Latest / Age Defiantly with Mark Young / [EP 38] Are You Letting the System Decide Your Health? | Dr. Sanjay Bhojraj

Transcript

[EP 38] Are You Letting the System Decide Your Health? | Dr. Sanjay Bhojraj · Age Defiantly with Mark Young

• 0:00
  Welcome to Performance Driven Living, the podcast where we question everything.
• 0:05
  We don't tip to around tough topics, we walk right into them, not to provoke, but to
• 0:11
  get closer to what's real.
• 0:13
  You might not agree with everything you hear, and that's okay.
• 0:17
  The show isn't about being right, it's about being real.
• 0:20
  These conversations are meant to stretch your thinking, challenge assumptions, and spark
• 0:25
  something deeper.
• 0:26
  The views shared are those of our guests and may not reflect those of the host or team.
• 0:32
  And while we dive deep into health, performance, and transformation, this is not medical advice.
• 0:38
  Talk to your doctor before making changes to your health or lifestyle.
• 0:42
  Take what lands, believe what doesn't, but whatever you do, don't stop questioning.
• 0:55
  We are here with the Performance Driven Living podcast.
• 1:00
  Now I will tell you this, where with our guest, Sanjay Boraj, who is an MD cardiologist
• 1:05
  and the curious cardiologist, I will say this Sanjay, normally my team's got me set
• 1:10
  up with these brilliant introductions about who you are and what you do.
• 1:14
  And of all of the days that I didn't receive one, I didn't receive one on you.
• 1:19
  So I don't have this brilliant introduction to give for you.
• 1:23
  So I'm going to ask you, like, I'm going to just start off by saying, tell me three
• 1:27
  most interesting things about you that the world may not.
• 1:30
  All right.
• 1:31
  Well, yeah.
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  So I like to live in secrecy apparently, so they may have requested to buy on me.
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  Three things that they might not know about me.
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  Number one, I am the father of triplet daughters who were in high school, which is an interesting
• 1:42
  fact.
• 1:44
  Number two, I was arrested my freshman year of college for having three of my friends in
• 1:50
  the trunk of my car and a cop pulled up behind us.
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  This was at Northwestern University.
• 1:55
  And number three is I am a two time gold medal athlete in powerlifting in the old man division
• 2:05
  of powerlifting at the US, USAPL, USA powerlifting association or whatever.
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  So it's amazing.
• 2:12
  Three things you might know.
• 2:13
  I knew about the daughters.
• 2:14
  I did not know that you smuggle people in your trunk and then I didn't know that you
• 2:17
  were a powerlifter.
• 2:19
  Smuggling makes it sound like trafficking.
• 2:22
  This was more like a prank.
• 2:23
  So they're like butt in looking at the traffic coming behind and I remember freshman year
• 2:28
  of college, like we're coming home from a frat party.
• 2:30
  I hadn't, I was the driver and I was too nerdy to drink at that point.
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  So like all my friends, it was like, all right, let's pile in the boot that my nickname
• 2:37
  was Booge in college.
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  Let's pile the Booge's car.
• 2:39
  Everyone get in there.
• 2:40
  And so it was like like 20 people in like a Toyota Camry, like in 1989, Toyota Camry.
• 2:46
  And these three were just like butt in, just like give me a play by play of what's
• 2:50
  going on.
• 2:51
  Pop on, scare the car behind you.
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  Yeah.
• 2:53
  And no, but like the trunk was open and so they were just looking at oncoming traffic.
• 2:57
  And I remember, I don't know if we can swear on the podcast, but I heard an oh, bleep.
• 3:03
  And I'm like, what happened?
• 3:04
  And sure enough, this cop pulled up behind us.
• 3:06
  And he was like, come on.
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  Are you serious?
• 3:08
  Like they made it too easy.
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  So.
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  So funny.
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  It was like two weeks into undergrad.
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  So yeah, try to explain that to your Indian parents and they were of course worried that
• 3:16
  I'd never get into med school and never be in a success in life based on one college
• 3:19
  prank.
• 3:20
  But luckily things turned out okay.
• 3:21
  I was gonna say things seem to be going all right.
• 3:23
  Yeah.
• 3:24
  Yeah, I think I think I pulled through, put it together.
• 3:26
  That's absolutely amazing.
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  See, the worst thing I'm doing, you're making me think, I'm trying to think like, did
• 3:30
  I do any stupid prank like that?
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  And I think the only thing I remember was in college, I drove a two-seater car, okay.
• 3:37
  And I had a friend without legs.
• 3:40
  So we would actually push her under the dashboard.
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  So you couldn't tell there was an extra person and we would go to a drive-in movie and
• 3:47
  not have to pay for a ticket.
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  So kind of smuggling, but it was actually taking a leg lift grill and putting her under
• 3:55
  the dashboard of the car.
• 3:56
  So you could count her, didn't know she was there.
• 3:58
  I think maybe we just end this line of conversation and yeah, I think both of us may end up with
• 4:03
  some bad social media right here in a minute.
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  All right.
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  Editor will take that out.
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  All right.
• 4:08
  Yeah.
• 4:09
  Maybe that.
• 4:10
  And here on the Performance Striven Life Podcast, we're starting now.
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  So Sanjay, I want to kind of dig in here because I'm fascinated by what you're doing right
• 4:18
  now and to give a little bit more setup on what you're doing.
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  And I love this because you're a cardiologist.
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  You've been working with cardiology patients for your entire career here.
