Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - March 20, 2024


Ep 971 ｜ Question Your Doctor, Save Your Life ｜ Guest： Dr. Casey Means


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 2 minutes

Words per Minute

167.26227

Word Count

10,375

Sentence Count

550

Misogynist Sentences

8

Hate Speech Sentences

1


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.640 After her mom received a diagnosis of stage four pancreatic cancer and was pressured to
00:00:06.120 endure invasive procedures that would ultimately do more harm than good, Dr. Casey Means had a
00:00:11.560 revelation about the medical system. It is not working. Instead of helping Americans get healthy,
00:00:18.240 it is, in a lot of cases, making us sicker. It treats symptoms without ever getting to the root
00:00:24.100 cause, and it often prioritizes profit over patients. One of my favorite and most fascinating
00:00:31.860 interviews I've ever done in all of my 1,000 almost episodes of Relatable, Dr. Means unravels
00:00:40.020 what she has learned about the corruption in American healthcare while also giving us really
00:00:45.660 practical tools to take charge of our health. Also, a very optimistic outlook on our future if we start
00:00:53.800 moving in the right direction. You guys are absolutely going to love this conversation.
00:01:00.180 She is the author of Good Energy, The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless
00:01:05.920 Health. We're going to be talking about all of this and so much more on today's episode
00:01:09.820 of Relatable. It's brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to goodranchers.com.
00:01:13.740 Use code Allie at checkout for a discount. That's goodranchers.com, code Allie.
00:01:23.800 Dr. Means, thanks so much for taking the time to join us. First, could you tell us who you are and
00:01:32.700 what you do? My name is Casey Means. I'm a medical doctor. I'm an author of the upcoming book,
00:01:37.720 Good Energy, and I'm a co-founder of Levels Health, a metabolic awareness company.
00:01:42.540 Okay, and I first heard of you. I saw a tweet thread sometime last year about you losing your mom
00:01:49.920 and an article that you wrote that basically said, look, I'm a doctor. I've been in the medical field
00:01:56.420 for a long time and you can't always trust us. And that statement accompanied with your mom's story
00:02:03.880 was really powerful for me. I think for a lot of people who realize that we can't always trust the
00:02:10.080 experts during COVID. So just take us back, take us back to that tweet thread, why you wrote that
00:02:15.360 article, and of course, your mom's story. Yeah. Well, I think my mom's story is very almost like
00:02:22.080 archetypal of what so many Americans are going through today, kind of realizing that something is
00:02:27.340 not quite right when it comes to our own health, the health of our kids, the health of our parents.
00:02:32.300 People are so sick in our country and they're getting sicker. And we're put on this chronic
00:02:37.340 disease, sort of pill-taking surgery treadmill, and yet we're not really getting better. So my mom's
00:02:45.340 story really just is so emblematic of this and played off so much of my own experience in medicine
00:02:51.800 as a surgeon. So my mom, she was very vibrant and from the outside looked pretty healthy, but
00:03:00.560 in her 40s, she had me. I was an almost 12 pound baby. I was big. Everyone kind of congratulated for
00:03:07.000 that. No one really thought much of it. She had trouble losing the baby weight. She was in her 50s,
00:03:11.420 had a tough menopause. Then in her 60s, she started getting, you know, the diagnoses that so many
00:03:16.300 Americans have. High blood pressure. Here's an ACE inhibitor. High cholesterol. Here's a statin,
00:03:21.980 you know, prescribed 200 million times per year in the U.S. High blood sugar. Here's metformin.
00:03:26.060 Very common. This is, you know, pre-diabetes. It's a pre-disease. Nothing to worry about.
00:03:31.100 And then all of a sudden she's 72 and she's hiking with my dad near their house in Northern
00:03:36.380 California and she gets a pain in her belly. And that's unusual for her. It lasts her a couple
00:03:41.700 days. So she goes to her primary care doctor. They order a CT scan and it turns out it's stage
00:03:47.060 four, widely metastatic pancreatic cancer. And 13 days later, she was dead. And, you know,
00:03:56.600 at the time of her death, she was seeing what a lot of people call like the best doctors in the world.
00:04:00.760 She was being at Stanford. She was being seen at Mayo Clinic, you know, really access to high
00:04:06.940 quality healthcare. And the oncologist looked at my family in the eyes and said, you know,
00:04:12.320 I'm so sorry. This was so unlucky, the pancreatic cancer. And knowing what I know about really more
00:04:19.880 a connected root cause perspective on health, to me, it's very clear that this cancer was not
00:04:25.040 actually unlucky. It was totally predictable. But in our Western medical system that is so
00:04:30.480 reactive, it's so siloed, it's like whack-a-mole medicine. They saw all those things that my mom
00:04:36.700 had throughout the past 30 years as separated, isolated things. The big baby, the trouble losing
00:04:42.080 the baby weight, the tough menopause, all the metabolic issues, blood pressure, blood sugar,
00:04:47.480 cholesterol, and then cancer. In our system, in our reductionist Western medical system,
00:04:52.740 they all look separate and it seems unlucky. But what I'm really, I think, on this planet to share
00:04:58.120 and what my book is about and what all my work is about is that through a different lens, through a
00:05:03.200 root cause lens, through a true physiology lens, what we'd understand is that all those symptoms and
00:05:10.200 diseases she had are actually trunks of the exact same tree. And that tree is metabolic dysfunction.
00:05:16.740 It's a core physiologic problem that's affecting 93% of American adults have some aspect of metabolic
00:05:25.520 dysfunction. Some of the most obvious ones you'd think about, it would be like diabetes and obesity,
00:05:30.660 but actually cancer, heart disease, stroke, depression, anxiety, having a big baby, which is called
00:05:36.580 fetal macrosomia, trouble losing the belly fat.
00:05:39.960 It's caused by, just because I don't know, and a lot of people don't know, the through line
00:05:44.560 of the different diagnoses that you're talking about. Like going back to you being a 12-pound baby,
00:05:51.020 the only understanding I have of why that typically happens is if a woman has gestational diabetes.
