Healing Through Functional Medicine: Dr. Jeffrey Bland's Revolutionary Vision with Joe Polish

The medicine that we have today we call the healthcare system is a disease care system. And it's actually pretty good at doing that. Quite honestly, I'm a product of an education in the disease care system, medical school education, PhD, all those things. But if we were to then say, how much is health embedded within that system, I think we would all come to recognize very little. So health is not just the absence of disease, it's the presence of function. So then I started to say, does our health care system, in the way that it's defined today, deliver anything related to function? And the answer is no. So feed the world. What does that mean? What do we want to feed the world? Do we want to feed the world calories? Do we want to feed them nutrition as defined by the American Society of Nutrition and the usda? Or do we want to feed their hearts, bodies, minds and souls with something that gives them full potential for their genes to express the white light of good health? That's a whole different set of objectives. Right. That last one I just talked about, and it's hard to codify in a mass production system that's based upon economics of efficiency, when you're going to really feed a person's body, mind and soul.

Effectively, how can you be a domino for someone else? The Joe Polish Show. Any problem in the world can be solved with the right genius network.

Thank all of you. What a privilege to be with this group of planetary change makers. It's energizing, it's speaking to my genesis and I'll be a better person leaving here as a consequence. So thank you.

You are welcome. Thank you. And so recently we spent a couple days on your boat and that was with Dr. Sachin Patel, his wife Deepa, Dr. Shiriyang. And that was amazing. How many of you by chance happened to see the interview that we did outside as a result of that yet? We just sent it out this week, but you should all have it sitting in your email box. But I would highly encourage that. So you've done a lot, you've created quite a bit. Yeah, exactly.

I'm a stir maker, by the way. This is my theme from TPT Barnum. Right. If you're not changing the world, you're not doing it.

Take the world and redefine.

Yep, exactly.

So you've had to. Has it been difficult? Have you gotten a ton of resistance from what I would consider. These are my words, not yours. The very corrupt healthcare industry. And I say corrupt because there's many parts of it that are not, but there's Many parts of it that are.

Is this a metric ton or a normal ton?

Yeah, it's a good question, right?

Oh, yeah. I've had my fair share over now, actually. What's very surprising, a couple months ago, I was giving a lecture to some physicians, and in the middle of the talk, it struck me subconsciously that this was actually the. The month and the day 50 years ago that I gave my first lecture to healthcare practitioners. So that's a half a century. And when I think about what's occurred over that half a century, then it was tough sledding at first, but momentum is on our side now. It's really changing rapidly.

Well, I'm gonna come back to that. So let's first define functional medicine. What is it?

So I think that the way of giving a definition of functional medicine is in part to do its antonym. So the medicine that we have today, we call the healthcare system, is a disease care system. And it's actually pretty good at doing that. Quite honestly, I'm a product of an education in the disease care system, medical school, education, PhD, all those things. But if we were to then say, how much is health embedded within that system? I think we would all come to recognize very little. And I have come to recognize over the 50 years that you can't burr the healthcare system out of a disease care system. There are two different models, two different language systems, two different objectives. And therefore, you need another kind of schema, another system that really focuses on health. And then you have to start asking, well, what is health? How do you metricize health? Now I'm going to define functional medicine because when you ask people, and we did this on our website a number of years ago, what is your definition of health? I was thinking that people would come up and say, well, it's the absence of some disease. I don't want to get cancer. I don't want to get heart disease. I want to get dementia. Those were very infrequent ANSWERS. Out of 24,000 people that responded, their definition of health was, I want to run a marathon. I want to be at my grandchildren's college graduation. I want to. I mean, there are all sorts of other things that when I codify them, I recognize we're really talking about function. So health is not just the absence of disease, it's the presence of function. So then I started to say, does our health care system, in the way that it's defined today, deliver anything related to function? The answer is no, except for rehabilitation in case of orthopedic injury or Maybe it used to be called functional medicine, meant psychosomatic medicine. It's all in your head. So someone asked me, when we defined functional medicine differently in 1990, why I chose that term to play with because it had some pejorative term before that that was really related to either geriatric medicine or psychosomatic medicine. But in 1990, I followed the literature fairly closely. I'm a bibliophile. And I came to recognize that there were new terms being applied to function, like functional cardiology, functional radiology, functional endocrinology. And these were then using the term functional in a different way to talk about physical, cognitive, metabolic and behavioral function. And if you could in fact quantify each of those and metricize them and roll them together, that was a person's real aspect of what they thought was health. So that became my. In 1982-84, when I was with Linus Pauling on sabbatical for my university position, that was my whole calling through talking to Dr. Pauling. How could we design a system that would incorporate health as a primary focus, that would codify and provide remedial approaches to improving a person's physical, metabolic, co cognitive, emotional, behavioral function? When I started to take that out, thinking it was really so simplistic an idea that everybody must subscribe to this, I got a lot of pushback from people saying, no, in the absence of disease, there is no worry. You were well until proven sick. So that's the change in the model.

