Science & Spirituality Talks with Joseph Pizzorno, ND

Hello, everybody, and welcome. We have another episode of Science and Spirituality Talks. And this time Our guest is Dr. Joe Pizzorno, who most of you already know. Many of us know him because of his pioneering in the field of naturopathic medicine, natural medicine. And throughout half of a century of work, he has helped establish and advance the academic, scientific, and the clinical foundation of natural, functional, integrative, and environmental medicine. And environmental medicine is a big piece of the pie for Dr. Pizzorno. He has a book, the Toxin Solution, which I use with my students at the university. And he is not only the founding president of Bastyr University, which was in 1978, but he has returned as president of Bastyr for this academic year. So welcome, Joe. Great to see you.

Well, thanks, my friend. Great to be with you.

Well, you know, I feel like so many people know about your accomplishments because you have many. You have many books. You're quite prolific. You even have a journal of which you are the editor in chief of. And so people know your writing and they know you from speaking. The goal here is to get a little bit personal with you to talk about your journey as to how you got into medicine, specifically naturopathic medicine, and your relationship with science by way of that connection to naturopathic medicine. So where would you like to start? That's a big question. I know.

So why don't we start with how I got introduced to naturopathic medicine?

Perfect. Let's go there.

Okay. So I graduated in chemistry from Harvey Mudd College in Southern California and went off to graduate school at Cornell University. And I was just. I just love doing research. And I was working in research. And turned out that was the height of the Vietnam War and we just had an additional expansion of the war. I was thinking to myself, I don't think I want to contribute to the war effort. I want to do something different. I had a friend of mine who was my college roommate at Harvard. Mudd was from Seattle. He says, nice place to live. I said, okay, fine. I'm going to give up and graduate school after a year and drive across country and go to Seattle. And I said, instead of being involved in the war effort, I want to be involved in the peace effort. Matter of fact, I want to be involved in medicine. So I got a job doing research in medicine, and I was really enjoying it. And I think, well, hey, I'll get a PhD in medical research instead. So I was in the Department of Rheumatology at University of Washington School of Medicine, and I was working with MDs and PhDs looking for a cure for these arthritis. We were looking at rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis. So one night I was having dinner with my ex classmate or actual roommate and his wife, and she mentioned, oh, by the way, you know, I've had arthritis since I was a juvenile, since I was a teenager, and I'm cured by juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. I said, what? How are you cured? That's an incurable disease. I know I'm working with all these MDs and PhDs, not just in our lab, but across the country, trying to find a cure. Of course, at that point, cure meant a drug. So I said, so what'd you do? She said, well, I went to a naturopathic doctor. I said, what? What's that? Okay. I mean, I was totally, totally conventional. So being very curious, I decided to go visit this guy and say, so what'd you do? For my friend, I was curious. He said, well, taught her how to eat properly, and I detoxified her liver. Why does her diet and her liver have to do with her knees and her hands being swollen? Okay, something's not right here. Anyway, so that was kind of interesting. Then I also asked him a question, which I asked the medical doctors I was working with. So when I left Cornell, I was not particularly happy, and I was kind of looking at how to live my life a little differently. And I read this book on health, and I read about a vegetarian diet. So, well, okay, I think I'll give that a try, See what happens. That's how my goodbye goes. A lot changes. So I asked the MD, one of the MDs I was working with a guy I was really close with. I said, you know, I've seen these changes in my body from being a vegetarian. Can you tell me what's going on? His response was, errors in your observation. The diet doesn't really affect you that much now. Remember, this was 50 years ago, 55 years ago. So. And that was kind of the standard medical belief at this point. While many still may believe that they're not going to say it anymore. So being. Being curious, I went to the nickopathic doctor, asked me the same question. I said, here's all things I'm noticing. What's it mean? He went to his bookshelf, pulled out Guidance Medical Physiology, which at that point was the standard physiology book for tech medical schools, and he shows me physiologically how becoming a vegetarian is changing my body. That's interesting. This nature path knows physiology better than the MDs. I'm working with. That wasn't enough to convince me to change my life, but ring a bell? So anyway, so I just continued doing research and got me an am on a couple publications. Way back in the 70s I got publications to range back or 50 years ago. We had a postdoc come to our lab and she was going to study a new drug for rheumatoid arthritis. And the way it was going to be tested was on an animal model. And the animal model we were using were ducks that had been genetically bred to get arthritis. Then, you know, because of the way their feet are, it's really easy to measure the joints, see how swollen they are, see did the drug work or not? So we got the ducks in to the vivarium. Being a vegetarian, you can imagine how terrible a place it was to be in a vivarium. But anyway, there we were. I had to do my job. These ducks came in and they were miserable. So do you have any pets?

Of course.