00:05:57.720 So is that part of what you're talking about? And all of these things are somehow connected to each
00:06:02.860 other? Absolutely. Yeah. So the trunk of this tree, this metabolic dysfunction,
00:06:06.620 it can show up like gestational diabetes. And at its very core, and not to get too science and
00:06:13.800 technical, but in our society today with the rapid changes in our diet and our lifestyle over the past
00:06:20.000 just like 50, 75 years, really since World War II, our industrialized diet, our chronic stress from our
00:06:27.800 devices, we're getting 25% less sleep on average than we were 100 years ago. The incredible amount of
00:06:33.960 synthetic toxins in our food, water, air, and homes, it's fundamentally caused a problem with our
00:06:41.000 cells that is super fundamental. It's a breaking of this metabolic machine in our cells. And
00:06:46.400 metabolism is how we convert food to cellular energy. And the reason that this can look like
00:06:53.800 so many different diseases is because if you have a problem converting food energy to cellular energy to
00:07:00.080 power our cells, in different cell types, this can look like all different things. If it's, you know, in a
00:07:06.440 liver cell, it can look like fatty liver disease. In a blood vessel cell, it can look like heart disease. It can
00:07:11.100 look like in the brain, it can look like depression and anxiety. So essentially, there's this core issue
00:07:16.620 that's caused by our lifestyle and our food system that is really breaking our bodies on a fundamental
00:07:22.720 level showing up as all these different diseases across the spectrum. And our healthcare system is
00:07:29.300 totally, totally blind to it, which is why they wait until the symptoms emerge and they treat those
00:07:36.460 isolated symptoms, but they never get to their actual root cause because that's not the way our
00:07:40.940 system works. It's about separation, not connection. And it's such a blind spot, but it's such a lethal
00:07:47.780 blind spot that it's really why it inspired me to write a book about it because, you know, you look
00:07:53.080 at the trends that are happening today, which is that the more we spend on healthcare, we're spending
00:07:58.440 4.5 trillion dollars a year on healthcare in America and outcomes are getting worse. The more
00:08:04.960 studies we do, the worse the outcomes are getting. The more specialized we get in healthcare, the worse
00:08:09.900 the outcomes are getting. You know, it's sort of the definition of unsustainability. And the reason is
00:08:15.500 because we're actually focusing on the wrong problem. We're focusing on reactive symptom-based
00:08:19.320 medicine as opposed to the connected root cause that's actually underlying most of the American
00:08:24.900 diseases that we're facing today. And in the case of the big baby, you know, in a mother who has this
00:08:33.180 metabolic dysfunction, her blood sugar starts rising, that then transfers in the blood through the
00:08:38.760 placenta to the baby. So the baby is exposed to that high blood sugar. That then causes the body to make
00:08:44.340 more insulin in the little fetus's body. And that insulin is a pro-growth hormone that causes the
00:08:50.400 baby to put on more weight and more fat. So it's how those metabolic blood sugar issues are actually
00:08:56.200 showing up in the fetus. And then being born above about 8.5 pounds, which is considered fetal
00:09:03.760 macrosomia that sets up the baby for metabolic issues for the rest of their life. Um, and also as a sign
00:09:10.000 of the mother having issues. So really at every step along the spectrum, um, it was all pointed
00:09:15.780 to the same thing, but the healthcare system is totally blind because it's so focused on reaction.
00:09:21.220 Yeah.
00:09:21.540 Each individual diagnosis, no one's taking a holistic look, even the top doctors. And I want to talk
00:09:27.940 about how this all relates specifically to your mom's story, because I know that there are a lot of
00:09:34.280 people out there who either they've been recently diagnosed with cancer or a loved one has, or they
00:09:39.760 wish that they would have known this, or I could see this conversation, someone having this conversation
00:09:45.220 or listening to it. And then next week, they're going through a similar thing and they're going to be
00:09:49.560 so glad that they heard your story and heard everything that you're saying. So you're saying that
00:09:55.100 your mom, when she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, that looking back over her life and some of
00:10:00.540 the things that she suffered from, that it was pretty predictable, maybe not entirely preventable,
00:10:05.600 but pretty predictable. Um, it seems like it came out of nowhere because she was just hiking and she
00:10:11.100 got that pain and she got it checked out. And then it was stage four. Um, and when you talk to the
00:10:17.640 doctors, you said these top doctors, they didn't have anything to say about her previous diagnoses.
00:10:24.420 They weren't interested in that conversation at all.
00:10:27.000 No, I mean, really, if you look at the way the system is designed, it's so hyper-specialized. We
00:10:34.700 have over 42 medical specialties and really like to climb the ranks as an American doctor,
00:10:42.240 it actually is getting more and more specialized. So I trained in ear, nose, and throat surgery and to
00:10:49.820 really be at the top of my field, I would actually specialize further into either ear, nose,
00:10:54.980 or throat, you know, become a rhinologist, a laryngologist or an otologist. And then even
00:11:00.160 within those specialties, you might focus on one specific disease and become the world expert in
00:11:04.840 that. So specialization is literally built into the very foundation of prestige in our system.
00:11:11.900 And what that does is it gets doctors to, you know, really ignore the rest of the body and how things
00:11:19.700 might be connected. There's also a financial incentive for that, right? That the business model
00:11:25.080 of our healthcare system is to do more to more people over long periods of time. The stark reality,
00:11:33.860 the stark economic reality of the American healthcare system, which is what needs to change if we're going
00:11:38.800 to actually improve the health outcomes of America. But the stark economic reality is that
00:11:44.080 every institution that touches our health, from hospitals, to clinics, to pharma, even to insurance
00:11:54.300 companies, will make more money if you are sick, and less money if you are healthy. And so chronic diseases,
00:12:03.660 these isolated chronic diseases, like what my mom had, diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure,
00:12:09.820 the system profits off treating those as separate things that you do things to for long periods of
00:12:17.560 time, chronic disease management. So not actually healing it, but managing it. And so because that's
00:12:25.100 built into the deep finances of the largest and fastest growing industry in the United States, which is
00:12:32.540 the healthcare industry, there is no incentive for people to back up and look at all of the
00:12:39.740 things going on and say, wait a minute, maybe we're looking at this wrong. Maybe there's something
00:12:45.600 more fundamental, the trunk of the tree leading to all of this. Maybe we could just intervene there.
00:12:51.520 And a lot of this stuff would melt away. And that is the reality biologically. But because of the
00:12:58.540 trillions and trillions of dollars that are baked into the way the system operates right now,
00:13:03.360 no one has any real incentive to stop and to do that. And so the pieces actually get actively held
00:13:11.400 apart. If you think about going to the doctor, how often, if you have several specialists you're
00:13:17.060 working with, how often are they talking to each other? Never. Usually the health records are in
00:13:21.820 different systems. And it's almost impossible to even have one doctor see the notes of another doctor
00:13:27.800 from another specialty. It's literally baked in on every level, the separation, which is not serving
00:13:33.820 patients. It's serving the financial interests of a reactive sick care system that is fee-for-service.
00:13:39.680 After your mom was diagnosed, what did the doctors recommend?
00:13:56.980 So this was what was so funny was that the second she got the stage four pancreatic cancer diagnosis,
00:14:02.760 it was like full court press from so many different doctors. They wanted a hematologist to help her
00:14:09.600 because her blood counts were low. The cancer was sort of causing her to destroy her red blood
00:14:14.340 cells. There was radiation oncologists, surgical oncologists, medical oncologists, you know,
00:14:19.600 radiation surgery medication. There was a liver doctor who wanted to put a stent in and everyone
00:14:26.820 was talking and it was incredible how much of a flurry it was. And, you know, we all kind of looked
00:14:32.140 at each other and thought, wow, 40 years of symptoms that, that we kind of know are all connected.
