Be Happy: Lessons from Two Women Who Built Malaysia’s Pioneering Longevity Clinic

From Seoul to Soul

Mar 15, 2026

As a physician dedicated to integrating whole-person wellbeing with precision medicine, there is a unique cognitive dissonance in shifting roles. From the one interpreting the data and guiding patients, to the one changed into a gown and becoming the data point myself.

I have written before about the longevity medicine boom, from the $55 online health checks to the $250,000 annual memberships being sold to the wealthy in Dubai. I have thought carefully about who benefits, who gets left behind, and what the evidence actually supports. And then, on a warm November afternoon in Kuala Lumpur, I walked into Longevity Clinic as a patient, changed into a gown, and let them run the tests on me.

The place holds a distinction that matters in this space. It is Malaysia’s first clinic to be recognized by the Institute for Functional Medicine (IFM). In a landscape where “longevity” has become a marketing adjective applied to everything from IV drips to journaling apps, that recognition carries weight. Functional medicine has its critics especially around the strength of evidence for some interventions. But, it also has something many longevity clinics lack. A coherent framework grounded in root-cause analysis with rigorous training standards.

Two Women, Two Family Crises

What makes this place different is who built it.

Megan C (founder), watched her father suffer a massive heart attack in 2012 with nearly 90 percent blockage. Despite stents, conventional follow-ups, and specialist care, his condition kept declining. Only when the family turned to functional medicine with nutritional interventions, lifestyle overhaul, root-cause work, did he begin to recover. That experience convinced her that proactive, preventive care needed to reach more Malaysians, and that waiting for a crisis was not a strategy.

Co-founder, Dr. Andes, grew up in a family where diabetes ran through three generations. From her early twenties she eliminated sugar and refined foods, determined to break the generational pattern of diabetes she had watched claim her grandmother. Today, she lives the prevention she prescribes and wants the next generation of Malaysians to have the same options she chose for herself. Together, and with their clinical team, these two women opened Longevity Clinic earlier in 2025.

I asked them both on camera what the single most important thing their patients could do for longevity. They answered simultaneously, laughed at each other, and said the same word again. Be happy. I will come back to that.

The Diagnostics Deep Dive

My four-hour visit began with a comprehensive functional interview with diagnostics block lasting roughly two hours.

The SECA mBCA body composition analyzer uses bioelectrical impedance to map the body in ways a standard scale cannot. It produces a granular picture of skeletal muscle mass, fat distribution, cellular hydration, visceral adipose tissue, and a phase angle that reflects cellular integrity. It takes minutes. It is non-invasive. And the data it generates is clinically useful in a way that BMI alone has never been.

My results were a study in contrasts. The surface numbers looked all well within normal range: BMI of 21; visceral adipose tissue at 1.4 litres; and my resting energy expenditure came in at 1,269 kilocalories per day (a number that helps to understand metabolic health that do not gets measured in standard care).

But the deeper signals told a more honest story.

My fat-free mass index was 14.7 kg/m² (flagged low), skeletal muscle mass at the 41st percentile for my age, and phase angle 4.9° (39th percentile). For someone who exercises regularly and eats mindfully, that phase angle was a quiet but important wake-up call. It reflects cellular integrity and membrane health, declining with malnutrition, chronic illness, or biological aging. Mine wasn’t alarming, but it was below average; and for a physician focused on whole-person wellbeing, it was precisely the kind of actionable data worth having.

In Mapping Your Territory, I described the physical dimension of wellbeing as encompassing cellular integrity, metabolic flexibility, and the body as ally rather than liability. Phase angle measures exactly that substrate. In my own framework, mine sits in the “striving” zone: functional and building, but not yet fully resilient. The SECA scan made it legible.

The second test was a urine-based free radical measurement, a colorimetric oxidative stress assessment that produces a result within minutes. My sample matched the second lightest band on the scale, indicating some oxidative stress as well as antioxidant defenses. Reassuring, and immediately actionable. What I appreciated about how the clinic uses this test is not primarily as a diagnostic but as a behaviour change tool.

When patients see their oxidative stress levels in real time, abstract lifestyle advice becomes concrete. The test is painless, affordable, and produces the kind of instant feedback that shifts commitment in a way that a blood result arriving three weeks later rarely does.

