113: Personal Responsibility & New Paradigms in Healthcare with Dr. Pamela Popper

Hello, my friends. You are in for something really special. I just finished up my recording with Dr. Pam Popper. Dr. Popper, if you don't know her, she is an internationally recognized expert in nutrition, medicine, public health and is especially known for advocating prevention and lifestyle based approaches over conventional sick care. She breaks it all down for us. We talked about a number of things from over diagnosis. We talked about DCIS not being cancer, we talked about her requirements for a healthy life and how we need to focus on maintenance and taking care of ourselves with the same care and respect that we take care of all the other things in our life. So if you are ready for that wake up call and want to know more what you should be doing to mind your health, then sit tight and stay tuned because here comes Dr. Pam Popper. So I'm always excited to have a fellow rebel rouser with me and today's guest, Dr. Pam Popper will not disappoint, I assure you. So Dr. Popper, welcome. I am so happy to have you here.

Well, thank you. And it's nice to meet you in this Zoom room or whatever it is.

Yes, it's so nice to meet you. On Riverside. Your ears must have been burning because I was talking about you. And then I asked you to come on the podcast. You agreed to come on the podcast. And then since the time that you agreed to come on the podcast, like five more people mentioned your name to me and I said, I know, I know, I know, she's coming, she's coming, I promise.

Wonderful. I'm glad the word is getting out.

I'm so glad you're here. Why don't you start by telling us a little about your background and how you got into. I. I know you're a naturopathic doctor. What, what drew you to naturopathic medicine?

Nothing really. And I'm not so happy with it when it comes right down to it.

Thanks for joining us today.

No, no, my, Mine started as a personal journey. I was fat. I was always on a diet and not interested in health at all, just interested in being thin and never put it together that to be thin you had to be healthy. And so I just, I did stupid diet after stupid diet for a long time as a young adult. And I had a real job back then. I was in sales and marketing and, and so I always told myself I was big boned then I wasn't as fat as I thought I was because I could delude myself. And I also told myself that, you know, with travel and everything, it's just really Hard to take care of yourself. So I had a good excuse for being fat. So, anyway, one day, this tells you how long ago this was. I was sitting at an airport with a delayed flight, and I bought Red Book magazine. I don't even know who publish that anymore.

Oh, you are dating yourself.

Oh, yeah. I'm. I'm almost 69 years old. So I'm sitting in the airport reading Redwood magazine. And remember, this is like the late 80s, early 90s. And. And I see this article about diet and health, and. And I mean, I had a terrible diet. It was just horrific. And. And so I thought, well, that's really interesting, this idea that diet could be helpful. And so I mentioned this to a coworker who said, well, if you're interested in that, there's a guy by the name of John McDougall, and my husband and I knew him when we lived out in California, and I've got his book and I'll loan it to you. And I read this book, and essentially what it said is that if you choose the right foods and you eat, you know, plant foods, and you can have a wonderful life and eat as much as you want. And his wife was a marvel, is a marvelous cook. And there were recipes in the back, and I made a couple of them. I thought I could do this. And so I melted down. I really. I just. People would say, are you okay? Like, the first thing people think when you lose weight is you're sick. And I wasn't sick. I was just fat. I was going to be sick if I didn't lose weight. But then I started running marathons, and people are going, like, what are you doing? What is this? Right? So anyhow, that's how I got interested in health. And this started just really as a personal journey. And then gradually, I arrived at the conclusion, and it was so long ago, I don't really remember exactly how it happened, but one thing leads to another, you take a step in the right direction. And I started to figure out that doctors weren't teaching this to anybody, that diet mattered. And in fact, I had. I had had a couple of what. What should have been health scares, but I wasn't paying any attention, you know, And a doctor never said to me, you know, you should lose weight and maybe you shouldn't drink so much alcohol, and maybe you shouldn't eat so much cheese and that kind of thing. So. So I thought, I'm. I'm going to look into this. And then one thing led to another, and I decided to start a business around this. And I think I was drawn to naturopathy really because I was so disillusioned with the conventional medical system. I wrote about this in my new book. My mother loved doctors and she died a ghastly early death after 20 years in and out of hospitals. And so that was my, that was my introduction to western medicine. Lots of operations and, you know, shoulder replacement, all this kind of stuff. She was always in a rehab center for having some surgery. And so I knew that wasn't good. So I thought naturopathy would be better. I think it has limitations. I think unfortunately the two systems seem to be merging a little bit. And, and I don't like that at all because the. I think that treating symptoms instead of causes regardless of what you're using is a bad idea. We got to show people that you can actually make yourself a new body that's healthy and in most cases and it's done through diet and lifestyle changes. So anyway, that's the short version of the story. And then there were a lot of twists and turns along the way. And I have to say I am the luckiest person most people ever meet because it's sort of like when you mentioned, you know, thought about bringing me on your show and then people start talking about me. I seriously have a thought come into my head about something I want to investigate. The opportunity comes up or something I'd like to do and the opportunity comes up. So I've been very blessed to have been part of a lot of projects and non profits and things of that nature that gave me a bit really wide breadth of experience that helped bring me to where I am today.

That's amazing. I want to go back to your personal journey and the. Because I, I think that there was a lot of messaging. It maybe isn't so strong now, but for the last 10 years we've had a lot of messaging that sounds like you can be both fat and healthy, that they're not mutually exclusive. And it goes along that, that mentality that we're not to body shame people and you know, it's not kind and there's a lot of. I mean, I remember there was a time when we weren't asking patients to get on the scale because we didn't want them to feel badly about themselves and that we weren't to use objective information as a means to make someone feel badly even if it was hurting them.

Right.

So what do you think of that whole toxic positivity? Positivity where you know, you can be both fear fat and healthy. What what do you think of that statement?

I don't like it. And I've made a commitment in my own work with people. I'm not going to lie to them for any reason. I don't want to say anything offensive, but I also want to tell them the truth. And it is not healthy to be overweight. And there are two aspects of it. One is overweight and just carrying enormous amounts of body fat. The other thing is it's not okay to be frail either. And so we should be encouraging people to develop strong, healthy bodies because that's the pathway to living your best life for your full lifespan. And in the book, my co author, it's a conversation. So my co author asks me about, do people really want to live to be 100? And here's what I answered the question because this is really important. I think a lot of people tell me they don't want to live to be 100 or in their 90s. And the reason is they look around and they look at what that looks like in nursing home, laying in a bed, whatever surgeries like, like what I saw my mother having. But, but I'll tell you what happens. 85 year old people with cancer start making deals with God. I'll do anything. Because as it turns out, sometimes the thing that makes people appreciate how marvelous it is on this planet for this brief time that we're here is the fact that they could have their life end early. And then it's like, no, no, no, no, no, I don't want that. I don't want that. So I think that most people given the choice would like to live a long life. They like it here. There's so much to enjoy. My gosh, I have to live to be 100 just to read the books I've already bought, let alone the new ones I'm going to buy this weekend. That, you know, people say stop buying books. You know, I'm running out of places to put them. But, but just to do that, I have to live a long time. And so I think people do want to live a long time and we owe it to them to tell them that the only pathway is to build a strong, healthy, lean body.

Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. And I do think, and you know, maybe I'm a little bit of a conspiracy theorist, but I actually think that that messaging that you can be fat and healthy is very intentional because it leads to a very specific and diabolical path.