00:14:41.140 And not once was there like a flurry of activity to like truly get my mom healthy, to truly get
00:14:47.140 her cells to heal. But the second there was this big diagnosis, you know, very late stage, everyone
00:14:53.060 flies into motion. And what was interesting is that the diagnosis was so bad, you know, pancreatic cancer
00:15:01.340 outcomes are so bad. And my mom was so in touch with her body and her really spiritual knowing
00:15:06.040 that she knew like she was, this was very bad. And she had this sense that it was going to be fast.
00:15:12.360 So we actually declined all the crazy amount of interventions they wanted to do and went home and
00:15:18.840 she was able to die peacefully at home, you know, 13 days later, everything they recommended,
00:15:23.860 nothing would have even basically had any time to have an effect before she died. And none of it would
00:15:29.380 have been worthwhile. You said that there was a, in your article, you said there was a 33% chance
00:15:35.080 that it would extend her life just a little bit, just a little bit. And then 33% chance that it
00:15:39.880 would do nothing. 33% chance that it would actually kill her, that the remedy so-called would actually
00:15:47.040 kill her and curtail her life even more. And so even if you did, even if you took that 66% chance
00:15:54.060 that she could live a little bit longer or that it would do nothing, she would still possibly,
00:15:59.260 if she took those routes that the doctors were recommending, because this was COVID era,
00:16:04.920 she would have been dying in a hospital by herself. She would have been going to these procedures by
00:16:10.140 herself. And you all knew that that's just not the end that she wanted for her. That's not what she
00:16:14.880 wanted. Yeah. Yeah. And those numbers that they gave us didn't even take into account the additional
00:16:21.080 complications she had. When she showed up at the hospital, the diagnosis, she was in liver failure
00:16:26.560 because of the metastases in the liver and her blood cells were depleted. So I think even that
00:16:32.360 66% of maybe having a benefit was so overblown. And so we looked at all this and said, you know,
00:16:40.100 no, like we don't want to give my mom up to the hospital where she would have almost unquestionably
00:16:44.620 generated what $500,000 plus of revenue for that hospital and had to die alone in a COVID lockdown
00:16:51.320 unit. So we asked questions and they of course were super shaming to us about, you know, not doing
00:16:57.840 the internet, you know, just that it's irresponsible. Literally the liver doctor, if this was my mother,
00:17:03.100 I would absolutely have her in there for that liver stint. I mean, she's in fulminant liver failure.
00:17:07.320 She can barely, this is a few days after the diagnosis, she was getting worse really quickly.
00:17:11.120 She was feeling super weak and they were saying, you know, you got to get her in here. And you know,
00:17:18.280 it's just so wild if you think that people who might not have the confidence or the background
00:17:23.580 in medicine to ask some of the deeper questions, I think probably 95% of people would just kind of go
00:17:28.540 with whatever the doctor said. Again, they're like the best doctors in the world and it would have done
00:17:34.240 nothing but hurt her. And that's not to say that people shouldn't take the intensive route,
00:17:38.960 but we absolutely should be asking questions. And I think the system, one of the ways it's become
00:17:44.820 so damaging, especially more recently is that the system has really created an environment where
00:17:51.100 people, I think, struggle to ask questions. We've been told, you think about the last five years,
00:17:57.860 plastered on billboards, practically trust the science, you know, trust your doctor. And
00:18:04.140 what's so alarming to me, and again, one of the reasons why we wrote this book is that
00:18:10.580 the system, when it comes to chronic health issues, has really done very little to earn
00:18:18.180 our trust. As we've started medicalizing these chronic diseases, which are primarily based in
00:18:24.880 diet and lifestyle, and many of which didn't even exist 75 years ago. At the same time, we've been asked
00:18:31.740 to trust the science. These diseases have exploded in their rates and are going up every single year
00:18:38.920 as we spend more money on them. So what I think the healthcare system has done, I mean, it has
00:18:44.380 produced miracles. Of course, life expectancy has gone up in the last hundred years, but what our
00:18:50.060 healthcare system has done well at is acute issues, things that are immediately going to kill you,
00:18:54.680 like an infection or a trauma surgery or something like that you need to have. So acute issues. And that's
00:19:01.060 primarily treating those, which are like the patient comes in, they get treated, they're gone.
00:19:06.580 Those, I think the healthcare system does a miraculous job at, but what the healthcare system
00:19:10.240 has done has asked to take our trust on its success in acute issues and apply it to chronic issues,
00:19:16.840 issues that last for a long time that need to be treated for life. If you think about an acute patient,
00:19:22.040 that's not recurring revenue, but a chronically ill patient is recurring revenue for decades. And so
00:19:27.620 essentially the system is asking us to not ask questions and to trust blindly because of the
00:19:32.880 trust they engendered from acute issues, apply it to chronic where they're abjectly failing at keeping
00:19:37.680 us safe. They're not preventing these conditions. They're certainly not reversing these conditions.
00:19:41.620 They're just managing them. And the message that I really want people to understand is that
00:19:46.400 it's actually much less complex than we think to really improve our foundational metabolic health,
00:19:54.140 to improve really the way our cells function and to really generate true health in our bodies.
00:20:00.480 But we've got to focus on the right issue, which is helping to clean up the environment that our
00:20:06.980 bodies and our cells are living in right now that are breaking them. And when we do that,
00:20:11.100 and we really do truly heal the foundational pathways of our body related to metabolism and cellular
00:20:17.340 health, we end up getting just incredible health across all these different systems. But unfortunately
00:20:25.920 right now, that's not what the system is going to help you with. Their revenue model is based on
00:20:33.300 more patients going through the system as quickly as possible, which lends itself to
00:20:37.420 going in, getting a prescription, and leaving.
00:20:47.340 And you mentioned, both in the article and you mentioned it in this conversation too,
00:20:57.760 the profit incentive. You talked about how your mom going through all of these procedures would
00:21:02.780 have generated $500,000 for the hospital. But you've also mentioned how the doctors specifically
00:21:08.800 have a financial incentive, right, to push some of these routes to go down when it comes to diagnoses
00:21:16.700 like your mom's?
00:21:18.080 Yeah, certainly. I mean, I would say just to start, like every single doctor I know
00:21:21.780 is like a very good person who went into healthcare with noble intentions. That is the reality. But
00:21:28.020 unfortunately, we're taking these very bright, eager minds who want to help,
00:21:33.780 and we're putting them in a system with just one dictum, which is economic growth. And so
00:21:41.140 what happens is that every level of the education and the way we practice and the science gets
00:21:48.320 corrupted, right, because of that financial incentive. And so I think in many cases, doctors
00:21:54.320 feel like they are practicing good medicine because they're following the science, they're following the
00:21:59.260 guidelines, not totally realizing all the ways in which the science and those guidelines are heavily
00:22:05.140 influenced by things like the pharmaceutical industry or the ultra-processed food industry.
