Latest / Health with Hashimoto’s - Thyroid or Immune Education for Autoimmune Thyroid Disease / 173 // From Prescription Pads to Root Causes: A Doctor’s Wake-Up Call
Transcript
- 0:00Have you ever wondered what it would take to make a doctor completely rethink
- 0:04everything that he or she was taught? Well, my guest today is Dr.
- 0:08Rob Downey, and he started his career in conventional medicine.
- 0:11He was writing prescriptions, following protocols, doing everything by the book,
- 0:15and then one patient's recovery changed everything.
- 0:19In today's episode, you're going to hear how that moment led him from prescriptions
- 0:22to purpose, and also what it means for you.
- 0:26Welcome to the Health with Hashimoto's podcast. This is where you will find
- 0:30clarity and simple, sustainable strategies to feel better.
- 0:34I want to help you figure out your root causes.
- 0:37My name is Esther Yunkin. I am a registered nurse.
- 0:40I spent about 17 years in the emergency department and then got sick and tired
- 0:44of putting Band-Aids on chronic things.
- 0:46I went back to school and now I have been in holistic health education for about 10 years.
- 0:51I know how exhausting it is to live with fatigue, brain fog,
- 0:55and the ups and downs of Hashimoto's, and that is why I'm here.
- 0:59I'm here to cut through the confusion and to give you practical steps that support
- 1:03your body, calm your immune system, so that you can regain your energy and feel
- 1:08like yourself again. I am excited to have a guest for you today and to introduce you to Dr.
- 1:13Rob Downey. He is a board-certified family practice doctor.
- 1:17He is an IFM certified practitioner, and he has 21 years of experience as an
- 1:22attending physician and 15 years as a functional medicine provider.
- 1:26He is the founder of Seaworthy Functional Medicine, and it is a pioneer in responding
- 1:31to needs for better availability of functional medicine in the underserved areas of Alaska.
- 1:36So he knows that a little goes a long way when you are looking at health changes.
- 1:43Dr. Rob, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Tell listeners a little
- 1:47bit about yourself. Thanks so much for having me.
- 1:51As we were getting ready today, we were talking about the bio,
- 1:55and now I'm in my 25th year as an attending, and I'll be entering my 20th year
- 2:00in functional medicine, so time really flies by.
- 2:04I had the privilege of interviewing Jeff Bland once, and he said,
- 2:06yeah, Institute for Functional Medicine, 30 years.
- 2:08And I thought, wow, that's just crazy that things have been around for a while now.
- 2:13But I'm in Alaska, and my practice has been in Montana and Alaska,
- 2:18and I've always worked for nonprofit hospitals and nonprofit,
- 2:21well, and for Native corporations, Alaska Native corporations.
- 2:24And so it's been really, really interesting in my career that it's most functional
- 2:30medicine clinics are sort of cash pay, standalone clinics.
- 2:34And mine has always been part of a hospital, has always been a clinic as a part of a hospital.
- 2:38So I've learned a lot about how to have functional medicine be covered through
- 2:41insurance because really the family practice visit is the same.
- 2:47It's a time-based high complexity visit.
- 2:49And I've gotten to serve a lot of people that wouldn't get served otherwise.
- 2:51In most instances, tribal health coverage or Medicaid or Medicare or insurance,
- 2:59a lot of patients in Alaska are insured.
- 3:02So there's always winners and losers in every practice. but having a functional
- 3:06medicine practice that serves people with insurance for those that don't have
- 3:10as many resources as the rest of us is something I've learned a lot from and been really proud of.
- 3:17And it's changed the shape of how I see things because I get to see a lot of
- 3:21complexity. I get to see a lot of what works and what doesn't.
- 3:24And most of my patients don't have a lot of resources.
- 3:27So I also think of myself as a painter that's learned how to paint with fewer paints or,
- 3:32A guitar with fewer strings or something like that. Some kind of metaphor or
- 3:35analogy about how much yield there really is.
