The Metabolism Connection: One Doctor’s Case for Catching Illness Before It Starts – meet Dr. Claas Hohmann

What if the entire healthcare system has the incentives backwards? That’s the provocation Dr. Claas Hohmann opens with — and it sets the tone for one of the most candid conversations we’ve had about medicine, money, and what it actually takes to stay well.

Dr. Hohmann is not a wellness influencer chasing the “longevity” buzzword. He’s a veteran clinic director who spent 25 years running one of Munich’s major hospitals, the Wolfart Klinik, after training in surgery and orthopedics following medical studies in Mainz. Along the way he added specialist qualifications in Mayr medicine, nutritional medicine, and sports medicine — a rare combination that lets him move fluidly between acute clinical expertise and a genuinely holistic view of health. Today, as Medical Director of Buff Medical Resort in Konstanz, he’s built his life’s second act around a radical premise: catch disease before it starts, rather than treat it once it arrives.

In this interview, Dr. Hohmann doesn’t hold back. He explains why almost every major chronic disease — cancer, heart attack, stroke, dementia, immune decline — traces back to the same root cause: metabolic health. He talks about extending how far ahead a doctor can “see” a patient’s future, the way a driver spots brake lights miles down the highway. And he goes further than most clinicians dare, arguing that loneliness may be as dangerous to your health as smoking, that our genes respond to how we think and feel, and that even his own industry risks creating the very dependency it claims to cure.

It’s a conversation about high-tech diagnostics and five-thousand-year-old fasting traditions, about wealth and isolation, and about what it really means to make a patient — not a pill or a procedure — the captain of their own health.

Interview by Frank Roller, Places of Healing

Dr. Hohmann: If you look at what we call the “healthcare system,” it’s fascinating — you can only make money from illness in it. That’s strange, isn’t it? A system called “health,” where the only way to earn money is through disease. Nobody in that system actually has an interest in health, because they’d be sawing off the branch they’re sitting on. This has occupied me for decades. I ran a clinic in Munich for 25 years — mostly surgical medicine, where things are straightforward: a broken femur just needs to be set.

But chronic disease is different — diabetes, dementia, cardiovascular disease — and especially something I think is barely addressed in European medicine: the shrinking of the immune system with age. 

We actually have the ability to largely prevent heart attacks and strokes through prevention. Largely! But what happens? Nothing.

What we try to do here is look early for each person’s individual risk — genetic family history, biomarkers, everything — and identify it before disease develops. Almost all chronic and “civilization” diseases — cancer, heart attack, stroke, dementia, immune decline — share a common foundation: metabolic health. 

If your metabolism isn’t in good shape, you’re first in line for all of them. Get that foundation right, and these diseases have a much harder time taking hold.

Frank Roller: I completely agree — this is a sickness system, prevention is underfunded, and education is missing. None of this is taught in schools. But here’s what’s interesting: you clearly know all this, and you’ve built BUFF Medical Resort around it — as have many other longevity clinics popping up worldwide. Yet access to this knowledge and these therapies keeps going to a narrow elite..

Dr. Hohmann: That’s inherent to the system I described. Scaling this to the wider population would mean going head-to-head with the medical-industrial complex — and honestly, I wouldn’t dare do that.

Frank Roller: But someone has to start, or it’s a downward spiral.

Dr. Hohmann: True. What matters most to me is health education — you only act once you understand the connections, and can relate them to your own life and risk. We learn nothing about this in school, university, vocational training, or later from employers. Yet individuals, national economies, and politics would all benefit enormously from more knowledge here.

Since the postwar years the message has been: “Don’t worry about anything, insurance covers it, we take care of you.” Now that this is financially unsustainable, people are suddenly told certain treatments won’t be covered anymore — without ever having been given the tools to take care of themselves. That’s deeply unfair.

