If you’re going to do the whole blood, urine and please-bend-over thing, don’t you at least deserve a nice foot massage at the end? And if you’re paying a fortune for some high-society doctor with a string of initials after his name, wouldn’t it be nice if he actually sat down and talked to you?

That’s the thought behind the new Canyon Ranch Executive Health Program, available at their spas in Tucson, AZ, and Lenox, MA. “Our core ethos at Canyon Ranch has always been taking charge of your health,” says Harley Mayersohn, vice president of marketing. “We’ve offered an executive physical for some time, but guests were telling us it wasn’t enough. They wanted something far more complete.”

In order to create the ultimate pool of health resources, the Canyon Ranch medical staff went to work to determine what was missing from the classic annual physical. “We saw that there were very few programs out there offering an integrative approach,” says Mayersohn. “A conventional physical tells you the normative range and if you’re outside the norm. But it’s not going to tell you how to achieve optimal fitness.”

One of the reasons why present health-care systems fall so far short of clients’ expectations is that everyone is time pressed. Research shows that an average patient spends seven minutes per visit with his or her physician. Canyon Ranch not only provides vast medical resources under one roof – including board-certified physicians with degrees from Harvard, Yale, Stanford and other prestigious universities – but those doctors are prepared to spend an unusual amount of time with each client. Mayersohn says that during the four-day Executive Health Program, each guest spends three hours with his or her doctor.

The program begins with all the conventional testing and then some: hearing, vision and lung screenings; a cardiometabolic stress test; bone density and DEXA body composition scans; and inflammatory markers, oxidative stress assessments, and complete chemistry profiles of all major organ systems. Once the testing is concluded, a team of experts swoops down on you – everyone from nutritionists worried about that potassium imbalance to behaviorists to help you stop smoking.

Even if the diagnosis reveals that nothing is seriously amiss, the true goal of Canyon Ranch isn’t just the absence of disease, it’s optimal health. So each client has nutrition, exercise and stress consultations and leaves the program with a “lifetime prescription.” Needless to say, this isn’t a short-term fix. The program is designed for executives to take home and implement in their daily lives and includes follow-up phone consultations with the nutritionists and exercise physiologists.

But what about that candlelit Euphoria Massage? Or that Pilates class out by the pool? At first the rock-serious program didn’t leave time for play, but after surveying guests, the staff was reminded that people come to Canyon Ranch looking for the full Canyon Ranch experience. In other words, they want their facials, hikes, yoga classes and cooking lessons in addition to their medical tests. Now the program builds in time for participants to relax and enjoy everything the spa offers.

For those who consider spa physicals indulgent or snicker at the thought of a row of executives wrapped in terrycloth robes and awaiting their pedicures, Harley Mayersohn has this to say: “These people have remarkable responsibilities and come to us with their stress levels through the roof. If you’re the senior sales guy for a large corporation, huge numbers of people are relying on you. You really don’t have the right to get sick because you’ll let too many people down.”

Canyon Ranch wants these overworked execs to grasp three things: One, stress is an unavoidable fact of modern business life. Two, stress will ultimately do them in. Sound bleak? Not really, because the third part of the message is that even the most burned-out salespeople can take charge of their own health. And at Canyon Ranch they’re happy to show you how.

For more information on the Executive Health Program and Corporate Retreats at Canyon Ranch, call 1-888-719-9470 or visit www.canyonranch.com.