How are you caring for yourself? And, are you addressing that nagging pain you’ve had for a while now? Our guest today is Dr. Fawad Mian, who talks about keeping your body healthy.
TODAY’S WIN-WIN:
Do something that provides significant value to the people around you.
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ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Dr. Fawad Mian is a board-certified neurologist and regenerative medicine specialist who helps high-performing adults 55+ live pain-free without surgery or medication—so they can stay active, sharp, and fully engaged in life and work.
After suffering multiple injuries and years of chronic pain himself, Dr. Mian was told what many patients hear: manage it with medication, consider surgery, and accept limitations. Instead, he searched for answers beyond conventional care and healed himself using regenerative therapies like PRP and stem cells.
Today, he brings that same precision-based, root-cause approach to leaders, entrepreneurs, and active professionals who refuse to slow down due to pain. As founder of Vitality Integrative Wellness, Dr. Mian blends advanced diagnostics, regenerative therapy, and movement re-education to restore performance—not just manage symptoms.
This episode is powered by Big Sky Franchise Team.
Big Sky Franchise Team is consistently recognized as one of the best franchise consulting firms in the world, helping entrepreneurs franchise their businesses through a proven 3-Step franchise process rooted in ethical principles, hands-on guidance, and customized deliverables.
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TRANSCRIPT
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Now back to the show. Welcome to the Multiply Your Success podcast, where each week we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I’m your host, Tom DuFore, CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team. As we open today, I’m wondering how are you caring for yourself, and are you addressing that nagging pain you’ve had for a while? Well, our guest today is Dr. Fawad Mian, and he talks with us about keeping your body healthy.
Now, Dr. Mian is a board-certified neurologist and regenerative medicine specialist who helps high-performing adults live pain-free without surgery or medication so they can stay active, sharp, and fully engaged. Today he brings that same precision-based, root-caused approach to leaders, entrepreneurs, and active professionals who refuse to slow down due to pain. As the founder of Vitality Integrative Wellness, Dr. Mian blends advanced diagnostics, regenerative therapy, and movement re-education to restore performance, not just manage systems. You’re going to enjoy this interview, so let’s go ahead and jump right into it.
Dr. Fawad Mian: My name is Dr. Fawad Mian, and I own Ascend Regenerative.
Tom: Perfect. Well, thank you so much for being here. One of the ideas that you help with is chronic pain and helping people heal. One thing that I found interesting is this idea of chronic pain and high performers and leaders. I’d love for you, just maybe, to start an open conversation about that, what you’ve seen with high performers and leaders.
Dr. Mian: High performers and leaders certainly burn the midnight oil, and a lot of clichés that go along with that. More often than not, we see them suffer through a lot of different things, one of which is injuries that they battle through. Sometimes just having those injuries makes it quite difficult to focus on their business or focus even on their personal life. We’ve seen a lot of those kind of patients, and we’ve even helped them with the regenerative medicine that we do in the office, things that consist of things like platelet-rich plasma and autologous stem cell therapies, prolotherapy, which you can always get into a little bit more.
The other thing I also see with a lot of founders and people like CEOs and all of that, too, as well, is that even though they may be at a very high level in terms of their meditation and cognition, they have a tendency to burn out, and they become a little bit less efficient. Sometimes that can actually impair them to a certain extent, or their health takes a toll from all the chronic stress, from things like brain fog to just chronic aches and pains to poor sleep. All these things come into play with all of this. We look into that in more of a holistic approach in terms of trying to help those folks.
Tom: One of the things that makes me think about is this idea of traditional medicine or going to see a traditional doctor. What are maybe some of the things that get missed with these chronic-type conditions?
Dr. Mian: Actually, there’s quite a bit. When I stumbled into regenerative medicine, I had my own injuries that I had to figure out and had to take care of. That’s how I got into this about circa 2012 or so. Things were missed on me, but moreover, I also saw a lot of these kinds of things missed in patients. I would actually get patients from orthopedic surgeons, from pain doctors, who were telling me that everything is neurological, because my background is neurology. I look at these patients and examine them, and see that I don’t think this is quite that.