00:22:11.100 You know, 95% of people on the recent USDA Food Guidelines for America had conflicts of interest
00:22:18.500 with food companies. And so at every level, it's been influenced and corrupted. And so you've got
00:22:26.580 these good minds practicing in a bad system. And I remember when I was in my fifth year of surgical
00:22:34.420 residency going out to launch out as an independent surgeon in the world, you know, the senior
00:22:40.120 surgeons would sit down and talk to you about the business of medicine and say, you know, as a private
00:22:46.720 practice surgeon, you eat what you kill. And that's unfortunately a very unfortunate euphemism that
00:22:52.600 basically just means your income is based on how many surgeries you do. You eat what you kill. Your income
00:22:59.340 is how much you do. And so because that is the way that you'll get paid, that's how your mortgage is
00:23:05.940 paid and your kids' tuition, of course you want to do as many surgeries as possible. So I would not say
00:23:11.600 it's like you're pushing surgeries on people knowing that it's not what they should have or something like
00:23:17.540 that. But when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And so it's just really baked in.
00:23:23.760 And certainly on a deeper level, many physicians, you know, are paid by hospital systems based on how
00:23:31.480 many RVUs they generate. RVUs are essentially billing units. And so the more you bill, sort of the more
00:23:39.560 supported you are as a surgeon. And so it's just built in on every level. And interestingly, with the
00:23:46.840 Affordable Care Act, you know, Obamacare, which kind of paid lip service to this idea of value-based care,
00:23:53.680 which in theory sounds really good, as opposed to paying for doing stuff to people, we would pay
00:24:00.380 for better value. And value is outcomes over cost. So that kind of sounds great. Wow, if we have better
00:24:07.660 outcomes, lower cost, we'll get paid more. And the cheapest way that you're going to have better
00:24:13.940 outcomes, lower cost is just having people eat healthy. So like, wow, maybe this will push doctors
00:24:19.500 to push nutritional interventions or exercise. Unfortunately, the whole thing got very
00:24:25.720 corrupted. The outcomes measures that doctors would report on for value-based care, many of them
00:24:36.540 were not actually, did the patient have better health outcomes? It was things like, how many of the
00:24:42.900 patients in a doctor's panel were prescribed long-term medication therapy? So instead of the
00:24:49.260 outcome being, did the patient actually get healthier? The outcome was, was the patient well
00:24:57.120 medicated? And if you're not looking closely, you could be like, well, yeah, we want all the patients
00:25:03.000 with diabetes to be on metformin. And of course, we want all the patients with asthma to be on long-term
00:25:07.980 control inhalers. But because the outcomes were defined by essentially medication adherence and
00:25:14.660 not actually, is the patient actually healthier? It drives to more of the same system, which is
00:25:21.220 intervention-based. So it's a way that sort of like a good idea can still get shunted towards that
00:25:27.620 reactive intervention-based system. And as you're talking about the more funding that this institution,
00:25:37.160 that this system has actually the worst outcomes have gotten, that is true in a lot of institutions.
00:25:42.720 It's true in a lot of different sectors of society. It's true in education too. We actually spend more
00:25:48.320 per pupil in real dollars than we ever have. I mean, times more than a hundred versus what we did 50 years
00:25:58.020 ago and outcomes are getting worse. And it's just, it's interesting. It, it is nice sounding that we need
00:26:06.280 to fund something. Of course, this good thing needs more money. If we just give it more money,
00:26:11.160 then it will be able to accomplish what we want it to accomplish. But that's kind of an easy way to put
00:26:16.820 a bandaid on something and not look at what's happening underneath the surface, what's really going on.
00:26:36.280 Um, you've explained really well what's going on in the system and why corruption happens. Do you think
00:26:43.960 that how doctors are educated in the medical school, um, has anything to do with this? Or do you feel
00:26:51.760 like this really kind of starts after they get out of medical school, once they start practicing,
00:26:56.300 once they see how the so-called game is played? And again, I'm not trying to ascribe bad, you know,
00:27:01.920 bad motives to all doctors. But as you said, this is just kind of how everything works. Like,
00:27:07.860 do you think it goes all the way back to education or do you think it happens after they're in the
00:27:11.880 field and they're just playing the game as it's played? Oh, unquestionably. I mean, I think it
00:27:16.620 starts, oh, it starts as early as college. Like if you think about it, everything in our system
00:27:24.460 funnels you towards fragmentation and specialization as a marker for increased success. So in high
00:27:34.120 school, you learn about, you know, all biology, you learn about like, uh, plants and bacteria and
00:27:39.880 cells and human cells. You kind of learning about everything, animals. Then in college,
00:27:44.540 if you're a biology major, you know, you focus on human biology. Like my major in college was human
00:27:50.480 biology. So you go from all life to humans and then medical school, you start focusing on each
00:27:56.280 organ system within the human. Like literally the way the education is, is structured at Stanford
00:28:01.720 medical school where I went is like, you have a nephrology block and you have a hepatology block
00:28:06.600 and you have a neurology block and you have a cardiology block and you have a gastroenterology
00:28:10.820 block. It's like the body is just these, um, individual parts. And then you go into residency
00:28:17.040 and you specialize in one of those. And then you go to fellowship and you go deeper. So built into
00:28:22.380 the brains of people is disconnection. It's not seeing things as a system. And what's interesting
00:28:28.560 is that it's basically like, we're just practicing outdated medicine because 75 years ago when we
00:28:34.880 didn't have, you know, metabolomics and proteomics, and we couldn't visualize inside the cell the way we
00:28:40.140 can today, the only way we could describe diseases was basically like how they looked like the symptoms.
00:28:46.120 So like, oh, depression is this constellation of symptoms. That's how we define the disease.
00:28:54.460 And only recently have we been able to define to see diseases based on what's actually happening
00:28:59.800 inside the cell, more like physiologic pathways. Okay. So the mitochondria is dysfunctional and we
00:29:05.320 have chronic inflammation and we have oxidative stress and these like invisible processes that we
00:29:10.600 can't see. But, and when, when you look at that level, what you find is that those same
00:29:16.040 disturbances, these invisible microscopic cellular disturbances are actually happening all over the
00:29:22.520 body. Obviously we're one body and they're just showing up in different places as different symptoms,
00:29:28.360 but medicine hasn't caught up to describe diseases based on what they really are, which is what's going
00:29:34.320 on on that invisible layer. They're still describing diseases based on collections of symptoms because
00:29:40.660 that's what we can see. And so of course, depression looks different than cancer. Of course, arthritis
00:29:46.000 looks different than erectile dysfunction. Of course, infertility looks different than a stroke
00:29:50.620 on the outside. But when you zoom in and really look at what's happening inside the biology, it's all the
00:29:56.980 same thing. And so there's, so yes, I think from the education standpoint, it's basically like very
00:30:03.860 fragmented look at things, not to mention that pharma underwrites like so much of the actual medical
00:30:11.200 school education. Like when I was at Stanford medical school, Pfizer donated $3 million to Stanford.
00:30:18.160 And that was during the time that the new opioid guidelines were being released. So there are
00:30:24.300 currently on the Stanford website articles that say that that money from Pfizer had no impact on how
00:30:32.760 medicine would be practiced. There's no conflicts. It's an educational grant, but like money is money.
