Wellness
Jyzen Labs’ Innovative and Holistic Approach to Health
Jyzen Labs’ Mill Valley space (Photo by Rob LeRoy) The multitude of gems and minerals strategically placed around Mill Valley’s new Jyzen Labs are somehow indicative of the elements of science-based health and longevity that clients have been seeking there. Overlooking Richardson Bay, the innovative center, co-founded by Dr. Beth McDougall and a team of experts, hopes to make “bio-optimization” a household word.
The synergy between integrative medicine and state-of-the-art tech is part of Jyzen Labs’ holistic bio-optimization approach — it is a place where resonance physics and cutting-edge wellness technologies come together under one roof to provide access to proactive health and antiaging science. Sound familiar? Think again. With bio-optimization, doctors and other industry leaders at Jyzen Labs customize a program for each client, which is different than taking your health into your own hands, doing your own research and then buying a 10-pack of red-light therapy sessions at a biohacking center. “While self-guided exploration and the use of a variety of available modalities like an Oura ring, a Whoop strap or red-light therapy can be effective,” McDougall says, “at Jyzen, our integrative medical team and our program designers come together to design data-driven, customized programming that support our clients in reaching their unique goals.”
McDougall, who founded Marin’s CLEAR Center of Health 20 years ago after recognizing a need for patient-centered health, says Jyzen Labs is the next logical step to help people lead longer, healthier lives. And the center, gleaming with Vasper high-intensity training bikes, HOCATT ozone saunas, bioresonance feedback machines, pulsed electromagnetic field blankets and much more, does look like the realization of that next step. McDougall says she herself “uses all of these therapies regularly to feel great, get a lot done and operate at a high level.”
As the global epicenter of technological innovation and the cornerstone of the $152 billion biotech industry in the U.S., the Bay Area is teeming with peak-performance pursuers who have been palpitating for a place like Jyzen Labs. As for me, I’m just a fairly fit fortysomething who felt middle age hit her like a Mack truck during the pandemic. Contrary to Beyoncé’s famous lyric, it was I who wasn’t ready for this jelly. And my usual repentances — a trail run in Tennessee Valley, a reformer class at Mighty Pilates, a kale salad at Blue Barn — were no longer enough to keep my fitness humming and my waistline snatched. The real irony of middle-aging is getting a primordial urge for longevity, despite having less time and energy for the activities that would promote a longer shelf life.
Since the clock is clearly ticking, I hurriedly signed a binder’s worth of waivers and other intake forms before I met with Jyzen Labs’ Head of Programs, Owen Monroy, to come up with a suite of technologies that would address my singular health goal: rewind the clock 25 years, back to that full-throttle metabolism, razor-sharp recall and youthful, rosy glow. According to Monroy, the services can vary from two modalities, twice a week, all the way to the “sweet spot” that involves the monthly use of a more comprehensive group of services — and comes with a pretty hefty price tag — to resolve chronic fatigue syndrome, remedy chronic pain conditions or reverse biological aging. Since every client is different, Jyzen Labs recommends starting off with one of its programming designers to create a regimen tailored to your needs and goals — there are monthly programs available and even à la carte options for specific modalities.
Needless to say, I mined the practitioners for take-home techniques during my one-day visit. “Our goal is to help our clients work through any physical limitations and empower them with the knowledge and the tools to be able to maintain their wellness on an ongoing basis,” says Mike Petrow, head of Jyzen Labs’ Integrative Bodywork Center. “We want to resolve issues for our clients, so they don’t have to keep coming back to work on the same ones.” I didn’t expect to get jiggy during our session, but Petrow customized at-home choreography just for me — lift one shoulder while dropping the opposite hip, alternating sides for one minute, three times per day — that could bring my body’s asymmetry back into alignment.
Jyzen Labs’ exercise physiologist and manager of the Biometrics Lab, Kristina Macias, huskily cheered, “You can do it! Let’s go! Let’s go!” as I sprinted on a spin bike until my runner’s quads practically combusted, all while a Pnoē device performed metabolic analysis. She instantly provided baseline metrics from the test, like body-fat percentage (an indicator of good health) and my VO2 Max number (the higher, the fitter), plus advice for improvement (in my case, strength training twice per week)
I felt energized coming off the Vasper, a tricked-out recumbent stationary bike. Jyzen Labs co-founder Sebastian Wasowski says his father’s backyard invention — Vasper Systems are now manufactured at the NASA Ames Research Park in Mountain View — uses vascular compression and cooling to deliver the benefits of a two hour, high-intensity workout in one low-impact, 21-minute session. Celebrities including Cher and Tony Robbins and pro sports organizations like the San Francisco 49ers and Stanford Sports Medicine have embraced the technology and have each shelled out $51,000 for a unit of their own. Luckily, Jyzen Labs has six Vaspers in its Adaptive Performance Center for your express-workout pleasure.
Also on my Jyzen Labs jaunt, I pleasantly discovered that four minutes in the –124°F Mecotec cryotherapy chamber is much easier to tolerate than an icy plunge at Ocean Beach or even a shockingly cold shower. (Guess how I’ll be re-creating the metabolism-boosting, inflammation-reducing benefits of extreme cold therapy at home?) And after recording my brain waves and generating a map of my brain with a Neurofield Q21 amplifier, Cindy Reynolds, the founder of NeuroFit at Jyzen Labs, unsurprisingly revealed that part of my brain was operating on low voltage, potentially affecting short-term memory. (What’s this story about again? Just kidding.) Thankfully, the condition may be improved with bodywork aimed at opening up the left temporal parietal region of the brain to help improve short-term memory.
Since the body usually knows best, Jyzen Labs only validated the wisdom of mine, which is to say that I’ve got plenty of room for optimization. Still, there’s at least one part of me that’s performing at peak, which I discovered after the brain map had been analyzed. “You have a beautiful and regulated autonomic nervous system,” says Reynolds of this apparently rare occurrence in her practice. Now that’s a takeaway I can be happy about.