The third test was the telomere length assessment. My results arrived several weeks after the visit. Average telomere length 7.08 kilobases, placing me at the 77th percentile for my age. Biological age estimate of 46 years against a chronological age of 48. I treat any single biomarker with healthy skepticism. I also smiled.

A 12-lead ECG was also performed during the diagnostics block. The machine flagged sinus arrhythmia, which in the absence of other concerns is a normal variant, commonly seen in people with good cardiovascular conditioning. Heart rate at 57 beats per minute. I mention this not because it was abnormal, it wasn’t, but because incidental findings like this one can send patients spiralling unnecessarily without a physician present to interpret them alongside context. Context is the whole game in diagnostic medicine.

The 5D LifeClock

Before moving to the intervention component of my visit, it is worth understanding what makes Longevity Clinic’s diagnostic architecture distinct from a standard executive health check.

Their signature program, the 5D Longevity LifeClock, combines five diagnostic layers into a single whole-person snapshot. The first is DNA, your inherited biological blueprint and risk landscape. The second is epigenetics, how lifestyle, environment, and history have modified the expression of that blueprint over time. The third is functional biomarkers, blood-based markers of inflammation, metabolism, and hormonal status that reflect current physiological reality. The fourth is the medical body composition analysis. And the fifth is gut microbiome assessment, what Dr. Andes describes as the second brain, with a reach into mood, immunity, and metabolic health that conventional medicine has only recently begun to take seriously.

What I find compelling about this framework is that it captures the past (DNA), the present (biomarkers and body composition), and the trajectory between them (epigenetics and microbiome). As I described in Mapping Your Territory, the physical dimension of whole-person wellbeing encompasses the biological substrate of existence as a living system. The 5D LifeClock is, in effect, a structural assessment of that substrate across time.

The clinic also draws on Malaysia’s own rich heritage of traditional knowledge. Some of their personalized supplements have roots in indigenous Malay and traditional Chinese medicine, plant-derived compounds that have been used in this region for centuries and are now being validated against functional biomarkers for individual patients. This is not a small thing. It is the difference between importing a Silicon Valley framework wholesale and building something rooted in the place where it lands.

Instead of carrying 20–30 separate bottles, their custom-compounded supplements are formulated into just 2–3 capsules per day. This makes them far easier to travel with and a smarter choice for patients managing multiple supplements, vitamins, herbal remedies, or prescriptions, where checking for interactions is essential.

Ninety Metres Below Sea Level, Breathing Pure Oxygen

The second half of my visit was hyperbaric oxygen therapy, 80 minutes at 2.0 atmospheres of pressure breathing pure oxygen. What is unique about the chamber at Longevity Clinic is that patients sit upright rather than lying down, the only such configuration in Malaysia. For anyone who has found standard HBOT chambers claustrophobic, this matters considerably.

I arrived for my session during what had been an exceptionally demanding conference week. The schedule had been relentless. That same morning, I had noticed a subconjunctival hemorrhage in my left eye. One of those bright red bleeds across the white of the eye that look alarming but are almost always benign, typically triggered by fatigue, strain, or pressure change. I flagged it with the clinical team, who confirmed it was cosmetic and safe to proceed.

The session itself was calm and supervised. Pressure builds like a slow airplane descent. I equalized, found my seat, and let the eighty minutes be what they were, enforced stillness in a week that had offered none. I read. I noticed, somewhere around the fortieth minute, a quality of quiet in my body that felt less like relaxation and more like repair.

I emerged feeling sharper than I had any right to feel at that point in the week. By the end of the treatment, the hemorrhage had cleared entirely. Whether the HBOT directly accelerated that resolution, or whether the combination of enforced rest, elevated oxygen, and a week finally ending simply allowed the body to do what it does, I cannot say with certainty. What I know from the evidence is that HBOT increases dissolved oxygen in the bloodstream substantially beyond what normal breathing achieves, that this oxygen reaches areas of the brain under stress or inflammation, and that it supports mitochondrial energy production, neuroplasticity, and repair mechanisms the brain cannot access under ordinary conditions. The small but rigorous Tel Aviv trial published in 2020 showed HBOT could lengthen telomeres and reduce senescent cell percentage in healthy aging adults1. The evidence base is early and contested. The mechanistic rationale is compelling. My experience was consistent with the reports of people who have done it repeatedly, which is that you come out noticeably more present than you went in.