Right.

It kind of commits that person to the system at one point, at one Point, if they continue down that path, they are going to become hypertensive, they are going to become diabetic, they are going to experience the metabolic dysfunction that goes along with being overweight.

Right.

Even if they don't have it right now.

I agree. And I think the problem is even beyond that. You know, at my age, I remember growing up when my grandparents were immigrants and, and they came here to make a better life. And the way to make a better life is you learn to speak English and you work hard and you. You are excellent at what you do. And I remember my grandmother and my mother, my dad, saying, if a job is worth doing, it's worth doing right. And, you know, from to whom much is given, much is expected and that sort of thing. So there used to be a feeling of wanting to be excellent and that high expectations were a good thing. And unfortunately, I didn't necessarily learn that from a health perspective. But then it really wasn't until I left home that I got fat and out of shape and that sort of thing. Because back then, you even if you ate McDonald's every day, like the hamburger was this big and there were 17 french fries in the thing, I mean, the portions weren't big and that sort of thing. But my point is that I think that our country has been racing toward low expectations all around, and health is part of those low expectations. And I tell people, listen, to live a spectacular life, you have to strive for something. People feel good when they do something. Just think about when you do a favor for a neighbor and they say, thank you so much. I couldn't have done this without you. A simple thing like that, you do something good, you feel good about yourself. We need to have more of that expectations of our children, that health is an expectation and academic success is an expectation. You have to read, you have to write. So I think the whole country has been trending towards this. Let's use these soft messages so that no matter how badly you're failing at whatever you're failing at, including health, it's okay. It's not okay. Look at where we're ending up.

Yeah. And we're very much geared towards mediocrity.

Right.

And I think that that is part of what people have become to expect. And so the answer that people get from their doctor when they go and say that they're tired and they don't feel well or they don't feel their best or, you know, the doctor kind of gives them the answer, well, you know, what do you expect? You're getting older it's outside of your control. This is just how things are, and it's just perpetuating this state of mediocrity.

I agree. I'll tell you another thing I think contributes to it, too. I've been talking about this more lately. When I was a kid, again, I sound like I'm 190 years old, but I'm actually only 69 years old. But here's the thing. We had a family doctor, and the doctor, that doctor took care of my mother and my father and my mother's grandparents and my sister and I and my aunt and uncle and their five children. We all live kind of close together, and so we were a tight community. And he knew our family. And so when you have a relationship like that with people, you're much more likely to have an honest discussion about something than the today's visits. Like, I have to defend doctors a little bit and nurse practitioners, you know, the. The visits are short. There's no relationship. Next time you come in, it might be with a different person who sees you for 11 minutes and says, oh, you're just here to get your prescription refilled. So I would like to see independent practitioners who are dealing with generations of the same family. And then pediatricians, for example, would be specialists who dealt with children who had specific pediatric illnesses, rather than, let's show up every three months to get jabbed and we'll call that healthcare. That's really not healthcare for children. So anyway, I think that's contributed to it too. There's no relationship there for somebody to say, you know, you're starting to put on some weight. And that's concerning to me. Let's talk about it. Well, to talk about something like that, you can't do it in 11 minutes, you know, so that the whole system needs to change to facilitate better expectations.

Yeah, I think it goes even deeper than that in that I'm not sure that even if they had the opportunity for a longer conversation, which they don't, I mean, there's no doubt the system is very broken. And I think that most physicians go into that system with totally different expectations and with. With the absolute best of intentions and motivations, and then they get forced into a very, very broken system. But the truth is that even if they were to start that conversation, I don't know that they have the words, the tools or the, the support mechanisms to help someone to reverse that situation and circumstance that they're in. I don't think they know how to tell people or help people to lose weight because they are trained that losing weight means eating less and moving more. And that is a very reductive, oversimplified way of thinking about weight loss. You know, our system is very, very broken. And I know that you don't like the fact that the system seem to be merging. What is it that you don't like about that?

I think we've gone from common sense, empirical, empirically proven things. You know, if you. If you go back to before medicine became so standardized, and I think there are a lot of misunderstandings, for example, about the Flexner Report and that sort of thing. And one thing I tell people all the time when you're looking at issues with health and medicine, is two things can be true at the same time. The outcome wasn't so great. But when Flexner started looking at how to reform medicine in the United States, the average medical doctor made less than the average government employee. They were reviled. And some of the medical schools were subpar beyond comprehension. Subpar. And Flexner actually had a pretty good track record. He had built a school himself built on German principles of education, which were pretty strong. So his idea that there needed to be standardization was not terrible. Now, what happened after that was terrible because it wiped out what was then an empirically based alternative, what we would today refer to as an alternative medicine system. If you look back at that time, we didn't have the type of technology to understand things, but so it was pretty primitive. We take that fruit, we mash it up, we add this stuff to it, we put it on bumps on the skin and they go away. Okay? So you might not understand the mechanism, but you've proven that it works. You've demonstrated that it works. Okay? So all of that sort of gets wiped out over time. The AMA became very aggressive, and Morris Fishbein in particular had 300,000 people on the quack list or something like it was ridiculous. But how it reemerged was as a mirror image of what we don't like about medicine. So if our stance is that testing and testing and testing, looking for increasingly small abnormalities and then turning them into diseases to treat, and they're not. I mean, a great example is ductal carcinoma in situ. It's not cancer. They're calling it stage zero now because they're trying to backtrack. But if too much testing over here is a bad idea, it's a bad idea to do the same thing over here using different tests. If too much drugging over here is a bad idea, it's a bad idea to Load people up with supplements to treat symptoms over here. And so what I think really needs to happen is the two systems need to be merged. And like you said, medical doctors don't know anything about diet and exercise. And they have an idea. I mean, they know that hamburgers and French fries are not the best lunch. But beyond that, they don't know much to do. And I think that the naturopathic community has become way too medicalized. And so our answer to that, by the way, is capital letters with a trademark informed. In other words, it doesn't matter whose idea it is. It goes through a filter that we all agree on in the beginning. And this is how I started my business, because even back 1996 when I opened, people were confused and I said, listen, we'll never get to the bottom of this with. He said, she said, this doctor, that doctor. I read an article, you read a different one, and I wrote a book and you wrote a different one. What you have to do, it's like playing football. The first downs are 10 yards, 15 minutes in the quarter, four quarters in the game, and you kick through the post to get a field goal. It's never any different. We're not talking about who won the super bowl in October. So we set forth the idea of these rules. For example, it has to be clinically significant, not just statistically significant. That it has to represent if the test has to. If you're doing some kind of screening test, it has to lead to longer life, less morbidity, et cetera. We have 19 of them, and so that way it levels the playing field. Nobody should be defensive about that. And if you're thinking that you're defensive, I say this to my critics. Then tell me which of the 19 rules you want to eliminate. Maybe conflicts of interest don't bother you. So we'll have a debate and I'll tell people you're not bothered by conflicts of interest. And we won't consider that a filter. Nobody in their right mind is going to show up for that, by the way. You'd have to have something be mentally deficient to agree to that. Right? And so I think the way that we solve it is we stop pointing at each other, across the way from each other, and we basically agree on some principles and say, listen, we both can learn from each other. All of the factions out there can learn from each other, but we have to have rules of the game to come together, because if we don't, then we're going to go back to name calling and my book, your Book, my article, your article, and this doctor and that doctor and somebody over here and somebody over there. And from a consumer standpoint, that doesn't lead any place good.