00:30:38.960 You know, it's of course, you're not going to be absolutely eschewing opioid use for holistic therapies
00:30:47.040 like acupuncture and micronutrients and stress management in the face of a $3 million grant. So, I mean,
00:30:52.540 maybe I'm wrong, but I'm just, that just feels kind of logical that you would not be really putting
00:30:59.300 down the medications of the people who are donating huge amounts of money. So yeah, I think it's not
00:31:04.400 only money. It's also just like the real framework of healthcare that needs to be updated. And when I
00:31:10.140 talk about the fragmentation and disconnection, I think it's, it gets into almost a more like esoteric and
00:31:17.880 and spiritual issue with our system, which is that we've asked people to really look at their bodies
00:31:25.220 as these like fragmented separate things and not as like this miraculous system that all works
00:31:32.400 together. And I think people, I think people in America feel very almost, you know, healthcare and
00:31:42.920 the body seems so complicated. It seems so complex to be healthy. Everyone's really putting the trust
00:31:49.920 like outside of themselves with the experts, you know, and with the science. And it's almost like
00:31:56.560 the system has designed this whole ecosystem that gets us to distrust our own internal knowing about
00:32:05.140 what's right for us and how to be healthy. And what I really want to share with people is like
00:32:09.880 to really just not accept that. Like, I believe that every person has such deep internal knowing
00:32:16.360 about what's right for them. And we've just been asked to be like divorced from our common sense in
00:32:21.500 a way when it comes to the health of ourselves and our children and our parents and to really put that
00:32:25.700 agency outside of us to our great detriment. And like, just step back for a second. We're the only
00:32:33.100 species in the world with a chronic disease and obesity epidemic. And we're the only species in
00:32:39.880 the world with experts and PubMed, you know, where all the scientific papers are. It's like,
00:32:45.440 we are the only species that is eating ourselves to death. And so maybe we need to actually wake up a
00:32:54.200 little bit and get back to really trusting ourselves, getting in touch with our bodies,
00:33:00.180 seeing our bodies as this miraculous connected ecosystem that it is. And like tapping a little
00:33:06.460 bit into that confidence that the system really wants to disempower in us. Because when we feel
00:33:12.300 weak, when we feel that it's too complicated for us, when we feel disempowered, what does that do?
00:33:18.280 It gets us to be, you know, rabid consumers of solutions and of experts outside of us, which
00:33:26.800 unfortunately isn't really working very well for us. So I think getting back to like real trust and
00:33:32.360 agency in our own, you know, common sense is really an important part of this too, um, that the system
00:33:39.620 has divorced us from. Wow. I have so many thoughts and questions about everything that you just
00:33:45.360 articulated so well. I was just thinking about my own medical history. I have hypothyroid. And so I take
00:33:51.640 medication for that and have for a long time. And there have been various times where I've had other
00:33:57.480 symptoms and they have sent me to specialists, the nephrologist or whatever, when really, at least in
00:34:03.000 my case, of course, I can't speak from a medical professional standpoint and I can't speak for anyone
00:34:07.960 else. But it ended up that it was all actually connected to my thyroid and getting on there, you know,
00:34:14.800 the right level of medication or lifestyle choices. I actually didn't need in my case to go see the
00:34:20.720 specialist. There was nothing wrong with me. There were just these kind of like off symptoms. And so
00:34:25.220 I'm thinking about that fragmentation and how my nephrologist at the time had no idea what was going
00:34:30.680 on with my thyroid, didn't even care what was going on with my thyroid. It was just, you know, this is
00:34:36.220 how I look at your kidneys. Your kidneys seem to be doing fine. And so then it's left up to the
00:34:40.920 patient. Okay. So I have to bridge the gap. So when I go to my endocrinologist and I say, well, my
00:34:45.720 nephrologist said that my kidneys are fine. And the thyroid doctor says, well, we're still seeing this.
00:34:50.440 So me without any medical degree, and I'm speaking probably for a lot of people, I have to be the
00:34:56.060 one to go to WebMD and be like, well, okay, well, what is going on here, which just causes a lot of
00:35:02.200 anxiety. And then what you have to go see another specialist that's supposed to bridge the gap
00:35:06.340 between those two things. And so we're simultaneously being expected to have the level of confidence and
00:35:14.180 expertise of a doctor while also being told you are too stupid to even ask basic questions about
00:35:20.580 your health. And so we're put in this very tenuous situation of having to be our own healthcare
00:35:27.200 experts and advocates, because our doctors are like, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.
00:35:32.200 Even with thyroid, asking my endocrinologist, is there anything I can do outside of medication to
00:35:37.840 help? Nope, nope, nope, nope. The answer is always no. So, okay, I have to become an expert in
00:35:43.100 nutrition. I have to become an expert in metabolic health. I have to become an expert in thyroid.
00:35:47.860 But if I ask you these questions, it's like, how dare you ask me? So it's just so difficult to be
00:35:54.120 a patient in the United States. Or maybe anywhere. Maybe it's like that everywhere. I don't know.
00:36:00.040 Well, I think a lot of it's unique to the United States or other countries that have moved
00:36:04.300 towards a system like ours. But you speak to such an important point, which is
00:36:09.480 this sort of trap that we're in where we are both dependent on the system, but also really aren't
00:36:17.560 getting good quality out of the system. And so it's such a tug of war. You know you're kind of
00:36:23.180 not getting the full answer, but we're also kind of dependent on it because things are pretty bad
00:36:28.420 with health right now. So we have to keep going to see these specialists, but not quite getting the
00:36:32.880 answers that we want. But there's not really a good alternative, right? Unless you're finding your own
00:36:38.160 functional medicine doctor, which like I recommend for everyone, like someone who's really
00:36:42.000 trained to see the body as a unified system, whether it's functional medicine, precision medicine,
00:36:49.420 naturopathic medicine, doctors that have a bit more of that like put it together perspective. But
00:36:55.620 what I actually think is so exciting about this time, I'm actually extremely optimistic. And what I
00:37:02.540 think is so exciting about the time that we're living in right now is that while some of the trends are
00:37:07.320 like very, very concerning, I mean, we could run through stats, but like, children's health,
00:37:14.360 terrible, you know, life expectancy is going down in the United States, like six and 10 adults have
00:37:19.440 a chronic illness. It's all bad, you know, 70% I think are technically obese, or at least over 75%
00:37:26.160 overweight or obese, 50% of American adults with prediabetes or type two diabetes, almost totally
00:37:32.700 preventable. 30% of children with prediabetes, that was 0% 50 years ago, 45% of children overweight or
00:37:41.740 obese, nearly 20% of kids with fatty liver disease, things that doctors would never have seen in their
00:37:47.240 career 50 years ago, 40% of 18 year olds with a mental health diagnosis. It is, it is bananas,
00:37:54.460 like what is happening with the, with the stats and the trends. But I'm very optimistic because we are,
00:38:00.900 we are living in a time where just in the last two to three years, there's sort of this
00:38:08.580 personal empowerment revolution, I think happening in our healthcare system. Part of its technology and
00:38:16.020 part, part of it is I think the response from COVID people are feeling a lot more like I need to like
00:38:20.840 be more of an active participant in my healthcare because the healthcare system really let us down
00:38:25.720 during that period. So with the technology side, just in the last few years, there's now tons of
00:38:32.820 companies doing direct to consumer lab testing. So you don't have to like beg your daughter. So you
00:38:39.100 don't have to beg your doctor for basic lab work on their timeline. You can literally just go online
00:38:44.680 and order a hundred biomarkers for $499. It's amazing. And then with like deep interpretation.