When I would do an ultrasound on some of these patients or examine them more closely, whether different diagnostics, we would find that there are more musculoskeletal issues and chronic injuries that are not seen very well sometimes, or MRI are getting missed by these other doctors. That’s when I started instituting more of the regenerative medicine in into the practice. Common injuries that we would see, things like in the spine, injuries to the knee, and the shoulder, tend to be the most common ones that we see. MRIs can miss small, fine detail where an ultrasound can pick up on. Ultrasounds could be very helpful for examining the knee and the shoulder, say, for instance, and picking up the minutiae.
Tom: One thing that I find interesting is this concept of regenerative medicine versus symptom management. Talk through that.
Dr. Mian: Traditionally, Western medicine is, well, let’s treat everything at the endpoint of everything. You wait till your labs are bad enough for you to be put on a medication and not do anything else before that. You have an injury, you’ll keep waiting until there’s surgery, even though surgery is not always going to fix everything, or whatnot. What’s different about regenerative medicine, even functional medicine, which is another thing in and of itself, is that we try to get more to the root cause of issues.
We’re also trying to be proactive and trying to help heal people ultimately so that they don’t get to that endpoint where they need to have a surgery, which is not always 100%, or they’re taking medications, which can have side effects, too, as well, and which can also make people sick. I can’t tell you the number of times that people come in my office, and like, “Okay, we can talk about these different holistic things. We can try to treat your headache, but there are these medications we can use.”
As soon as I mention a few of them, or one or two, they roll their eyes at me. They’re like, “I don’t really want to do this.” They want to do something a little bit more different. They look into them, and we look at the different causes of what could be causing their headaches, say, for instance, and try to get to a more deeper root cause of what’s going on.
Tom: Let’s talk a little bit about your book. It’s called Getting to Pain Free: How to Make Your Body Stop Hurting So You Can Start Living Without Drugs and Surgery. What is it that drove you or led you to want to write a book like this?
Dr. Mian: Number one, I can get in a little bit of my story about my injuries. Then number two, it was COVID, so I had time to write. [chuckles]
Tom: [laughs] All right.
Dr. Mian: Right at the height of the pandemic. I wrote this book about my own personal injuries. I’ll just give you a little maybe abbreviated synopsis of what happened. One day I was actually in the weight room. I was doing some shoulder shrugs, and the weight slipped out of my hand. I ended up injuring a small little joint in front of my shoulder called the AC joint. I went to the orthopedic doctor, and the orthopedic doctor was like, “Well, maybe we can get a surgery out of you. Maybe you have something called a slap tear.” In English, what that means is that it’s a cartilage tear in the shoulder.
Fortunately, I didn’t have any of that. I had gotten an X-ray, showed some arthritis in that joint. The physician assistant, not even the doctor, actually just gave me some shots in that joint twice. I still wasn’t that much better. While all this was happening, my foot was starting to bother me too as well. I had actually done some training in New York and walked a lot in dress shoes all the time. Then one day I was here in New Jersey and just walking, and then all of a sudden my feet hurt. I thought it was because of, hey, it’s bad shoes. Maybe I just picked the wrong shoes today. They just kept going.
I went to the foot doctor because that’s what you do. Then I got some expensive orthotics, didn’t really help. Gave me several steroid injections. They didn’t work until the third one, where I felt like I was at least 50%, 60% better. I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to run on the treadmill now.” That was a bad mistake because I actually ended up getting more injured. I injured the tissue on the back of my heel, called the Achilles, and then also ligament in that ankle, too, as well. The foot doctor gave me some various treatments too, as well, and I still wasn’t getting it better.
Because of that foot injury, now my knee was actually starting to bother me because it changed the way that I was moving. I actually had what we call an ACL repair, which is a ligament in the knee that I tore playing sports a while back. I was falling apart, and I wasn’t even quite 40 yet at this point. From the orthopedic doctor, he was like, “Well, maybe we can just chop off part of the bone because that’ll relieve pressure on the tendon down there and wouldn’t have so much pain.”
After having failed a knee surgery years ago, which I’ll get into a little bit, I didn’t want to go back and do another surgery. Then I wanted to keep what I was born with in me like most people. I decided to keep that part of my collarbone, fortunately, and that still remains there today.
The foot doctor was like, “Well, you know what? You have something called a Haglund’s deformity. That’s just a fancy word for a bone on the back of your heel, that’s bony overgrowth. All we can do is shave the bone down and put things back together, you’d be fine. Kind of entails you’re shaving the whole bone down, you’re detaching the tendon, you’re reattaching it with anchors. You’re going to not really be moving a whole lot for a good period of time.” That’s something I want to do.