Well, good for you for having the vision and even pushing through it. Elizabeth, she shared with me this quote a while back a few months ago. A healed patient is a lost client to the medical industry. Right. And it's true.

Can I stop you right there?

Yeah.

Because that is an incredibly important concept conceptually, if you, if you deep dive into that, which we won't do. But let's just go right to the next level of many levels. This concept that docs want to keep people sick is not true. I'm a medical school professor for 13 years, I was a tenured professor. I published 100 articles and research. And I recognize, having dealt with medical doctors now for the last 50 years, that they are really impassioned to do a good job and to get their patients well. But they're limited by their own specific catechism, the rules of the road, the way they're reimbursed, the way they're judged, the way their licenses are regulated. And that is the next level up. It's the administrative hierarchical level that makes medicine into A business. It really creates this. This. This fracture because doctors are leaving the profession. They're not fulfilled. They're not re enchanted. They thought they were going to spend all this time going through school and learning things to really help people. And then they get out there and they find they're an indirect salesman for the drug companies. And that is really unfulfilling. So I want to make really sure that we don't leave the wrong impression about docs. Docs want to do a good job, but by the standards of care, what's called usual and customary procedures, they're constrained by their licensure. And I could go through many examples of this. And we're trying to break that chain. We're trying to be the break the tyranny of the diagnosis as being the cause of medicine. That is a tyranny. When you get to what's called the icd, that's the international classification of disease. That's how a doctor is reimbursed based upon a diagnosis. It comes through an ICD code. It's now ICD 10. That then constrains them into a thinking that's very myopic, very siloed, and very turned to this whole concept of usual and customary. You can't have us and customary if you want to really create a healthcare system. And that's where we are.

Yeah, thank you. And let me speak to that, too, because just since I made that statement, I feel that the same way in a lot of systems. Me and Dan Sullivan have had this conversation about things start out as a movement or a cause, then some become a business, and then if they get corrupted, they become a racket. And I think there's a lot of rackets that are going on, and a lot of the people within these. It's a system, it's a systemic problem. The individuals oftentimes are. They're just how you just explained. They become inadvertently, you know, drug dealers for a pharmaceutical company. And how do you work within that system? You either change it or you have to leave it. And I. For instance, this was a very interesting stat from the. The book Dark Calories by who? I've now become friends with Dr. Kate Shanahan. And she talks about, you know, the gross domestic product, the GDP of healthcare is in the 18% range in the United States. Food is, I think, 5.4%, military is 3%, and technology is 1%, less than 1%. So almost $1 out of every $5 is going to healthcare. That's why you see so much pharmaceutical. That's why you see so much corruption. Just follow the money, right? And so right after I left the trip with you, me and Cherie went and spent four days with Dennis Belani. Where's Dennis at? Back here right now. He's, he's a big farmer in Saskatoon. He took me to, you know, this, the biggest farming, you know, convention, aginmotion, ca. And then I went to his facilities and then we went out with all these farmers and they're explaining everything to me related to seed oils and canola and organic and non organic and regenerative farming. Then I, you know, he introduces me to all these people. We go to the, you know, the agriculture department at the University of Saskatchewan. Or is it University of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan? And we're in Saskatoon. These fricking names. It's Canadians. And then we do an interview at the very end. I film a ton of stuff. And I also realize in that industry and I'm like still learning all this stuff where there are people in it that are great. Like, you know what I've learned from Dennis, these farmers, their perception is they're feeding the world. They want to feed the world. That's what they want to do. And so the question is like, then you have big agriculture, right? Well, what does that even mean? Because he's in big agriculture, he understands that sort of thing. But what I see is these food companies and what I notice is a lot of people don't talk to each other. You know, the influencers aren't talking to the farmers. The, the, the, the doctors aren't necessarily always talking to the farmers. I think you talk to everybody. I think in your world you're just trying to figure this out. And so I think in a lot of ways, what is the solution to this from your standpoint?

