How Dr. Robert Whitfield's SHARP Method is Revolutionizing Surgical Recovery

Hey, welcome to the drive. We're going to talk about sharp today. It's our methodology to care for patients. I think if you go back in the history of my training, there would be a series of patients who I couldn't explain why someone would either stay swollen longer, have pain longer, take longer to mobilize, just take longer to feel better. There are a whole host of, you know, factors that affect everyone's recovery. And as I propensally, you know, the propensity for us to improve recovery is making, you know, incremental progress. And if you talk about things that are going to improve with AI, I think, you know, looking at data will help us in the analysis of why some of the patients, from a genetic predisposition standpoint, take longer because they detoxify slower, they metabolize slower. So there will always be that group of patients who I strongly feel have just a genetic predisposition. And knowing that you can alter and improve some of their, you know, micronutrients, macronutrients, find ways to support them that are more personalized and, or individualized to them to help them recover faster. So, you know, think of it like an athlete who seems like they get a lot of injuries, but they then look at their genetics, they look at their diet, they look at like their oral health. Yesterday I interviewed biologic dentist Dr. Tony Ingram and I've had other doctor dentists on who have discussed the same techniques. Dr. Blodgett who are really, really on the front of taking care of patients and providing the best guidance for oral health. Holistic, you know, care of the oral microbiome. Because the, the gut starts at the mouth and obviously ends at the anus. But the thing with the oral microbiome and you're trying to really provide balance, I guess that's the take home point always whether you're in the oral cavity or in the stomach or the GI tract. And you want to have balance, not be out of balance, have the proper amounts of bacteria and fungus and not have overgrowth of one or the other. But to go back to the topic, if you have looked at all those things and you know you're trying to correct what you can correct, you can't correct everything all at one time. People find that too difficult. So for instance, if I want someone to start the sharp method, I'll have them make some specific dietary changes and start with some specific supplementation. So we already know that a lot of the food can be challenging by the way it's grown intrinsically, you know, the food, the Food supply, what we eat and drink, it should be of the highest quality. All we're trying to do is just improve the quality of the food. Yesterday my daughter and I had a cucumber that tasted as if it had chemical in it. And. And we, you know, discarded it because it was questionable. So. And that was bought at a local store. And those are just the things that happen sometimes. So I'm not, you know, immune to this at all. I shop at a local farmers market and that's where get a lot of our meat, some poultry, and definitely the majority of our fish. I do always find it, you know, challenging to get fruits and vegetables. There are vegetables at the farmers market, but very rarely are there fruit outside of something like an apple or a peach in Texas. And so if you're trying to really cut out the, that are ultra processed, that's the easiest. Don't eat out of a box or a bag. So cut out, you know, chips and snacks. Those are ultra processed. Those are going to create, you know, more trouble for you if you already have inflammation. And then really leaning into, you know, we'll say fruits and vegetables and, you know, quality sourced meat or poultry or fish. Just try to improve each of those. And on the podcast I did yesterday with Dr. Ingram, she talked about how, you know, there's fluoride added to our water supply. There's fluoride added to all the, you know, the toothpaste and all the things that you end up using. So we're gonna say there's probably too much fluoride in the, in the system amounts that don't really show benefit. So backing up to the filtered water. Try to drink filtered water. If you don't have good water in your community, which I had a patient recently come from a community where they had buy all their water because there was water contamination. The city that she was in would send out a letter saying the water supply is not good, you cannot drink it. And so, you know, they have to buy their water and bring it. So she knows that drinking the water from a different source in her situation is important. And then we're trying to avoid bisphenols and microplastics. So whenever you can obviously switch out or don't use single use water bottles, but obviously first and foremost have bottles of water to the best of your ability, cut out and energy drinks and things like that because those are not going to benefit you from a nutrient standpoint. And then since I bring up nutrients, each of