• 4:30
  And but you've strayed off the cardiology path a little bit and I actually find that
• 4:35
  fascinating because so many of the conversations that I have on this podcast are with people
• 4:39
  who are defined the way that everybody thinks things ought to be.
• 4:45
  And it could be anything from a person who just finds a new way of dieting or a new person
• 4:51
  who's on a supplement regimen that may be different or person who just anything to be
• 4:56
  honest with you.
• 4:57
  But a way that life could be lived with higher performance is the intention.
• 5:02
  So your story, and I met you earlier this year and we kind of clicked based on just
• 5:07
  weird obscure movie references.
• 5:11
  But aside from that, one of the things that fascinates me about what's happened with you
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  is your story is not unlike several that I've heard and that is a classically trained
• 5:21
  cardiologist.
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  If I can say that, a Western medicine trained cardiologist who gets into a space that is
• 5:28
  a very, I'll say achievement focused, what I want to say, discipline, I mean, practice.
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  And then later ended up kind of having this light bulb went on and was just like, wow,
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  maybe the way Western medicine isn't necessarily the way that I want to take my career.
• 5:46
  And it's like, well, that's a pretty lucrative step back to, you know, to step away from
• 5:51
  a cardiology practice and then go into more of a holistic approach to treating your
• 5:57
  patients and training other cardiologists on this approach.
• 6:01
  And now recently in my conversation with you, you're like, I realize that the one thing
• 6:05
  I have that's different from all the other influencers who are out there telling people
• 6:09
  to live a healthy lifestyle and do all these, you know, somewhat, you know, naturopathic practices
• 6:15
  and he goes, your words to me were, I realized what was different about me and all of them.
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  And that is, I'm a cardiologist.
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  Yeah, I've got, I know, I live on both sides of the equation.
• 6:26
  So yeah, we can talk a little bit about the origin story.
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  And so for me, you know, like I mentioned before, my parents basically brainwashed me into
• 6:36
  going to medicine before I knew any other career option.
• 6:38
  And, you know, honestly, it worked out for me, you know, you're good at science.
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  You're an Indian kid, like your parents want you to be a doctor.
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  I've come from a whole line of physicians.
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  And so it wasn't really a stretch, right?
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  But, but naturally for whatever reason I graduated towards cardiology as a
• 6:56
  subspecialty because I really just enjoyed the heart and it just fascinated me.
• 7:01
  And then did additional training in what's called interventional cardiology.
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  So not just did I focus on the heart and imaging, but I was actually the one doing cardiac
• 7:08
  procedures, like balloons and stents and trans catheter valves and all this kind of nerdy crazy stuff.
• 7:13
  And I loved it for a long time.
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  I mean, it was really fascinating.
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  I loved the, the energy I loved.
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  I love procedures number one.
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  So I love doing doing the procedures.
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  I loved being an important part of people's health, like there is, you know, and people's lives.
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  And really as a cardiologist, I think it's one of the most sacred doctor patient relationships.
• 7:34
  There is because you're just bonded by fire with your patients.
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  And it's a, you know, I still see patients to this day that I treated 10 years ago.
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  In fact, the other day I was at a church thing and someone asked me, wait, aren't you doctor B?
• 7:47
  And I'm like, yeah, and I didn't recognize the guy.
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  It turns out 14 years ago, I'd put a stent in this guy and he remembered me and his
• 7:54
  insurance switched and he moved out of the area, but we just happened to be in the same spot.
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  And we just, you know, it's just, it's a bond like none other.
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  So I, you know, it was really fascinating.
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  And and as time went on, it did really well.
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  But I always had a little bit of, of reserve, I guess, for success because I was starting.
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  I got long enough in the tooth in my career to where I was getting repeat business, right?
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  And I know that in business, like when you want shark tank or anything, you're always asking about, you know,
• 8:20
  what's your reorder rate or how many people are you having come back and medicine is one of those
• 8:24
  unique disciplines, particularly interventional cardiology where we don't want to repeat business, right?
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  That means that you're having a second heart attack or you coming in with another event or I've had, you know,
• 8:33
  I put in three stents in you and I'm sending it to heart bypass.
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  There's, there's a fail in there, right?
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  And and this is not, you know, with lazy medicine.
• 8:41
  This is the full conventional medical, you know, toolkit that I've got.
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  So optimizing blood pressure and cholesterol and blood sugar and, and all these conventional numbers,
• 8:50
  even getting them in optimal range, I was still getting repeat business.
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  And I said this, you know, something's not adding up here, right?
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  Because if we are as great as we think we are as physicians, then, then, you know,
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  I should not have patients having second events.
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  People should be living forever.
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  What's going on?
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  And through a series of backward circumstances, actually, one of which involved me being a powerlifter.
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  So my powerlifting coach told me, Hey, if you, you know, we're getting all these supplements anyway,
• 9:17
  sign up for a professional account and you can get, you know, the professional discount.
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  So of course, the brown man and me said, game on.
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  And I got on there on their email chains and one of them, one of the emails that got sent out was from
• 9:29
  Institute of Functional Medicine, a functional medicine approach to hypertension.
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  I remember.
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  And, you know, at that point, I had been well into my career and I was like, yeah, you know,
• 9:36
  teach me something to find whatever you think, you know, and this is now 10 or 12 years ago,
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  before functional medicine is what it is now.
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  It was very fringe before and not really well understood.
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  And truth be told, there is a lot of signal to noise issues, even inside the functional medicine world.
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  Not to say there are no, but it was, it was just kind of a little bit more all over the place.