How do we. Well, I think you, once again, your brilliance, you know, penetrates through because it's below the surface. You have to listen to your words. So feed the world. What does that mean? What do we want to feed the world? Do we want to feed the world calories? Do we want to feed them nutrition as defined by the American Society of Nutrition and the usda, or do we want to feed their hearts, bodies, minds and souls with something that gives them full potential for their genes to express the white light of good health? That's a whole different set of objectives. Right. That last one I just talked about, and it's hard to codify in a mass production system that's based upon economics of efficiency when you're going to really feed a person's body, mind and soul effectively, particularly in a heterogeneous gene pile of our population. That's all these ethnicities are woven together. It's not like just the Japanese population or the Chinese population. You've got all these different variants that require different personalities for expression of optimal health. So when you start asking this question about feeding the planet, feeding the world, I think of Norman Borlaug, right, the father of the Green revolution. And I think of Robert Voigt, who was the father of the environmentalism of today. They lived at the same time, right? They were competitors of one another. Their ideologies were competitors. Avoigt was totally against the Green Revolution. Of course, Borlaug was saying, look at we're feeding the world, we're providing much more efficient, you know, we've 50 folded the increase in production per acre by using genetic hybrids and fertilizers and ag chemicals. So what's your objective? And the objective is to find a marriage of these two that you can use the planetary harmony to produce products that are good for an individual to feed their hearts, bodies, minds and souls. And is that possible? Absolutely possible. Based upon the way that we now understand the science of the soil microbiome, speaking to the plant roots that produce then the nutrients for which then animals eat them, for which we then eat them. That through line is the connection to our health as a planet. And we've lost that now, we're regaining it. Farmers know this and that's why we have these now. I never thought I'd be in organic farming, but now I own these organic farms in upstate New York where we're producing this 3,000 year old food called Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat. Because we're trying to find ways a to support small farms, but bring food that has this nutrient potential back that we now recognize scientifically has virtues and values to the feeding the body, mind and soul that you don't get from depleted foods that are in risk with a few B vitamins.

Okay, so before I forget how to pronounce it, Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat. What is so special about this?

Well, because we can pronounce it, it's special alone, right?

By the way, we showed Dr. Jeff how to utilize AI to make a song out of Himalayan Tartery Buckwheat. And it was singing this whole thing on his boat and I got this all on video. He's like, oh my God, you could actually do this.