- 3:39Right. Oh, I love that because I lived in Alaska. I worked there for three and
- 3:45a half years, three years.
- 3:47You're right. There are people without a lot of resources everywhere.
- 3:52But I feel like in Alaska, there are even more as a percentage.
- 3:56And even now, yesterday and this morning on Facebook, one of my friends in Alaska
- 4:01is like, I'm dealing with these health issues.
- 4:03You know, I'm struggling. I don't know where to turn.
- 4:06And I need the Native corporation to cover whatever I'm going to do.
- 4:11So hearing you say that you serve that population just brings such relief and comfort to my heart,
- 4:19knowing that there are people like you serving the population that I so deeply
- 4:24love. So thank you. Thank you for doing that.
- 4:27Yeah. Thank you so much. Yeah. So your story is interesting.
- 4:32And when I'm talking about doctors on the podcast, sometimes like I love doctors.
- 4:37I've worked with so many.
- 4:38There are, of course, being human, there are some bad doctors.
- 4:41I have worked with some like bad doctors. But for the most part,
- 4:46doctors go into medicine to help others. They have good hearts.
- 4:50They want to do good. And sometimes I
- 4:53feel like I give them a bad rap on the podcast because we're talking
- 4:56about how to get deeper and when your doctor isn't answering the questions how
- 5:00do you do things so let's start with your story back before you found functional
- 5:05medicine like what prompted you to get into medicine and then tell us about
- 5:11finding functional medicine great yeah thanks for the.
- 5:17So, yeah, when I went into medicine, I had a family, a medical family,
- 5:24which often can be a disincentive.
- 5:27But I remember telling people when I applied to medical school,
- 5:30I just thought it was really important.
- 5:32I wasn't fired up about business, for example.
- 5:35I thought meaning is going to have to really drive my work. And it was just
- 5:40sort of the choice at hand.
- 5:44And and so i leapt into medicine and
- 5:46i really enjoyed the challenge and i really enjoyed the service but
- 5:51i remember from med school up through becoming
- 5:54an attending physician being in north of the arctic circle you know for a couple
- 5:58of years up until 2005 i remember thinking wow this is really great for some
- 6:03things and not so great for other things yeah and i never articulated it though
- 6:08i just it was just this sort of observational journey,
- 6:12So conventional medicine is great for removing brain tumors,
- 6:16setting broken bones, killing bugs with drugs.
- 6:21And I would never want to be without those tools.
- 6:25But I saw two types of things happen before my functional medicine training.
- 6:30One was that I saw folks not be met in the moment.
- 6:34Yeah. And that wasn't even a functional medicine issue. I remember a patient
- 6:38that had to have part of her esophagus removed.
- 6:40And as the medical student, I rounded on her and she was writing on a chalkboard
- 6:45and she said, I didn't know the score going in.
- 6:48Oh, no. And I remember talking with her for an hour, because a medical student's got an hour. Right.
- 6:55But I thought this should have been the attending physician before the surgery.
- 6:59Oh, absolutely. We should not be hearing this.
- 7:02This is devastating.
- 7:04So part of my take was just, we have to connect.
- 7:08And I kind of lucked out there because that's always been part of my jam is
- 7:14connecting with people.
- 7:15So I end up getting this job. I dream of going back to Western Montana.
- 7:19I get a job, South Central Montana, and everything's wonderful.
- 7:24And it's an integrative clinic, and the only criteria to get the job are that
- 7:27I have to be open to integrative medicine. And we all think this is a great situation.
- 7:32And then I'm sitting in a patient room, and this woman comes to establish care
- 7:37with me, and she's probably 55, and she has psoriatic arthritis that's so severe,
- 7:43So psoriasis, arthritis, autoimmune arthritis.
- 7:46It's so severe that she has nearly disabling low back pain that the digits of
- 7:52her fingers, pardon me, her fingers have drifted off the hand bones by about
- 7:5620 or 30 degrees. So her hands are really deformed.