Yeah, I agree. You started to talk about DCIS and Gilbert Welch's 2014 book over diagnosed is, you know, a glaring elucidation of how we are over screening for so many conditions. Over screening for blood pressure, continuing to lower the threshold for treatment, over screening for lipid abnormalities, over screening for prostate cancer, over screening for thyroid cancer, over screening for breast cancer. And it has not brought out more health, more life, less morbidity. All, all that it has done across the board is use of more pharmaceuticals across the board and increased morbidity. And in the case of dcis, it actually increases mortality because when you take someone with a non life threatening condition, treat them like they have a life threatening condition, you actually give some of them a life threatening condition in the way of cardiac disease, osteoporosis. I mean, there are consequences to taking away estrogen. Long term consequences for some people, not so long term like they develop these consequences early. So the thing that leads to dcis, the screening tool that leads to DCIS is mammogram. What do you think of that test?

Well, I think it's misused. I think it's misused. We've got to start from the standpoint of personal responsibility and letting people know that there's no substitute for it. So often when I speak in public, people will say, when we talk about over screening and that sort of thing, well then what do you think people should do? Like there isn't anything else. Okay, well, the first thing is the way that you become confident in your health is to take care of yourself. Okay, so why am I confident that my car will get me back to the office this afternoon? Because I maintain it. Why am I confident that my house isn't going to fall down while I'm at the office this afternoon? Because I take care of it, right? So I don't walk around all day long going, oh my God, oh my God, what if the roof falls in? And what of the, you know, I mean, things can happen, but I do everything I can to take care of them. People don't do that with their bodies. And so they walk around in this extremely anxious state. They're subject to all these messages that early detection saves lives and you have to be screened and that's the only way, you know, for sure. And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So when I talk to people, you know, I think that mammography is not all bad. I think it's misused. And, and the misuse of it gives people a false sense of security. And by the way, PSA testing and a lot of this other. A lot of other tests, too. It's not limited to breast cancer screening. But I think the first thing, we've got to get rid of this idea that as long as you're hanging out with doctors and getting screened and screened and screened and screened, they tell you nothing happened this year, you're fine. And by the way, this is being told to people by doctors who weigh 300 pounds and are visibly unhealthy. And that is another problem we have too. We have to model good behavior. We would not tolerate second grade teachers who can't read, and I don't want a CPA to file my tax returns who spent time in prison for tax evasion. Right. We have standards in other areas when we hire people to do various things for us. And I think doctors should model good behavior. And it doesn't mean everybody has to look like a fashion model. But come on, you know this, the smoking outside the ER is just the most visible. Like, what the heck, you know?

Yeah, no, I couldn't agree with you more. And I think that that is a major problem that probably starts at the medical school education level because we're not taught to model good behavior. And I mean, in surgical residency training, I can tell you that I can name the attendings that would go between cases to go have a cigarette. And the amount of drinking that happens in, in that population is tremendous. There are a tremendous amount of alcohol. There's a tremendous amount of alcohol consumed. They don't prioritize sleep. They're not exercising. Like their, their jobs are very, very stressful. And I can tell you that the surgical lounge is not filled with people cross legged meditating between cases.

Right, Right.

Like, that's not what's happening. So they. I don't know that they're preaching it, but they for sure aren't practicing it.

Right. Well, and there's another aspect of medical school too, and I've heard many doctors and I. Prasad's talked about this a lot, and it's even the way that doctors and training are introduced to patients. And I remember seeing a podcast where Prasad said, we got to get rid of calculus as a precursor to medical school application, because I've never used calculus with any cancer patients ever in my life. They don't ask how were my calculus. Yeah, that is valid. Then the second thing he said is that from the Very beginning, the doctors should go to school in the morning and they should be seeing patients in the afternoon with doctors and starting to learn how to interact with people. Then the third thing, and this is something I've done some research on and it just absolutely has to end, is all this standardization. And this goes back to when the Affordable Care act was passed. And so the whole idea, it always sounds good in the beginning. We're going to collect the best practices and then those are going to be the ones that we encourage and reimburse. And what it turned into is, oh, you only get reimbursed if you do it this way. And then so this leaves doctors very little choice. And doctors should be able to use their judgment. Good doctors need to use their judgment and should be able to use their judgment. And the other thing is, a friend of mine who supervises residents was telling me in the beginning, like when he, he said, if you turn the clock back 20 years ago, we used to take doctors around and we'd be asking, okay, Mrs. Jones is here in the bed. She's got these six things wrong with her. What do you think we ought to do with Mrs. Jones? Doctors had to think critically about what to do with Mrs. Jones. He goes, now it's like Mrs. Jones has high blood pressure. What do we do? You're spitting out answers to reductionist questions instead of trying to all of this standardization, we need to go back to a much more hands on, less technical standardization rules, guidelines that are generated by computers and algorithms. Because humans are not really treated very well with algorithms. As it turns out, we're not machines. It just doesn't work.

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Back to our show. You're absolutely right. I just, I heard a horrible story the other day of the, the business side of medicine where a very big orthopedic group was given a package from Medicare that said, listen, you know, right now we're paying you $18,000 to care for a person who you do a knee replacement in. So I'm going to propose that we now pay you $16,000 and if you can do it for less, we'll split the difference with you. So they, they worked to be able to only spend $14,000 on that, on the care or $15,000 on the care of that patient. So they got like a $500 bonus and then the next year they moved the bar to 15,000. So they figured out how to do it for 14,000 and they got a thousand dollar bonus and split the difference. Now it's 12,000 and they can't do it anymore. They simply cannot care for that patient for $12,000. And this is what it's become. It's like package it up and rinse and repeat. And what about the person that doesn't fit the mold, that doesn't fly through the system? They're not getting the care that they need because they're put into this package that doesn't fit everyone.

Yeah, you're right. You're right. And so it's again that standardization and I think the answer to that is I think more and more doctors and surgeons, they're going to open their own surgical centers like the plastic. The plastic surgeons were really very smart. They got themselves away from the hospital environment. And I don't have any great love for some of them either. But the point is that they can do what they want to and they can, they can spend time with patients and that sort of thing. And by the way, one thing that happened, this happened a long time ago. It was before all the COVID nonsense. A couple of breast surgeons left Ohio State University's medical center and set up their own breast cancer surgery center. And they had developed some ways to keep women from Being readmitted to the hospital with complications and all this kind of thing. And they were going out, it was really interesting. They were going out to see people who administered self insured health plans at the corporate sites and saying, we can do this for less because we don't have all that overhead. It wasn't cutting the cost or the service or in any way. It was just we don't have that enormous $10 billion complex to worry about. And it's just the two of us. And we only do this one thing. We're breast cancer surgeon. That's all we're going to do here. And so we can do it for less and we have much better results. And one of the corporate clients that we worked with at the time said, what we're going to do is we're going to say to our employees who have breast cancer, you go over here, we pay 100% of the tab, you go over here to OSU or wherever. And it's the standard deductibles and co pays and whatever. So they were driving people to the better option. It was really a better option. I'd like to see more of that kind of innovation where sometimes it results in cost cutting, but it also results in better care and a better relationship with the physicians and the healthcare professionals you're interacting with.

