User:Steven Charlap

Steven Charlap (born 1958) is a semi-retired, preventive medicine physician and serial medical entrepreneur who practiced in Delray Beach and Boca Raton, Florida. He is the author of Making Sense of Nursing Homes: A Guide for Families and Why I Had To Close My Preventive Healthcare Clinic, published in The Atlantic (http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/01/why-i-had-to-close-my-preventive-healthcare-clinic/282929/).

With venture capital invested by a Dublin, Ireland based investment firm called DCC, Ltd., Charlap with Alec Jaret, DMD, a dentist, co-founded HealthDrive, which they grew to be the largest U.S. provider of medical and dental services to the extended care industry. Over twenty years, HealthDrive provided services to over five million patients located in over fifteen hundred facilities located in thirteen states. HealthDrive was a two time INC. 500 company that grew every year during Charlap's tenure. In 2008, Charlap sold HealthDrive to a Boston-based private equity firm called Riverside Partners and in 2010 announced his resignation to pursue other endeavors.

In late 2010, Charlap co-founded with Michael Rose, a real estate entrepreneur, MDPrevent, LLC. MDPrevent was a primary care, preventive medicine and education center dedicated to primary disease prevention. It offered a range of services including primary care, nutritional and psychological counseling, weight loss counseling, and diabetes education. In 2012, MDPrevent was the largest provider of Medicare paid for obesity counseling services in the state of Florida and the only Certified Diabetes Education Center in Delray Beach, Florida. MDPrevent closed in late 2013. (See The Atlantic article.)

In 2013, Charlap founded The Longevity Club, a club to connect like-minded people interested in healthy lifestyles.

Biography Born in Jerusalem, Israel, Charlap with his parents, his father a rabbi and his mother a Hebrew school teacher, and two older brothers, one who would become an attorney and the other would become a cardiologist (now deceased), emigrated to the United States when he was seven months old. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York and attended the Yeshiva of Crown Heights for grade school and Yeshiva University High School for Boys--Brooklyn for high school. For college, he graduated Magna Cum Laude from Yeshiva University and received his medical degree from New York University School of Medicine. His residency was completed at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York. Afterwards, he received his MBA from Harvard University. He received the Dean's Award for Outstanding Contribution to Harvard Business School for his founding of The Business Ethics Forum, a student publication devoted to business ethics.

Dr. Charlap is also a lecturer that has given dozens of lectures to thousands of people on health related topics, and has appeared on numerous TV and radio shows.

He is married with three children and lives in Boca Raton, Florida.

Views Charlap holds strong views against the routine use of dietary supplements. He believes that whole foods offer significant advantages and sufficient nutrition, and are almost always superior to over-touted natural extracts and artificially synthesized pills. He writes a blog that can be found at www.mdprevent.blogspot.com. He most enjoys identifying well-done, reliable clinical studies that offer useful information.