Luxury travelers have found a new way to stay, with wellness-centered and longevity science focused stays in urban cities solidified as one of travel’s biggest trends.
Vogue Arabia, May 2022. Photo: Suzana Holtgrave
Atlantis the Royal is pioneering this kind of holistic holiday, with its partnership with in-situ clinic AEON. In addition to all of the luxe details expected at Atlantis the Royal, guests can align their stay with AEON’s professionals to enjoy an immersive wellness experience from check-in to check-out. Founder of AEON, Dr Jaffer Khan, says he was drawn towards holistic wellness and longevity science after decades in the beauty and aesthetics industry showed him that clients valued treatments that not only extended their lives, but the quality of that time. By aligning with Atlantis the Royal, he says, he was able to create a clinical space that could fully treat patients when they are their most relaxed, while still in a luxury setting.
AEON. Photo: courtesy AEON.
What sets AEON apart is its dedicated programs, designed to go deeper into the client’s specific area of concern and dissect it from all potential approaches. Programs include ones focusing on rejuvenescence, pain management, cardiovascular health, functional health, immunity and gut health, performance enhancements, and what Dr Khan says is one of the clinic’s most popular, anti-aging based off longevity science. Custom programs can also be created for more specific need. Whichever route you take, visitors to AEON can start off with a series of consultations to best guide their journey. A lifestyle consultation with a regenerative medicine specialist includes the clinic’s Oligoscan. The detailed analysis assesses the body for a full composition report, breaking down percentages of heavy metals and minerals present in the body. You will then be taken line by line through your results and the regenerative medicine specialist’s recommended action plan to amend too-high or too-low levels, a sometimes illuminating process. The in-house dermatologist will determine her own report with a thorough skin assessment, including a high-powered microscopic scan of your complexion, detailing each pore, line, and discoloration. Once your team has a feel for your key concerns, your treatment plan can include any number of external and internal remedies, working in coordination to maximize results. Some treatments can include the DMK Enzyme Treatment, a highly effective facial designed to renew the complexion. The Airpod is a hyperbaric oxygen therepy enclosure that floods the system with a heightened dose of oxygen, while the photobiomodulation red light laser therapy heats the body to help sweat out toxins. Also highly recommended is the AEON Rejuvenescence IV vitamin drip, with the addition of gold standard NAD+ to revitalizes cells from the inside out.
In-between and post-treatments, hotel guests staying at Atlantis the Royal can enjoy world class dining, a pool day beside the sprawling Royal Pool, or even some family fun at the neighboring Aquaventure water park. The AWAKEN Spa offers an elegant retreat, with muscle-melting massages and skin-refining facial, and with arguably the best sauna and steam spa facilities in the Middle East. Attracting both regional guests looking for a holistic staycay, or international travelers seeking out wellness solutions, Atlantis the Royal harnesses some of the region’s best luxury experiences. In true Atlantis style, the rooms and suites are chic with touches of indulgent gold to be found throughout the stylish fitouts. Flooded with natural light, the rooms and suite face either the wide horizon of the expansive Arabian Gulf, or looking back over the Palm Islands, across to the bright city lights and towering skyscapers of Dubai.
Read on for Dr Khan’s thoughts on the importance of holistic treatment.
Why did you decide to partner with Atlantis the Royal?
The partnership with Atlantis the Royal was thought out because it is an experiential resort unlike any in the world, the sheer scale of the project is a credit to Dubai and its leadership. The client tell in fact are people who have already travelled the world, and these are generally people of means who have everything they need in life, but now look to life itself and better quality of life as the thing that they need the most at this point. Hence the number of them have travelled around the world to receive their stem cell treatments with different protocols obviously in different countries. Remember there is no real market leader in our industry, which is a $19 trillion longevity space the standard operating procedures, protocols and data gathering is happening as we speak and is continuously in a state of evolution at the moment due to the cost of the treatment this is usually a luxury for those who have the affordability to do it. These are the same people who would normally stay at the Royal Atlantis also wanted to promote Dubai as the ultimate wellness destination. I would like to say the ultimate destination for regenerative medicine, but that is a term that very few people in fact, even doctors understand. The fact that we can have a seamless interface between ourselves, the rooms, the restaurants and the spa gym, yoga, etc. means that the client experience will be top notch with a seamless interface between these services. For the future we are overlooking to do some novel concepts, which I will keep close to the chest at the moment.