And I think in the case of breast cancer, that model actually works quite well. Where it starts to get complicated is in the, like a colon cancer where they're spending multiple days in the hospital and taking care of, you know that that level of patient is different than the outpatient breast surgery, right?

I agree.

And the other part of it, and this is something that when I trained as a breast surgeon, part of my training was reconstruction and I worked with the reconstructive surgeons and most of them give up breast cancer reconstruction because it doesn't pay nearly as much. There's a lot of work involved, there's a lot of emotion involved. Like it's very different than their breast implant, you know, their augment patients. It's different than their blepharoplasty patients, their facelift patients, like their light, their liposuction patients, just different. There's an emotional investment there that doesn't exist for, for any of the others. There's a fear there that doesn't exist. It's harder work. And so a lot of them give it up for, you know, the easier life. But the ones that do do it.

Because.

When we think about medicine and medical care, is it a right or is it A privilege in the area of cancer, it's thought of as a right, as an entitlement. And so if in fact it's an entitlement, it's something that insurance should pay for, no questions asked, that kind of thing. And so it's very hard for the providers to walk outside of that system.

It is.

And. But I think I did it. But I'm not a conventional oncologist anymore. I'm not operating on anyone. I'm not administering chemotherapy. I'm just not functioning in that capacity, which is why I could walk away from the system. But if you want to function in that conventional way, it's very hard to do it outside of the parameters of the system.

I agree. And another thing, I think you brought up the issue of insurance. And one of the reasons why this has become such a contentious issue is because insurance companies have been asked to pay, to pay for egregious protocols that have no hope of working. I mean, just think about. And since you have an oncology background, you know, a lot of these new drugs being approved on extend life for a single day. So you pay 100,000, the insurance company reimburses for $100,000 for a year of drugs that extends progression free survival by 45 days, but doesn't extend life. Another very good example is what happened back, I think it was late 80s, early 90s, when the whole scandal with that South African doctor who had published the fraudulent data saying that he was doing bone marrow harvesting. I don't know if you heard this story, but. And it's not an isolated case where something like this is happened, but he published.

I did not hear this story. So can you give more details?

Yeah, sure.

I don't know what you're referring to.

Oh my gosh. This is. But I wish I could tell you this is the only time that it happened. But this guy's name was Boswada and he was a South African oncologist, breast cancer oncologist. And he claimed that what he was doing was administering multiple types of chemotherapy. And the reason was because the side effect profile would be different if you use different drugs and you bring these women, you harvest some bone marrow, then you bring them to the brink of death, put them in a clean room in a hospital, and then you do a bone marrow transplant. And he claims his cure rate was something like 60 or 70% for stage 3 and 4 cancer. This caught on here in the United States and Duke University Medical center became the epicenter for it. And insurance companies said, we don't Want to pay for it. And they were right. It was unproven. And so women sued to get this, to get reimbursement. Nobody knows exactly what the tab ended up being. It was like 6 billion, something like that. Reimbursement. This is back in the late 80s, early 90s. So one day at a conference, all these doctors are together, and everybody's talking about the fact that nobody's ever produced the results that Biswoda did. So somebody said, maybe we ought to go to South Africa and see this guy, which maybe we should have done that in the beginning. So they find out there's nobody there. His data was all fraudulent. There were no records for most of the patients. He just made it up. And so when people beat up insurance companies. I'm no big fan of insurance companies, but the reality is that they have a point of view, too, in this whole mess. And we're not going to fix this. If we continue to tell insurance companies that you're going to have to pay for whatever we dream up and whatever cost it's going to be, if the FDA approves it or Duke University wants to do it, you're going to pay. Because they've been doing that for years. They can't make the books balance on the side of the women. 9,000 women died of the treatment. 30,000 were permanently disabled. And guess who gets to pay for that? The insurance companies and the government safety net. So this brings us back to, we have to use an informed process for all this. In other words, before you go to court screaming and hollering that your cancer treatments are being withheld from you by nasty insurance companies that just want to make money so their CEO can live in a big mansion. And by the way, that thinking is what resulted in its CEO getting gunned down the street in New York. That thinking is very dangerous in a number of different areas. Let's bring a guy from South Africa here and comb through his data and see if there's anything there before we run off to the races. And we're all enchanted with the shiny new thing and that goes on all the time. And so we just. We have a carelessness about healthcare, a lack of discipline that bothers me greatly and it affects all branches. And I'm not. And by the way, there are shining lights. I'm glad to have met you because you're a shining light in this. And I have friends who I think Vinaya Bresson is the shining light. Thinking doctor, critically thinking, willing to speak out even if it threatens his job. And you know, so we. And I have some friends who've been able. Who've done that. I have a psychiatrist who supervises psychiatric residents and said, well, won't let them spend time with drug reps. And they complain. They say, well, all the other doctors are like. She says, well, if you. When you're here, you know. No. I said, well, one of these days you're going to get fired. She said, I don't care. But we're not. We're not entertaining drug reps in this department under my watch. So there are shining lights out there. But that is so rare. That is so rare. But that needs to be the standard. We need to up the standards and we make. And make everybody out there a game. And evidence based. And that evidence based has been so polluted with ridiculousness. You know, a lot of. A lot of medicine is based on sound reasoning, not sound science. Sounds like it should work, but.

Right, right. And it's a huge issue. I forget. I forget who wrote the book. I think it was called Cancer, and it was all about the pharmaceutical industry, the development of new oncologic drugs, and the fact that we have become a system where we put in all of these surrogate endpoints that have nothing to do with increasing survival. And then we approve these drugs, which don't work any better than the drugs that are now off patent. Right. But instead of them being completely affordable, we've taken something that is, you know, I'm making up a number, but I don't know, it's $1,000 in infusion, and we're substituting in a drug which does not work better, which does not extend life, which has never even been proven to increase survival. Because that was not the end point of the study.

Right.

The end point of the study was response to treatment.

Right.

So.

And now. And now we're paying $100,000 for an infusion for nothing, for no benefit, and in. In many cases, increased toxicity.

Yeah. And. And that's a. Cancer is a particular issue where we need for the various factions to talk to each other. I don't know if you read Kelly Turner's book, Radical Remission.

Oh, my God.

She's.

She's one of my favorite people on earth.

Yeah.

And her books, Radical Remission and Radical Hope, they are assigned reading to everyone that I work with.

Yep. That's the same thing we do. And the other thing is, I tell people to subscribe to that podcast series, which is free. And by the way, I listen to those podcasts when I'm cleaning house or Cooking food or whatever. And I learned stuff that I didn't know. But the whole approach, and we've seen this work so often with cancer patients, is to use the best of everything. You know, people are. People tend to want to pick a camp. I don't want any conventional treatment. I tell people all the time that would be a fatal mistake if you didn't have this surgically removed or if you decided not to have any chemotherapy. The problem isn't chemotherapy. The problem is the stupid use of it. And the other thing is, older drugs are sometimes quite effective, not very expensive, and when used with. In combination with alternative medicine, lead to very, very good responses, particularly if the cancer patient is in a good mental space. If they think they're going to live, they're going to live. And if they don't, maybe not so much too, you know. So the right.

The number one predictor of how long you're going to live is how long you think you're going to live.

Yep, exactly.

That is the number one predictor.