- 8:01She's circumstantially depressed, not a depressive person.
- 8:05It's affecting her marriage. It's affecting her outlook because these immune
- 8:09drugs suppress the bone marrow.
- 8:11She's ending up with low weight blood cell counts and recurrent pneumonia,
- 8:14and they're not suppressing the psoriasis.
- 8:18And so I say to her in good faith, oh, well, why are you seeing me?
- 8:22And she says, you're the integrative doctor.
- 8:23You're going to change all this.
- 8:28And that's where I'm really proud also that I'm kind of a team-based person
- 8:34I think I'm much more of a we than an I person and so I'm also glad that I had
- 8:41the humility to say oh wow well I know who you should see but it's not me.
- 8:49And that that sort of way of relating to things has been really important at
- 8:55many many junctures in my career.
- 8:57So our naturopathic doctor who's trained at Bastyr, Hillary Daly,
- 9:02had been doing it for a long time, had a great reputation with autoimmunity.
- 9:05And I said, I'd really like to refer you to our naturopath.
- 9:08So I passed the same patient in the hallway about somewhere between three and six months later.
- 9:14And you know how when people get better, their posture gets upright and their
- 9:18skin gets nice and flat and their eyes get bright and their complexion is rosy.
- 9:24I mean, it's the look of vitality.
- 9:27And she has that. She's at ease in her body, clearly.
- 9:31And I say, wow, you look so different than the day we met. What happened?
- 9:36And she said, oh, I'm so thankful for Dr. Daly.
- 9:40And I'm maybe 50, 75% better without drugs.
- 9:44It's awesome. And I said, what did she do?
- 9:48And she said, a whole food plan that's anti-inflammatory and stress management
- 9:53and boswellia, bromelain, quercetin, probiotic,
- 10:02And I said, and?
- 10:08Right? She said, no, that's it. And so I was talking to Dr.
- 10:12Daly in the break room, and I said, what are you doing?
- 10:16How do you do it? And she said, the Institute for Functional Medicine teaches
- 10:19medical doctors to be like Bastyr-trained naturopaths because Jeff Bland and
- 10:24Joseph Pizzorno have this sort of common root type thing.
- 10:27Jeff Bland and Joseph Pizzorno founded Bastyr, and then Jeff Bland founded the
- 10:31Institute for Functional Medicine.
- 10:33So you're going to find the same principles there.
- 10:35And I just delightedly said, oh, well, if I get the training,
- 10:38well, I understand what you do. You know those moments in life?
- 10:42And she said, if you get this training, you'll do what I do.
- 10:45What an invitation. And yeah, and my mentor, who I dearly love and remain good
- 10:52friends with, she's a pretty thrifty person.
- 10:54And she said, Rob, if you do the introductory class, I will fly to Fort Lauderdale
- 10:58with you and take the class with you to be your support team,
- 11:03because that'll be so fun to freshen up my skills and be.
- 11:06And so we flew to Fort Lauderdale, and every night I just said,
- 11:09head exploding emoji again, in the best possible way.
- 11:15Yeah. And because you gave me the chance to talk about this,
- 11:18which I don't get to talk about very often, I'll never forget that David Jones,
- 11:21who sort of is like a heart-based family practice doctor, he did a lot of the
- 11:26functional medicine framework around connecting with people, including the data,
- 11:30and collecting oneself, centering and grounding oneself before going into the visit.
- 11:34And he was there and he did the intro and he said it and this is this is true
- 11:39you can really hunt this down if you wear a pair of glasses that turn everything
- 11:43upside down for a period of weeks,
- 11:45when you take them off your brain will flip everything yeah and then over a
- 11:50period of days it'll flip back and he said bad news everyone you're all wearing upside down glasses,
- 11:55we're going to take them off this week and you're going to be really disoriented.