So if your pet's unhappy, you know it. It's obvious the ducks were unhappy. So being a kind hearted woman, she got good with her husband. We found an empty lab, brought him some plywood and some sawdust and sand and made him a duck run. Got this little plastic swimming pool so he could swim in it. Brought him some fresh fruits and vegetables. So he gets up there with a duck chow. Now quack, quack, quack, quack. They have you running around. Now we're feeling morally good even though we know they're gonna get arthritis and we give them drugs, but we're feeling that at least we're doing it morally. So okay, now let's, let's. We're waiting for them to get the arthritis because it takes, takes a couple weeks. And we're waiting for them to get the arthritis. And wait for them to get the arthritis, wait for him to get the arthritis. They never got the arthritis they were genetically bred for. So then we had a going away party for this woman and the MDs and PhDs I was working with, they're all consoling her, patting her on the back, so sorry I didn't work out. And look at them and say, wait a minute, you don't need a drug for arthritis if you don't get it by living healthily. I said, you know, I don't think I'm going to study drug medicine anymore. I think I'm going to look into this thing about called naturopathic medicine. That looks pretty interesting. And that's how it happened and kind of changed the world in some surprising ways.

That's wonderful. What, how old were you then when you had that realization? Was it like mid-20s? Okay, so still very, very young in your career. Okay. And so from there you decided that you wanted to go and study naturopathic medicine.

Now, at that time, there's only one naturopathic college left in all of North America. The NBA had been very effective and pretty much destroyed the profession. Only license in four, six states and a felony in two states, by the way. It's still a felony in those two states as far as I know. So the profession was basically dead year before I entered the. There were no entering students in the class, so you could say the profession died, but not quite so. The school happened to be in Seattle, where I live. So I went to the school and the doctors and the teacher were well meaning, but they were not professional teachers. So the education was pretty marginal. But I got to spend time with people like Dr. Bastyr, who is incredible physician, healer, and I learned a lot.

And so then what led you down the path to starting Bastyr and being one of the founders?

So after I went through the educational program, I realized I had a lot to offer. I got myself elected to the board of trustees at the college. At this point, the college had moved to Portland, Oregon. So every month I'd drive down to Portland, Oregon to be part of the trustees for the institution. But as I spent more and more time there, I started to realize that the profession was so much in a bunker mentality that they weren't able to step up to modern standards of education and research and things like this. They're just trying to stay alive. After two years of this, realizing it wasn't going to go anywhere, I very foolishly said to the community, you know, we can do this right. I think I'm going to go start my own school and do it right. Got together with some of my friends, Dr. Les Griffith, Dr. Bill Mitchell, our dear friend Sheila Quinn, you know Sheila, and said, hey, let's get together and start a school. So then I mentioned that to my receptionist and my receptionist mentioned to her mother. Now, I'd taken care of her mother for rheumatoid arthritis. Now I consider myself a failure for her mother because I was not able to cure from the rheumatoid arthritis. But from her perspective, I was a wonderful doctor because I got her so much better. She didn't need as much drugs. You know, I was kind of extreme. Did I cure not any good? No. Actually helped her a lot. She sent me, she sent me a check for $200. She said, what a great idea. Why don't you go start this school? So with $200, I started what was then named John Bastyr College of Naturopathic Medicine.

And what year was that?

1978.

78, right.

Then when we did that, I went over to Dr. Bastia, said, Dr. Baer, you've done heroic work keeping this medicine alive despite tremendous opposition and persecution and frankly, persecution stories. I can tell you what happened to my forebears. So I said to name this school after you. Said don't do that. Now I don't know if he wanted us to misuse his name or if he was too humble for it, but I just, I'm so embarrassed. But I said, talk about here. I'm going to name him after you because I want to give the school spirit. And the only way to stop me is to get an attorney. What a terrible thing to say to this older guy who. Just one of the kindest human beings in the world who dedicated his life to healing people. So. But I did it anyway. So now there's a good news. Good part of that. After school was established, we're successful, breaking records, et cetera, we would every year have a reception at the home of a wealthy donor of the new graduates. And at one of those meeting meetings, document your tears in front of the other students, said thank you. He'd always wanted it, so felt good back around.

That's great. And you definitely did create a whole new standard in the industry.

So what I did, which I think was unusual, is I immediately said, we're going to advance science based natural medicine. Now I got a lot of opposition from the nature of the community because science with a capital S was the bludgeon used by the AMA to discredit all the other healing arts. And it's how they got Nature Path from being licensed in 22 states to only unlicensed in six states on a felony. Two by saying we're not scientific. So that's okay. From ground, from right from the ground. Fairground formation of this institution because they're based on science. So I invited PhDs to teach the basic sciences, I invited MDs to teach diagnosis, but I invited the naturopathic doctors to teach treatment and philosophy. And so I was able to establish a really strong scientific foundation. And so when it came time to try for accreditation, remember, no school of natural medicine had ever been accredited anywhere in the world. So when it came time to get accredited by going forward with a science Base and incredible faculty. I was able to get mastered becoming the first accredited university of natural medicine ever anywhere in the world because we did it right.