With my knee, a different orthopedic doctor looked at my knee, tugged on my knee, and said that I should have my knee scoped, barely looked at me, and bragged about how he had five different offices, this guy. I didn’t want to do any of that. I didn’t want to have any surgery for any of these people. I had had an ACL repair that I thought was repaired, but 12 years later, after my knee started bothering me again, I found out that the ACL is not where it should be. It was completely torn. They didn’t put it together very well, basically. Didn’t do the best job in the world with that.
The only thing I could do at this point was more surgery, chop things out, reattach things, get scoped, take pain medications that I didn’t want to take because I know they can impair you, especially for myself, being a doctor, or anybody else who’s a high performer. You take medications that are sedating or make you sleepy, you can’t function. It’s really hard to function and do anything. That’s when I started looking into other resources, and I found something called prolotherapy with a doctor out west in Colorado, and had some training, had some treatment on my Achilles that started helping.
Fast forward, I started learning things about platelet-rich plasma, or PRP, and that actually was able to heal some of the plantar fasciitis and the Achilles issue, some of which I had to do on my own because it was badly damaged. Then the AC joint, a little smaller joint from the shoulder, was badly damaged also from the steroids, because steroids actually eat up things. They actually don’t heal anything. I had to do treatment of PRP and prolotherapy on that to repair the ligaments. Even though there’s some arthritis that’s in there now, I don’t have any problems where I can go back to lifting weights, I can sleep on it, and all of that.
I wanted to share that with my patients because I started instituting a lot of this stuff back then, around 2012 or so. We’ve been able to get many patients better since then. We highlight not only my story, which is a little bit more protracted in that book, but then also some patient cases where people do well and talked about diet, nutrition, mindset, gratitude, and all that. It works as something that is more of like a beacon for people so that they can see that there are other alternatives to getting better, and it doesn’t mean that they have to go do drugs or surgeries necessarily.
Tom: We have a lot of entrepreneurs, business leaders, franchisors that will tune into this and say, “Wow, that sounds like me.” What’s a place that someone might be able to start if they’re in the area, maybe close to you, that they could get connected with? Or, if they’re not in the Northeast and maybe they’re in Texas or somewhere else around the country, what’s a first step or something someone might be able to do here?
Dr. Mian: A first step, say, if it’s for a chronic injury, we’re located in Denville, New Jersey. For those people who are not here and people who are scattered across the country, they can certainly start looking in online about regenerative medicine doctors and start doing other research a little bit too as well. There are also some other doctors from Regenexx, say, for instance, that are scattered about the country too as well, which is a company that has basically affiliates with some other doctors and whatnot that are there. That’s how I would get started with.
Then also on the functional medicine side where we’re trying to look at things internally, there are many different organizations that sometimes will have doctors on their website, but you can simply still look into functional medicine doctors near me, honestly, and start looking around, doing a bit of research on some of these doctors and and then see who’s going to be the best fit for you.
Tom: Very, very good. Dr. Mian, for someone that is closer, who wants to get in contact with you or learn a little bit more about what you’re doing, is there a website or a place you could direct them to?
Dr. Mian: Yes. They can reach us at prolohealing.com. There they can make an appointment online, or they can give us a call at the office. We can get you in and evaluate you and take care of you that way.
Tom: Dr. Mian, this is a great time in the show, and we make a transition. We ask every guest the same four questions before they go. The first question is, have you had a miss or two on your journey and something you learned from it?
Dr. Mian: Yes, I don’t know. I look at it where there’s always a million misses with different things and trying to just pick something. I would say in my journey now, I look at things retrospectively. I didn’t realize that I really like to do things with my hands until much later on after my training. Now I do a lot more hands-on stuff. I do both things, where I do the regular appointments and hands-on stuff, but I wish that I’d gone– if I could go back in time and go, okay, well, I’d get more additional training at that level so that I would have been even more advanced than where I was, which ultimately took many years to get to that point or whatnot. I would say that to me is a bit of a miss there.
Tom: Let’s look on the other side. Let’s talk about a make or a highlight.
