Forty-four years. The same few square miles.
Christopher W. Traughber, M.D. has practiced medicine on the Palos Verdes Peninsula and across the South Bay since 1982. Athlos Health is what he built next.
You may already know him. If not, your neighbor does.
Most longevity clinics are staffed by physicians you have never met, often in another state, sometimes on a screen. Dr. Chris founded the urgent care in Palos Verdes and ran it for thirty-nine years. He has been the medical director of a Torrance skilled nursing facility since 1990. He was the student health physician at Los Angeles Harbor College for three decades. He taught in the family practice residency that trained the generation of doctors after him.
If you have raised a family on this peninsula, there is a fair chance he has already cared for someone you love.
Longevity medicine is a young field. This isn't a young doctor.
A career that began in urgent care and ran through geriatrics, stroke rehabilitation and thirty years of student health is an unusual path into longevity medicine. It is arguably the right one. A physician who has spent four decades treating the consequences of decline — the falls, the strokes, the diabetes that arrived quietly in someone's fifties — has a particular view of what is worth preventing, and how early.
What four decades here buys you
- Pattern recognition that no protocol document contains
- A referral network built over a career, not bought
- Hospital affiliations at Torrance Memorial and Providence Little Company of Mary
- A reputation in this community that took forty years and would take one bad decision to lose
What it isn't
- A telehealth physician who signs prescriptions he never discusses
- A medical director whose name is on the wall and nowhere else
- A practice built to sell a protocol rather than answer a question
- Someone who will be somewhere else next year
The sideline, and the drug test.
Team physician, soccer, 1984 Olympic Games. The summer Los Angeles hosted the world, Dr. Chris was on the sideline as a team physician — two years out of residency, in his own city. Sports medicine at that level is the discipline of managing healthy, highly motivated people who very much want to be told yes. It is more relevant to this clinic than it first appears.
Certified Medical Review Officer since 1992. An MRO is the physician formally trained to interpret drug testing and to have candid, confidential conversations about what someone is actually taking. It is an unusual credential for a longevity clinic, and it is precisely the qualification that makes an honest conversation about performance-enhancing drugs possible here rather than awkward.
Where you may have met him.
Nearly every role below is within a fifteen-minute drive of the clinic.
- 1982 – 2021
- Founding partner and medical director of the urgent care he built in Palos Verdes, and a second in San Pedro. Four decades of first-call medicine for families on the peninsula.
- 1990 – present
- Medical director and geriatric care provider at a Torrance skilled nursing facility — thirty-six years caring for this community's parents and grandparents.
- 1982 – 1996
- Medical director of a Lomita rehabilitation center for stroke and traumatic brain injury patients.
- 1990 – 2020
- Student health physician at Los Angeles Harbor College for thirty years, and at Marymount College in Palos Verdes before that.
- 1982 – 1985
- Attending physician in the Family Practice residency program at San Pedro Peninsula Hospital, teaching the doctors who followed him.
- 1982 – 1995
- Volunteer physician at the Harbor Free Clinic in San Pedro.
- 2021 – 2025
- Physician at Optum Palos Verdes, and at Western Health Community Clinic.
The formal record.
- Medical degree
- M.D., University of California, Davis, 1979
- Undergraduate
- B.S. Biology, with High Honors, California State University, Dominguez Hills, 1975
- Residency
- Family Practice, San Pedro Peninsula Hospital, 1979–1982
- Licensure
- California physician and surgeon, licensed since 1980
- Certification
- Certified Medical Review Officer, American Association of Medical Review Officers, since 1992
- Olympic service
- Team physician, soccer, 1984 Olympic Games
- Hospital affiliations
- Torrance Memorial Medical Center; Providence Little Company of Mary, San Pedro
Dr. Traughber completed residency training in Family Practice and has been licensed to practice medicine in California since 1980.
See the doctor, not the protocol.
Every Athlos plan is designed, prescribed and monitored by Dr. Chris personally. Founding members receive priority baseline assessments and founding pricing when we open on November 1.
Physician-supervised · Individually evaluated · No obligation.