Oh, and I've seen this. I've seen people who, who are alive 10, 12 years later that if you looked at the. Their original file, you'd think it was impossible. And then I've seen people who I thought could survive, who didn't because they really, they. They just didn't have the energy and the. Because it takes energy to fight with the cancer institutions and, and that sort of thing. We have, we have a member, longtime member, now five years, four and a half years past diagnosis of stage four ovarian cancer. And, and she's volunteering at the Y and going to church and living a great life. And she's gets a little conventional treatment. And, you know, we're not trying to get rid of it. We're trying to just extend her lifespan so she dies of old age instead of cancer. But the point that I want to make is that the. Where she's getting treatment, I think they're kind of aggravated that she's still alive. It's like, oh, you again, you don't fit into our, our expectations. And now we don't know what to do with you. So.

Yeah, well, I think that's the start of Kelly Turner's book, Radical remission is that, you know, she went when she was doing the research for the book and talking to these medical oncologists about these cases of radical remission. And at first they were like, no, they don't exist. Right. Like, everyone who refuses treatment dies. And she came back to them and she said, you know, I have all these people who refuse treatment and didn't die or, you know, didn't do everything that you told them and didn't die. And he. And the response from medical oncology was, yeah, we don't talk about those because we don't want to create false hope for people.

Which is ridiculous. Yeah, right.

It's crazy. The book I was talking about is the Cancer Code by Jason Fung. Did you ever read that one?

I have not read that, but I will, I'll write it down.

I feel bad putting another book on your list. Oh, no, but, but it was, it was a really good one. Really looking, examining the behind the scenes business of medicine in the cancer world because it's unfortunately an undeniable aspect and it runs the gamut. It, it's, it's why we over screen, it's why we over diagnose it. It's why we over treat. And there's just a lot of motivation there. Again, I'm not saying that I think doctors are pawns in the game, unfortunately. I think that they're put in a terrible, terrible position. And you know, had I not gotten sick, I don't think that I would have ever lifted my head up in that. I went to medical school, did my residency, did my fellowship, went to work. $500,000 in debt, and I put my head down and worked.

Right.

I did exactly what I was trained to do. I did it really, really well. And why would I ever question if what was taught to me was true, if what was taught to me was the right thing to do, why. Why would I ever question that there would be no reason for it right? Until it was about me.

And that's how a lot of doctors wake up. It's about them or a family member and they start to say, something's not right here. And unfortunately, it's unfortunate that that's happening, but it's good that it's happening more often because I think that I remember reading Malcolm Gladwell's the Tipping Point, where something starts and then it has to gather steam very slowly. It's almost imperceptible until it reaches the point where there's no question that a shift is coming. And I think we're building to that. And I think we've got the consumer side of it is ready. Consumers want something different and a lot of doctors want something different, which is why we train health professionals how to open their own practices and make money at it. Because that's another thing too. Doctors get no business training. I came From a business background, which is why I was able to make my thing work. But a lot of doctors don't get business training, so they don't really know how to make money. And we have to talk about money. Right. And by the way, it can be done without taking insurance reimbursement. Because part of the informed process is saying to people, look, and I write about this in my book too, you have to take care of your body and pay for it. Okay? My car insurance company does not pay for me to get the oil change or to change out the power steering fluid or to get new tires when it's time or to rotate them. It pays for if the car is in an accident or a tree falls on it. Right. The same thing with. Can you imagine if every time the gutters needed to be cleaned, I called my homeowner's insurance company and a couple of bricks fell out of the chimney? And I call my. Okay, so my homeowner's Insurance would be $42,000 a year and nobody could afford insurance. Right. So. So we've got to go back to the place. And I think this will encourage personal responsibility. I tell people all the time, if you took care, if you took care of your body like you take care of your house and your cars, you'd be in great shape because you'd spent. You would make sure that the scheduled maintenance was done every day. And scheduled maintenance starts with breakfast. Then it starts with the next step is the gym. And then the next scheduled maintenance for the day is lunch, and then the next scheduled maintenance is dinner. And then what are you reading and what's your state of mind and what do you do for relaxation and what are you doing to challenge your brain and what is your social life like? I mean, this is all scheduled maintenance for human beings. And we have to get as focused on that as we are in cars and that sort of thing. The other thing, too, I said this in a conversation I was in last night at my business. I have a 10,000 square foot building full of humans. I've got a commercial kitchen and a hot yoga studio, and a gym is playground for people like me. Right. But the point is that my insurance company comes in every couple years. They show up to look around, let's see what the gym looks like. Let's look at the kitchen, you know, is there.

Yeah, they want to. They want to copy you.

Yeah, yeah. I'm accountable for keeping the place. And by the way, every couple years, the landlord sends an email saying, our insurance company companies coming in to check out, to make sure that the roof's not leaking in the whole nine yards. Okay. So really that's what health insurance companies should be doing, is making sure that humans are keeping up with scheduled maintenance because we can't afford to insure humans who don't. And that's part of the reason the system is collapsing, too.

I agree.

And I have repeatedly said our insurance system is broken. And that is another part of what's wrong, because people expect their insurance companies to pay for the maintenance, and so they're not taking care of themselves because there's no motivation for them to do that.

Right. Well, the system lets them do it, you know. The system lets them do it. And to their credit, you know, to defend humans a little bit. Nobody's ever explained the rules of the game this way. But I think the way to get to people is to basically say, economically, you can't. You can't go on like this. And the system is so terrible that it is to the place where people are willing to entertain something different. And I think that the answer, my proposal is, the first thing is we have to agree on these informed principles. Everybody has to agree on the same principles. We have to. And like I said, I don't know any reasonable person who's going to look at this list and say, I'm opting out on the epidemiological studies, dictating protocols. Really? You want to make that argument in public? Good luck with that. So, so we start there. The second thing is we have to get people to take financial responsibility. And that's getting less and less difficult to do because the CO pays. Unless you're on Medicaid, the CO pays are huge. Medicare doesn't pay for anything anymore. My dad spent, I think close to a million dollars on my mother. Medicare wouldn't pay. So. So anyway, I think we get people committed to financial responsibility. And a cost sharing program like the Christian cost sharing programs have done a very good job. First of all, they don't let you in unless you commit to taking care of yourself. Okay. Yeah. The second thing is that they basically when. When a huge expense comes up, they just send it out to the group. I have a member right now who went to an alternative clinic for cancer treatment. $150,000. And they paid it all. They paid it all. She's a large brain cancer patient still alive three years later because she did not do the conventional treatment. And so we know that that can work. Those things have been around for a long, long time. And then we get doctors out of the system and free them from the prisons that they're in and teach them how to have fun. So this is kind of interesting. People keep asking me, when are you going to retire? I go, what do you mean?

Why would you retire?

65 is when people retire. I'm going to be 69. And you know, I'm not retiring. I've got another 30 years of stuff to do. And they look at me like I've flown in from Mars. But, but what I, what I see in them is they're working in a system where nobody in their right mind would stay a minute longer. Then you have to. It's like looking at your watch all the time. When can I get the heck out of here? Right? And I tell them, come over to my side of the, of this where it's fun, where work every day is fun and the people are fun. And yeah, they're sick and cranky when they show up, but when you help them, they get better. And you see people get better and it's fun, right? It's fun. Put the fun back in medicine.

