Eric Chehab, M.D.: Extending healthspan and preserving quality of life

**Peter Attia** (0:04)
Hey, everyone, welcome to The Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia.
The Drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com.
Hey everybody, welcome to this week's episode of The Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia. My guest this week is one of my best friends from medical school, a guy by the name of Eric Chehab. Eric is an orthopedic surgeon, specializing in sports, but overall knee and shoulder. He's an assistant clinical professor at the University of Chicago. We met obviously at Stanford, and he went on to do his residency in orthopedic surgery at the Hospital for Special Surgery, or HSS as it's known, in New York City. It's generally regarded as the best orthopedic facility in the country, if not the world. He did his fellowship with the New York Giants before settling in Chicago. He was also mentored at HSS by a guy named Russ Warren, who anybody listening to this who knows a lot about or a little bit about orthopedic surgery will understand the significance of that. Russ is generally considered the godfather of sports medicine.
This interview was also really informative for me, because I, as you know, think about longevity through the standpoint of living longer, but living better, and a big part of living better is not getting hurt.
And what I love about talking to orthopedic surgeons, especially people like Eric, who are just so cognizant of what the demise looks like at the end of life, is I think by understanding where people fail later in life, you can understand how to mitigate that earlier in life. So we get into a lot of detail around the common joint injuries. So what's going on with knee pain, especially from incorrect form in a loaded fashion? We talk a lot about shoulder injuries, especially with weights being used overhead, elbow, wrist injuries, ankles, what's going on with the Achilles tendon? Obviously we talk about lower back stuff, which for many people is also, I think it's almost impossible to get through life without at least one lower back flare up. We revisit sort of my injury, which I've talked about actually in the past. We talk about all the complications that can come from it. And we talk a little bit about how you can decide when PT makes more sense than surgery, which unfortunately for lower back injuries is almost always the case.
We get into some of the real controversy stuff, like meniscus surgery, which some of you may be aware of. We talk about the origins of pain. So a lot of times people present with joint pain, but it's not really clear, is the pain matching the thing you see on the MRI? And again, I have an example of where that was not the case. We get into PRP, stem cells, sham surgeries, and all sorts of things like that. The other thing that probably comes across though, not as maybe as much as I would have liked, is Eric is probably one of the funniest human beings I know. He actually sang at my wedding, and I think we even discussed that story early in this episode. Although I didn't get him to sing, so that's probably one drawback. Anyway, the show notes will be linked to a ton of awesome stuff that follows up and goes deeper on some of these things. And obviously, if you want to learn more about Eric, that's great, but the reality of it is, this is mostly just a way to kind of help people think about orthopedic surgery, and more than anything else, these types of injuries and what we can do to prevent them. So I hope you enjoyed today's episode, and here we go.
Hey, man, what's going on?

**Eric Chehab** (3:38)
Not much, good to see you. It's been a long time.

**Peter Attia** (3:40)
I feel like it's been two years since I've seen you in person. And we did get to spend an hour finding a place to record this, so that gave us a good chance to catch up.
Where are we sitting right now?

**Eric Chehab** (3:51)
We are sitting in my WillMet office for Illinois Bone and Joint in WillMet.

**Peter Attia** (3:55)
We're actually in a patient exam room, I think.