My whole family's heard that so many times. Dad, turn that off, please. That's enough hundredth time to play. It was really beautiful. So the Tartan district of China is in the upper Himalayan district of China. So this tartary buckwheat comes originally from the Tartan district of China. It's 3,000 to 4,000 year old food. It's one of the two oldest agriculturally husband and foods on the planet. And it turns out that it has an extraordinary array of nutrients. 141ft because we've analyzed it. Nutrients that modulate how our genes express their function, particularly through the immune system. And so if you. I've been talking to Dan Buettner about the blue zones. What is characteristic of the diets of people in the blue zones that are living long and healthy and don't need a lot of modern medicine? What's one of the things? I mean clearly there are many parts of their lifestyle, community and relaxation and spiritual beliefs and so forth. But one of them in the diet is that they're consuming foods that are fulfilling the same process or principles as is tartery. Buckwheat. It contains their foods because they're colored like the rainbow. And what are those coloring agents in foods? Vegetables and fruits and grains and so forth. Those coloring agents are called flavonoids and polyphenols. We have neglected them in our science of nutrition. Until recently they were throwaway. We fed them and we gave them to fed pets. And so we made springy pets and worn out owners. And so now we find that these particular compounds, of which there are over 10,000 in an unrefined food supply, have extended extraordinary effects. Not like vitamins, but they're upstream to regulate how genes are expressed, particularly genes that are rapidly expressing themselves. And where are those? Those are the tissues, principally in the mucosal cells of our body, the gut mucosa, the lung tissue and the immune system. Do you know you're producing 1 million new immune cells every second sitting there today? 1 million new immune cells. Now, will they be as good, better or worse than the ones they're replacing? That's the question of our age. And why do you think we did so poorly with SARS? COV2 the worst developed country in the world with regard to outcome of COVID 19 more intubation, more hospitalization and more death. Not because we're older, but because our immune system sucked. Quite honestly, we were not measuring the right things. We're not looking at that first line of defense, the innate immune system which sits where on the surfaces of our tissues, the gut and the lungs, which are the sites that the SARS CoV2 spike protein attached. Now we start to recognize as we're piecing this in retrospect together, that as we departed from the foods that actually delivered those nutrients, it regulated those processes, that we pay the price thinking that we're the most well nourished population, the healthiest in the world, twice per capita in health care than any other country. But when you look at the outcomes, we had more death than anyone with sars. So all of this starts to make some sense in light of the new science that relates to what's going on with things that we learned long times ago, but we're having to relearn with the language of today.

Boy, that's great. There's so many things I could ask you about. So I've heard many times, most disease resides in the gut. I don't know if that's true or to what degree, how that relates. But where, if you're not feeling well, where do you start?

I start with Eli Metchnikov. Eli Metchnikov won the Nobel Prize in Medicine and physiology in 1903. He was the director of the Pasteur Institute when, when Pasteur passed away, he took over a Russian physiologist. And how did he win the Nobel Prize? Well, he was on the southern sea coast of France, had his monocle. He picked up a starfish from the low tide area and the tidal area and he picked up a sea urchin and he punctured with the quill of the sea urchin, the starfish. Then he got his monocle out and he looked at this site of puncture and he saw these corpuscles developing at the site of the injury to the starfish. Because he was a microbiologist, remember this was the age of the birth and the whole concept of infectious disease and microbes and so forth. He immediately thought, oh, I'm eliciting microbes from the injured starfish. But when they started to look at it more in detail, no, they weren't microbes. They were the cells within the starfish that were its immune system, the so called macrophy cells, part of their immune system. He discovered the innate immune system. And as he then started to ask the question, where does the innate immune system connect with the body principle? He found it was with gut. And so he authored a book called the Proliferation of Life in 1904. In that book, which I'm very fortunate to have in my library original copy that was translated in English from the French, he talks about the gut as being the site of all disease. He says there you have thousands of. Remember this is 1904. We have thousands of different bacteria living in there. They can be friends or foe depending upon their environment and how they're fed and how they operate within the gut. And they're right directly associated with the rest of the body. Now, what they didn't know is what we know today. 70% of our immune system is clustered around the gut. Why? There was no better place for the universal designer of human bodies other than this to throw it around the gut cosmetically. Let's just put the immune system around the gut. No, because in the course of living, all of us will eat between 20 and 30 tons of foreign molecules. That's called our diet. And therefore our body has to make a sense of our diet to say what's friend and what's foe. So we have this very adept immune system that's clustered around our gut that makes that decision. Why do you think we have so much food allergy, food sensitivities and problems as it relates to the adverse effects of food? Because we've been futzing around with, with all these chemicals in our foods for which the immune system, our gut never knew it was gonna be exposed. And now it has to learn how to manage 50,000 new chemicals that are coming into the food supply system. So this construct that all hell starts in the gut is really to say all health starts with our immune system, of which the gut is a major participant. Our immune system resides on the surface of our lungs. It resides on our skin. There is not an organ or tissue in your body that doesn't have an immune system. It is communicating 24, 7, 365. In fact, the best prediction of how long you will live to the year is the biological age of your immune system. You want your immune system to be younger than your years and birthday. And can you measure that? Yes, you can. And we're doing research and many others are doing this. It's the frontier of the new science of immunology. We call it immunorejuvenation, turning the clock back not one way street towards immunodegeneration, but. But immunorejuvenation because in your body's process is the ability to recreate a younger immune system if we just treat it right.

