For three years, former Browns quarterback Bernie Kosar has been undergoing treatments for his concussion-related headaches at VitalHealth Partners in Lyndhurst under the care of Dr. Todd Pesek, M.D.
EXCLUSIVE: Bernie Kosar opens up about the treatment that is bringing him post-concussion relief
Pesek is Founding Holistic Physician and CEO of VitalHealth as well as Chief Medical Officer for Heinen’s Grocery Stores and author of “Eat Yourself Super.”
“My approach is one of enabling the body’s natural physiology to flourish,” Dr. Pesek said.
Pesek’s holistic care approach emphasizes a superfoods diet including leafy greens kale, cabbage, mesculin, arugula and spinach along with rainbow vegetables like peppers, garlic, beets, onions, tomatoes and sweet potatoes. It also includes balanced proteins, rainbow fruits and Omega 3 fats like flax, chia, nuts and seeds.
“Make no mistake, no one cares for your health more than you, I don’t how great your doctor is,” said Pesek.
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“More and more people are demanding an opportunity to be enabled to take charge of their own health.”
“People want to know how to make healthier choices one small step, one small bite at a time in a sustainable way,” he said.
“Holistic medicine by necessity requires the effort of the individual but often times, in this day and age, people are led astray by interested business and media and don’t necessarily know what the right things to do for their health are.”
Kosar’s treatments for his concussion-related headaches involve a superfoods diet along with regular cleansing and purification programs and megadose vitamin treatments he receives several times a month tailored to meet the deficiencies in his own system.
“Megadose vitamin therapy is an incredibly underutilized strategy at optimizing health in this day and age,” Pesek said.
“Generally speaking, my approach is one of enabling the body’s natural physiology to flourish. Really disease need not exist and if it does it’s for one of two reasons usually like toxicity or traumas and there are subcategories of those. Toxicity there are environmental toxins, plastics, PCBs, endocrine disruptors, xenoestrogens, heavy metals; and food toxicity too much sugar, too much fat, food that isn’t food in our food like plasticides or larvicides and fungicides and herbicides. These things interact with endocrine systems in deleterious ways.”
Pesek said the solution for the toxins is to eat a superfoods diet and detoxify regularly. “Cleansing is a process we advocate for in our practice.”
As for the traumas, stress is a big one but there are also traumas Pesek said people often don’t think about like the traumas of being removed from nature.
“You know we’re not running around naked like our ancestors so everyone has a Vitamin D deficiency, we’re not eating C vegetables like our ancestors, everyone has an iodine deficiency.
“People’s lack of iodine in their diet really is why 76 million Americans are on Synthroid, which is an artificial thyroid hormone. Vitamin D is another great example, with an optimized Vitamin D breast cancer risk reduction is 83 percent, cancer across the board 77 percent, heart attacks 30 percent, MS 54 percent, Diabetes Type I the inflammatory type 66 percent,” he said. “It’s really us being removed from what our ancestors did.”
One of the reasons Bernie Kosar wanted to do the story with News 5 on his treatments at VitalHealth was to make others aware that alternative holistic forms of healing can help along with traditional medicine.
“There’s absolutely no question whatsoever that it is unfortunate but true that interested business plays way too prominent a role in the standard of care medicine,” said Dr. Pesek. “That includes with our athletes and our ultra-athletes, in large part they’re subjugated by the drug and surgical and pharmaceutical industries.”
“Just the simple knowledge that pain killers actually slow healing should be in and of itself enough of a reason to seek other ways for more optimal healing strategies amongst our athletes,” he said.
For more on our discussion with Dr. Pesek, watch the video above.