Dr. Allan Mishra has been an orthopedic surgeon for over twenty years. He’s on faculty at Stanford, he’s spent decades researching regenerative medicine, and he hosts his own podcast on vitality and performance. By most measures, there isn’t much left in this field that should catch him off guard.
Then he came to Torrey Pines as faculty for the 2026 ARTS Summit — and went home and recorded an episode about what he hadn’t known. Not a recap of the sessions. A reflection on what surprised him.
He named something we created on purpose but haven’t articulated as well as he did: a gathering across plastic surgery, dermatology, orthopedics, and regenerative medicine that generated its own cross-pollination — the kind of unplanned collision of ideas that only happens when the right people are actually in a room together, not just on a schedule together. (This year’s room, we should mention, was a full one — we sold out the Summit for the first time, which we’re still a little amazed by.) He even ran a vitality assessment (his “VyScore”) on the group and found something striking: attendees over 60 were keeping pace with the room’s youngest participants. Make of that what you will about the company adipose tissue keeps.
What surprised him?
The fact that fat is not inert storage, but living, reparative tissue, richer in stem and signaling cells than bone marrow, already earning a place in plastic surgery and dermatology, and showing early promise in conditions like knee arthritis.
I’d never met Allan before this Summit. I’d seen his Vitality Substack, and I knew he’d been on the faculty at the TOBI meetings. It’s a quiet joy to watch someone like him arrive, independently, at the same regard for this tissue, this science, this way of gathering people around it, that got us building ARTS in the first place.
There’s another thread in his work worth noticing. Allan’s whole practice outside the OR — the podcast, the book, the courses at Stanford — is built around vitality and sustainable performance for people carrying a lot. It’s mostly aimed at his patients and his audience. But it points at something we’ve been leaning toward for ARTS too: caring for the caregiver. The clinicians in our world spend their careers helping other people’s tissue regenerate and rarely turn that same rigor toward their own restoration. It’s not just self-care for its own sake, either. Dr. Tess Mauricio said something during the Summit panel on patient comfort during office-based procedures that’s been proven: the energy a practitioner brings into the room shapes how comfortable the patient feels on the table. A steadier clinician makes for a steadier procedure. Allan’s Vitality work is a natural neighbor to something we’re exploring for the ARTS offerings – a place where the standard we hold for the science extends to the people practicing it.
If you want the fuller picture, including his notes on a 15-second chair test that may predict more about your future health than you’d expect, his episode is here: Vitality Explorer Podcast
If conversations like this one are your kind of thing — the cross-disciplinary, still-early, worth-taking-seriously kind — the ARTS Commons is where they keep happening after the Summit ends. I invite you to come sit in on one.