us probably could do better getting trace minerals that would be A separate supplement that you can do. You can also do micronutrient testing. You know, for the larger supplementation. We got to make sure you're getting enough vitamin C, D3, K2, glutathione methylate, B complex. Those are core, have enough glycine to detox, and then other things can be sprinkled in. Obviously, the. Those are all pretty basic. Those are liquid or powder based, and those help get you off. But just listen to those changes in addition to trying to make an effort to. I know this is going to sound a little off, but take time to breathe before and after you go to bed. So not before you go to bed, but I'm sorry, before you get out of bed in the morning. So say for instance, I got up this morning, I'm on my way to the surgery center as I talk to y', all, and before I got out of bed, I just did my own little five minutes of belly breathing. And that's to get you in a better physiologic state and really help with your HRV heart reverb, which is one of the key indicators of recovery. And over the past several months, I've been doing some breathing exercises before I go to sleep and before I get out of bed in the morning, and those have helped improve my hrv. The things about sleep that we've talked about in the past, quality, you know, quantity, going to bed, you know, creating a routine so that you're getting enough sleep, you're staying asleep long enough, and the quality and depth of the sleep is good. You get enough sleep cycles, and you're trying to create, you know, a consistency in your schedule. So maybe, you know, on nights I have to get up and then go to the surgery center relatively early, I go to bed a little bit, you know, earlier. So it's about nine on days I don't. It's between, you know, 9:30, you know, is the latest, probably certainly not more than in 10. And then we just went to an Austin FC game on Saturday night, and so we're up later. But still, those games, you know, started 7:30, they run for 90 plus minutes. And then you're on your way out. And then so your, your schedule has to stay relatively consistent. That's my point. Like, you can't, you know, Monday through Friday go to bed at a certain time and on the weekends completely blow that up. That's gonna make it more difficult on you for recovery. So working on sleep as a priority, prioritizing the quality of the macronutrients, the Reduction of ultra processed. You know, don't eat out of a B or a box. I know a lot of people have this issue with sweets or salty stuff. Mine was always salty. It's always like salty things. I do like a good piece of dark chocolate. It's a good dopamine hit. Makes you feel good. But that's not sweet. It's not milk chocolate. It's dark. So it's like 80% cacao or 70 to 80% cacao fire. You know, I'm always looking at the grocery store, can I find a different kind of chopper? So then you're basically making it easier for your body to go ahead and then recover. Now for surgery, you know, we have people eating higher and higher amounts of proteins. So going back to oral health, that's going to build up more in your oral cavity behind your back teeth. So you're going to have to brush a little bit more. You have to, like, according to Dr. Ingram, just angle the brush almost like it's up and down and straight up and down. And then brush the back teeth. I'm sorry, brush the back of those front teeth because that's where the saliva is pooling and you can get more plaque buildup. And I certainly experience that. And then you gotta, like, I've had to floss, you know, more and more and more, certainly with dental work I've had and then with eating more and more protein because I've upped my protein. Sometimes I'll get like 200 grams of protein in a day, depending on how many times I'm eating, how many, you know, protein drinks I may have. Because that's the other thing is I'll mix, you know, protein drink as we go to the surgery center. I may have, you know, one or two between, you know, cases today. I just mix it up in some filtered water. We use echo for our water at the surgery center. I have a little tabletop there. It either has filtered or hydrogen water. You know, I place priority on obviously just getting quality water that's filtered. We also have, you know, I have all my stuff at the surgery center, Creatine and amino acids, their powder, and our pea protein powder. So we have everything there. So we're, we're, we're keeping our habits very consistent. Wherever I'm at, I have all the same components at the surgery center as I do at the office, as I do at my home. So that I can always have those things and not make excuses about, oh, I need to order out, or, oh, I need to have this bar or this snack or whatever. Actually, that. That's a good point. I don't eat, you know, bars really anymore. I used to have a lot of bars and, and order a lot of kind of snack things like meat sticks and stuff. And I just don't do that as much anymore. And there are a lot of quality