So I was doing consulting years ago with Bill Phillips and his brother. And one of the things, the analogy I made is that marketers invent a lot of diseases. Marketers invent a lot of stuff. And some marketers are great and other marketers are frustrated, frankly, evil and so if you were to give your industry or a category a disease, what would it be? And so we're talking about fitness night. So I came up with a term like, well, people are in the fitness fog is what I came up with. That's what I shared with them. I said, they're getting all this conflicting advice. Take this much protein drink, this type of protein powder. Should you even be drinking protein powders? How do you exercise? How do you work out all this variety of stuff? And it's more complex than ever. There's so much information that is conflicting out there. And so I think in the same way, people are in this fog. So if you were to start a process of building the strongest immune system, reversing it, just how you explain, where do you start? Do you start with diet? Do you start with sleep? Do you start with water intake? Do you not use Bluetooth headphones? I mean, there's so many different factors that impact us. What are the fundamentals? And I guess I'll say it in this way, like if you want to build strength and you're, you know, a weightlifter. Even though we got John Jaquish, the inventor of X3, is he in the room or is he not here till tomorrow? Is John in here? You can't miss the dude. He's a big dude, but basically, you know, bench press, squat, deadlift. Right. Those are the three basic strength moves. What would be the foundational things for immune health? Like, where does one start?

Yeah, I think that is a really a extraordinarily important question at this day and age, because we're going to have more exposure to funny organisms that our immune system is going to be challenged by. We're going to have more stress, we're going to have more pollutants. We know that this is all part of the industrialized society in which we live today. So the question is, how can we maximize our resilience? And our resilience really is our immune system. And so if, you know, a lot of people feel it's just the resilience against infectious organisms, but it's way more than that. We've now discovered our immune system is on a search and destroy mechanism for all kind of injured cells into tissue. It's constantly there to repair, replace. In fact, let me just say one thing to you, Joe, on this whole issue about maintaining good health. So if I was to analogize everything I've ever learned about biological science into a simple metaphor as a major freeway, you've got traffic heading in one direction on one side and then separated by some barrier, you've got traffic heading on the other direction. The lanes of traffic of our society today are on the traffic side, which is called senescence, degeneration and dis ease. On the other side of the highway, however, is another set of highway lanes going the other direction. This regeneration rebuilding and is operational in every human body. Our body doesn't have just one direction, it has bi direction. The problem is we're over accentuating, staying on the the lanes that are degeneration and senescence and we're not occupying the lanes that are regeneration at the same level. So you may need to get off the off ramp of the degeneration to get on the on ramp of regeneration. By the way, those are all biologically accessible. They reside within our physiology. And that's why I don't talk about good molecules and, and bad molecules. People say, oh, glucose is bad. Well, glucose is pretty darn good. It's just where is it and how much and, and under what conditions is it being delivered. You can take that state for anything like lactic acid with exercise we say oh, when you get lactate overload, now you have sore muscles, it's damaging. But we know that lactate at a certain level is, is a metabolic activator for certain immunological properties. So what we really talk about is resilience and balance. Now go back to your question. How would you start with the immune system? The immune system, because it's dynamic system first has to take its message somewhere as to what it should do. Should it be on the lane of degeneration, which is you will get worse as you get older, or should it be on the lane of regeneration or we call it immune rejuvenation. And the way you do that is to recognize what Dan Buettner so beautifully brought us to understand with the blue zones. If you get on the blue zones state of the highway, you are in the regenerative mode because you're by natural carrying on a lifestyle because you're going to be fit, because you're outside exercising, you're going to be eating the right foods because you're eating like the rainbow. And I'm not talking about synthetically colored foods, I'm talking about natural plant foods. You're going to be having relationships with people like we're having here that are positive on the, on the lanes of regeneration, not degeneration. How many of your conversations are about doom and gloom at this meeting? Aren't they about up and out? Up and out creates a different gene expression pattern, because these signals that we're receiving on receptors that sit on the surface of our cells are going to translate into the genes that perform to give us what our phenotype is, how we look, act and feel. Obesity isn't a consequence just of calories. It's a consequence of a degenerative alarm system in which our body's trying to defend itself. Could be hostile abuse, it could be trauma, it could be so many variables that then deal through the genes to then produce a body shape that tries to protect us from injury. It's not just calories alone. So all these things are part of the new science that we're trying to leverage as it relates to immunorejuvenation.

