Our AI-powered Medical Assistant “Ask Dr. Bill.” Is Your Best Source of Personalized Health Information

For Cardiovascular and Related Conditions Like Diabetes and Hypertension

Over the last month I have posted real clinical cases and real clinical questions related to patient problems that I presented to our AI-powered medical assistant. You can review those posts at your convenience to see how good the answers are. Here is the good news. We are going to go live on Substack one week from today on Monday April 7, 2025, and you can get access to that application for your personal use. You will have the opportunity for a one-week free trial to see if you like it.

Ask Dr. Bill is your best source of personalized medical information about cardiovascular disease and related conditions like type 2 diabetes or high blood pressure for several reasons. Here is the first and most important reason. You are the most important member of your healthcare team. You are only with your doctor for 15 minutes every few months. For weeks and weeks, you are managing your illness on your own. Self-management of your illness is a critical skill for you to acquire. We designed this app to assist you in self-management. Achieving the best results in managing chronic diseases is not like treating other conditions. To achieve the best results, you must understand your disease, what can be done about it, and why it is worth your time. Chronic diseases, by their nature, are long-lasting. This means that individuals must manage their conditions over extended periods, often for the rest of their lives.

Our current system does not provide enough personalized medical information in sufficient detail to support you in the most effective self-management. The Ask Dr. Bill Substack provides you with patient education courses on each of these related topics. You have access to these materials on your phone at any time and in any place. Our AI-powered medical assistant will answer your questions about our medical education with the same level of convenience. If you have symptoms, it will help you understand what they mean and how urgently you should seek medical attention. We are teaching you enough about your disease to enable effective self-management. We are not providing medical advice that is a substitute for your healthcare team. It is important that you have a primary care team that you can trust.

All artificial intelligence applications are not the same. Most of them that are available to you are open source and they are very broad in their subject matter. Their sources of information are also broader, and they are not as tight. These open broad systems are not the ones that will lead to much greater understanding. Our system is much tighter. It is a dedicated AI application that only uses proven scientific sources. We only recommend treatments that are proven to work!

My colleagues suggested that we name our application “Ask Dr. Bill” so that you would know that we trained it based on information accumulated over 30 years by an internal medicine physician who focused his practice on preventive cardiology over that time. I saw patients face-to-face all day every day five days a week. I have long and direct experience in helping people understand their disease, what can be done about it, and why it is worth their time.

Everything that we teach is consistent with the guidelines for individual conditions like diabetes and hypertension, but we take those guidelines to the next level of effectiveness. Our current medical system is based on scientific understandings that are very old. It is based on what you can see, touch, or feel. Cardiovascular disease is especially outdated. Our current paradigm is designed around the idea that heart attack, stroke, and kidney failure are the diseases and high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, and smoking are the risk factors for those diseases. Decades of more advanced science have proven that model is wrong. Disease is defined as a disorder of structure or function in a human, animal, or plant, especially one that has a known cause and a distinctive group of symptoms, signs, or anatomical changes.

Now we know that heart attacks and strokes are catastrophic complications of disease that has been going on for decades. The new science is much more advanced, precise, and effective. Cardiovascular and related diseases like high blood pressure and diabetes involve changes in structure or function that begin with poor diet leading to excess abdominal fat as one example. Smoking cigarettes also causes changes in structure and function long before a catastrophic complication occurs.

Too much abdominal fat causes hormone levels to rise and increases oxidant production and inflammation. Cigarette smoke contains oxidants that increase inflammation. Increased oxidants and inflammation damage every cell and organ in the body. They are involved in virtually every chronic disease including all cardiovascular diseases and cancer. All arteries become thicker and less distensible prior to the development of high blood pressure. The hormones made by abdominal fat increase oxidants and inflammation damage every cell and organ in the body to cause high sugar levels, high cholesterol, high blood pressure. It is all a continuum and a vicious cycle. Now we know how it works in detail. Now we know how to precisely interfere with the disease process well in advance of a catastrophe like heart attack, stroke, or sudden death.

We can directly block the effects of the hormones from abdominal fat with older, proven, inexpensive medications like lisinopril or losartan or eplerenone or spironolactone that were developed to treat high blood pressure. That blocks oxidant production and inflammation. We are addressing the root cause of disease upstream to protect every cell and organ in the body. Metformin, statins, and Jardiance precisely block the effects of excess oxidants and inflammation further downstream. Diet, exercise, weight loss, intermittent fasting and stopping smoking add to these beneficial effects. When you combine these interventions in an integrated protocol, it does not just dramatically reduce heart attacks and strokes compared with the care most people receive. It extends healthier life by 8 years in patient with diabetes and chronic kidney disease compared with usual care. It makes heart attack, stroke, and dialysis much less likely. It decreases cardiovascular and all cause mortality dramatically and it does it at lower cost. It protects every organ and cell in the body. It is the new frontier in medicine.

There is one more important fact to know. This medical assistant is much better than a book. It answers your question directly. You don’t need to remember where you read it. Our medical assistant finds it for you in seconds. Our medical assistant is not static. It is constantly getting better. It is like a living book that is constantly being updated. The questions you ask update it too. Every time we add new material to our educational materials it updates the medical assistant.

That is what makes our AI-powered medical assistant so much different and so much better for YOU! American medical science is almost entirely focused on developing the next new thing. There are very few medical scientists focusing on translating the mountain of important science that already exists. That is what we have been doing for 30 years. It is that mountain of new science that we have used to train our medical assistant. That is why it is a great tool to provide the medical information you need to live a longer healthier life at lower cost. You can get it for a week free to try it out. Give it a spin!