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  And I watched this one hour lecture and I don't even remember who gave it,
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  but it was fascinating to me because that's in that lecture, I learned how to connect diet and lifestyle
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  to all of these health outcomes and they were relating it to hypertension,
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  but I extrapolated to coronary disease and sleep apnea and atrial fibrillation and hyperlipidemia
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  and all the things, you know, high cholesterol, all the things that we deal with in the cardiology world.
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  And I said, you know what, this is what, this is what's been missing from my practice.
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  And the one thing I'll say about an interventional cardiologist is because we are the doers in cardiology,
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  right? It's like what Home Depot or Lowe's, I can remember helping doers or whatever that line is.
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  You know, I am down with anything that's going to help my patients and I'm as the, you know,
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  my podcast called the Curious Cardiologist, like I'm always curious about what more can I do to help people.
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  And so I went to a week long, the initial week long course in functional medicine and honestly,
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  truth be told, I didn't know what to expect. It was in my hometown in Chicago, right downtown,
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  right where I used to live. And so I said, okay, if these guys are like wackadoodles and they bust
• 11:01
  out some prayer symbols and we're doing chants or something, then I'm just going to bust out and
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  go have drinks with my high school friends or whatever, right? And it was absolutely fascinating.
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  It turned out to be exactly what I was looking for. And, you know, once any of us have had that
• 11:15
  revelation in our lives of something that this is your path, right? It becomes this impossible
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  like gravity, like the gravity of a black hole pulling you in. It just becomes this gravity that you
• 11:27
  just can't escape. And so for a few more years, I tried and tried to just, you know, do the good
• 11:33
  path and stay in my velvet coffin with my current career because it's so easy for me and comfortable
• 11:38
  in all these things. But my soul was just pulled in a different direction. And ultimately, I just said,
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  you know what, if I want to live an authentic life and not have that road less traveled or
• 11:48
  that fear of a grad or something, this is just what I have to do. So yeah, I made the very
• 11:53
  counterintuitive jump out of a lucrative orange county cardiology practice and into this brave new
• 12:01
  world. That's absolutely fascinating to me. So I did a different journey. My education goes all
• 12:08
  over the map, to be honest with you. But what's funny is that like I always thought that when I
• 12:11
  was a kid that I would have become a doctor and then I didn't. I just want one probably. Yeah.
• 12:17
  Well, I didn't go to med school and I wasn't the person who, although I absolutely would have lived
• 12:22
  and died by Western medicine, that was 100%. You know, I grew up believing that it was, it was far
• 12:28
  my, it was all this kind of stuff. I grew up in that world. My best friend growing up's parents
• 12:33
  were doctors. He's now a nephrologist like so on so forth. So I always had a great respect for
• 12:40
  that world. And then found myself later in life earning a PhD in functional medicine. I'm like,
• 12:45
  who am I? Right? Like all of this seemed, it seemed very, you know, woo. Back in the day. And
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  it's funny because nowadays it's, it's funny to me because when I see people that very much go
• 12:59
  on that path of, I'm going to use the word Western medicine just to, conventional medicine.
• 13:06
  Yeah. Just nomenclature wise. But, you know, we get into that Western medicine mindset. And it's
• 13:11
  like I laugh because I'm on the telephone with my aunt the other day. And I just said I was kind
• 13:17
  of under the weather. Like I just, yeah, it's just kind of tired today. And I mean, her first thing,
• 13:21
  you need to get to a doctor, you need to get an antibiotic. And, and it's, and I was like, wow,
• 13:27
  like that's, that's the first place your mind goes is there needs to be a prescription for this.
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  I mean, but, but medicine has been so great at that. I don't know where I, where I was. Like,
• 13:39
  I think I was doing some sort of a doctor business training. And I said, doctors are actually the
• 13:43
  best sales people ever if you think about it, right? Because we have, I mean, I don't use the
• 13:49
  term lightly gaslit people into thinking that whatever their problem is, we're the only ones that
• 13:54
  have that solution, right? So you have to go through us. And so, yeah, I mean, if you look at,
• 13:58
  you know, ear infections and kids and, and, you know, antibiotic resistance for, for inappropriate
• 14:03
  antibiotics, I mean, I get where it comes from because we have, you know, the conventional medicine
• 14:08
  world has said for so many years, you know, that pills are the only way, right? But if you think
• 14:14
  about like my grandmother in India, they didn't have medicines, right? Like she was, she was like a,
• 14:20
  like a pocket herbalist. And, and I remember she had this, this wooden box of like roots and,
• 14:26
  and things. And whenever we'd go to India for the summers and we'd get sick or something or,
• 14:30
  whatever she would make some sort of a paste or something, yeah, all these are diabetic therapies.
• 14:34
  And, you know, when you think about medicine, really, it's only as old as penicillin, right? Like,
• 14:39
  that was when we had the first win, uh, was like the 1900s, 1910 or 1920 or whatever. I think it was
• 14:45
  1918 or wherever penicillin came out, you know, medicine is a very early science, right? And,
• 14:51
  and while we have amazing knowledge of molecular biology and complex systems and modeling and
• 14:58
  things, you know, the, the dumbest cell in the human body is a million times smarter than the
• 15:01
  smartest PhD, uh, ever, right? I mean, it's, it's amazing when you think of biological systems. So,
• 15:07
  I think it's such, it's so arrogant of us to say that, you know, medicines are the only way when
• 15:11
  you've got thousands of years of experience with herbs or, or lifestyle. I mean, look at Ariavella.