products. I've just tried to concentrate on eating, you know, whole fruits and vegetables. I have this. We bought one of those air fryers. It's the kind of dual stack Ninja. We live, you know, currently where we don't have a lot of counter space. And trying to have something that doesn't occupy a ton of counter space is nice. So it's kind of narrow and vertical. It's stacked vertically. And I buy these little burgers, either regular burgers, chicken burgers, goat burgers, lamb burgers. And I cook them up in the Ninja and I just put them in some Pyrex and I bring them to the surgery center. I don't ever reheat anything with the lid on because the lid's got plastic. You don't want to put plastics into your food under temperature because plastics will leach into your food. You don't want to do that. So leaching is a real phenomenon. It happens with things like heating up Teflon pan, having plastics, like I said, around your food, or certainly if you heated up your food. So we don't, don't do any of that. You know, there's Pyrex, there's ceramics. Caraway has ceramics to store food. So there's lots of ways to do things that you should really avoid reheating and avoid as many things with plastics. All this testing we do shows that people have high levels of, if we see it, bisphenol, and then the other is plastic, I'm sorry, phthalates, which is a plasticizer. So plastics came into the US really in the 50s, so nothing new there. Just really be careful with that. Microplastics have been found all over in tissues. So I carry, you know, the food with me all the time, and I don't carry a bunch of vegetables. Just not a big vegetable person. Nothing, nothing wrong vegetables. I just don't crave them. So I'll take all sorts of fruit. Like, I went to the grocery on the weekend and got, you know, things stocked up, and I went to the farmer's market on Saturday morning. It was cold and rainy in Austin in the 30s or whatever. And I got my. What I needed for the week. And then fruits and vegetables, you know, get like bananas and apples Apples are kind of easy to acquire right now. And, you know, some oranges or tangerines or something like that, bananas. And I just, you know, I just pack a bunch of those and that ends up. Those are really good sources of fiber, so that helps. And I just carry those things with me all the time, you know, so it's not like you got to do a ton of meal prep these days with a ninja. I mean, I was telling my daughter, who's 16, I was like, man, if I would have had one of these when I was younger, this would have been awesome. Because the. The ninja admitted doesn't create, you know, smoke. It's not a dangerous thing. If you were to, you know, get the food and just go home and cook it, you wouldn't need to store it in a freezer or anything. So it's, like, ideally suited for. For, you know, quick preparation and then just storage. So for meal prep, you could just get your. Your glassware, your ceramics, which are. If you're using ceramics, it's usually caraway. And then get everything prepped and have it and then just grab it when you needed to. To go, or if you needed to eat when you got home, it wouldn't take you then time to go ahead and set things up because, you know, half the battle is just timing. People don't have a lot of time. So I took maybe 40 minutes to cook eight burgers of whatever varieties. I think my daughter likes the chicken burgers. So I ended up kicking most. Cooking most of the chicken burgers in the actual ninja and then just, you know, clean up's not bad. Stored them and, you know, basically take those to and from work. I'll have to, you know, do some more midweek or something because my daughter likes. She's a little bit of. She's definitely carnivore. She likes her protein, which is totally fine. However you get your protein, I don't care. If you like to eat fish and are pescatarian, great. If you're a vegetarian, great. I find my vegan and vegetarian clients have the most difficult time getting enough protein just by virtue of their diet. So supplementing with things like pea protein can be helpful. Or if there's another source of protein that they like that really aligns with them and works well with their system, then that's what you should do. You just have to get enough protein because that's going to be what your body uses in terms of healing, you know, amino acids, proteins, and then I also, you know, healthy fats, avocados, nuts, little grass fed butter ghee, something like that. And then, you know, good carbs. It's like, I just don't eat a bunch of carbs anymore. Do like some good sourdough though. That's good. Let's some butter. So the tips and tricks of just eating for recovery, sleeping for recovery, and proper supplementation for recovery, that's basically sharp. Look forward to hearing more from y' all in the comments. You can sign up for email and we'll have a newsletter coming up. You know, shortly there'll be more opportunities to participate in sharing short. In short order. So thank you.