Yeah. Oh, it's tremendously rewarding, that's for sure. So you keep referring to these principles and I know that you are very, you've made it a priority to practice evidence based medicine.

Right.

So what are these principles that you're referring to?

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I don't have a list in front of me, but I'll go through some of them. The first thing is Occam's razor. When, when this goes back to the 14th century. Fryer. When more than one option is available, the simplest is usually the best. So I use this, I always teach by analogy. So I live in Columbus, Ohio, and if I hear hoof beats outside my window, it could be zebra. Probably it's deer. So before I start barricading the windows and that sort of thing, I'm going to call the zoo to see if it's any zebras have left the premises. You know, we have a fascination with exotica and, you know, people are. If you're an overweight, diabetic, hypertensive person, I don't really think you got that way because of glyphosate. I hate to tell you that. I think it's probably bad diet, not taking care of yourself, no exercise, you're dehydrated, et cetera. So Occam's razor, the separating sound reasoning from scientific and evidence. I mean, the whole vitamin D hoax was based on sound reasoning. People who are sick have low vitamin D levels. Therefore vitamin D levels, if they're too low, cause the sickness. And there's no evidence of that. In fact, the evidence is reverse causation. You get sick, the D levels go down. So you have to look at, make sure you're not falling into the sound reasoning trap because that, that really has generated a lot of very bad protocols. The statistically significant but clinically meaningless is a, is a big one. If you look at, if you look at statin drugs for primary prevention, the number needed to treat something like 400. And I tell people, you know, I hate to tell you this because I know everybody thinks they're special, but you're probably not the one out of 400. You're probably 399, right? So we prescribe a lot, we do a lot of things to people that don't have a big impact, and then we ignore the stuff that does have a big impact. The use of epidemiological studies is. So I tell people, I'll give you three correlations that you can take to the bank. The more phone poles that go up in a country, the more heart attacks. So clearly you don't want to buy a house near a phone pole. The more ice cream consumed, the more drownings. Ice cream clearly should be banned. And in countries where women are getting more driver's licenses, the breast cancer rate is going up. So if the United States cared about females, they would not let them drive. Drive. Okay. Now, what's really going on here? In Westernized countries, more women are driving. Like in Saudi Arabia, they're westernizing. So what happens? Different diet. So taking away the driver's license means they maybe couldn't go get fast food. But it's not really going to solve the problem, you know? And ice cream. When is ice cream consumed? In the summer. Where do we consume it? By the pools in the ocean. So if you ban the ice cream, you're still going to have the drownings. So it is astounding to me the amount of. And by the way, two things can be true at the same time. I think that a valid discussion about fluoride, for example, is whether or not you can force people to consume fluoridated water. But the studies that they're using are garbage, just plain garbage. To make the argument against fluoride. And this decision out of Florida, out of California that everybody's saying is so fabulous, I did an interesting thing. I read it and I tell people, you know, if you take up reading, you're going to be amazed at how much embarrassment you save yourself. So I read the thing. It's 89 pages long. And I also looked into the judge who issued the decision. He was nominated four times. His own party wouldn't approve him. He was that bad. So you start with this, a questionable person to begin with, and then he starts out by saying there's 75 epidemiological studies and 19 of them are high quality. But there is no such thing as high quality epidemiological studies for making treatment decisions, right? So because you don't have any confounding factors, that's another thing to be taken into consideration, Confounding factors and all that. So on this business of fluoride and iq, it doesn't prove anything. It's all association. Nobody knows the IQ of the parents. Nobody knows the education level of the parents. Nobody knows anything about the school systems these kids are in and how long they've been there, whatever. So he actually says. I think he gets to page five, and he says, the EPA doesn't have to do anything except look into it on the basis of my decision. And then you've got these people who don't read saying, we won. I don't know what the hell you think you won, but. But there's nothing to win. This is a piece of crap decision by a questionable judge who gets overturned by, you know, the. The Circuit court most of the time. And so, so anyway, that's, that's, that's a rule, I think that you always look at the conflicts of the, of the characters who write these articles, and they're not disclosed like they're supposed to be in journals. So Google's a handy thing to look up what people have not disclosed. I think I'm trying to think what some of the others are. But, but this gives you an idea. I mean, I don't know anybody really who would argue with me on these kinds of things. Um, and it's one of the reasons people don't like to argue with me. And it's not because I'm so smart. It's because if you start with a set of rules, I mean, if you and I play chess, there's not much that can go wrong because we agree what the rules of the game are. All right, so, so we can outwit each other to a certain extent, but what we can't do is change the rules halfway through. All right, I'm going to swap out some of my pieces. And I don't like the way this chess game is going. Right. We agree when we sit down. And so I think if we, if we started with this in mind and we got, and we basically then separate the informed from the uninformed. Over here, informed people who agree to principles, and over here, the people who are saying, I just want to say what I want to say. I want to blame overweight diabetic hypertension on oil well fracking and glyphosate. Okay, great. Well, you can, you can go. We will now label you as an uninformed person. I don't mean name calling. I mean helping people sort out what's right and what's not right. And then when you don't know, you don't know. There isn't always an explanation for everything. And sometimes we have to say we just don't know why this happens. Or sometimes things just happen. You can do everything right and still end up with cancer because bad things happen to good people. And that's happened since the beginning of time.

Yeah, that's absolutely true. And I, I say even, you know, from a surgical perspective, you can do everything right and patient can still not have a good outcome.

Right, right.

Right. Because there's more going on. And so I think we, we need to be less invested in the outcome necessarily, and more invested in helping people, people along the process.

You're exactly right. I could not have said it better. Yeah, that's exactly right. And it's going to be a lot of work to fix. This is why I've got to stay alive for 30 more years.

Because before I you do, we need you.

Well, I want to see this fixed because I think it's really. It's really important. We've reached this tipping point. Can't go on the way that it is anymore. It's too horrible for so many people. A lot of people suffering.

Yeah.

And by the way, going back to how we started our discussion with overweight people, the saddest part about catering to people who are overweight and telling them it's okay is I don't know many overweight people who are super happy about being overweight. None of them are happy. Okay. So it would be one thing if we said, well, you know, we're really not telling the truth about it and that kind of stuff. But all in all, at least we're telling them what they want to hear. And they're happy clams. No, they're not happy clams. They're not living their best life. So. So this is something that's really ripe for shifting. And I think we're going to be able to do it. I really do. I think we've reached that point where it can happen.

I hope so. I think change usually doesn't come until, you know, you are at the point of desperation in that most people avoid change because they fear the unknown. So the fear of the unknown, you know, the fear of staying the same, has to be more than the fear or less than the fear of the unknown.

Right.

For people to really commit to making a shift and making a change. And, you know, it's not new that our system is broken, but we are going to get to a point, point, I think, in the very near future where we simply cannot afford to go on like this.

Right.

Where we won't be able to sustain even the system the way it's working now. We won't be able to take care of these people who are so sick from metabolic diseases that you and I know are completely reversible diet and lifestyle.