- 12:00But that's what your conventional training has done, is it's made the world
- 12:04inverse to what's actually happening in terms of the complex chronic backstory
- 12:09to people who have complex chronic problems and root cause medicine.
- 12:12And it was just the perfect way for me to understand the disorientation and
- 12:17psychic pressure I was feeling around, wow, there's a whole other world here.
- 12:21And the Institute for Functional Medicine said, hey, drugs matter, procedures matter.
- 12:26Somebody with graves disease who's in the icu we're not
- 12:29going to give them herbs we're going to you know
- 12:32suppress the thyroid storm but it was just this whole
- 12:35extra dimension and then because it's
- 12:37super functional medicine says now you just got a bigger toolbox you need to
- 12:40learn how to use it elegantly that's been my joy in getting to do that and it's
- 12:46really it's really deepened my compassion for my colleagues who you invoked
- 12:50because what i'm so clear about none of them have endorsed this,
- 12:55but I feel certain this is true.
- 12:56The actual reason there's such a pain point to getting into my kind of work
- 13:01is I had to let go of a bunch of things that I thought were gospel.
- 13:07Yeah. And in medical school and residency, essentially during the training,
- 13:15the trainees are kind of imprinted like goslings following Mama Goose.
- 13:21Absolutely. If you color outside the lines, you're going to hurt somebody.
- 13:25You must listen to us. You can't be a cowboy. You can't be freewheeling.
- 13:30And so the trouble is, then, there's a certain temperament, and for better or
- 13:34worse, I actually have that sort of half-devoted student, half-rebel temperament.
- 13:41Mm-hmm. That you need. That positioned me to say, hey, I'm just going to pursue what's true.
- 13:51There's a bigger truth here.
- 13:53And i hadn't actually heard many other
- 13:56people invoke the hippocratic oath but i
- 13:59ended up invoking that quite a bit that once you know there's something better
- 14:02you have a hippocratic oath obligation to manifest that i still believe that
- 14:07so yeah that's led to just an incredible career some real challenges i would
- 14:13never ever characterize myself as some somebody who got everything right.
- 14:18I upset some people. I overstepped a few times. I got in over my head a few
- 14:23times. But that's medicine.
- 14:27Right, right. And you're doing it with a Hippocratic oath in mind.
- 14:32You're always trying to do the best for the person in front of you.
- 14:36Yeah, yeah. And just being a pretty fierce person and pretty all-in person,
- 14:40I mean, my successes have been because of that, I think.
- 14:44And the times that I pushed the envelope a little too far, I mean,
- 14:49we would have never gotten into space if we didn't have test pilots.
- 14:52So every once in a while the plane tumbles the wing rips off so yes.
- 15:01Anyhow i'm happy with how i practice now because i learned a lot i learned a
- 15:06lot very quickly about where the line is okay so yeah i love that visual of
- 15:14the glasses because i've heard that before,
- 15:16like that study, but applying it to this instance of when you were in medical school,
- 15:23you're putting on those glasses without even knowing it.
- 15:26And now this is how you see the world. And now we're going to remove the glasses
- 15:31and everything is going to look upside down.
- 15:33What were some of the biggest, like most confusing things for you that you had
- 15:39to learn this is actually true.
- 15:43Gosh, there were a lot. When I met my mentor, I met her out in the street down
- 15:48in Hamilton, Montana about...
- 15:51An hour drive south of the clinic where we worked together. And she had a big
- 15:55naturopathic practice there.
- 15:56And she had 500 amber bottles in the back of her clinic that she had wildcrafted
- 16:00these botanicals in alcohol.
- 16:04She made her own tinctures and just this whole, wow, there's all these plants
- 16:09and they're all back there and they all do something.
- 16:12And this lady mixes them together. You know, it sounds like alchemy.
- 16:16But then down the road, then the active ingredient in turmeric is curcumin,
- 16:21and curcumin down-regulates NF-kappa-B, and NF-kappa-B is the same master regulatory
- 16:26knob that's impacted by prednisone, so you get the down-regulation without the side effects.