That's an interesting statement too. A body design, a body image that's trying to protect you from injury.

Absolutely. There's no question. Let's use another example, autoimmune disease. As you know, 8 out of 10 people with autoimmune disease, which is increasing in frequency in our culture, you only need to look at the TV ads to see the number of products that are now being sold, these biologics for all these autoimmune conditions, colitis and skin related psoriasis and arthritis and SLE and so forth. So what are those really speaking to? They're speaking to the fact that 80% of the people that get those conditions are women. So there's something about being a female. And so I have heard so many times in the decades that we've been focusing autoimmune disease, which is now more than three decades, that women will say, why is my body damaged? Why? Why am I an injury waiting to happen because of being a woman and going to get autoimmune disease. It's as if they have an image that they're flawed. They're not flawed at all. Think of what a woman's immune system is prepared to do to be able to support in her body another individual that may be the opposite sex. Now, what has to happen to her immune system to allow that to be tolerated? Just ask my wife about that. It's really a very remarkable, sophisticated immune system that can adapt to a foreign body being in that person's body for nine months and accept it and have a healthy infant coming out of it. And so the sophistication of a woman's immune system is much more complicated than the unicentric dials in a male immune system. And as a consequence, she may carry the yellow canaries. That then makes her more sensitive to certain things in Our environment, which are the first early warning signs men get. And wake up because you'll get them too. It's just a matter of time until this spreading effect of these bad messages that our immune system is designed to seek and destroy. So what is really inflammation? Is it an injury or is it the body doing what it's supposed to do because it perceives a threat? I'm telling you, from dealing with thousands of patients publishing over 100 papers and clinical studies, there is a tremendous amount of relationship between the environment, that person, I'm not to say woman, but that person is engaged in how it translates through her immune system to produce then her body trying to defend itself or his body trying to defend itself against perceived offenders. You take away those offenders, the immune system then relaxes, it finds its point of resilience and lo and behold, you get spontaneous remission without TNF alpha blocking agents. Wow.

So if you were in charge of everyone's health care here, what would you suggest? Who would they go like? How do you find the best healthcare doctor? Functional medicine advisor? There's a lot of choices out there. How do you advise people to find not only the best person to help them, but I think the very best person for someone is themselves. It first has to start. A lot of people have doctors that are dispensing, in my experience, harmful advice and many that are, you know, wonderful, they're amazing, they transform people's lives and it's a mixed bag just because they. What's that joke? What do you call the guy that got the word worse grades at Harvard Medical School, that graduated? Doctor. So it doesn't necessarily because they have the name doctor behind their name, it doesn't mean they're going to follow a protocol that's best helpful.