That is so beautiful what you just described, because you created that crosstalk amongst scientists, physicians, allopathic physicians and then the natural medicine community. And I feel like that's very rare, that's very rare to do it in equal measure and in such a way that each one is benefiting the other and that you're rising the entire platform and what is given to people. So I feel like you coining that term science based natural medicine says so much just right in that lexicon and how we talk about natural medicine.

And when I put went to the community, people were kind of resistant to this. I said to people, we do science not to prove ourselves, we do science to get better. Because men would say, well, I don't need to do science, my patients get better. I say, well, good. That's why we're here, because patients get better. But how do you know if your intervention is helping them, neutral or actually hurting them? And the only reason they're getting better is because they believe in you. Because people's belief in their doctor hugely impacts how effective they are. So I said, you don't know if your therapy is actually working. You're effective, but you don't know if the actual therapy you're using is effective. The only way to figure that out is by doing research particularly. It took a while to sink in, but eventually it. Yeah.

And again, you've been such a leader, a pioneer in that area of bringing science into everything you do, including something like detoxification, which has been fraught with all kinds of stigma and you know, just all the different things that are said out there about that particular field of which we know of as environmental medicine. You have created a different groundswell of authority and credibility as it relates to how it's being talked about out there. So, so it's just, it's kind of your imprint, that's your blueprint of what you're bringing forward into everything you do is what I feel. It's the science, it's the clinical application and it's threading those things together in again, equal measure where one is benefiting the other.

Best.

Yeah, so it's like the best of science. You know, Jo, I'd like to back up just a little bit though, because I know that you gave us a run in, into your university life, but I actually want to go back a little bit earlier to, to when you were about seven, you know, because one of the things that I've heard, whether through psychology or different books, is that, you know, we kind of have our true calling. And many times that comes when our identity forms, which is about between the age of seven to nine. And I'm just kind of curious. Who were you as a young boy in the way of your interests? Were you always into science? Were you out in nature? Were you, like, looking at frogs and, you know, in the forest? You know, you came into Seattle at a different time of life. But I'm just kind of curious who you were as a child and how that informed your professional path and your interests.

Isn't this fun? I've never been asked that question before, and I've done.

I told you I was going to get close and personal.

I did not have good childhood, and I'm hesitant to share that on a national media, no matter how big or how small. But maybe what I learned from what happened to me, it made me a kinder person. I saw what it was like to not be treated with kindness and treated with some different attitudes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's appropriate. And I didn't know if you were, like, drawn to being like, you know, did you have certain aspirations, like, I want to be an astronaut or. You know, when I think of kids that age, I mean, even for myself, I thought I wanted to be a nun. Like, I can clearly remember because I was taught by nuns in school, and they were, like, my role models. So when I've talked to a few of our colleagues, like Bob Rountree and Wendy Warner, you know, it's kind of interesting because they describe this real connection to nature at a young age. So I was just kind of curious if you had any strong connections in any way that would inform kind of your connection to the healing arts. But, you know, I think one of the things with healing, though, that I've observed, and I'm sure you have, too, is that when people go into healing in a variety of different capacities, either as a physician, nurse, or whatever the capacity is, it's almost like sometimes it does come from something personal to heal, you know, so it somehow brings us into the light of that in a good way.

Yeah, so that's true. So many of my colleagues, they had that kind of experience. Yeah, mine was totally intellectual. Seriously. So how do you cure rheumatoid arthritis? So. Oh, the drug method has limitations. There's another approach. So I'm just. It's just been entirely intellectual.

It's been intellectual.

And now, having lived this way and noticing that in my birth cohort, over half my birth cohort is dead, and most of the rest of them are full of disease. So as I learned this, I adopted it, and I practiced what I preach. I'm a preacher, forward person. I say what I mean. Okay. And mean what I say. And so I live healthfully, and I'm starting to realize that Laura and I. My wife, Laura and I, by living healthily and showing you don't have to get a lot of disease when you get older, it's as powerful statement as anything I say with my mouth.

I actually want to interview Laura separately because I've been to your home. I know that both of you walk the talk. You're so inspirational as a couple, and you're one of the few couples where I could say, like, you're both aligned. Right. There's no question. Usually in a relationship, you get one that's a little bit more on the walk the talk than the other. But you two, it's like you keep each other in check. It's really remarkable to see that dynamic. It's very. Yeah, it's inspirational.