- 16:32So that's the mechanistic part. And then there's the art part,
- 16:37just our natural medicine playbook pages that these plants are,
- 16:44you know, the gift of God or the gift of Creator or the gift of goddess or the gift of Mother Earth.
- 16:50So we have these multifaceted physiological cascades that are meant to be intimately
- 16:56entwined with these signaling systems from the Earth.
- 17:00Whether it's food or botanicals or to some degree nutraceuticals.
- 17:04And so it was just this wild, wonderful, beautiful journey.
- 17:07But the thing was, the patients were having these spectacular outcomes,
- 17:10and they were deeply appreciative, and it was very safe.
- 17:14And so actually what happened is my psychic pressure had to catch up with the
- 17:18outcomes, because my mentor and I saw these patients together at the visits,
- 17:22and the outcomes were just like the psoriatic arthritis case.
- 17:26They were out of proportion to expected, or way out of proportion to expected,
- 17:30In a good way. In a really good way.
- 17:34And so it was just so compelling how powerful this tool was.
- 17:38And it really, my heart of service was just compelled to just keep going.
- 17:42And then I guess the other thing that I was able to do is just say,
- 17:47oh, wow, there's things I didn't understand.
- 17:49And now that I do, I have to figure out how to internally reconcile all of them.
- 17:53And that's when I started talking to my colleagues and my patients about this
- 17:58does all fit together. And credit where it's due.
- 18:00That's what the Institute for Functional Medicine said the whole time.
- 18:03They said this all fits together. These are just more tools.
- 18:06So you turn a bolt with a wrench and you turn a screw with a screwdriver.
- 18:12And if you take one tool to the other thing, you don't get what you want.
- 18:18So it's been, and it's a neat chance to, they used to say re-enchant yourself
- 18:23with clinical medicine, Institute for Functional Medicine, that was their old motto.
- 18:27And it is, it's enchanting, because in the best possible way,
- 18:32there's some creativity and alchemy in the plans, but the science is so rigorous,
- 18:39and the decision-making, clinical decision-making is so discerning and so rigorous.
- 18:43And so it really is possible to do it all and we never know where the cases
- 18:47are going to go because each case is just a tailored jacket made for that patient,
- 18:51and sometimes they think they're here for herbs and they end up seeing the surgeon
- 18:55and sometimes they think they need a blood pressure drug and they end up on
- 18:59some CoQ10 and magnesium and mindfulness we just never know,
- 19:04what their tailored jacket's going to look like Right, because each person is unique Yes.
- 19:11I remember you said when I was on your show, I think you said there's such a
- 19:16binary in a traditional medicine, either you're sick or you're not.
- 19:21And that's not actually true. Like there's more to it.
- 19:25So when somebody comes to see you, let's say for Hashimoto's,
- 19:28that's my podcast, how would you have seen that binary?
- 19:34And what do you look at now instead?
- 19:37Well, it's poignant to report that not only did I see it in a binary fashion,
- 19:41but that was who I was and that's how I treated things up until 2005.
- 19:44That might have been part of my motivation, too, is sort of atonement once we know more.
- 19:51Maybe with our kids, for example, those of us that have kids,
- 19:54if there's something in our parenting that wasn't optimal but well-intentioned
- 19:58and then we know a better way to do it,
- 19:59part of why we really show up for that next level is this sensibility,
- 20:04oh, I could have done it better, but I didn't know.
- 20:08And sort of hoping then that they'll give us grace for who we were before we leveled up.
- 20:15So I used to say to people, well, you don't, you know, I did the thing that I now am so critical of.
- 20:23I said to people, you're fine.
- 20:25There's a deep irony, of course, which your audience will appreciate.
- 20:29And Hashimoto's hypothyroidism is the perfect example. I said,
- 20:33you're fine because your TSH is less than five or less than five and a half
- 20:38or six or whatever it was when I was trained.