Well, we know the term doctor means in the strictest definition where it means teacher. Right. So in this area, I think what we're looking for are partners who have certain expertise that they've learned through years of study that can then help open up opportunities for the person to make self discoveries as to how their own individual uniqueness can be properly managed in this complex environment. And that's what we try to teach in the Institute for Functional Medicine. A lot of people say, what are the protocols? In the Institute for Functional Medicine? We're not teaching protocols, we're teaching ways of thinking, we're teaching ways of relating the information that exists in the biosciences of today, which by the way is exploding dramatically. I can hardly, I'm probably not even keeping up. Even though I'm trying very hard to stay on top of the literature of this front edge of what's going on in molecular science, cell biology and so forth. It's translating into medicine, but you really aren't. We don't want to just have a geek squad out there that's giving you technology. We want people to know how to relate and communicate so that a person can take the operating system of their own body and start to use it effectively for their health. Now, that's what we try to train in the Institute for Functional Medicine. I. I am very appreciative for the docs that have done this. Now think for a moment when I started the. When we started, and I want to emphasize we. It was my wife that actually was the brainchild for the idea in 1990 or 1988, actually. So when we started, just real quickly, we. We started with a very small group of people. And I was told by my colleagues in academic medicine, because I was just transitioning out of being a professor into the world in which I gave all my security up, my tenured faculty position to start a company to teach doctors how to do nutritional medicine in their practice. That was my business plan. Now, that ended up with 20 companies later and eventually forming MetaGenics and having 2,000 employees and all sorts of things that I would have never dreamed would have happened over the next years. But the start of that was my colleagues at the initial phase said, jeff, you're never going to get medical doctors to go back and open their books of anatomy, physiology, cell biology and so forth. Come on. They're licensed, and they just want to forget all about that and move on with their lives. And I said, well, I think there will be some that will be interested because accessing that information with a different perspective might lead them into things that are much more fulfilling for them as to why they went into medicine. So I naively moved ahead. Now we have, as you said earlier, over 150,000 certified functional medicine practitioners in the world. It's in 67 countries that I'm aware of. And that then is validation that these individuals will go back on their own, even though they have busy lives and practices and they're fulfilled by the covenants of insurance and all that stuff, and open these textbooks on their own and pay money to come to these courses above and beyond that of their normal daily life, to become capable of doing what they set out to do to help people. Now, that is so inspiring for me, and I'm so pleased that now we can send them to the IFM registry of physicians and they can type in their zip code and they will come up with a list of certified functional medicine practitioners that have certain criteria fulfillment that you can read about. And it's not yet a half a million, but it's certainly better than we started with five of us. So we're moving in the right direction.

How many? There's approximately what, 130,000 functional medicine docs.

Right now in the United States. Yes. And then a lot more internationally. Wow.

I mean, are you pretty proud of what you created? Do you like get arrogant and say I'm like a total badass here or what?

No, no, I don't. I actually, I guess quite the opposite. You know, I'm 79 almost, and I recognize that it's time to start handing off the baton. I want to make sure that we have the right successional plan so that people coming up can carry this forward and take it to the next level and we can scale this thing. It needs to be scaled. It needs to be scaled on every level from humanism to cost efficiency. We need to unburden ourselves to this unnecessary inflationary spiral and disease care. And the only way you do that is to go to the ground level and say, why are people getting sick that need hospitalization and is it modifiable? And the answer is absolutely yes. There is no question of anybody in science that we are capable of reversing this epidemic of chronic disease by implementing what we already know. In fact, let me give you just a quick anecdote. You might find this humorous. So obviously I get a lot of opportunity to lecture to different medical groups and I'm always the kind of fugitive guy on the program. If they want to have a balanced program, they choose me to be the balanced person for the rest of the program. And so one of the common questions I have is something like this. This is a very common kind of question. Someone will say, well, Dr. Bland, I really like what you talk about. It makes sense and you're a really good storyteller. But I only practice scientific medicine based upon double blind placebo controlled randomized clinical trials. And you haven't proven your hypothesis with the appropriate amount of randomized trials. Now here's my response to this, and I don't mean to sound deferent or facetious, but it's something like the following. Okay, let's assume, just for the sake of our discussion between the two of us that you are saying I practice a form of non scientific medicine. Let me ask you, do you ever have occasion in your Practice that you prescribe a series of drugs for a patient that you will know they will be on for years in duration, maybe decades in duration. Does that ever happen in your practice? And we'll say, well of course that happens. And I say, what is the scientific evidence that the, that particular treatment program you've chosen is both safe and effective over the years that you intend on using your patient? Well, yes, we have this study on this drug and we have this study on this drug, and we have this study on this drug. And I say, so how long are those clinical trials that led to the FDA approval for those drugs? Well, I don't know. And I said maybe you should read the studies. And are there any studies that demonstrate the effect of all those drugs, those three or four you're implying together in a patient over a long period of time? Well, I'm not sure of any group studies. And I say, okay, then let's both assume that we're practicing a form of non scientific medicine, but mine is safer.