• 15:16
  I mean, how did these guys come up with this? You know, they didn't have microscopes or they
• 15:21
  didn't have, you know, the stethoscopes, even for that matter, right? But something. When you
• 15:26
  learn Ariavella, they've designed and they've divine to principles like intermittent fasting or
• 15:30
  understanding different metabolism types and body types and, and, you know, some people need to
• 15:36
  have your food, some people need lighter foods. The words may be a little bit different, but,
• 15:39
  you know, it's a lot of what we practice and preach today. So, you know, we need to have respect
• 15:44
  for these old traditions, but yeah, it's, it's, it's unfortunate that so many people now just feel
• 15:49
  that as soon as I have an issue, I need a medication rather than doing the longer term diet and lifestyle
• 15:56
  things that we teach in functional medicine. And there's a lot of deep program that, deep programming
• 16:00
  that needs to happen there. You mentioned a couple things in there that I want to highlight.
• 16:03
  And the one is the, the idea that doctors are the best sales people. And I actually think I don't
• 16:09
  blame the doctors in that just to be clear. Like, it's not a doctor's trying to sell somebody
• 16:14
  something. I think what happens is we as a culture have established that the word doctor just has
• 16:20
  so much value to it that you've reached the epitome of everything, which means you know the answers
• 16:26
  to everything. Yeah. And as a, and then the doctor walks into the room like if he told you to stand
• 16:31
  on your head, you probably would simply because we've, we've loaded that title with so much authority.
• 16:38
  And I think the general public by and large feels, I'm going to say feels stupid or perhaps
• 16:45
  ill-equipped to question something that a doctor says that, you know, you do hear stories about,
• 16:51
  you know, my, my so and so, my spouse, my parent or whatever. And I questioned the doctor and he
• 16:55
  shut me down. Yeah. Because people feel that if they do ask those types of questions,
• 17:00
  they're either being disrespectful that they're going to that, you know, their ignorance is going
• 17:05
  to show and they're, they're going to be shut down quickly with, with they can't argue back
• 17:10
  because they don't know enough about the topic. Or third, if I argue with the physician,
• 17:15
  is my loved one or are I going to receive less than quality care? In jeopardy. Yeah. And because
• 17:21
  I questioned the system. Yeah. And, and I see such a regional difference in that too. I mean,
• 17:26
  I trained in the, I grew up in Chicago, grew up in the Midwest, did my training in Michigan and
• 17:29
  elsewhere. And I practiced here in Southern California, you know, and, and there's a definite
• 17:34
  difference. Like, for instance, when I was in Indianapolis, everybody was whatever you say doc.
• 17:38
  And I was a med student at that time. And they'd be like, they'd still call me doc, even though I
• 17:41
  corrected them to say medical student, but there's something about that ceremonial, that coat that
• 17:44
  you have that kind of distances you. And there was zero questioning. I think when I trained in
• 17:49
  Michigan, you know, this was in the inner city of Michigan, there was a cultural questioning
• 17:55
  of the medical establishment, but an ultimate respect for it. So they would ask one or two questions
• 18:00
  and, you know, are you sure? And I'm like, well, this is what, you know, this is what, what,
• 18:04
  you know, I think we should do. And then they were okay with it. And in Southern California,
• 18:08
  and, and part of this is different times too, because the internet became a thing,
• 18:12
  Dr. Google and all this stuff. So it may not necessarily be a regional thing, but just in my experience.
• 18:15
  So when I'm here practicing in, in SoCal, I almost feel weird if somebody just accepted my
• 18:22
  treatment plan without asking me, right? Like, it's like, don't you have any questions? No doc,
• 18:25
  whatever you say, I'll, you know, you told me lime beans, I'll eat lime beans. I'm like,
• 18:29
  well, no, no, well, I need you to understand what's going on. And that part of that may have been
• 18:33
  my evolution as a physician too, because one of the things I realized is the most important
• 18:39
  person in someone's healthcare team is not the doctor, but it's the patient themselves, right?
• 18:44
  Like, you know, we want to talk about obscure movie references. There is a movie, do you remember
• 18:49
  the movie Willow? Like, it was with, this is how market, and there is like the wizard comes to
• 18:56
  the village and says, you know, which is the most powerful finger? And he puts his four fingers up,
• 19:01
  and the answer was the Willow's finger that he had, right? Like, like, you're the most powerful
• 19:05
  person. And so similarly, you know, I think maybe I had a, a transition in my mindset too that,
• 19:11
  that made me realize that I'm not the most important person, because I only see this patient
• 19:15
  15 minutes every six months, you know, the other 179 days, 23 hours, and 45 minutes of time,
• 19:23
  that person is the one making the decision, right? They're the ones deciding what to put
• 19:26
  in their mouth. They're the one deciding whether to sit on the couch or go for a walk. They're
• 19:30
  the ones deciding, do I take my medications or not? And rather than me just kind of being in that
• 19:35
  old paternalistic model of preaching to people, we need to engage them and kind of help them
• 19:42
  understand the importance of things. And, and so, you know, those three, those three approaches
• 19:47
  to physicians that you outlined, I think that is an evolution. But that's also, you know, each
• 19:52
  practitioner is very different too, right? I mean, I think that I'm a very different type of
• 19:56
  practitioner. There's a, there's an influencer cardiologist online who just did a post about why
• 20:03
  all functional medicine is stupid. And, you know, he's, he's a pretty arrogant guy or at least has
• 20:09
  aura. And I'm like, yeah, you know, that's like 99% of the cardiologists out there that I deal with
• 20:14
  when I tell them what I do. They're like, what are you like crazy? Like, what are you a communist now?