- 20:41And so once this two for functional medicine came along and said,
- 20:46it's not disease versus absence of disease. It's not that binary distinction.
- 20:52It's disease to optimal health. And there's a spectrum and we're moving people here.
- 21:00Then what i realized was when i said to people they
- 21:03were fine how deeply offensive that was because
- 21:06they would have never come to see me if they felt fine right and even more deeply
- 21:12ironically their numbers weren't fine and i was the one that didn't know it
- 21:17so very poignant i would say the other thing is to do functional medicine as
- 21:22a physician you have to be ready to be humbled,
- 21:25but just about everything that matters is humbling.
- 21:29I mean, not all the people who attain mastery level in their craft are humble
- 21:34people, but the process of learning and showing up and trying to attain mastery
- 21:38level is inherently humbling, I think, for everyone.
- 21:42So then, fast forward, I would say to people, hey, this is what the Institute
- 21:45for Functional Medicine says,
- 21:47TSH optimal 0.4 to 2.5, nice robust free T4, free T3, nice little reverse T3,
- 21:53thyroid antibodies as low as possible here's the lifestyle non-drug dimensions
- 21:59here's the medication dimensions here's the degree to you know unwedge yourself
- 22:03from these bridging principles and it was just so satisfying,
- 22:07and it was really satisfying to say to somebody whose tsh jumped up to 17.
- 22:13Hey, the thyroid supplement's not going to get you back under 2.5. This is a dosing issue.
- 22:20And I have people drifting in and out of my practice all the time because I
- 22:22do what Satchin Patel recommends functional medicine doctors do. I polarize my audience.
- 22:28And now my true north is I just say, this is what I would do for me or my family.
- 22:33And it's just, it's very easy then. I don't struggle with my message because I've seen what works.
- 22:39And it's kind of easy to be who I am and know that a bunch of folks are going
- 22:45to benefit and actually know that it's good that they not be with me.
- 22:48If they don't want to deploy the things that I have to offer them,
- 22:53then they definitely should be seeing somebody else, not in a bad way, and I hope a good way.
- 22:58Right. You have to be having a good relationship with your providing physician or nurse practitioner.
- 23:05If you don't have that trust, it's not a good fit.
- 23:08Yeah. And I would say what's shocking to me, Esther, is just the number of people
- 23:15who say the first visit, they just say, this is the first time I've ever been heard.
- 23:20Oh, it breaks my heart and also makes me grateful for you. I think, wow, ouch.
- 23:27And I do know, I mean, a bunch of my colleagues are hearing their patients, too.
- 23:32I think what we're not, we do a long intake visit.
- 23:37And so it has a very relaxed feeling. Yeah. And very much the vibe on the front
- 23:43end is just like meeting somebody for coffee.
- 23:46Hey, how are you doing? How was your day? How was the drive?
- 23:49How's your kid? How'd the softball game go? Most folks are just ready to just jump right in.
- 23:56It's fine. My shoulder hurts. I'm coughing. I'm tired.
- 24:00I'm insomnic. I'm anxious. but just that whole sort of open-ended first salvo
- 24:06just fully exhausting itself and just connecting to that what about this what
- 24:12about that anything else also i end every single visit,
- 24:16do you have any questions or concerns i didn't address.
- 24:19And then they say, oh yeah, there's these seven other things I wanted to do.
- 24:22And I say, okay, we will get those into the note or I'll have them give them
- 24:26to my team or put it on the portal and we'll get to it next time.
- 24:29But I think when we do it well, we're, we're really correcting like just a fundamental,
- 24:39we're going back to the way people have related for hundreds or thousands of years.
