often improve or disappear, and new chronic diseases become less likely. A destabilized ECM is a condition — not a disease. By correcting it, we are not treating a disease. We are fixing a condition that could lead to disease. This is prevention at its most powerful.

What This Book Covers

This book shares health plans that have worked for my patients over many decades, focusing on:

  • Brain health — supporting the brain’s ECM to help reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia
  • Heart and blood vessel health
  • Digestive system health — stomach, intestines, and gut
  • Bone and muscle strength
  • Healthy skin and graceful aging
  • Lowering the risk of cancer and improving detection rates for improved survival

All of these aging-related diseases share one common root: chronic inflammation. Think of inflammation as a slow, invisible fire burning inside your body, damaging the ECM and making cells sick over time.

I call Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, cancer, and diabetes the “Four Horsemen of the Medical Apocalypse.” They are four of the deadliest diseases of aging, and they all ride the same horse — chronic inflammation. If we can put out that slow fire, we can fight all four at once. That is the power of what you will learn in this book.

Figure 1. The Four Horsemen of the Medical Apocalypse — Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, cancer, and diabetes — all share chronic inflammation as a common root cause. Stabilizing the Extracellular Matrix (ECM) is our most powerful strategy against all four.

A Warning About “Experts”

Today everyone seems to be a health expert. You can watch podcasts and videos where people confidently recommend the “supplement of the week.” But ask yourself: How many real patients have these people actually treated? How long have they followed those patients — a few months? A year? Maybe five years?

I have followed some patients for more than 40 years. That is how you truly know whether something works long-term. You cannot get that knowledge from media personalities, many of whom rarely see actual patients.

My goal is to provide clear, balanced, evidence-based guidance — meaning recommendations backed by real science, not opinions or personal stories. The following examples show how social media leads to misinformation by leaving out important details like proper dosing, by exaggerating results, or by making something sound more “natural” than it really is.

When someone online offers a supplement — something you can actually buy and take — it feels like action. It feels better than being told to “wait and see.” That urge is very human. But it can push people toward products that may not help and sometimes may even harm. Be especially careful of social media posts claiming to help you lose weight or boost your brain power. Here is something shocking: many of these products do not contain enough of the active ingredients to actually work.

The Hoodia Problem:

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a plant called Hoodia was proclaimed a “miracle weight loss plant” on television programs like Oprah and 60 Minutes. Health stores were packed with Hoodia pills claiming to suppress appetite. But the pills sold contained only 250–500 mg. The scientific studies that actually tested Hoodia used 2,200 mg — 4 to 8 times more — and even at that higher dose, it did not produce meaningful weight loss. Worse, some products contained no real Hoodia at all, had dangerous contaminants, and could damage the liver. By 2009–2010, the FDA and NCCIH raised serious safety concerns. Today, Hoodia is almost entirely restricted to botanical research — not weight loss.

The Creatine Confusion:

The current darling of the supplement world is creatine. We are being flooded with claims about its brain benefits — memory, mood, nerve protection. Women’s health podcasters promote it for menopause, bone density, and mental resilience. But the studies that found brain benefits used 20–35 grams per day — 4 to 7 times the standard 5-gram dose most people take. Even at those higher amounts, brain benefits were small and inconsistent. I still recommend creatine combined with the appropriate Basic ECM Stabilizing Protocols to support muscle growth — not as a brain miracle cure.

Why does this keep happening? Traditional medicine has not always provided good affordable solutions for the chronic problems of aging. People (including biohackers) are desperately looking for answers. Certain supplement sellers and some social media personalities fill that empty space with underdosed, overpriced, sometimes unsafe products. They are allowed to make health claims without proving those claims work.

To truly understand and effectively address the chronic conditions of aging, a doctor must have a long-term practice — seeing patients year after year, decade after decade — to carefully observe, develop, and evaluate whether protocols actually succeed over time.

Reading this book will help you spot false or exaggerated claims, understand what real science says, and protect both your health and your money.

What I Hope You Gain

My goal is simple: I want to help you age in a healthy way and lower your risk of the chronic diseases that so often come with getting older.

These are not theories. These are approaches I have tested on thousands of patients over nearly 50 years — and on myself, every single day.

Before you dive into the specific health protocols, please read the Foreword section called “Understanding Our Approach and Terminology.” It will help everything else in this book make sense.

Thank you for trusting me with this information. After five decades of practice, I finally feel ready to share everything I have learned. I hope this book helps you live a longer, healthier, and happier life.

Let’s begin this journey together.

References

The following references support the key medical and scientific information presented in this Preface.

1. Osler W. Aequanimitas. Philadelphia: Blakiston; 1932. [Classic reference on patient-centered listening in clinical practice]

2. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. History of Polio Vaccination. Atlanta, GA: CDC; 2023.

3. Frantz C, Stewart KM, Weaver VM. The extracellular matrix at a glance. J Cell Sci. 2010;123(Pt 24):4195–4200.

4. Bharat A, Bharat B. The ECM and its role in chronic inflammation. Inflamm Res. 2019;68:399–412.

5. Libby P. Inflammation and atherosclerosis. Circulation. 2002;105(9):1135–1143.

6. Hotamisligil GS. Inflammation and metabolic disorders. Nature. 2006;444:860–867.

7. Heneka MT, et al. Neuroinflammation in Alzheimer’s disease. Lancet Neurol. 2015;14(4):388–405.

8. Ridker PM. C-reactive protein and prediction of cardiovascular events. J Am Coll Cardiol. 2007;49:2129–2138.

9. Agatston AS, et al. Quantification of coronary artery calcium. J Am Coll Cardiol. 1990;15(4):827–832.

10. Wilding JPH, et al. Once-weekly semaglutide in adults with obesity. N Engl J Med. 2021;384:989–1002.

11. Jastreboff AM, et al. Tirzepatide once weekly for obesity. N Engl J Med. 2022;387:205–216.

12. Grundy SM, et al. 2018 AHA/ACC Guideline on Blood Cholesterol. J Am Coll Cardiol. 2019;73:e285–e350.

13. NCCIH. Hoodia: what you need to know. Bethesda, MD: NIH; 2010. Available at: https://www.nccih.nih.gov

14. Pheiffer C, Naidoo RN. Safety and efficacy of Hoodia gordonii: a review. Phytother Res. 2009;23:879–884.

15. Avgerinos KI, et al. Effects of creatine supplementation on cognitive function. Exp Gerontol. 2018;108:166–173.

16. Gualano B, et al. Creatine supplementation in aging: effects on muscle, bone, and brain. Amino Acids. 2016;48:1793–1805.

17. Cohen PA. American roulette — contaminated dietary supplements. N Engl J Med. 2009;361:1523–1525.

18. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Dietary Supplement Labeling Guide. Washington, DC: FDA; 2005.

19. Institute of Functional Medicine. Clinical Practice Guidelines. Gig Harbor, WA: IFM. Available at: https://www.ifm.org

20. Hyman M. The Blood Sugar Solution. New York: Little, Brown; 2012.