• 20:19
  You know, and, and they're just like, what happened to you? And I'm like, you know what,
• 20:22
  there's absolutely nothing wrong with empowering patients. And there's absolutely nothing wrong in
• 20:27
  using natural remedies as long as they work. Like I'm not going to say to someone you have a heart
• 20:31
  attack go jump off of a bridge. That seems like a very bad idea. But, you know, if you're having,
• 20:36
  you know, I believe in a second heart attack, I suppose. And you're at otherwise low risk. Yeah, we can
• 20:41
  try a, a, a, a nutraceutical, try a lifestyle intervention and see if that works. And then, you know,
• 20:47
  the power of being a cardiologist of being MD is, all right, we can try the natural stuff, the
• 20:51
  functional medicine stuff, whatever it may be, meditation, breathing, supplements, whatever. And
• 20:56
  if we're still in a pickle, then I can open the other toolbox, right? And, and kind of go down
• 21:01
  that route. So it's, I don't see that as an either or I think the way a lot of people do,
• 21:06
  that, you know, functional medicine is at odds with, with conventional medicine. I just think of
• 21:10
  as a right hand and left hand, right? Like sometimes like when I'm, you know, like when I'm,
• 21:15
  when I'm playing tennis, I have a one handed forehand and a two handed backhand, right? Like,
• 21:18
  like that's just how, how it works. And it seems so natural to me. So now I feel like I'm a
• 21:22
  more complete cardiologist. And really kind of, I go from being someone who treats patients to
• 21:27
  being a healer, because, you know, as, as you know, in the functional medicine model, we're
• 21:31
  really dealing with the underlying issues, not the number of blood pressure, but the inflammation
• 21:36
  that's leading to glycocalics dysfunction that's leading to very, it's signaling and your
• 21:40
  nitric oxide goes down, right? So, so I just think of things in a very different way. But yeah,
• 21:44
  I wish that there was some way that we could crack open the minds of so many others, but,
• 21:48
  you know, we've been institutionalized to think that everything else is garbage and only the
• 21:52
  answers that we have are the ones that make sense that we have. So I have to tell you,
• 21:55
  first of all, you use the movie Willow. And I've been waiting to jump in here to give my story.
• 22:00
  And that is the, the willow, I hated reading as a kid. Like I hated reading so much. And it's
• 22:06
  hilarious to know who I am today and my obsession with books. But the book Willow was actually the first
• 22:13
  book I officially read as a kid. And it made me fall in love with reading. So it's really funny
• 22:17
  that you actually brought that up. How absurd. And oddly, it was like a very early,
• 22:21
  Val Kilmer movie. I don't know if that was before, after real genius. But he was mad
• 22:25
  Martin again, I think. Yeah, it's mad Martin again. Very good. So, so I want to, I want to pivot a
• 22:31
  little bit here, Sanjay, because again, you've got a unique story because you've gotten this
• 22:35
  Western training and now you've, you've kind of enveloped in this Eastern model. And as you
• 22:41
  said, you're a very holistic cardiologist now. But for the, for the listener who's listening to
• 22:46
  this, because I mean, all of this background stuff is great and we can sit and talk about, you know,
• 22:50
  our beliefs and everything. What I really want to do is kind of, kind of tackle what's going on.
• 22:55
  And from a, from a Western cardiology mindset, versus an Eastern Ayurvedic approach,
• 23:04
  which are almost at odds, but not because they're, they're fighting, but because they just approach
• 23:10
  a problem from a very different direction. And I kind of look at it. It's almost like a hug,
• 23:15
  right? Like hugs, not a hug unless both arms are involved. And, and how do we, how do we get
• 23:21
  those things married together? But what I'm curious about is, because like I said, early on,
• 23:26
  you're an unusual animal. And so much as you, many people, I know, I know a lot of people who've
• 23:32
  gone from the Western world, the Western training and just completely flipped the switch.
• 23:39
  And they've gone completely into holistic functional practice. I've often made the comment,
• 23:45
  that you see a lot of people go from Western medicine into functional, but you never see anybody go
• 23:49
  the other way. And yet you kind of like went there and back and now sitting in the middle and
• 23:55
  this weird kind of, you've found a harmony between these things that I think a lot of both Western
• 24:02
  and Eastern practitioners struggle with. I think, I think a lot of, you know, classically
• 24:08
  trainer or Western trained conventional medicine doctors, MDs, DOS, DOS maybe not as much, but
• 24:15
  especially MDs have a tough time dealing with the functional side of things. And I don't blame them,
• 24:20
  I blame the training that they're given because we can only teach what we know. And then in the
• 24:25
  functional space, it's almost as if there, there's a bias against any kind of Western training. And
• 24:34
  I've been the person who says, you know, keep me off of prescriptions, but if my leg falls off
• 24:38
  and I'm in the yard, please provide pain medication, right? Like I'm not that much of a divergent
• 24:44
  when it comes to my own health in that respect. Yeah. What are, what are some of the, the biggest
• 24:50
  ways I want to start in two ways? And I want to start with what are the ways that you see them being
• 24:55
  the most different? Like what are the few perspectives between that Eastern Western type treatment plan
• 25:02
  that you think are the most different? And then I'll ask you, what are the similarities
• 25:06
  afterwards? Like where is there so much harmony that people may not even realize how much harmony
• 25:11
  there is? You know, I mean, we're going to talk about, we're going to talk about movie, we're,
• 25:14
  what we talk in movie quotes, right? And so I remember in the Incredibles, when Mr. Incredibles,
• 25:18
  like, you know, you keep wanting to get into a fight, but I'm just happy you're alive, right?
