On a recent morning, my mentor, a retired breast cancer surgeon in his 70s, sent me a screenshot from his Apple Watch.

10,208 steps.
7.25 kilometers.
One flight of stairs.
Before lunch.

For him, it was just another day. For me, a younger volunteer and PhD student watching Taiwan age into a super-aged society, it was a quiet masterclass in what prevention really means.

This surgeon, Dr. Lin, is not just any retiree. For more than 40 years, he lived inside operating rooms and tumor boards, fighting breast cancer one patient at a time. He helped introduce advanced imaging and early screening programs in Taiwan, and recently received a national medical contribution award for his efforts in cancer prevention and public health.

If his story stopped there, it would already be impressive. But what changed me was how he decided to live after stepping away from full-time hospital work.

The organic retirement field

Instead of playing more golf or giving occasional talks, he built what he calls his “organic retirement field” on the outskirts of Taipei. It is a carefully designed small farm, somewhere between a family garden and a professional operation: trellises for tomatoes and passion fruit, nets to protect leafy greens, lemon and sugar-apple trees as long-term anchors, and rows of cruciferous vegetables that would make any nutritionist smile.

Nothing about it is random. Short-term crops like cabbage and mustard greens keep the winter table full and provide gifts during Lunar New Year. Mid-term crops like tomatoes and passion fruit climb vertically to reduce back strain and produce for months. Long-term trees provide year-round lemons for cooking and seasonal fruit for sharing.

It is, in other words, a lifestyle medicine clinic disguised as a farm.

Most days, his 10,000-plus steps come not from a treadmill, but from walking irrigation lines, checking leaves, tying vines, and carrying baskets of vegetables to the kitchen. When he later sends photos of the food on his table, radish and pork bone soup, stir-fried greens, homemade red yeast rice cakes individually wrapped for friends, the continuity from soil to dinner plate is obvious.

Through years of volunteering in elder-care programs and public health outreach, I have become familiar with the language of “healthy aging”: anti-inflammatory diets, physical activity recommendations, fall prevention, and cognitive resilience. What I rarely see is a physician who integrates those principles by living them.

Conditions of life

When we talk, he rarely begins with lab values or imaging findings now. Instead, he talks about conditions. Not just medical conditions, but the conditions of life.

He often returns to a simple idea rooted in his Buddhist and tai chi practice: Health is not a fixed state but something that arises from multiple conditions, such as sleep, food, movement, relationships, and mindset. If one condition changes, the whole system shifts.

During one walk through the fields, he pointed to a thin tomato plant struggling in a corner.

“In the hospital,” he said, “we argue about drugs and devices. But if you do not fix the soil and the sunlight, nothing grows well. Patients are the same. Our health system still spends most of its energy on the last ten percent, the surgery and ICU bed, and far too little on the daily conditions that make disease more or less likely.”

This is not romantic nostalgia. Taiwan, where we live, is one of the fastest-aging societies in the world. Families are shrinking, caregivers are scarce, and chronic diseases often collapse onto one spouse or one daughter. I see those families often through community programs, caregiving outreach, and charity work.

In that context, Dr. Lin’s “organic retirement field” is not a hobby. It is a form of leadership.

He now helps guide a 160-year-old charity hospital in Taipei as it tries to move from charity and rescue toward prevention and resilience. Inside the institution, his framework is simple: medicine, movement, and meaning.

• Medicine: The part he spent his career mastering, including early detection, appropriate use of technology, and safe, evidence-based treatment.
• Movement: What his Apple Watch quietly records every day, not just gym exercise, but making walking, climbing, and physical labor a frictionless part of life, especially for older adults.
• Meaning: The hardest piece. It includes the tai chi he practices as a disciple, the humility he tries to cultivate through “relax, quiet, natural, joyful, and letting go,” and the way he talks about family.

One day, during a conversation about adult children who make different life choices than their parents expect, he said something that I now hear in families I encounter through elder-care volunteer work.

“Many parents say they worry about their children,” he told me, “but sometimes that worry is mostly about their own anxiety. You cannot do your child’s homework for them. Accepting that truth is also a kind of prevention: prevention of resentment, of burnout, of broken relationships at the end of life.”

In clinical practice, we are taught to count events: heart attacks prevented, tumors resected, hospital days avoided. It is harder to count the value of a father who is still able to walk with his grandchildren because he spent the last decade tending a garden instead of sitting behind a desk. It is harder to quantify the relief of a daughter whose mother’s surgeon also models how to age with dignity.

As health professionals, we write and read countless lifestyle brochures for our patients. But patients and families are watching something else: how we ourselves live, age, and eventually step away from our titles.

Not every physician can or wants to build an organic farm. Not everyone can walk 10,208 steps before lunch. That is not the point.

The lesson I am slowly learning from my mentor is that prevention cannot remain an abstract public health slogan or a line in a hospital mission statement. It has to be visible in the way we shape our spaces, choose our food, move our bodies, and relate to the people we love.

Guidelines may tell patients what to do. Our lives show them what is possible.

Gerald Kuo, a doctoral student in the Graduate Institute of Business Administration at Fu Jen Catholic University in Taiwan, specializes in health care management, long-term care systems, AI governance in clinical and social care settings, and elder care policy. He is affiliated with the Home Health Care Charity Association and maintains a professional presence on Facebook, where he shares updates on research and community work. Kuo helps operate a day-care center for older adults, working closely with families, nurses, and community physicians. His research and practical efforts focus on reducing administrative strain on clinicians, strengthening continuity and quality of elder care, and developing sustainable service models through data, technology, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. He is particularly interested in how emerging AI tools can support aging clinical workforces, enhance care delivery, and build greater trust between health systems and the public.