I also tried an IV NMN (nicotinamide mononucleotide) infusion. NMN is a direct precursor to NAD+, the coenzyme essential for mitochondrial energy production, DNA repair, and activating sirtuin longevity genes. I have taken NMN sublingually for some time, but delivered intravenously, it raises NAD+ levels rapidly and efficiently. Longevity clinics use it to support cellular repair, metabolic health, and resilience against age-related decline. The mechanistic rationale is strong and animal data compelling; human evidence is still early-stage but growing (improvements in energy metabolism, insulin sensitivity, and aerobic capacity have been noted in small trials). It paired well with the HBOT, two different routes to the same goal. Giving the body the raw materials and environment to repair.

A More Accessible Middle Path

I had spent time in Singapore’s longevity and wellness scene about a year ago. The contrast was instructive. Singapore’s offerings tend to sit at the premium end of the market, priced for expatriate professionals and medical tourists with considerable disposable income. What I found at Longevity Clinic was a more accessible proposition, one that feels built for the Malaysian professional class: credible through its IFM recognition, clinically grounded, and priced to be reachable rather than exclusive.

As I wrote after my India visit, longevity medicine faces a structural equity problem. The interventions most likely to improve healthspan are largely accessible only to those who can pay out of pocket. Public health systems serving the majority are still struggling to integrate even basic preventive screening consistently. The gap is not closing. I was glad to see Dr. Andes and Megan C are already thinking about this. They are in active conversation with employers and government bodies about insurance integration for preventive diagnostics, recognizing, as I do, that prevention saves money over a long enough time horizon that most healthcare systems are still not built to see clearly.

Malaysia is also moving toward a super-aged society, a demographic shift that makes the question of how to keep aging populations functional and well, genuinely urgent. The Wellspan post I wrote in January, noted that the global gap between lifespan and healthspan was already 9.6 years and growing. What the 5D LifeClock is trying to close is exactly that gap, not by adding years but by making the years functional across the dimensions that actually constitute a life.

What Dr. Andes Said About Numbers

There is a moment in my interview with the clinical team that has stayed with me. I asked Dr. Andes about the biohacking culture. The competitive tracking of biological age scores, the viral posts about people shaving years off their epigenetic clocks. She shrugged.

A better number is good, she said. But what can you do with it? If you cannot climb stairs. If you cannot play sport. If you cannot get down on the floor with your grandchildren. She was not dismissing the biomarkers. She was insisting they be held accountable to function. To joy. To what a body is actually for.

This is, I think, the most important thing being said in longevity medicine right now and the thing that gets said least, because it does not generate engagement or sell memberships. The number is not the goal. The life the number is supposed to be enabling is the goal.

Reflections

I left with a stack of reports, and another of HBOT behind me, and something more valuable than either. Sharper questions.

My cellular age appears to be tracking slightly younger than my years. My oxidative stress is low-moderate. My cardiovascular function looks healthy. But my muscle mass and phase angle told me I am not protecting the metabolic organ that will matter most as I age. Skeletal muscle governs insulin sensitivity, inflammatory signalling, mobility, and resilience against chronic disease. Building and maintaining it is arguably the most evidence-backed longevity intervention available, and it costs nothing except time and consistency. The PDF will not let me forget that.

The clinic’s diagnostic architecture covers the physical dimension with clinical precision. The DNA and epigenetic layers address the inherited and lived conditions of the physical self. The functional biomarkers assess current metabolic and inflammatory reality. The body composition analysis gets at cellular integrity and structural resilience. The microbiome reaches into the biological foundations of mood, immunity, and gut-brain connection.

When I asked Dr. Andes and Megan C for their single most important longevity tip, they didn’t hesitate. They glanced at each other, turned to me, said

Be happy.
It sounds like a greeting card. It is not. It is the culmination of two women who watched their families suffer preventable disease, who spent decades building something different, and who have sat across from enough patients to know that a phase angle improving from 4.9 to 5.4 degrees matters considerably less than whether the person living inside that body feels connected to something worth staying well for.
That is not a rebuttal of precision medicine. It is precision medicine’s necessary companion.

Soul Inquiry

What would it mean to you to know your biological age, and would that information motivate action, or would it produce a kind of quiet anxiety you would rather not carry? And what is the equivalent of “be happy” in your own life right now? Please share your thoughts below.

Seoul to Soul

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