Talk us through the AEON concept:
The word AEON from the Greek language refers to a period of a very long time. In many ways that is what we are doing, we are extending time and we are also extending the quality of the time. We do this through the principles of functional and regenerative medicine. Normally as we age our cells become senescent or old, and these are not replaced as effectively by new cells, and hence we have all the stigma of aging. If we are able to stimulate the body to make new cells or indeed replace the lost cells and remove the senescent cells, we are actually able to reverse and slow down biological age. Functional medicine doctors look at aging as a disease, if you think about it most things like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, osteoarthritis, Alzheimer’s disease, and the number of other autoimmune disorders, including and even cancer, for the most part, are age related diseases. Therefore, by living a better life longer and keeping the manifestations of aging at bay, we also simultaneously prevent and potentially treat existing age-related disease. This is what we are trying to propagate through AEON.
How important is it to align outer beauty with inner wellness?
As a plastic surgeon over the last 25 years, we have been addressing external beauty throughout the times either surgically or through aesthetic medicine. I believe inner wellness is more important and hence the shift in my interest. I believe we have a responsibility to ourselves, as well as the people we love around us to propagate in our wellness which is fundamental to the fabric of a society. When we have inner wellness, we look at our external appearance and we can or may not decide to do something about it, but on the whole, if our biological aging is slowed down so to the physical manifestations of aging, hence inner wellness and outer beauty do go ahead in hand if we are not talking about major external physical changes.
Do you think there’s a growing interest from clientele in taking holistic measures?
You can only have a look at the different articles and interest in what we called biohacking, which is really a lay person’s term for functional and regenerative medicine wherein we institute measures such as red-light therapy, ozone therapy, cold plunge, and sauna therapy, as well as interval training and intermittent fasting. These biohacking procedures are really an extrapolation of the principle of hormesis, which is simply put ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ when the body receives insults either in temperature or physical activity or otherwise, it starts to generate survival proteins and the survival proteins also help to reduce inflammation and reverse biological age. People have caught onto that, but of course at AEON we believe to take it one step further through a medical point of view, for example longevity through science.
What are the hero treatments and services for AEON?
There are many centers which offer holistic wellness, as well as some of the treatments that I have mentioned in the previous question. At AEON we take a step further instituting ozone plasmapheresis, which essentially is removing all the heavy metals, toxins, bacteria and viruses from the blood and basically a sort of dialysis treatment which can be carried out in order to cleanse the body to finally receive stem cells. We also have photodynamic therapy or we call in intravascular or intravenous Light treatment, which helps stimulate different chromophores or target cells in the blood for a regenerative action. I think the key thing is that we are able to prepare the body to receive the ultimate regenerative cell which is stem cell and this whole course with the capability of putting stem cells into the joints into the face and hair and finally intravenously is what set us apart from most of our competitors.
Can you give an example of a treatment plan for the average AEON client?
The treatment plan starts with a comprehensive consultation with either one of our naturopathic doctors, geneticist or general practitioners. At this consultation will take a full history to understand what has transpired with the patient’s health in the past and what are their goals for the future. We also do gut biome testing, metabolic testing, hormonal testing, and genetic testing. The results of which allows us to formulate a customized plan for the patient. We then put the patient through the treatments which involve photodynamic therapy, hyperbaric oxygen, ozone therapy as well as exosomes, stem cells as well as peptides for them to take as supplements. A diet plan is also drawn up as a lifestyle plan and the patient is given a six-month concierge service where we continuously review their progress and determine how the treatments have helped to reverse their biological age.
What does the future hold for AEON?
As we talk about longevity because this is what most of us understand we also have to remember that during these consultations and blood test and discussions with the patient. We also managed to uncover at least two or three illnesses, which are in progress, which is due to lifestyle or genetic constitution or even what we call the epigenetic, which is how we live our lives. Therefore, we are able to pre-empt a lot of these disease condition and offer treatments for these even in the stage where only symptoms are appearing. The idea finally is to change people’s lives in the way that future medicine should. We envisage our world free of allopathic medicine where one’s own body and cellular processes can heal and repair. This science is already here, it is a question of educating the public and instituting the measures required to give people a better quality and longer life without a dependence on drugs. Cellular and genetic therapies are the future of medicine.