And Laura has become an incredible Whole Foods cook. The food I know anymore because not only is the food not as good as our food in terms of the healthiness of food, but it's not prepared as well as what Laura does.

And you grow your own food. I mean, to a large degree. I mean, when. When I had the meal at your home, I mean, everything was. You know, when I looked at the veggies, it was like, well, this is from our garden, and this is local. And know, you know, the point of origin, which is really great. And I wish more people were able to do that.

I just spent the last hour before this. This call picking blueberries. Blueberries. I have. I have 12 blueberry bushes that I've been growing organically for 35 years. They're incredible. I'll. I'll get 100 pounds of blueberries this year. You'll. You'll never taste better. Blueberries, they have so much flavor and depth. Oh, and this year, I planted carrots for the first time, so I've been systematically growing more and more things. So I planted the raspberries a few years ago. Now we have black raspberries. Just incredible. And now I just planted currants, and I just planted some honeyberries, which I've never even had before. So I'm gonna try those out.

That's unique. I think when I was at your home, you were showing me squash. It was during the fall time. And so you had a bunch of different squash that you had just picked.

So we overdid the squash a little bit. We had about 300 pounds of squash. So I'm dialing back on the squash.

Yeah, well, and it's all seasonal. Right. Because this is the time for berries. So it's perfect. So being that you were very intellectual, very research minded, did you ever think about getting a PhD in conjunction with the ND? Do you feel like that would be a compliment to all of the clinical work, or did you feel like it wasn't necessary because you already had an undergraduate focus in research, so you didn't really require that deeper dive into a topic?

Very good. Very good question. I actually thought about that a lot because it would easily go off. I consider PhD, I consider MPH and such. But as I worked on the politics of advancing natural medicine, I realized that only being an ND and being really good should be enough. So I kind of said, I'm an inshot doctor. I'm really knowledgeable about health and disease and I don't need any other degrees. I get. This is enough credibility.

Yeah.

Obviously having more degrees would have been nice, but this actually ended up being a political decision rather than a scientific.

I love that. And, you know, I actually ask you that question because in this day and age, I kind of feel like when I see health professionals, they're always looking for the shiny object, like, what's the next degree I can get? And then they start getting all these letters after their name. And then it's like the point of diminishing returns, it's like, I mean, they're consummate learners, but it's almost like, you know, after a certain point, it's like just putting in the work and doing that from that point forward. Right. Rather than all the degrees. But for some people, it's very nourishing to do that. So I was just kind of curious with you with your love of science and research. That was your genesis.

Yeah, my genesis has been insatiable intellectual curiosity. A good example of that is a few years ago, 15 years ago, I think it was, I was touring a chocolate factory, a local chocolate factory called Theo Chocolate, with my son and daughter. Going through the. It was really interesting. So I was asking questions, asking questions, and after about half an hour, both of my kids told me, said, dad, stop asking so many questions. You're. You're embarrassing us. But I'm curious.

Yeah,

best characterize me. Characterize me. I'm curious.

I want to learn. That's good. The deeper dive. So Being that you're curious, let's segue into spirituality. I'm kind of curious because of the scientists that I have been exposed to. I find them in one of two categories. Either they're incredibly spiritual because they feel like the mysteries that they're exploring through research are, like, insurmountable. And, you know, it's almost like you figure out one thing, but then it's like, wow, there are just many other layers. Then there is another camp where they become atheist, where it's kind of like it's just about science and it's just what you see. It's just nature. There's nothing beyond that. So I'm kind of curious because you are very intellectual. How has that played in with your spiritual framework in the way of, like, thinking about your purpose, your meaning, your sense of connection? Just like, why? What's the point of life, the meaning of life for you?

Well, first, let me start by talking about my wife. Lara was one of the first women to graduate from Yale Divinity School. She was the only woman in all her classes. So that's part of what attracted me to her. So I'll use naturopathic language. I'm a vitalist. I have a great belief in life. When you look at the universe, you look at the laws of physics. Life should not exist. The universe always goes towards entropy, always goes to low quality energy. Everything always degenerates. Life is the exact opposite of entropy. There's something in our universe that leads to life, and it manifests in so many ways. So I believe in the universal consciousness, and our life right now is a manifestation of that universal consciousness. So I do everything I can to help people manifest their consciousness as much as possible. And the part I work on that is helping people be as healthy as possible. I think it's very, very hard to be spiritually conscious when your body's breaking down and your brain's not working.

Do you see the body as a teacher of spiritual lessons? You know, I know that there's literature out there looking at, like, what your body is really telling you. So if you have arthritis, we could say that that is heightened inflammation. But going even deeper, looking at psychological aspects, it's, where are we angry? Where are we reactive? Where do we have this sense of inner psychological inflammation? How do you see the body as a divining rod to our spiritual growth?