• 25:22
  So it makes me kind of think of that. Like, like, I don't think, I don't, I think it's kind of
• 25:27
  artificial to, to say that Western and Eastern medicine have to be at odds with one another.
• 25:32
  Unfortunately, that's the mindset a lot of people have. So maybe let me talk about the similarities
• 25:37
  and the differences first, right? So in the similarities, obviously, we want to improve patient
• 25:41
  outcomes, right? And I think part of the problem is is that we get stuck in this religion of our
• 25:47
  teachings and say, you know, my God is more right than your God is, even though both say we want
• 25:52
  peace and we want harmony and doing to others and kind of all these things, right? But we get so stuck
• 25:56
  in the nomenclature, but ultimately we all want the best outcomes, you know, so improving
• 26:01
  lives, improving blood pressure, getting people to live longer, managing, you know, disease states,
• 26:07
  whatever it may be. I think that the divergence, though, comes in, you know, very much in the how,
• 26:12
  whereas in Western medicine, where basically I feel like essentially prolonging the inevitable by
• 26:17
  just treating numbers, right? Well, your diabetes is high. I'm going to give you a medicine that's
• 26:21
  going to make you pee out sugar so that your diabetes gets better. I'm not going to deal with why you
• 26:25
  have the high sugar in the first place, but we're going to normalize your sugar, you know, by affecting
• 26:30
  your sodium glucose transporter in your distal tubule and your kidney and just get you to pee it out,
• 26:35
  right? Or your blood pressure is elevated, you know, so rather than dealing with the underlying
• 26:39
  inflammation and glycocalics and endothelial dysfunction, I'm going to give you a medicine that's
• 26:43
  going to relax the sodium channels in your vascular smooth muscle and dilate your blood vessels,
• 26:49
  right? So, you know, it's very much a treat of numbers and assume that you're going to help things.
• 26:56
  And, yeah, of course, you know, you're being blood pressure down 10 points with medication,
• 27:00
  and you're going to have better cardiovascular outcomes, less strokes and heart attacks and
• 27:04
  whatnot. You know, in the functional world, while we still have that mindset of, you know, reducing
• 27:10
  the blood sugar, improving blood sugar, improving on things, I think it's much more of a why,
• 27:15
  right? Like, like, why is this person diabetic? Where is the block? Is it something, you know,
• 27:22
  that we think of in the conventional world, like, is there an issue in the pancreas? Like,
• 27:27
  is the body attacking itself? You know, but in the functional world, we also think of energy,
• 27:32
  and so, you know, is there an energy block here? Is there like an emotional trauma that we need
• 27:38
  to deal with that's causing something? And, and we don't, you know, we don't like the shishi
• 27:42
  kind of stuff in the, in the conventional world, but, you know, I'm so convinced that, that these
• 27:47
  things make a difference. And, and so in the, on the functional side of things, I think very
• 27:52
  anti-medicine in the sense of, you know, very anti-apil for every ill, that model that we learn,
• 27:58
  but, but rather focusing on what's the underlying issue. And then why I blend this is honestly,
• 28:04
  I learned from an early age that you learn from whoever knows more than you. It could be the
• 28:09
  janitor, it could be a teacher, it could be a parent, it can be one of your peers, right? But
• 28:14
  if somebody has more information than you, you don't have to worry about the source in the sense
• 28:19
  that, you know, I can't learn something from the janitor, right? Like, that person may have more
• 28:22
  life experience than you, and so you learn from them because it makes you better, right? And not
• 28:27
  to pick on janitors or anything, but, but, you know, I think that, but I think that, that, in my mind,
• 28:32
  I don't really differentiate between the tools that are functional medicine versus conventional
• 28:37
  medicine because ultimately they're all tools and helping me make you better, right? And that's
• 28:42
  that's really the most important thing. And so the blending of the world seems like the most natural
• 28:47
  thing to me because, yeah, you know what, are there things that I think in the functional medicine
• 28:50
  world, they're absolutely crazy? Yeah. Like, that was a big part of when I was coming in this world,
• 28:57
  trying to figure out signal the noise, you know, when you've got a study that someone's quoting
• 29:01
  that was done on seven earthworms, like how apical bull is that to humans, right? Like, or at the
• 29:07
  same time, is there stuff that's done in conventional medicine? That's absolutely back shit bonkers? Yeah,
• 29:13
  you know, like, why, you know, why are we, why are we ablating someone's vagus nerve going to
• 29:19
  their kidneys to treat blood pressure? Yeah, it brings down the number, but hey, we don't really
• 29:23
  understand everything about the vagus nerve. What else is going to happen, right? We've got this great
• 29:27
  medicine, fen fen, for weight loss. Yeah, it's basically like doing a couple of lines, lines
• 29:32
  of coke, but you know what, you lose great weight. Oh crap, we didn't know that 15 years later,
• 29:37
  your heart valves would be completely chewed up and you need heart surgery, right? I mean, like,
• 29:41
  so there's, there's stupid stuff on both sides of the equation. So I think as long as you
• 29:46
  open that, you know what, for just as much evidence-based stuff there is in conventional medicine,
• 29:51
  there's a lot of stuff that we do that's not evidence-based. And even then, the evidence,
• 29:55
  like a lot of these big trials are designed never to fail. And so they may not show the outcome
• 29:59
  that you think they're going to show, right? Or in the functional medicine world, yeah, maybe a case
• 30:03
  series of three people is not, you know, a 10,000 person randomized controlled trial, but if it
• 30:09
  worked in those three people, you know, what's the harm in trying it, right? What's the downside?