00:38:50.160 So that's one there's now wearables, you know, so you can really understand a lot of your core
00:38:56.200 vital signs. There's, is that what that is? This is an aura ring. Yeah. So this tells you my sleep,
00:39:02.320 my steps, my oxygen saturation, my heart rate variability, stress levels, all sorts of things.
00:39:07.320 So that's really amazing. Cause then if I start to see something going in the wrong direction,
00:39:11.220 I can take action myself, you know, before it gets to be a problem. We've got biosensors,
00:39:17.520 like continuous glucose monitors that can tell you in real time, what's happening with your blood
00:39:22.400 sugar, as opposed to waiting a year from now for your doctor to give you a single data point about
00:39:28.660 your blood sugar and maybe say, Oh, it's getting worse or whatever. You can see it now in real time
00:39:33.120 without having to go to your doctor. So there's these trends of personal empowerment and data
00:39:37.500 that are very, very exciting. And currently those aren't, they're expensive. They're not necessarily
00:39:42.980 accessible to everyone, but it's a movement towards, okay, I'm going to be in control of
00:39:48.280 my day-to-day health to hopefully avoid some of these chronic lifestyle diseases that are
00:39:53.260 totally plaguing us. So that's very, very exciting. And then to speak to what you were talking about
00:40:00.760 with the thyroid and the kidney, I think a big message that I want to really share with people is
00:40:08.220 that it's, it's, it's not as complicated as we've been led to believe. So if we think about
00:40:15.800 symptoms anywhere in the body, liver, kidney, thyroid, all symptoms, like all symptoms that we
00:40:24.360 have are necessarily the result of dysfunction within ourselves. They have to be, we are, our entire bodies
00:40:31.680 is just like 40 trillion cells. And we don't have a symptom arise out of thin air. It has to arise
00:40:38.340 out of dysfunction and how our cells are working. And there's not, there's not actually that many
00:40:45.480 things that affect how our cells function. It's literally like food, sleep, movement, stress,
00:40:55.200 temperature, light, and toxins. Of course there's genetics, but those pillars, which I talk about
00:41:01.480 in extensively in my book, those are the knobs that we can turn to like change, you know, how we're
00:41:08.120 meeting the needs of the cell. So if you have a symptom, it means there's cellular dysfunction.
00:41:13.540 And if you have cellular dysfunction, then you need to run through the list of what's affecting your
00:41:18.000 cells and take stock of what could be hurting them or helping them and make adjustments. And most of
00:41:24.260 the healthcare crisis we're in today could really be wiped away if we actually just sort of ran through
00:41:29.820 that list. And of those different pillars of sort of lifestyle and environment and thought about like,
00:41:35.180 how am I meeting the needs or not? And then a question would be like, well, how do I know?
00:41:38.940 And one of the ways is by just looking at your own biomarkers, like I just talked about getting the lab
00:41:43.780 testing, whether it's from a direct consumer company or from your doctor, basic lab markers that
00:41:48.700 your doctor orders and look at what the biomarkers are saying. So if you have symptoms and your biomarkers
00:41:54.900 are off, it means you need to turn some of those knobs probably on those dietary and lifestyle
00:41:58.660 things. And again, like pretty simple how to do that. It's like, get more sleep, move more,
00:42:03.880 eat more real food, less processed food, et cetera. Again, all outlined in my book, but
00:42:08.620 starting there with like a real first principles framework about what's going on, I think can be
00:42:14.960 really, really empowering. One of the ways that I look at my body is I'm like,
00:42:21.520 it's sort of like I, Casey, I'm like the mother to my 40 trillion cells and they're all like little
00:42:29.360 infants and they can't speak in words. So if they're not getting their needs met, they speak
00:42:35.280 in symptoms. And just like a baby, there's not that many things that you would necessarily adjust
00:42:42.480 if you have a crying baby. It's like, do they need a diaper change? Are they cold or too hot? Do they
00:42:47.280 need to sleep? Do they need milk? Like with our cells, you kind of just run through the checklist
00:42:52.320 as well. It's like food, sleep, exercise, stress, temperature, light, toxins, et cetera. And it's
00:42:59.340 just really doing an inventory of like, how do I help meet the needs of what these cells need? And then
00:43:06.460 how do I not overburden them with things that they don't need that are going to cause them to break?
00:43:10.360 They're just little machines. They're just little factories and we know how they work. Like that's the
00:43:14.280 beauty of our scientific world is that we do really know how cells work. And so I believe
00:43:19.300 that all could sound a little intimidating, but like, it's actually not, not that challenging.
00:43:24.580 The system wants us to think it's complex, but if we got ourselves into this chronic disease mess
00:43:29.700 in 50 to 75 years, clearly it's not that, that complicated. You know, we know how the environment's
00:43:37.020 changed. We know how to protect ourselves, but we have to be empowered, understand a little bit about
00:43:42.000 the biology, understand a little bit about how to interpret our own biomarkers, which I'm happy to
00:43:46.540 talk about if you want to, and then just have the boldness to take action in our own lives. And
00:43:52.020 sometimes that means being a little counterculture and doing things a little differently than everyone
00:43:55.920 else in your community is doing. And it's worth it because being sick is not fun.
00:44:00.760 Yeah.
00:44:13.480 And speaking of counterculture, there is kind of a movement and I don't know how prevalent it is in
00:44:18.960 the actual medical world. That's kind of something that we see more on social media.