I know there are a lot of people done a lot of work in that area, and I think I've been very inspirational. I'm kind of. I'm kind of a Bland kind of guy. I'm. I'm just into the science. Got arthritis. Probably because you have PCBs or some other toxin damaging your body. Or the nutrient you don't have. So I don't look at the body as giving messages about spirituality. Doesn't mean it's not true. It's just mess up that gut.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And that makes sense, you know, because there are many different layers that people can take into it. So how. How could science actually help to uncover more in the area of spirituality? I kind of feel like that's happening nowadays. Because maybe that interface is consciousness. You know, consciousness is being discussed in neuroscience. We're seeing it discussed in quantum physics. Is consciousness kind of like a form of spirituality. That is more under the guise of science? Would you see it that way? Or how would you define consciousness?

Honestly, I've not thought a lot about it. I'm, again, I'm kind of materialistic. I believe. Help people be healthy.

Yeah.

Now, when I say help people be healthy. It's not just physiological. It's also spiritual and psychological as well. I give examples to my patients, to my students when teaching. Or patients who come to see me. Have a particular disease, and you fix it. Then you have another disease and you fix it. And they have no disease, and you fix it. And you realize, wait a minute. They have a reason for being sick. So that's how I get, how I get into it. People often have reasons. Spiritual reasons or psychological reasons. I think one of the greatest causes of disease in people from a psychological perspective. Is lack of meaning and purpose in life. And so that's one reason why we support spirituality from meaning. I'm not really big into religiosity. I think many of the structures have been built up around religion. Make it hard for people to tap into that inner spirituality.

Yeah. And do you feel like through everything that you've done with Bastyr. And all of your efforts to create this robust educational platform. Do you feel like you had built in spirituality or spiritual health. As part of all of those endeavors? So maybe starting with the physical, first looking at the biochemistry. But then somewhere along the line, a clinician would learn about the importance of purpose in life. And informing somebody maybe in their 60s or their 70s. Because, you know, just being through so many changes. And so I'm just curious how spirituality finds its way into naturopathic medicine specifically.

So the early volumes of the textbook Natural Medicine. Had a chapter on spirituality in medicine that Laura wrote. So I believe very, very strongly spirituality does affect people's health, and people's beliefs affect your health as well. So one example I'd like to give my students. So a woman came to see me for a condition called renal artery atresia. So what happens here is a genetic background. You get scarred around with small blood vessels going to the kidneys. And its first diagnosis is super high high blood pressure. And the only intervention at that time was surgical. You go in and you try to open up the artery. If you can't open up the artery, you have to remove the kidney because otherwise they'll die from hypertension. So had a woman come to see me. She was a nurse. She was in her mid-30s. And she said, my sister's got this condition. They had to take out her kidney. And I'm hoping you naturopaths will have some kind of cure for this. Conventional medicine does. So one of the things I learned early on in practice is many patients came to see me, had a misdiagnosis. So I said, okay, well, so did the standard. Where the standard test run to make sure you got the condition? She says, no, yeah, I had high blood pressure. My sister has. It's genetic. I'm scheduled. She was scheduled for surgery two weeks later. I said, well, hold off on the surgery a second. Let's actually run the test that confirms whether you got it or not. High aldosterone, basically. So we ran the test, and so the lab test came back. She was in my office. You see this woman, a young woman. You can see that. You can see the tension and worry and such. I said, okay, well, the test results are back. You don't have this condition. You can see all of a sudden, a week later, blood pressure was normal.

Stress.

They would have removed her kidneys without doing the confirmatory test. Okay, now, you know, on the one hand, you might say, well, it was. It was obvious what the diagnosis was, but you have to be sure about it. So people's ability to induce disease as well as remove reverse disease is influenced by their spirituality, their. Their beliefs? Not entirely. It's only one component. Just don't expect you've got cancer. I'm going to pray myself away from cancer. You might get lucky. But, no, by itself, it's not.

Well, that kind of speaks to the placebo and the nocebo effect. You know, even within science, the effect of the mind is so strong that what constitutes an ironclad gold standard of a study is one that has a placebo. And it's fascinating because even with arthritis, if I recall correctly, there is a 40 to 60%, at least in osteoarthritis is my recollection from previous data where you compare a placebo to an active and you can get a huge response as it relates to pain and perception of pain. So where do you think scientifically placebo fits in? Like how, how do you reconcile that through your intellect in the way of like, wow, how does this, how does, how does the power of the mind find its way into science?