• 30:14
  And you want to jump in. You said something earlier that I think is the most critical piece of
• 30:20
  all of that and that is, and this is where I think the the distance comes in and that is,
• 30:25
  I agree with everything you're saying that functional has some crazies and conventional has some
• 30:29
  crazies. There's stuff on both sides that could use some improvement and probably a little more
• 30:34
  harmony, but it's kind of like the Republicans of the Democrats, right? Like, like, I think both
• 30:39
  want the country to go in a good direction and both of them want prosperity for everybody,
• 30:43
  we just disagree on how to get there. So it's more of the methodology as the problem rather than the
• 30:49
  intended outcome. And we tend to demonize the other side when, in fact, their intention is the
• 30:55
  same. We just disagree with their convention. That being said, you said something that I want to
• 31:00
  make sure that we don't lose for a listener and that is the most important person in the room
• 31:08
  regardless of who the practitioner is the patient. And I'm curious. I was just the guest on a
• 31:15
  podcast recently having this conversation about how do we fix our medical system?
• 31:21
  And, and my pushback was, you know, the medical system has broken, medical system has broken.
• 31:28
  I'm like, I want to kind of counter into it that and say, doesn't matter what the system is,
• 31:33
  if the patient doesn't feel personal responsibility for their own health, no system is going to ever fix
• 31:41
  that. Right. And I think part of what we need to do is realign patient behaviors with patient
• 31:48
  outcomes, right? Like, so what I mean by that is, so I run a metabolic program and everybody gets
• 31:53
  a wearable device. And you can see like when you eat certain foods that how it affects your sleep
• 31:58
  or how it affects your sympathetic, parasympathetic nervous system, right? Like reconnecting people
• 32:03
  with rapid feedback to outcomes so that they feel that they have control, right? So I think that
• 32:09
  the first step is, you know, having people realize that they are truly in control of their
• 32:15
  numbers, right? They're truly in control of their health. That, that in and of itself is a
• 32:19
  paradigm shift because so many people now just kind of outsource their health the way that they
• 32:23
  outsource, you know, lawn care or, you know, doing the dishes or reading contracts or whatever,
• 32:28
  right? But you need to have a personal stake in this. And, and, and the first thing we need to do
• 32:33
  to fix health care is fix people kind of meaning let them understand what, how much responsibility
• 32:38
  they can have and show them outcomes of this is how much better you could be if you make better
• 32:43
  choices, right? And so for instance, like again, getting back to my program, I've had so many patients
• 32:48
  probably in the last six months, I've had at least four or five patients who have come off of insulin,
• 32:54
  right? They, they're types of diabetics on insulin, but we fix their cells, fix their metabolism,
• 32:59
  all that stuff. And, and they see now that their numbers, they were continuous glucose monitors,
• 33:04
  see how much better their numbers are. And they say, you know, I didn't realize how much
• 33:08
  I, my diet choices were affecting me because I just thought, you know, I can have a piece of cake
• 33:13
  and take some more insulin, right? Well, that's not, you know, yeah, it brings the number down,
• 33:17
  but you're not dealing with the underlying pathology that's, that's happening, right? So
• 33:21
  what we need to do, I think, is, is have people make that mental connection to reconnect outcomes
• 33:27
  to behaviors? Like think about driving, right? What if, what if your spedometer only gave you,
• 33:32
  gave you a readout every 20 minutes on your heart, right? And what's the first thing a cop asked
• 33:38
  you, police officer asked you when they pull you over, you know, for speeding at least, you know,
• 33:41
  how fast you're going, right? And, and you'd be like, well, you know, my thing says that four
• 33:46
  miles back, I was going 15 miles an hour. Well, that's not, that's not reflective of what's happening
• 33:51
  immediately, right? You just, you just bold through a school zone at 90 miles an hour, you know,
• 33:56
  but, but you're saying, well, what happened four months ago is that I was, I was driving 15 miles
• 34:00
  an hour, whatever it may be, right? So, so getting that rapid feedback, and that's where I think
• 34:04
  wearables are such an important part of the future of healthcare is getting people to learn how to
• 34:10
  use them, getting people to wear them number one, you know, but then teaching people how to use
• 34:14
  them appropriately and then using data science and and modeling and AI and machine learning and
• 34:19
  all these things to make sense of these 800,000 data points that inevitably we're going to get on
• 34:25
  people. And then, you know, the next version of that would be not just descriptive saying, hey,
• 34:29
  you know what, your blood sugar was high, your movement was low, you know, this is going to happen
• 34:34
  to predictive models of being able to say, you know what, based on the last five years of data,
• 34:39
  you're, you have a 97% chance of being diabetic unless we do XYZ, right? So, so, you know, I think that's
• 34:45
  really where the future of healthcare needs to be, but it needs to be more personalized, but scalable,
• 34:52
  which is a very difficult thing to do. And that's where I get so excited about kind of, you know,
• 34:58
  privacy issues be aside, like these companies that understand data, like Google and Microsoft and
• 35:03
  all these guys getting in there, Apple, you know, to be able to help navigate some of that stuff,
• 35:08
  as long as we're doing it in a responsible smart fashion. Yeah, so I actually was looking up an
• 35:12
  article while you were talking there for a moment and I was looking up a video that was sent to me,
• 35:17
  I brought this up a couple of times today, yesterday, a friend of mine sent me a video and it was
• 35:21
  John Oliver from HBO, just dogging RFK and the Maha movement and laughing at wearables and making
• 35:30
  fun of people who, you know, are doing some of these things. I mean, he took a pretty stern
• 35:36
  approach against Casey and Kelly Means. Yeah, I saw it took that. Yeah, and it was, I mean, it was,
• 35:42
  it was super harsh and the friend sent it to me and was like, have you seen this? And I said,
• 35:46
  no, and I went ahead and watched it anyways and and the response was it's kind of funny,
• 35:50
  not funny because some of the stuff that he points out is kind of funny because this, you know,
• 35:55
  biohacker crowd, if you will, does get a little weird sometimes and to the to the normal person,
• 36:00
  some of it does look a little bizarre. But aside from that, I was like, my response was, yeah,
• 36:05
  it's funny if that message wasn't hurting people because, you know, the fact that you're laughing
• 36:11
  about food dies being in cereals because of the dramatic way that it was demonstrated. It's like,
• 36:15
  okay, but you never defended the food die being in the cereal. You made fun of the accusation.