00:44:23.400 The body positivity movement, which I think has some positives to it. Absolutely. I don't think that
00:44:29.620 everyone needs to look to a supermodel who is underweight to be, you know, the standard of
00:44:40.320 beauty or the standard of health. And so moving into a more realistic view of the body and health
00:44:46.680 and strength and all of that, I think can be good. But just like any trend or movement, it can swing too
00:44:52.320 far. And we have seen kind of an either normalization or even glorification of unhealthy
00:45:00.800 lifestyles and obesity and a push against what is referred to as fat shaming, even by doctors. And so
00:45:11.100 I think there is a fear of saying one type of choice or one type of lifestyle or one type of diet is bad
00:45:21.280 bad or being a certain weight is bad or being fat is bad. Like there's almost a growing stigma around
00:45:29.200 that now because we don't want to say that anyone is making the wrong choice or doing something bad
00:45:34.460 or unhealthy. Like, do you see that in the medical world? Oh, this is definitely happening in the medical
00:45:40.460 world. People are petrified to piss anyone off in our world right now. It's I mean, I think we have
00:45:47.520 unfortunately an epidemic of cowardice that's happening in our country because people are so
00:45:54.340 afraid to get any backlash about because of the way our digital world works. It's so easy to for
00:46:01.740 people to like weigh in and to, you know, tell you you're, you know, horrible if you say this and that
00:46:06.580 that people are really, I think, silencing themselves. You are not one of those people. This is why your
00:46:11.160 platform is amazing. And I think, but I do think there is such, such fear of being perceived as
00:46:21.200 anything, but like the good girl and the good boy. And it's, it's, I mean, great. So we can just like
00:46:27.040 please everyone as our, as Rome burns. And as the country gets closer to a hundred percent of people
00:46:32.900 literally being sick, but you know, it's crazy. But when it comes to this sort of the, the fat
00:46:40.280 positivity movement, I mean, one thing that's coming out more and more is like how many of these
00:46:45.760 nutritionists that are pushing some of these messages are actually paid for directly by the
00:46:51.520 processed food companies. So you always have to follow the money. And this has come out in news
00:46:56.420 articles in the past six months that a lot of these tick tock and Instagram nutrition influencers
00:47:02.580 are getting direct payments from ultra processed food companies who, of course, it would absolutely
00:47:07.600 be in their best interest for everyone to think that, you know, it's terrible to talk about weight
00:47:15.000 because their foods are designed by food scientists to get us to be insatiably hungry and eat as much
00:47:21.840 of it as possible. So always follow the money. But I think the real reframe that needs to happen
00:47:29.260 with the conversation about obesity or weight or BMI is to ignore, maybe ignore the weight component
00:47:38.640 and just focus on metabolic health. Like there are people who are overweight who are metabolically
00:47:46.720 healthy. It's a small percentage, but what everyone needs to know is whether they are
00:47:51.240 metabolically healthy. Because if that's the case, you're going to avoid a lot of the top killers
00:47:56.820 of that are killing people in the United States and you're going to have better longevity.
00:48:02.480 But if you're not metabolically healthy, you are more likely to suffer from many of the
00:48:07.900 non-lethal symptoms that are plaguing us from depression, anxiety, migraine, fibromyalgia,
00:48:13.160 gout, infertility, erectile dysfunction, all the way to the things that are going to kill us like
00:48:17.560 stroke, heart disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer's, dementia, fatty liver disease,
00:48:21.700 all of those are on the metabolic spectrum. So you have to know if you're metabolically healthy.
00:48:26.800 And the reason the conversation would benefit from switching from talking about obesity
00:48:30.660 to metabolic health is because it takes away a lot of, I think, the stigma about how someone looks.
00:48:37.140 And it's a little bit more like, just feels more sterile. It is very simple to know if you're
00:48:43.400 metabolically healthy or not. You literally have to look at five biomarkers that are generally free
00:48:48.900 on your annual physical. And these are the criteria for metabolic syndrome, which is fasting glucose,
00:48:55.800 triglycerides, HGL cholesterol, waist circumference, and blood pressure. And if people have a fasting
00:49:03.360 glucose under 100 milligrams per deciliter, a triglyceride level under 150 milligrams per
00:49:12.780 deciliter, an HGL cholesterol above 50 for women or above 40 for men, waist circumference less than 35
00:49:20.040 inches for women and 40 for men, and blood pressure under 120 over 85, they fit the criteria for
00:49:26.760 metabolically healthy. And they will likely have a much lower rate of all the chronic diseases affecting
00:49:32.800 Americans today. It's that simple. Those are basically free. They just, I mean, if you get a
00:49:38.120 cholesterol panel, fasting glucose, and get your blood pressure taken at the doctor's office and a
00:49:41.840 waist circumference, which is pretty standard on every annual physical, you can know that.
00:49:46.960 The wild information is that only 6.8 of Americans now have the healthy levels of all five of those
00:49:59.720 biomarkers not on medication. So if you look at the recent research from the American Journal of
00:50:04.560 Cardiology that looks at those biomarkers, if you're in the correct, you know, the healthy range for those
00:50:11.620 biomarkers not on medication, it's only 6.8% of American adults. It should be 100%. Those are all
00:50:18.500 lifestyle-based. So we need to move away from the conversation, I think, about just obesity, which is
00:50:24.100 so charged and talk about empowering people to take full ownership of, are you metabolically healthy?
00:50:31.080 Because if those biomarkers, one or more of them are not in the proper, you know, the healthy range,
00:50:38.360 it's a signal that there's a fundamental problem with how your cells are converting food energy to
00:50:47.040 cellular energy, which means that you're going to have essentially underpowering of this miraculous
00:50:52.800 body. And of course, that will lead to dysfunction, which shows up as symptoms. So I would just
00:51:01.000 implore people to just make sure they understand their levels on those biomarkers. And then of
00:51:05.360 course, there's lots more advanced testing you can do to know more about your health, fasting insulin
00:51:12.080 levels, inflammatory markers, liver function tests that together can also add richness to the picture of
00:51:19.720 sort of underlying health. But like, every American should know where they are, whether they're in
00:51:25.120 that 6.8% or not. And if they're not, they should do everything in their power to get there and make
00:51:30.820 that number bigger because it will have wide ranging positive impacts on every aspect of health. And it's
00:51:39.260 pretty simple to do. Eat real food, sleep, move your body, manage your stress, don't overload your
00:51:46.240 body with synthetic toxins, et cetera, et cetera. So. Oh my goodness. I feel like I've been to medical
00:51:50.980 school. I feel like I've learned so much in this conversation. That's great advice. And obviously,
00:51:55.800 people are going to get more details about all of those things and even more specific advice in your
00:52:03.280 book, Good Energy. Give us some tips, if you will, as we kind of close this out on how we can advocate
00:52:13.000 for ourselves to our doctors. You have been in all the positions. You've been a patient. You've had a
00:52:21.020 parent who has had a life-threatening and a fatal diagnosis, and you are a doctor. So from all of those
00:52:28.020 different angles, how should a patient best advocate for ourselves or our loved ones?
00:52:33.260 That is such a great question. The primary thing I would say is that never be afraid to ask questions
00:52:41.620 and always probe deeper. You are the customer. You get to ask the questions. And if your doctor's
00:52:50.500 not willing to sit with you and answer your questions, find a new doctor. I think one thing
00:52:56.420 that people can do if they're feeling sort of lost in their health journey and they're seeing a bunch
00:53:00.880 of different specialists and it just feels like they're going through the revolving doors, consider
00:53:05.060 seeing a more holistic-focused doctor, like a functional medicine doctor. There's a great website
00:53:10.300 called ifm.org, which is instituteforfunctionalmedicine.org. And these are going to be doctors who have this
00:53:16.560 more connected systems view of the body and can often be that bridge that you were talking about
00:53:22.140 of looking at all your records and helping you kind of put the pieces together of how they all
00:53:27.220 relate. They'll also often order more extensive lab work. But on that website, you can find practitioners
00:53:32.640 in your area who practice that type of medicine. Parsley Health is a wonderful digital health
00:53:39.360 organization that's very affordable and takes insurance that practices functional medicine.