So my pejorative response to that is placebos does, does throw rocks at conventional medicine a lot. My apologies. Conventional medicine does a lot of good things. But I'm, I'm existing naturopathic doctor because his errors were conventional medicine. It doesn't do very well. So I look at the placebo as a way of discrediting the body's healing ability. As I give my students example, here's this great drug, placebo controlled, showing that when people use this drug for this particular case was stomach ulcers, 75% response. Isn't that fantastic? And well, what was the placebo response? It was 50%. So I said, which was stronger, the placebo response, the body's ability to heal or the drug? The drug only added 25%. The placebo added 50%. Placebo is twice as effective as the drug. Now I want to be clear. Placebo is, you know, just because you have the bleed doesn't mean you're always going to be cured. But the point is the body has tremendous ability to heal if you just give it a chance. That's one reason why I named Bastyr after Dr. Bastyr, because he had this remarkable ability. He was a physician. Healer. Physician meant that high level diagnostic and therapeutic skills. Healer. That ability to stimulate within each patient their belief and ability to get better. Big, big part of that.

It's beautifully said. You know, one of the people that I interviewed, Dr. Younger, made a statement. He said, not all doctors are healers and not all healers are doctors. And I'm curious what you think about that. Is that

so? The best ones are both. And my first lecture with students, I said my job, what my goal here with this school is to make you physician healers. So for example, I say two things from Dr. Bastyr. Number one, always touch your patient, let them know you care. And number two, always study. I tell students, people ask me all the time for referrals to my graduates. Who do I refer? I refer the ones I see at the conferences because I know they're the learners. They're the ones who will always keep Getting better. They're going to be the better. The best doctors.

Yeah, well, and it's almost like you're. You're joining head and heart when you say that. You know, touch them, connect to them, have that therapeutic encounter. Because Even back to Dr. Herbert Benson's work, looking at the therapeutic relationship, that triangle, right. That the efficacy comes not just from the patient having a placebo effect, but it's also how the practitioner perceives that modality. It's so intricate. Right. The whole aspect of healing. What about the nocebo effect? So thinking that you're going to have a negative response. You know, when gluten became a big thing and there was this huge fear about gluten, like, I've been gluten or oh, my gosh, people would have this apprehension about going to restaurants and having gluten. And I'm just wondering how much do we create nocebo or negative aspects as it relates to our food and eating relationship that may actually be more detrimental than the thing itself?

Absolutely. 100% agree. And that's one of. I think the dangers of our medicine is that we do help people understand what foods are eating that are damaging them. And it's easy to get into paranoia. But there's another aspect of nocebo, which I've seen a lot of, that has bothered me the most. Patient come to me because their doctor told them, nothing can be done for you. So they stimulate in that person the belief, and that's because be done for them. Fortunately, they had just a little leftover to say, well, maybe one kind of one long shot, this weird nature path. Maybe he can help. Okay. But they already come in thinking, you can't help. Nobody can help me. The most difficult patient to see is when a husband is brought in by his wife because the wife knows the husband's sick and he doesn't want to deal with it. He doesn't want to hear what I have to say because it's like his belief is, no, this is what I've got. And nocebo effect is actually something I've had to deal with and had to get people out of it and say, no, wait a minute, we can do something about this. And hopefully I'll have a patient example. So here's a patient who had this problem, and here's what we did. It helped her out or helped them out.

That's such a good point. I had never thought about the nocebo as connected to that framework of what people have been told about their diagnosis, their prognosis, and then it's just kind of like they shut off. Right. And you know, it's kind of like what our colleague Dr. Jeffrey Bland talks about, your genes are not your destiny, the diseased delusion, all of that kind of stuff. It's not to say that it's not important to define what's going on in you, but how much do you attach to that? So, you know, the whole field. I'm kind of curious too. I'm fascinated with psychoneuro, endocrine immunology, AKA pnei, which Candice Pert and others have really brought to the forefront. Right. It's kind of looking at again that body mind interface and how, you know, I just feel like again looking at that as a framework for how to. How we connect our belief system into our body. And we've seen that with the immune system that many times stress states of anger can actually change the function of different immune cells. So, you know, I just hope for more research like that to come out, more departments to actually focus on the connection between all those systems.

One of the fun parts about my life, and I've done this for so long, people like Candice Pert was a personal friend. So many of these people who have been said made such big impacts in the world. I know my friends, I knew them when they were doing that research and developing those insights. So for me, it was just so incredibly enriching.

Are there others that you would like to bring to the forefront that would also be in the same camp as is Dr. Pert, that you feel like, wow, I mean, like obviously Dr. Bastyr,

John Bastyr, Jonathan Wright, Alan Gaby. There are a number of people out there who have been giants in this field. I didn't really know Linus Pauling that much, but Abram Hoffer, for example, I got to know him. Just a wonderful person. So I got to meet many of these people who did this landmark work and they were all wonderful, they were all humble, they all made a big difference. It was wonderful.

