Fix the root cause
Jeffrey Chew practises functional medicine at the Zung Beauty Clinic in Kuala Lumpur — and he’s refreshingly honest about what actually heals people. Functional medicine, as he describes it, is about finding the root cause of illness and correcting it at the level of the whole system, so the disease is removed from the picture — usually through the body’s own natural processes rather than drugs and surgery.
The honesty is the point. “I would be lying,” he says, “if it were all about products.” Most healing comes from lifestyle changes, because most disease is caused by lifestyle in the first place. Nutraceuticals, injectables and clinic technology facilitate the healing — often necessary, but never a replacement for the basics. His first job with any patient is to dig out their real lifestyle pattern; the funny truth, he laughs, is that people usually already know why they’re sick.
From there it’s personalised and data-driven — which is exactly why he sits in Biohacking Upgrades. He tailors nutraceuticals (“nutrients as medicine,” high-dose and well-formulated, distinct from over-the-counter supplements) to each person’s genetic and blood-biomarker data, and builds the whole programme around the patient’s own goal, most often the same one: to live long and disease-free.
And yes, it’s a beauty clinic, so the body-optimisation tech is here too — EMSculpt Neo to burn visceral fat and build muscle, InBody tracking, intermittent fasting and ketosis for stubborn belly fat. Chew is candid that this fits modern life, and that he lives that modern life himself. The through-line is consistent: lifestyle first, technology as the accelerator.
