About the practice

There’s a strange place a lot of men find themselves in somewhere between 30 and 50.

 

Nothing is catastrophically wrong. They’re still working. Still providing. Still running companies, managing teams, raising kids, traveling, coaching, golfing, hunting, fishing, and doing everything everyone expects them to do.

 

But they don’t feel like themselves anymore.

 

They’re carrying more weight than they want. Their energy isn’t what it used to be. Sleep doesn’t seem to restore them. Old injuries hurt more. Their strength and conditioning have slipped. Sex drive isn’t what it was. Maybe their blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, or hormones have started moving in the wrong direction.

 

Individually, none of these things necessarily feels like a crisis. So they adapt.

 

They buy bigger pants. Drink more coffee. Stop tucking in their shirt and stop taking it off at the pool. Blame the sore back on an old football injury. Sit the hike out. Take something to sleep and something else to wake up. They tell themselves they’ll get serious about their health when work and life slow down.

 

And eventually, somebody says the phrase that bothers us more than almost any other: “I guess I’m just getting older.”

 

Maybe.

 

But we think that’s a question worth investigating before accepting it as an answer.

 

There’s a Difference Between Getting Older and Giving Ground.

 

At Xylem Wellness Systems, we don’t believe the goal of medicine should simply be to keep you from getting sick enough to require more medicine.

 

We want to know what you want your health to allow you to do:

 

Do you want to lose the 40 pounds you’ve been carrying around for the last decade?

Do you want enough energy left at the end of the day to play with your kids? What about for your wife after the kids go to sleep?

Do you want to get back in the gym without feeling like you’re starting from zero every six months?

Do you want to sleep through the night, improve your metabolic health, understand what’s happening with your hormones, or reduce your reliance on certain medications when medically appropriate?

 

Maybe you just want to look in the mirror and recognize the guy standing there again.

 

Those aren’t frivolous goals… That’s what health is for.

 

Why Xylem Exists

 

I spent more than a decade working in emergency medicine.

I still believe modern medicine is extraordinary at what it was built to do. When something goes catastrophically wrong—a heart attack, stroke, severe infection, traumatic injury—there is nowhere else I’d rather be than inside a modern hospital surrounded by a great medical team.

 

But emergency medicine also gave me a front-row seat to what happened before the emergency. Year after year, I watched hardworking men gradually become less healthy. More weight. Worse blood sugar. Higher blood pressure. Poorer sleep. Less activity. More medications. Less energy.

 

These weren’t lazy men. Quite often, they were the opposite. They were business owners, executives, fathers, husbands, professionals—the kind of men who would move mountains for the people who depended on them. And that was part of the problem.

 

They had spent decades taking care of everything except themselves.

 

By the time their health demanded their attention, the typical solution was another brief appointment, another diagnosis, another prescription, or another reminder to “eat better and exercise.”

 

Those things aren’t necessarily wrong. They just aren’t enough.

 

I wanted enough time to ask a different question:

“What do you want your body to let you do again?”

 

I built Xylem to put men on the path to results regardless of how they answer that question.

 

— Dr. Nick Harrell
Founder, Xylem Wellness Systems