And you know what's so neat about some of those that you mentioned that I happen to know as well, like if I'm thinking of Dr. Alan Gaby, who wrote the largest, you know, just like you, very much a writer, prolific Nutritional medicine is his textbook. And it's like that, it's so thick. And what I know about him is that he's a musician. It's like a beautiful like science and art connection. So I'm curious for you, after being to your home, I would say like, for you it's kind of like Jeff Bland, where it's a bit of like the athleticism, you know, for you. You. You couple the science with kind of like the body of like, being active and physically connected and being fit in that way. I'm curious if you have other hobbies that kind of bring you into that balance for when you've been like, just like you went and picked blueberries. So, like, do you have other things where it's like you have to balance all that mental activity with something physical or, you know, just to kind of bring it over into like the art a bit?

So, yes, as you probably know, I have been a very avid basketball player.

Yes.

For about 35 years. I played two hours of full court basketball three times a week until my joints broke down. I couldn't play anymore. I did everything I could. Glucosamine sulfate and everything else just tries to stimulate my joints. And I played way. I played 10 years longer than all the other people on my basketball court. At some point my body could keep up with it, but that was what I did. What I did. And I haven't replaced it yet.

Yeah, yeah. Because Lara's very active too, with Pilates and bar and. And so that's what I know about both of you is like, you definitely are very intellectual, but then you also have like, okay, let's. Let's move the body and let's get physical. Like, it's a good balance there because otherwise I think, you know, just being so in the head, it's really hard to kind of come back down into the body.

Yeah. Like, I had a really challenging board meeting yesterday with the board of trustees of Bastyr. My very first board meeting. So before I went to the board meeting, I went down and used the StairMaster.

Good idea.

Get my body ready to go.

That's good. Do you meditate? Is that something you do? No, nothing like that.

I probably should, but I. It. It's never worked for me. Yeah, I probably should, but it just never worked for me.

Yeah. And I don't know, you know, some people pray or they just find like, moments of stillness in their saunas and, you know, just, you know, grabbing that in the way of, like, contemplative time.

Picking blueberries, pruning the grapes, the excess grapes from my grape arbor. Picking the raspberries, planting, putting my plants some. My. My connection with nature is a lot of how I.

That's what I was thinking, that your meditation probably comes in the garden.

Yes.

You know, it's an active meditation.

I just. Thank the blueberries for their wonderful bounty. They don't have the. I don't think they have the consciousness to hear me, but I thank them for providing me this really healthy food.

That's beautiful. Are you still a vegetarian? So that was kind of like your point of like where you entered.

I'm a pescatarian, so I'm a lacto ova pescatarian, so we eat fish. Well, we try to eat it once a week. We don't quite make that, but we find as hard as I try to eat a healthy lifestyle, I need a little bit of fish for my health. I pembelika around it. Yeah, I don't want to do that. Okay. But I haven't figured out a solution yet.

Yeah, no, that's true. And of course I'm sure that you go to thinking about the environmental impacts of that. I'm kind of curious too how you did come into environmental medicine in the way that you have. I mean, when I see you lecture, you talk a lot about arsenic. This is a big one for you. You have a number of editorials in imcj. So I don't know philosophically, if you want to leave us with a couple of thoughts about what's happening on the planet, how that translates into people's total toxic load. But I would think that as you get into the weeds of all things in the environment, that probably your mind gets a little bit philosophical about this as well and about what's happening. So do you have anything to share on that front?

So I got into. It was kind of accidental. I was asked to do a corporate wellness program in Canada with 4,500 oil workers. The guy invited me to do that when they were wealthiest people in Canada sent his personal Learjet down to Seattle to pick me up and fly me to Calgary. And I said, well, you know, I'm a true believer in natural medicine, but I also like hard data. I'm very objective. I said, I want to run lab tests on your people to see where are the problems, how much can I spend? He said, blank check. I said, blank check. He says, yes, you convince me that it's going to be useful to run this test on my employees. I'll pay for it. So I ran what was at that time the equivalent of $1,500 of lab tests on each one of the 4,500 oil field work. I got a lot of data, probably now probably three to five thousand dollars worth of tests. I found a lot of unexpected toxicity. Now, initially, when I heard the term oil field workers I was thinking refineries. So I did all the testing. You would think of people in refineries. No, these are typically guys who would get up in the morning in a pickup truck, drive out to prairies, make sure the oil pumps were working. They had no chemical exposure. I mean it may have had some occasion if some piece of equipment was broken and added clean off a solvent or something. But no, they're just making sure the pumps were working. They had no toxic exposure, but they had a lot of toxins. So I started looking at, well, where are these toxins coming from? And then I realized that many of them were working in the oil fields as a secondary job to subsidize the family farm because the family farms were too small to make it against big agriculture. And what were they doing with family farms and herbicides and all this stuff? And it was damaging them, I think. Well, wait, imagine these people. How about the people who are eating their food? And I started looking at the research saying, wait a minute, we now we're seeing this diabetes epidemic starting. What's it correlate with? Correlation with exposure to diabetic gent in the environment? You've looked at this research, you've read, read those books. The research on diabetes being due to environmental toxins is uncontrovertible. Anyway, that's where it is.