- 24:44I think part of our genetic sort of birthright or physiologic
- 24:47you know who we are ness is just
- 24:51to connect in an open-ended fashion because i think that's probably
- 24:54what hunter gatherers did right how's the hunt where'd
- 24:57you see the berries what were the leaves doing what was the weather
- 25:00what was the day like how'd you feel when you woke up
- 25:03you were two days out from camp how'd that go well
- 25:06we saw this and we saw that then we collected such and such then so and so twisted
- 25:10their ankle you know or winter right telling this telling the stories of who
- 25:15we are and how we relate to something bigger than ourselves so i think there's
- 25:20a universal resonance state we're tapping,
- 25:24when we just literally hear the deep listening that's probably the right term
- 25:29i think they were heard in other settings but i think they're at what they're
- 25:32actually saying this is the first first time i've ever had a physician manifest
- 25:36deep listening yeah yeah because a traditional clinic you don't have time.
- 25:41Like you are restricted. The insurance companies or clinic managers,
- 25:45like you got to push them through.
- 25:47And there's another irony here. It's the most efficient because I did deep listening
- 25:51before I got the functional medicine training, just intuitively.
- 25:54And I'd have these really complex folks and I'd take an hour on my intakes or
- 25:5845 minutes, something like that, pretty long and long follow-up visits till we got them dialed in.
- 26:03And I remember I'd say to my complex patients after I'd known them for six months
- 26:06or a year, Anything else? Nope, good to go.
- 26:09And then I'd be doing the note and think, oh, we manage their chronic kidney
- 26:12disease and their congestive heart failure and their hypertension and their
- 26:15high cholesterol and their depression and their insomnia and their fatigue. Yeah.
- 26:19Wow. They didn't have anything more they wanted to address at the end of the
- 26:24visit. No, I'm good. See ya.
- 26:26Right. So it's the most efficient, too.
- 26:29Yes. Yes, it is. I remember when I was going back to school for holistic health education,
- 26:34one of the research papers I read said something about most physicians,
- 26:39if they listen to their patient and don't interrupt after, I think it was 120 seconds,
- 26:45they will be able to diagnose what's going on without any further testing.
- 26:48But most people interrupt after less than 10 seconds.
- 26:52And I put it into practice when I went into my patient's room in the ER.
- 26:56And even with that in my head, I still found myself interrupting, so pressed for time.
- 27:03I'm like, okay, I'm going to try just to listen. I'm going to try to ask questions.
- 27:08And of course, starting an IV while we're talking or whatever.
- 27:11But that deep listening, I think you're right.
- 27:14It is so integral for feeling heard, for feeling seen,
- 27:21for feeling like there is hope and feeling like somebody actually knows what's
- 27:26going on and can do something about it. And it's just a level of connection.
- 27:30And then it, like you said, it's so important for you and figuring out what's going on.
- 27:35So it's like cheating. It feels like cheating oh wow the x-ray vision reveals
- 27:41what's happening again right i can't imagine practicing without it yeah.
- 27:48Yes. So if somebody is currently seeing like a traditional physician who does
- 27:56not know about functional medicine, is there any advice that you would give them?
- 28:00How can they improve their care in that setting? Or do they have to look outside
- 28:04and find a functional medicine doctor?
- 28:08Probably the latter because again
- 28:11i i think what's happening in the conventional setting is just that you you
- 28:17as the patient can pick up on it when they say yes and no in a binary fashion
- 28:21they think they're protecting you from harm they think they're protecting you
- 28:24from folks that don't know what they're doing and that's what they were trained
- 28:27and i forgot to mention just again from a.
- 28:32If we were to think that a provider should start to endorse integrative, holistic,
- 28:37functional, we might need to remind ourselves that then their confidence to
- 28:42even treat a cold, I mean, they just may not, it may not be psychologically
- 28:49fair to expect that they could.
- 28:51Right. So essentially, I think you have to gravitate to somebody who has the
- 28:56interest that this is the right thing to do, to get onto the other side,
- 29:00into this other toolbox, and then it becomes comfortable again.
- 29:04And it really gets rid of a bunch of awkward stuff.
