Dr Flutura Hasa Harold’s reputation precedes her. But it’s not her impressive professional skillset that gets mentioned when her name first comes up. It’s her innate positive attitude. Dr Harold is a functional medicine physician and longevity specialist at the Longevity Hub by Clinique La Prairie at One&Only One Za’abeel. But even with more than two decades of clinical experience behind her and a following that has earned her the nickname “The Hormone Doctor”, it’s the way she moves through the world that her staff brings up first.
They clearly adore Dr Harold, describing her as permanently laughing, permanently bright. And you absolutely can’t miss her in a crowded room with her bright red hair and striking thick black-framed glasses. But as upbeat as she is in life, she is also completely unsentimental about the unglamorous yet important work of trying to stay healthy for as long as possible. “I practise what I prescribe,” she says about the routines and regimens she assigns her patients. “I really track what I do, not because I am purely fascinated by the data, but because daily, personalised good habits can make such a huge difference in the long run.”
Born in Albania, Dr Harold trained and lived across Europe and the United States before landing in Dubai, and she rattles off her geography like a woman reading a boarding pass: Belgium, Austria, India, Sri Lanka, Spain, Italy. She speaks Spanish and Italian. She spent three months studying Ayurveda in India, not because a curriculum required it but because she couldn’t stop wondering what ancient health practices could teach modern medicine, and how it could be strategically implemented in the pursuit of healthy longevity. Triple board-certified, she holds postgraduate degrees in public health and health economics. She has also trained as a yoga teacher as a side hustle, purely for her own edification.
“I’m one of these people that really never stop learning,” she says. “I know that in healthcare, we doctors should keep learning. How could we stay up to date and help our patients if we’re not trying to know everything that is happening?”
What all that travel taught Dr Harold had less to do with medicine than it did mortality. “We all age, it doesn’t matter which country we are from,” she says. “But in general, the way we approach ageing by culture and by country can really make a difference.” The traditional systems she studied preached methods of dealing with detoxing, digestion, sleep, stress, and finding internal balance, while the modern research she trained in focused on toxins, inflammation, mitochondrial health, immune regulation, and biological ageing. Dr Harold’s entire practice makes the argument that these different perspectives are actually part of the same conversation – two sides of the same longevity coin.
Her pivot out of conventional medicine was not, however, academic. It was personal, and it was her own body that forced it. Ten years ago, working in anaesthesiology, pain management and a trauma centre, Dr Harold was burned out and unwell. She was in perimenopause and getting nowhere. “I was going to the gym every day and on top of that, I was dancing at night,” she recalls. “So I was like, what is going on with my hormones?” She consulted colleagues across hospitals in the US and the UAE, brilliant doctors all of them, and got back what she now calls “old-fashioned guidelines and old studies.” Synthetic hormones, essentially, and a shrug.
The turning point in her career came at a conference in California, where a functional medicine doctor made her an offer that sounds almost like a dare. “She said, if you are so curious, you could start with your own health,” recalls Dr Harold, who explains that the woman also suggested she join the American Society on Aging programme, to discover other perspectives on the topic of ageing well. So that is exactly what Dr Harold did: she started with her own health. Her years working in the ICU gave her the other half of the longevity equation. “I saw so many people suffering, complex patients with chronic illness,” she says. “With time, I realised that if there are chronic conditions and the patient ends up in the ICU because it’s too painful, there could be a way to prevent some of those, before they get to that point.”
Today her motto is one doctor, one strategy, whole-body longevity – which she is quick to clarify is not a claim to omniscience. What she takes issue with is the exhausting relay race most of us run when it comes to managing our health: the scans, the labs, the endless specialists, and nobody talking to anybody else. “One doctor means one strategy, which means building personalised pathways that connect every aspect of your health.” The five-step framework she has come up with consists of diagnose, optimise, regenerate, rejuvenate, and finally sustain. It’s a process that always begins with possibly the least glamorous step: a full history, a physical, and comprehensive labs. “We are really going back to the basics,” she says, before going “deep, deep, deep to see what the root causes are.” On one of the health and wellness space’s current hot topics, she is candid. GLP-1 drugs and peptides, she says, “are amazing, powerful tools. But they are not a magic solution. None of them is the magic pill or magic injection and then things will magically just get better.” Weight gain is never just weight gain. “It won’t work that way,” she says flatly, noting that there are usually deeper issues.
Ask her what she’d recommend a 35-year-old focus on when it comes to their health and she laughs, because she was that 35-year-old once. “You feel that you can do whatever you want. You have all the energy.” Her instruction is simple: look at your hormones first, build the habits now, “don’t abuse your body.” And do not, under any circumstances, wait for something to go wrong. “Please don’t wait for a diagnosis to start paying attention to your health,” she says. “Everyone thinks that going to a longevity clinic like where I work is a fancy thing, but it’s not. It’s really a necessity when it comes to being smart about preventive healthcare.” Her own regimen is not for the faint-hearted. She is up every day at 6 am. Pilates three times a week, reformer sometimes, and hot yoga, which she rates “better than a sauna” for detoxing, though she warns her patients off doing it more than twice a week. It is meditation, though, that she credits with doing the heavy lifting of her mental and emotional health. “That is where my escape is,” she shares. “My meditation journey has made me resilient to overcome some of the big challenges.”
Dr Harold believes, genuinely, that the answers to how to age gracefully are changing, and modern medicine is making impressive breakthroughs every day. “Ageing isn’t something that just happens to us and we have to resign ourselves to a slow decline,” she says. “We can measure our true age now, we can influence it and we can manage it.” By taking the power of ageing into our own hands, we can have a profound impact on how the third, and maybe the fourth, act of our lives plays out. “Let’s aim together to not only treat symptoms, but restore the whole body and spirit. To add life to our years, not just years to our life.”
– For more on luxury lifestyle, news, fashion, and beauty, follow Emirates Woman on Facebook and Instagram.
Images: Supplied
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: emirateswoman.com