Yeah. And you continue. Are you still in the. What's calling you there in terms of environmental medicine? Is it the popsicle or do you feel like arsenic is, I mean, on the list for the cdc, different contaminants? It's truly arsenic. It still remains. I think it's still number one.

But still still number one.

For sure it's still number one. So is that something that you can.

Metals are number one, two and three. Arsenic, mercury and lead are the three top ones or three of the top four ones. No question the metals are causing trouble. But the problem is, as you know, there's now thousands of chemicals and we have a huge problem. We can't even measure most of these things. But you can, you can measure the damage in the body.

So what do you just to leave us on a, like a philosophical kind of a spiritual note on this whole aspect of environmental health because it just feels kind of dismal. It feels like is this even going to get any better or is it just going to continue to get worse and just incrementally, what can we do?

So the good news as we've had people out there like Bobby Kennedy who are at a national level, I mean this is the first time at a national level, we've got somebody talk about things that you and I and many of our colleagues have been working on for decades. Find somebody saying this. So we as a community, a total community have to say we want to grow our foods healthfully, we want to avoid toxins in the environment, we want to go to doctors who teach us how to be healthy rather than simply give us drugs to turn off the symptoms of the body breaking.

Yeah, no, it's good to have that visibility for sure. So maybe we'll see more of an impact. And then finally, you know, I'd like to bring science and spirituality together. What do you see in the future as it relates to things like AI or fusions of these different areas of disciplines where they're starting to do more crosstalk. What do you foresee being that you're first a scientist and then a physician, how do you see these continuing to thread together as we make our way into the next couple decades?

So I think the AI tools will be very useful. But the challenge for AI tools in medicine, they're based on PubMed. They're based on a model of disease management, not disease cure. PubMed is full of fraudulent research on drugs and it's full of fraudulent research that discounts natural therapies. So it's really hard for AI to actually get the natural medicine approach. I'll get the drug approach is fine. That's pretty easy. The more difficult, more subtle things, it's going to have a problem because it doesn't have good data sets and it doesn't have good standards to match to.

Right, that's a really good point. That it's only as good as the inputs. Right. And if the inputs are flawed, then the outcome will be flawed.

Do you think though, garbage in, garbage out.

Right. But what about some of these smaller types of AI frameworks where they're very specific about the articles? There are some functional medicine based ones.

Very useful, Very useful.

Yeah, excellent. And you've done a bit of that yourself on the genetics front, so you kind of know what's involved there. And the complexity, they're not easy to create.

No, not easy to create. And the body is hugely complex. But also, as you know, in medicine one of the biggest challenges is uncertainty. We rarely, rarely have one to one correlations. It's all statistical. And then we look at conventional medicine and they use the T test with statistics to be significant at the 95 percentile, 0 less than 0.p less than 0.5. So everything that was less than 0.5 is now considered invalid. Wait a minute. For the people that it worked for, it was really, really valid. Well, you're just saying it's not valid in terms of treating everybody with that particular approach. And so, again, a lot of conventional medicine is going to lose things because statistically insignificant engagement for migraine headaches, clinically significant, clinically not significant. But for the people who need the magnesium, it's cured them.

Right. So what you're saying is that there's a lot of nuances and that is not always baked into all of the personalization.

So much of the research is based on generalization, not personalization.

Yes. Well, great. You know, this has been a fabulous conversation. I know we connected a lot of dots, some of them personal, some of them professional, but it's all the same, right? Because what you do has become your personal mission. So at this stage of your life, you know, being back at Bastyr, infusing some inspiration into that platform and bringing that to life, which I think is fabulous. Do you have any final words as we come to a close on science, spirit and anything philosophical that you'd like to leave us with? Words of wisdom.

So I guess I'll stick with the. Physical bodies have tremendous ability to heal if we just get a chance. And how do we give it a chance? To quote Dr. Sid Baker, one of our beloved teachers, get into the body what uniquely needs. Get out of the body what uniquely does not need. That goes for everything. Spirituality, relationships, vitamins, minerals, environmental toxins, everything. Getting what we need, love, families. Get out what we don't need, hatred and anger and being mean to other people.

That because toxins can be more than heavy metals, they can be stress, stressful relationships. So thank you for mentioning that. That really rounds out the conversation. So thanks so much, Joe. A pleasure to be speaking with you about all of these things. Thanks for being so open to having the conversation.

Great chatting with my friend.