Regarding what we personally do: we have a foundation here. All staff earning above a certain threshold agreed, when hired, to contribute 5% of their annual salary to it. Starting next year we’ll decide how to deploy those funds — very likely toward schools: educational programs, talks for parents and children.

Frank Roller: That needs to be communicated!

Dr. Hohmann: It will be — once it’s ready to announce.

Frank Roller: That’s exactly the right approach — it’s what makes a place authentically a “healing place” rather than just riding the longevity trend. 

Dr. Hohmann: Let’s start small — what do I actually change in my guest, my patient? I don’t love the word “longevity” — it’s become a buzzword. What concerns me is that the supplement industry, like conventional medicine, tends to create dependency — on pills, therapists, doctors, procedures.

My real intention — I described this once as an image — is to make people the captain of their own ship of health. Sometimes you need a pilot to navigate a difficult harbor, but the pilot doesn’t take the wheel; he tells you how to steer, and the captain stays responsible.

 So: first, help people know their ship — individual risk factors. Second, show them concretely, not just theoretically, how to sail it — here, over ten days, someone learns they can survive breakfast without white bread and sugared coffee, eating eggs, avocado, and tea instead, and feels the difference physically. Third, give them the underlying knowledge to keep steering it themselves.

Frank Roller: Is there an integration piece — some ongoing support after people leave, an app or follow-up?

Dr. Hohmann: Yes — the Aftercare Package: four consultations over the following year (by video call) with whichever specialist the guest chooses — nutrition, physician, sports scientist, whoever. If someone needs more than four, they simply book additional sessions. We don’t want people to leave, pay, and be done — we want ongoing relationship.

Frank Roller: Compared to other longevity resorts — Buchinger, Chenot, Lanser Hof,  what’s genuinely different about Buff Medical Resort’s approach, beyond fasting, which everyone offers?

Dr. Hohmann: Think of it as a piano — fasting is one key among many; every clinic plays some version of it. Where I believe we’re far ahead of competitors is diagnostics: in-house brain MRI, cardiac MRI, always chasing the same question — where is your individual risk, found as early and precisely as possible?

The image I give guests: driving 160 km/h on a straight highway, you see brake lights far ahead — no problem, you ease off in time. Same situation in fog, rain, a curve — completely different. I want to extend how far ahead I can “see” the traffic jam of disease — from 800 meters to 1,500. Because early detection gives us the chance to change course through lifestyle, sometimes medication  — and avoid the crash. Once you’ve had the heart attack, medicine is good for treatment, but the odds of dying are still substantial.

Frank Roller: Are your guests mostly healthy people wanting a checkup, or people recovering from cancer treatment, chemo, or a heart attack?

Dr. Hohmann: Mostly people who’ve already had some “impact” — but not acute; we don’t do acute care. If you’ve completed cancer treatment and want to move forward, or you’ve had earlier warning signs, this is the right place. The intention is preventing further deterioration.

There’s a spectrum: conventional medicine waits until you’re sick, then treats symptoms rather than causes. 

One step further is disease prevention. But I still want to go further — practice medicine whose actual goal is producing health. That automatically covers the other two as well.

Frank Roller: What’s your take on the American extreme — this near-obsession with “longevity,” huge supplement stacks, checking off Wim Hof breathwork, cold plunges, fasting protocols — a slippery slope where chasing health itself becomes a kind of sickness?

Dr. Hohmann: Exactly what I said before — it’s a movement that creates dependency again, sold through fear. And here’s something I think is far more important than any of it: supplements are, for me, almost the least important piece — maybe a 2–3% add-on at best. What we almost never talk about is how we think and feel about ourselves and the world — mindset, our sense of social connection, who we’re responsible for, who’s responsible for us, what occupies our mind all day.

We now know of at least 56 genes that switch on or off depending — simplifying — on how we think. Genes are like a vast library; we used to think we were slaves to it, fixed and unchangeable. Now we know we can influence, to a real degree, which “books” get pulled off the shelf and read — through nutrition, exercise, and very significantly through mindset: how we see the world and ourselves in it.