Well, I think the. The good news, and I always have some good news, I think that the government, at some point in time, because more and more and more people are covered by government insurance and these exchanges and that kind of thing, and this isn't going well. I think at some point in time, they're going to start facilitating people moving to other systems. One of the things I have a nonprofit that started gathering people up during the COVID department debacle And I've said, you know, we started during the COVID debacle because people needed. They needed each other. And it was a frightening time. And we got involved in a lot of litigation. We're still involved in a lot of litigation regarding that. But. But I think the new thing, you know, we've moved beyond that to a certain point. And now the reason to gather people is that to. Is to accumulate a critical mass where you could flip the switch and say, we have enough informed people that we can really make this mess irrelevant. And there's a chapter in my book called making them Irrelevant. In other words, we got to stop thinking that there's some way we're going to write to our congressmen and get them to change it. Our congressmen are in the pocket and women are in the pocket of big Pharma. They're not going to do anything like this. And there aren't enough of them who agree on this to get anything done anyway. But the answer to that isn't to throw up your hands, is to basically say, listen, we used to get along without so much government because people in communities took responsibility for themselves and each other. Let's go back to that. And if we get enough of those communities taking responsible people taking responsibility for themselves and each other and those communities having a relationship with each other nationwide now, that can make a whole lot of what's wrong in America irrelevant. And we can get people out of the education system that's all messed up. And we can get them out of the health care system that's all messed up. And we can, we can build our own structures. You know, there's an interesting moment in history that you might, you might know about the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. So it's been done before. I'm a history buff, by the way. When I'm not reading about health, I read history, a lot of it. So the communist regime in Czechoslovakia was just one of the most horrific in history. And so people in Czechoslovakia survived it by building a parallel society. And one beautiful example of how it worked is the communists didn't want them having American films translated to their native language because people would be all enchanted with all the freedom over here. So cinemas weren't allowed to show American films, but there was a very robust underground cinema network. Everybody was showing films in their family room and basement and that sort of thing. Everybody saw all the movies they wanted to. And then when the government said, you have to. If you have a business, you have to put the sign in your window, well, people refused to do it. And so they couldn't close the businesses because the communists had to buy food and shoes, too. So it's like, well, you know, we'll just let it go. So. So we're more powerful than we think. And I think by, by working on setting up a parallel society that works on structures like education and health, which are super important and also super failing right now, we could, we could do. We could make a big difference here and it wouldn't take long for it to happen. I mean, I think really, it's all going to happen in the next five or six years.

I hope so. And people like you and I are certainly setting up our lives, our businesses, our practices in anticipation of that because we know that it.

What was.

Is not sustainable and shouldn't be. Right. It's not. It's not serving people. It's not in the best interest of people. I do want to know your opinion on fluoride.

Well, I think that. I think it's more nuanced than people think. I think that people want to. When people look at issues like this, they want. Yes, no, always, never. It's not that kind of an issue. And so if you apply your informed principles, right. The first thing is you throw out these up and epidemiologic studies and judgments by judges that are bad. I think, I think at one time that guy even said, we're going to suspend the trial because it's complicated and hope you guys can figure something out. So, I mean, just like, ooh, right. But I think that there's no question that fluoride, when it was introduced, had a positive impact. You can look at communities that were not fluoridated. It's been. There are communities that have taken it out of the water and then lobbied to put it back in. And there's no question that if you take it out, you're going to have Medicaid bills that go up these kids that mean the way that you take care of your kids and other people take care of the kids, we're completely exempt from this type of thing. But we are all paying for Medicaid patients and these kids are going to have more cavities. I mean, we have good data showing that they're going to have a lot more cavities and it's going to cost billions and billions of dollars. I think the most logical legal argument is, I am a taxpayer, I pay a water bill, and you shouldn't make me drink anything or consume anything I don't want to consume. That's the actual legal argument that has the most traction. And then before you put that argument, before you get a group of citizens, you say, okay, because we do have some. Some data on this. All right, so I live in Franklin county, and if we're going to take the fluoride out of the water, we know what the Medicaid bills are here. We know how many Medicaid patients are seeing dentists paid by Medicaid. So you say, okay, we're going to look at taking it out and just understand that the cost to the system is going to go up by X dollars if we do it. Okay? So knowing those things, let's all take a vote and see where that ends up. And that would be an actual informed approach to it, where we get rid of the screaming and hollering on both sides and the people who don't read. Okay? That pesky problem with people who don't read. And then people who don't read listen to the people who don't read. And that's how we gather momentum toward nonsense and see where it ends up. I don't really think it's as harmful as people say it is, and I don't think it's as helpful as some people say it is. I think there's this wild exaggeration on both sides. And I also think that part of the problem is that public health has discredited itself so much that nobody wants to listen to anything they have to say. And that's also not good, because one day there is going to be something that's going to make people drop dead on the sidewalk. And you really ought to stay home and everybody's going to yawn and go out and drop dead on the sidewalk because these people have just buried themselves. And so we have to restore some trust and. And public health.

You. You can't blame them because there has been a lot of. There. There have been lies that are.

Oh, yeah.

So, yeah.

Oh, I agree. No, they've buried themselves. But believe me, you know, the. I think I watched just a few minutes of the one hearing where Kennedy RFK said to. In a screaming match with one of the people screeching at him. You know, Rochelle Walensky sat here and lied and lied and lied and light. And nobody's brought her back and asked her to answer any of those questions again or, you know, nobody's to put her in the hot seat. And I. I'm less. I'm less interested in her being in the hot seat than changing the structure of the CDC so that there won't be any more. Michelle Walensky's in charge of it. But that's, that's another thing I cover in the book. I go back through public health, which has been generally a disaster since its inception.

And so I can't wait to read your book. It only came out on Friday, which is why I haven't gotten it yet. But I'm really looking forward to it. So I want to end with you telling us about your book and why you wrote it. But first I want to ask you if you could write a one page owner's manual for your health. Right. Kind of words that most everyone should be living by. So the same way that you're taking care of your house in the same way that you're taking care of your car, what would be in that owner's manual for your health?

Yeah, I think the first thing is take off your clothes and stand in front of the mirror and you'll know if you need to lose weight or build muscle. People go, I don't know if I'm overweight or not. And I tell them, I'll tell you, easy way to find out. You don't even need a medical doctor to help you with this. So it's unpleasant. But look at yourself in the mirror and be honest. Take an honest assessment of where your health is. The average human adult will consume one ton of food in a year. That's a lot of matter if you think about if somebody dumped it in your street. It's impossible to think that that's not going to matter when you take it in. So look at the quality of your diet. A lot of people are promoting some pretty dangerous diets right now. And so again, let's use the informed principles to determine the best diet for humans. And there is a best diet for all creatures. You know, my cat's a carnivore. If I feed him potatoes, it takes me about 10 days to kill him. And if I eat his Diet takes about 25 years for that to kill me. Right? So get the diet right, drink good clean water, get out in the sun. You should have a tan by the end of the of the season because that's your body. Makes 10 different kinds of vitamin D and lots of other photo products. Exercise your body. You got to be aerobically fit and muscular because that's the only way you live in your own home until you die. I'm living in my dream home. I want to die here. I don't want to live in a nursing home in one room. Look at what kind of intellectual stimulation you're getting or not. Read, join a book club, learn to play tennis, travel if you can, spend time with other people. Look at, look at, look at making a difference. I find that people who stay alive often stay alive just by sheer force of will because they feel that they have something important to do. And so look at that and why you're here and, and then express gratitude every single day. Write down something that you can appreciate because most people don't appreciate how great it is here. And, and it's easy and it's easy not to. You know, there's traffic and there's this and there's that and then a bill comes in the mail and you get focused on all this minutia. But you know, one thing that I've been doing probably the last several years is just seeing how beautiful a sunset is and how pretty the deer are in my yard and how funny Winston, my cat, is when he's, I have a butterfly bush outside my window. This is my home office. And when he's trying to climb the wall because the butterflies are swarming around.