00:53:44.620 And then I would also just consider if you have a diagnosis that's stubborn, like a hypothyroidism or
00:53:50.280 something like that, go into Google and search your symptom and then just write functional medicine
00:53:57.600 or like dietary and lifestyle strategies after it. And you're going to end up going, seeing a lot of
00:54:03.900 other types of like blog posts and articles that might give you like some ideas for books or podcasts
00:54:09.940 that can just sort of expand your thinking about what's possible. Like, and it's not like this is
00:54:16.360 fringe. The Cleveland Clinic, which is one of the premier hospitals in the country, has the Cleveland
00:54:20.880 Clinic Center for Functional Medicine. And at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, there's Thomas
00:54:26.240 Jefferson Marcus Institute for Precision Medicine, which is practicing this way. And so there's
00:54:31.840 different hospital systems that are like major and mainstream who are like practicing this way. And
00:54:36.920 they have wait lists for like years because people want someone to put the pieces together. But at a
00:54:43.240 very, at a minimum, you can start to like shape the way you're researching online with a few of those
00:54:48.480 like extra search terms to basically see if there's, you know, thought leaders that, you know, that,
00:54:55.220 that resonate with you. I also highly recommend books by, obviously, Good Energy is filled with this
00:55:01.260 information. It comes out May 14. But Dr. Mark Hyman has written 19 books on a root cause approach to
00:55:08.000 health. Many New York Times bestsellers cannot recommend his books enough. Sarah Gottfried, Terry
00:55:15.820 Walls is an autoimmune expert who's written books about autoimmunity and root cause perspectives. Jason Fung,
00:55:22.860 Kara Fitzgerald, David Perlmutter. There's wonderful academic thought leaders out there who are
00:55:30.000 talking about this stuff. And I think books can often be a gateway to a whole new way of thinking
00:55:36.700 about things. So yeah, all of those have impacted me greatly.
00:55:40.900 Wow. Dr. Means, can I just say that you have been one of my favorite ever guests. And I really mean
00:55:48.080 that we have almost 1000 episodes of relatable. Now I've interviewed a lot of people. I love all
00:55:52.780 of my guests, but you not only are so knowledgeable, but you are so good at articulating the knowledge
00:55:58.200 that you have. And not everyone has that ability. So I really do believe that God has given you special
00:56:03.360 gifts. And you said at the beginning that you feel like you've been put on this planet to talk about
00:56:08.120 this. And I can see it. I really can. I can see that this is something that you have been called to do.
00:56:13.740 And, um, it, you know, it's really interesting how God redeems tragedies because I'm sure you would
00:56:19.480 not have chosen for your mom to get that diagnosis and for it to unfold the way that it did. And yet
00:56:26.260 he is so good at bringing beauty out of ashes and then using something that no one ever would have
00:56:34.940 chosen. So using something so dark and so tragic to then not just help you, but to help countless
00:56:40.960 people through the message that you're conveying. So thank you for doing that.
00:56:45.260 Thank you so, so much. Thank you for using your voice to always push for a better world. I appreciate
00:56:49.860 you so much. And that last point you just made resonates so much. Nothing has helped me feel more
00:56:55.440 spiritually grounded and more in touch with a bigger picture than this experience with my mom.
00:57:01.760 And then seeing how it's unfolded, seeing beauty come out of tragedy. I think that that in and of
00:57:07.620 itself and how it was transformed into beauty in my own life has made me realize on a bigger level
00:57:13.680 that there is, um, there's not as much to fear in the world as I think we are thought we are made
00:57:20.280 to believe. And I think that's a big part of our health journey too, is waking up to realizing that
00:57:24.440 like there's actually, we live in a really beautiful universe and we live in a really, you know,
00:57:30.060 there's a bigger picture and, um, and kind of popping up into that bigger picture, I think is
00:57:34.860 actually also incredibly important for our health journey. Like that, um, things can seem really bad,
00:57:40.920 you know, here day to day, but it's like, there's actually a really beautiful, bigger picture going
00:57:45.080 on. And I think that knowing has actually been a huge part of my health journey too. So I appreciate
00:57:50.380 you saying that. And I think it's really true. And I think when we can tap into that awe, it helps
00:57:55.060 on every level. Definitely. Well, Dr. Means, thank you so much. I really do encourage everyone. They can
00:57:59.540 go ahead and pre-order your book. Yes. Okay. So they can pre-order your book. It'll be out May 14th.
00:58:03.960 I'm so excited for you. I hope it's a bestseller. So I'm so excited to read it. I'm excited to go
00:58:09.420 back and listen to this conversation to take notes on everything that you said. So thank you so much,
00:58:14.000 Dr. Means. I appreciate it. Thank you.
00:58:20.240 Okay. I hope you guys loved that conversation. I was thinking the whole time that she was talking
00:58:25.640 about the importance of seeing the body as one unit with many parts about how the church
00:58:34.880 is described as one body with many parts. Like, even though it is speaking metaphorically in
00:58:43.160 scripture, it still emphasizes this same principle that the body has different parts that are working
00:58:50.980 together. So I didn't have a way really to fit this into that conversation, but I wanted to use it
00:58:56.340 as just a closing encouragement to you and a reminder that God is so wise. So this is 1 Corinthians
00:59:04.000 13, starting in 1 Corinthians 12, rather, starting in verse 14.
00:59:12.400 For the body does not consist of one member, but of many. If the foot should say,
00:59:16.280 because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body, that would not make it any less a part of
00:59:22.240 the body. And if the ear should say, because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,
00:59:26.260 that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye,
00:59:30.980 where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell?
00:59:35.820 But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them as he chose. If we were all a
00:59:42.160 single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body. And he goes
00:59:48.220 on, of course, he's talking about the spiritual gifts that each member of the body of Christ
00:59:53.440 brings to the church. But again, the underlying principle here is clear, that all parts are
01:00:00.240 necessary, that all parts work together, that all parts depend upon one another. Isn't it
01:00:04.320 interesting that these biblical writers so many thousands of years ago understood something that
01:00:10.100 apparently many of our top medical doctors don't understand today? And I was also reminded of
01:00:15.800 Ephesians 4, 15. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who
01:00:22.560 is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which
01:00:28.540 it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up
01:00:35.060 and love. God is so wise. And just as with everything, science is always catching up to
01:00:44.240 God. All of the things that become new discoveries today, we can always go back to scripture and say
01:00:49.400 the principle was always there because the God who created all of this, who is the author of life,
01:00:54.280 the creator of our bodies, he has known it from the beginning because he is the source of all truth.
01:01:01.720 And so we are just on a journey figuring out and catching up to the wisdom that God has always
01:01:09.180 had and has given us through his word. So I just wanted to end with that, with that spiritual truth.
01:01:15.340 So thank you so much for listening. We will be back here tomorrow.
01:01:31.720 So thank you so much for listening.