Frank Roller: That sounds close to a more holistic, almost Steiner-adjacent approach — art therapy, movement therapy, talk therapy. Is that offered here? 

Dr. Hohmann: We do offer things like that — one doesn’t preclude the other. That’s exactly where I see our strength: high-tech medicine on one side, deeply traditional practices on the other. What we do around nutrition and fasting is nothing new — Ayurveda said it 5,000 years ago, Hippocrates 3,000 years ago, Dr. Mayr 120 years ago. Every religion on earth has some form of fasting. 

What’s new is that we can now measure and explain the molecular mechanisms behind what people once only sensed intuitively. Whether that makes it better — I honestly don’t know.

Frank Roller: But explaining the “why” is a cognitive step — it’s not yet the next step of actually integrating change into daily life. We’re becoming a more isolated society generally — and there’s a version of this “longevity clinic hopping” where wealthy, lonely people bounce from resort to resort without ever tapping into the healing power of real community. 

Dr. Hohmann: My priority is first creating awareness — not handing people a nice temporary bubble and sending them home to figure it out alone. Americans especially are obsessed with detoxification — think about social detoxification too: sort the difficult people out of your life. Think about material detoxification: what surrounds you, and what are you a slave to? This is deeply personal work — we run a personal-coaching format with Martina Meisenberger that goes exactly into this territory.

One of the most dangerous things about aging, health-wise, is loneliness — worse than smoking, on the level of chronic stress. Ideally you recognize that danger early — by 40 or 45 — the same “see far down the highway” principle. My job is to convey the knowledge clearly enough that people understand it, then talk through what’s actually standing in the way of applying it in their real life. If someone works 12-hour days on the New York trading floor, I’m not prescribing a 6-hour weekly fitness plan. This clinic is really just the seed funding — the point of condensation around which something more can form.

Frank Roller: So is there active follow-through here — programs addressing something like “your social connection is weak, isolation is a major stress factor for you” — beyond the aftercare calls? Or is the focus mainly diagnostic: showing people where their physical and psychological vulnerabilities lie, and then it’s up to them?

Dr. Hohmann: My goal — and my colleagues’ — is that people leave with maybe five concrete, personally-tailored to-dos. Not twenty; that never works. If someone tells our trainers they realistically have 3 hours a week to exercise, we design a plan for 1.5 hours, not 3. Combine that with the aftercare package to track what’s working and what isn’t. 

What I’d like less of is what you described — people getting a warm sense of community here that evaporates the moment they go home; they need to build that themselves, or it just creates a new dependency.

Frank Roller: So are the wealthy guests at your resort also the lonely one

Dr. Hohmann:  Interestingly: the wealthier you are, the lonelier you tend to be. I have a friend who was married to one of the richest women in Germany — he described exactly this: constant suspicion of others’ motives, being exploited by people around you. One path is withdrawing from everyone; another is only associating with people of equal wealth so it’s no longer an issue — but those people are hard to find with the right mindset too. That’s exactly why the dining hall’s looks very quiet — I don’t need people to become instant best friends, but I’d like them to actually see each other and connect.

Frank Roller:. I keep thinking about educational programs for young people — youth mental health is collapsing. Ambassador programs backed by BUFF Medical Resort’s clinical expertise, offering online guidance to less privileged young people, could be regional rather than global in scope.

Dr. Hohmann: Yes, regional is exactly right, Hans Juerg Buff is a deeply religious person — the foundation idea traces back to the concept of tithing, somewhat outdated , but we’re operating among very wealthy people in a luxurious setting, and that’s the base to draw from and redistribute. My own focus for the foundation would be clear: start with children and teenagers — first something simple like nutrition education, then eventually the harder territory of mindset and mental preoccupation.

Frank Roller: Thank you for having us, and thank you for your time