So I want to touch on the fact that there are. It's an interesting question. I'll try to frame it this way. What I notice about a lot of industries, oftentimes the really great practitioners, really caring, really well researched. If they start trying to become celebrities, they become, let's just take doctors, an example, really great doctors. The moment they start pursuing becoming celebrity doctors, all that attention goes away from patient care and goes into promotional. And at the same time, if you don't know how to run a business and have make profitability and get clients, it's sort of a catch 22. And so finding the balance, I want to, you know, for instance, I, I met you several years ago at Consumer Health Summit. I believe that's the first place we met. And then, you know, we ran into each, you know, we'd run into each other every once in a while. And then at JJ Virgin's really awesome Mindshare Summit, which you've now changed the name to Health Health Biz. You gotta yell louder. Second, what's she saying? Evan? Okay, all right. Something else, something collective. But yeah, so, but yeah, I know it's. What can we do for heary? What's the function of that now?

What are you talking about?

No, so JJ teaches and Tim, because I think it's really Tim behind the scene. Kidding Tim, they're both great. And so JJ teaches these doctors and these practitioners how to basically run a business, how to get clients, that sort of stuff. And they're doing really good work, you know, so. And so there's a lot of people that are in this room that are really instrumental in helping in all areas, getting good stuff out there. And so with. With the Institute for Functional Medicine, because I want to make sure that we leave with the limited time we have left. We've only got a little left. There is. Where do we direct them to everyone here, and then I'll help you.

I think you said a number of things here. I mean, I'll try to unpack what you said really quickly.

Thank God, because I'm very confusing right now.

No, you're not confusing. You're a great leader. Into new interrogatives. So if we look at this for a second at docs who become celebrities, the good news, bad news is they develop a certain level of proficiency in what they do that they want to share. The problem is that the media and the medium that we're in now, social media, you know, kind of feeds into this kind of status. So you finally ask the question, where do you draw a line? Where do you want to be in your Persona, your ego, your ID in this culture? And do you want to be a person who then can contribute to the architecture of this new society in such a way that your ego doesn't get in the way? And I think that Hans Yelli, the father of stress, wrote an incredible book that I thought was, for me, very instrumental, called Altruistic Egoism, in which he was talking about, the ego can really be a benefit to us. In fact, we need an ego if we're ever going to aspire to be doing something positive. But it should all be tethered to altruism. And you should always then be going back and forth in that interrogative with yourself. How much is this coming from my point of altruism to helping others? And when you talked about, you know, what is an individual goal? My goal is to be in my life able to do something that has a lasting impact, that makes the world a little bit better. So that's as a parent, a grandparent, a professional, whoever, as an expert. And if I ever lose touch with that, then I've lost touch with really why I'm being. And so to me, this construct of bringing younger people up into our discipline and giving them the chance to see patients and witness the transformation. I can't tell you how many extraordinary moments I've had in meetings like this all around the world. I've traveled 6 million miles. So I've had a lot of experiences. And I have people coming up to me that I've never met before who come up and they literally put their arms around me, start crying and say, you saved my life. Now, how did that happen? I never actually directly dealt with that person, but some idea transmitted out that they wanted to identify somebody they could say was responsible for that transformation. But it was probably some other practitioner that was actually their attending doc that delivered that information. That's the celebration of group. That's the celebration of transformation, and that's what we're trying to do in the functional medicine movement.

Well, you know what? Thank God for you, Dr. Jeff Glenn, because you're doing. You're doing good stuff. So how do they get. How do they find out more, follow you or any other resources you could recommend. You have a great book here, which is called the disease delusion.

Okay.

And big book and. Yeah. So what other resources could.

Yeah.

How can we help you?

Well, you are helping me. Thank you. I mean, the time that I spent with the three of you for those three or four days on the boat was transformational for me. And every connection I have with a group like this re energizes me. It re empowers, you know, my. My wife says, jeff, you're still traveling. Isn't there time to retire? And I said, I am retired. I'm putting new tread on the tire so I can roll a few more years. That's retiring. So that's what it's all about. And I thank you for the opportunity to. To enlist the great energies that are going to transform our society.

Absolutely. And what's your website?

Website, jeffreybland.com or bigboldhealth.com love to see you come visit us. We've got more videos and stuff than you probably ever care about, but you'll find maybe something there of interest to you. And thanks for the opportunity.

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