- 29:09Right. Because it's such a tense, icky feeling that they don't agree with you
- 29:16and they're trying to dissuade you.
- 29:17And the patient often feels that the doctor is arrogant, which isn't necessarily the case.
- 29:22And the doctor often thinks the patient is noncompliant or whatever old-timey
- 29:26word we have for they're not doing what I want them to do.
- 29:30And I just think there needs to be that. There's quite a few very well-trained
- 29:35people in many domains now, not just IFM.
- 29:39Of course, That's the one I'm familiar with, but a bunch of bodies that do really
- 29:43excellent work, a bunch of fantastic naturopaths, a bunch of fantastically trained
- 29:46people in this lovely ether that you and I live in part of the time.
- 29:52And so I think they need to find somebody who's receptive.
- 29:55Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately, I think you're right. If they're seeking real answers,
- 30:00they're going to have to go out of the broken system.
- 30:04One nice thing to do is when you go back to the conventional provider,
- 30:08the best way, the way the communities I've been part of have changed is the
- 30:13medical providers have heard from the patients.
- 30:16Wow, this made a huge difference. And I still do the conventional part.
- 30:22I think that's the best way to change the system is the patients have so much power.
- 30:29Wow. That's huge.
- 30:32That's huge. I did not know that. I love that.
- 30:36So my listener, been listening to the whole conversation, fascinated.
- 30:40If there's one thing that he or she can take away from our conversation,
- 30:44what is the most important thing you want them to hear?
- 30:47It's really important to be at peace.
- 30:51Because our immune system, our physiologic pathways, our digestion,
- 30:58etc., you know, they're all built on the groundwork of us being at peace.
- 31:03And we don't live in a world right now that feels like that's the default response
- 31:08to the world we live in to be at ease.
- 31:11But those are all the default switches
- 31:14in our physiology that we need to be healthy and have low or no autoimmunity
- 31:18and vibrant thyroid health in a native fashion with no drugs no testing no nothing
- 31:23no supplements i mean all the software and hardware is just sitting there it's
- 31:28all turned on from a state of peace yeah so whatever your state of peace is
- 31:32whatever you need to be at peace,
- 31:34it's probably the most important functional medicine question there is and thankfully
- 31:40again everybody's tailored jacket, they actually know in their heart what that
- 31:44thing or those things plural are.
- 31:46So it's more about just the courage of whether or not they're going to choose to be at peace.
- 31:53Yes. Yes. And that's something that you don't have to go see a doctor to figure out.
- 31:58Everybody can do that for themselves. What will help me be at peace? Yeah.
- 32:02Yeah. The price point is right. The price point is courage.
- 32:05Yeah, very true. Dr. Rob, thank you so much for taking some time out of your
- 32:11day to be on the Health with Hashimoto's podcast.
- 32:13Where can my listeners find you?
- 32:17SeaworthyMed.com. So you can check out Esther there. She's on the Field Notes
- 32:21podcast. It's just a tab you could click on.
- 32:24Don't check out the blog. It's old and dusty. You won't find much there.
- 32:28We probably need to take it down.
- 32:30Podcast on the island is really vibrant and has people like
- 32:33esther and it just would really
- 32:36mean a lot if there's value there to do what all content creators encourage
- 32:40you to do it does actually matter like it subscribe share it because somebody
- 32:45needs if you're benefiting from this somebody else needs it and in the digital
- 32:50ether the only way you can get it to them is to feed the algorithm in a good
- 32:53way so seaworthymed.com the podcast tab,
- 32:56Awesome. I'll have that link down in the show notes. Thank you again for coming on the podcast.
- 33:02This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only.
- 33:05Please discuss any changes with your trusted healthcare provider.
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- 33:13You do not have to figure your health out alone.
- 33:16So that is school, S-K-O-O-L.com, and it is the Health with Hashimoto's community.
- 33:21I'll see you next time on the Health with.