Dr. Mian: I would say also what I’m doing right now is a make and a highlight because it was something that was completely unexpected. It’s something that has transformed not only my life, but then also a lot of my patients’ lives too as well. It’s something where I’ve treated my own family members and gotten them better too as well. It’s something that definitely passionate about, and I want to make sure that people know about it, that you don’t have to do drugs and surgery. This is something that I find very helpful for a lot of people.
Tom: The name of the show is Multiply Your Success. We always ask guests if you’ve used a multiplier to multiply yourself personally, professionally, or organizations you’ve run.
Dr. Mian: I would love to be at the higher end of all that, but recently in the last year, I’ve hired a VA. The VA has been able to do a lot of work which was bogging me down in terms of things like social media outreach, also employing her to help with one of the tasks and the memory course that we’re going to be launching pretty soon, too, as well. I find that really helpful. I think once we can get that base layer down, and as things grow, then we can start adding in more layers to that so it takes more of a load away from me and then spreads it out a little bit.
Tom: The final question we ask every guest is what does success mean to you?
Dr. Mian: Success to me, I think, is a few different things. I think it’s definitely where you’re doing something that provides significant value to the people around you. Seeing that reaction of those people where they feel like they’ve had a lot of benefit from what you’re doing to me is tremendous success too, as well. It’s not just on the financial side, although that, I think, is important for any business ultimately too as well. For me, I think that’s going to be one of the biggest things that I want to see.
Then also as with your business, certainly we want to see growth larger and then something that has more of an outreach to more people, too, so that it’s not just centered in one area, but something that can be centered in multiple areas and locations where you could help a lot more people.
Tom: Dr. Mian, as we bring this to a close, is there anything you were hoping to share or get across that you haven’t had a chance to yet?
Dr. Mian: I was mentioning the memory course that we’re rolling out. In that memory course, it talks about people who are typically between the ages of 40 and 60 on average, where they’re starting to have a little bit more of a mental decline, they’re starting to forget things, busy moms, entrepreneurs, people working. A lot of people think that they have Alzheimer’s, for instance. In this course, it talks about, well, there are many different things that actually can affect your cognition, your memory.
It goes into a lot of that, goes into different diagnostics that you can talk with your doctor with, that you can get evaluated for to as well. It goes a little bit on the functional medicine side, too, as well. I wanted to give a resource that was something that would be beneficial to people’s– I get people who come in here and they’re 20 and 30 years old and say, “I’m losing my memory. Do I have Alzheimer’s.” We try to provide more clarity with that. I think this course certainly does that.
The course, we have a quiz where you can take where you can actually see if you’re starting to have some memory issues which are actually impacting your daily living. That link for everybody is course.prolohealing.com/quiz. Again, that’s course.prolohealing.com/quiz. You can take that quiz and see, hey, well, am I really having a memory issue or not? Then, for those people who want to take things further, then we can get into the course and go over things a little bit more in detail.
Tom: Dr. Mian, thank you so much for a fantastic interview. Let’s go ahead and jump into today’s three key takeaways. Takeaway number one is when he talked about chronic pain and high performers and leaders, and that he found that that’s pretty common and that complications compound due to focusing on their business and that there tends to be a tendency of burnout.
Takeaway number two is when he talked about his book, Getting to Pain Free, where he talked about how he had his own journey of having these injuries, the shoulder injuries and foot injuries and ACLs and all these other things, that led him as a doctor to get to the point of figuring out some of these things for himself that he decided to help others that might be in the same situation.
Takeaway number three is when he talked about a miss that he had, where he realized he really enjoyed doing more with his hands and working in that regard, and said it would have been great to have had more training or focused on that earlier in his career. I think that’s a reminder for all of us, making sure we’re doing something in the areas we want to be focused.
Now it’s time for today’s win-win. Today’s win-win comes when Dr. Mian talked about success. I thought it was great how he said he wants to do something that provides significant value to the people around him. I think that’s a great takeaway, adding significant value to the people that are around you. It’s going to be a win for you because you’re going to enjoy it. It’s going to be a win for the people around you because, boy, they’re going to gain significant value. I just thought that was a nice way to close out the episode.
That’s the episode today, folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review. Remember, if you or anyone you know might be ready to franchise your business or take their franchise company into the next level, please connect with us at BigSkyFranchiseTeam.com to schedule your free, no-obligation consultation. Thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to having you back next week.
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