Oh, the butterflies must drive him bonkers.

I mean, it's the best thing ever. And one of my co workers planted, did my front yard. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I thought the first time he saw the butterflies, they, she planted it. Last year we didn't have butterflies, but when they, when they came this year, I thought he was actually going to climb the wall. That was how excited he was. So, so taking the time to just see how fun that, how much fun he was having. You know, I have a little place up in Port Clinton with a private beach, you know, just a two minute walk away. And the last few years I've just spent an awful lot of time walking on that beach thinking I'm the luckiest person in the world. Most people don't have one house, I got two and I've got this, you know, and so appreciate things. That alone will extend your life a lot.

Yeah. I don't think we talked about sleep, but I'm sure you appreciate the importance of sleep.

Yes. And another thing I learned, I read, I can't remember the name of the author, but it's a book called no More so Sleepless Nights. It was written by the guy who set up the sleep lab at Mayo, I think before they started drugging everybody. And one of the things he says in the book is we've, we've gotten into issuing sound bites about sleep. And people have different sleep patterns. There are short, medium and long sleepers I'm a short sleeper. So if you try to get me to stay in the bed for seven hours, I sleep lighter and lighter and lighter till I'm actually groggier than if I get out of the bed after five. Einstein was a long sleeper. Nine, ten hours. And Edison was a short sleeper at two, three hours. And then he would nap. And so get your sleeping pattern, figure out what your pattern is and then be respectful of it because sleep deprivation, it takes this. It just sucks the joy out of everything.

Yeah, yeah. And you make bad decisions.

Yeah.

Right.

Including driving a car when you don't realize how impaired you are and because of falling asleep at the wheel is one of the biggest causes of automobile accidents.

Yeah. I love how that list started off with taking off your clothes and kind of a mirror and, and look at yourself with honesty, which I'm sure most people do not do. I mean, I have so much even seen and denial is undeniable.

Right.

I have seen women with like fungating cancers growing out of their breast and how it got to that and how, you know, they're married and their partner doesn't know.

And.

And I think it's because we, we just stopped. We stopped looking. We stopped looking.

Yeah.

And it's important to look because that's going to tell you the truth.

Yeah. And it's not in a beat yourself up kind of way. It's just honest assessment. You know, if I was, if I took over a healthcare company that was failing, which I don't want to do, but if I did, the first thing I do is I'd say, okay, why is this place falling apart? Okay, these are the problems. This is what we have to fix. And that's what I'm suggesting people do. Your starting point is to figure out where you haven't been paying attention and you should and then organize your life. Believe it or not, my. We teach a time management class to our consumers and I also teach it to my health professionals who study to learn how to do what we do. And because there is enough time. There absolutely is enough time. You just have to discipline yourself to get a paper planner and start planning out how you're going to spend your time in a deliberate way. And people don't do that. Yeah.

I was going to ask you, like, what do you say to the person who thinks they're too busy to take care of their health? Because there are a lot of them.

Yeah. And the thing I tell them is when people get diagnosed with stage three cancer, they drop everything and take care of their health. And the second thing is you have the time. You do have the time. You're just not using it properly. And so in the beginning, when we teach this, it's like a two and a half hour class and we recommend they get a pretty particular type of planner to do it. People will say, but you. What you're doing is you're planning every minute. And people don't realize how much free time I have. Like, I read a book every week and I sleep in a bed every night for the amount of sleep that I need. And I drive to my lake house and I walk on the beach and I have dinner with friends. But the reason I can do that and get everything done is because I planned it all out so that I'm not constantly scrambling around something always out of whack. The house is a mess, so there's nothing to eat in this refrigerator or, you know, or I've got something that has to be done on Tuesday and I didn't get to it till Sunday, so now I'm going to stay up all night. So if you're planning, you have time to do all of this stuff and then you also have time to enjoy it, because I really do. I mean, there's some days I drag myself to the gym and I'd rather not go, but generally speaking, if you have.

That's me every Monday and Thursday, by the way.

What's that?

That's me every Monday and Thursday dragging myself to the gym. Rather not go.

Yeah.

But then wouldn't forgive myself if I didn't.

Yeah. And once you get there, you're glad you did the whole nine yards and you set aside the time and you're not saying, well, I can't go to the gym because if I do that then I won't get this done. And you know, so. So the whole thing is planning and you. There is enough time. You just have to. We all have the same 24 hours a day. Just have to use it differently.

Yep. Tell us about the book. Who'd you write it for? Why'd you write it? What are we going to get from it?

Okay, I wrote it with, first of.

All, what's the name of the book?

Conversations with Pam the Power of Informed Healthcare.

And where are we getting this book?

You can get an autographed copy by calling our office. We should have them next week, I would think. And then you can get on Amazon, download it to Kindle. It's downloadable to Nook. You can buy the hard copy on. On Amazon. I wrote this book because I wanted to tie together all the things that we've been talking about. Public health, the history of public health, what the data show. There's. There's a chapter called my study. Your study gets into the rules of evidence. You know, how to live your best life, and the insurance system, the reimbursement system. We have a chapter called A Bad Way to Die. I talk about my mother, you know, she was a good example of a bad way to die. It was a terrible way to live. It ended too soon, and it was a bad way to die. But I want people to know that it's up to us to fix it. It's up to you to fix you. It's up to us to fix this. Out here. The insurance companies and the government and all that, they just kind of respond to what's going on out here. We have to fix out here. And the way that we do it is we gather together and we rise up when we say enough. And it starts with each individual person. Everybody, I think, has a tendency to wait for somebody to do it. And it starts with, you do it and you become a center of influence in your world, and then that's how it spreads. And one day you wake up and you have a million people organized and you can have your own healthcare system and you can make them irrelevant. You can actually make them that out there, that mess becomes irrelevant.

I couldn't agree with you more. I loved this conversation. Dr. Popper, if people want to hear more from you, where do they find you?

They can go to Wellness Forum, Health.com and our online calendar is there. We do lots of free stuff, by the way. We're always offering free stuff so you can get a chance to see what we're all about. Before you make a commitment to join. You can buy my new book. You can join Wellness Forum if you want to start a Food Over Medicine club. We started Food Over Medicine Clubs a year and a half ago, and we're establishing them in every neighborhood and city in the country. If you want to get involved with our legal efforts, you're welcome to do that. My email address is pampoppersm.com and I do read and answer my own emails. So if you write to me, you will hear from me.

Amazing. You are such an amazing person doing such great things. And I do believe that you're going to be around for a good long time and going to be, as my friend JJ Virgin says, very relevant at 100. There's no doubt in my mind that you are going to continue to be relevant because you're changing the standard and it is so needed.

Thank you.

So I loved my time with you. Thank you so much for being here today.

Thank you for having me.

And thank you all for joining us today. Make sure that you get Dr. Popper's book, Conversations with Pam, and know that this will be our first of many conversations together, I'm sure. And share this with someone who needs to hear it. And know that I will be back next week, same time, same place. It's Dr. Jen. Bye for now.

Sam.