• 36:21
  You never defended that it was wrong. Well, and this stuff happens, you know, they're like, you
• 36:26
  know, I don't know if it was in that or somewhere else where he's like, you know, what's the big
• 36:28
  deal of food dies? You know, if you're still eating, eating, you know, skittles, for instance,
• 36:33
  right? I think skittles, like, you mentioned Casey, so in her books, that Skittles in their
• 36:39
  dataset was one of the ones that affected blood sugar the worst, right? And they have all these
• 36:42
  artificial colors and all these things. And yeah, I'm not saying let's make skittles healthier.
• 36:47
  Ultimately, the goal is let's get skittles out of your diet, right? But this, but there is such
• 36:52
  an arrogance in that, right? Because it basically comes from the the established world, but, you know,
• 36:58
  think about the dreamers, right? Like, those are the ones that move society forward, not the people
• 37:03
  that just double down on what we already know, right? Famously, Albert Einstein, when he came up with
• 37:08
  the theory of relativity, they thought physics was a dead field because they had Newtonian physics
• 37:12
  and that described absolutely everything in the world. And he was discouraged to go into physics as
• 37:16
  a career, but he rethought the world and people thought that he was crazy. And now, like, show me a
• 37:23
  physicist that doesn't believe in relativity, right? Even like things in the Medtech world, like,
• 37:28
  for instance, like the idea of a peacemaker, right? So the founder of Metronik, his name escapes me,
• 37:35
  said, you know, we've got patients and there's an issue with the electrical activity in their
• 37:39
  heart. And so I've invented this device that can reestablish electrical impulse to bring people
• 37:45
  back to life. And nobody believed him. He was laughed out. We have the American College of
• 37:49
  Cardiology. That's our big trade meeting. And so we applied the ACC to have a session where he
• 37:54
  would talk about pacemakers. And, and he was denied, laughed out of town. So what he ended up doing
• 37:59
  in a gorilla marketing move was he got a dog that he put into complete heart blocks. So we're
• 38:04
  the top and the bottom of the heart weren't talking to one another. And that's a not great situation.
• 38:09
  And he had this dog hooked up to an external pacemaker, which at the time probably was the size of
• 38:13
  a washing machine or something crazy, right? And, and in the, in the hallway of the session had this
• 38:19
  dog, people were playing with it. And then he shut off the pacemaker and the dog would collapse
• 38:23
  because he had no conduction between the, the, the, in his heart. And then everyone would freak
• 38:28
  out. And then he turned the washing machine back on again, meaning the pacemaker. And the dog
• 38:31
  would be just as playful as before, not saying we recreate that experiment. But the,
• 38:37
  metronik is now a multi billion dollar global company based on someone who was laughed out of
• 38:43
  the conventional universe, right? So I hate when people take a stance like that. You know,
• 38:48
  once you've lost your curiosity, that's why that's why the career is cardiologist, right? Once
• 38:51
  you've lost your curiosity, I feel like you've really stopped caring about humanity, right? And,
• 38:58
  and so for someone to, to say, oh, this is stupid and this and the other, you don't think about the
• 39:02
  why behind it, right? Like why, if we're, if we're so great at what we do, why are people still
• 39:07
  dying? Why do we have such crappy health outcomes? Why are 93% of Americans metabolically unhealthy,
• 39:13
  right? Like we're not doing what we need to do. And you know, we need to look at things differently.
• 39:17
  So yeah, I took exception to John Oliver. Everybody's crazy until they're not. I mean,
• 39:23
  that's kind of, that's kind of the way it goes. That is like my mantra. Am I crazy or no?
• 39:27
  Can you tell me? We ask them for a friend. Yeah, I mean, but everybody's crazy until they're not,
• 39:31
  right? Like everything has a bad idea until it works. And, and you know, that we need that
• 39:36
  dreamer. We need that, which does bring me to my next series of questions and conversations with
• 39:43
  you because you met you kind of alluded to it earlier. But medical diagnostics is taking a
• 39:48
  complete different turn in the introduction of AI is, is turning everything upside down. And part
• 39:56
  of that being that AI doesn't have the same burdens that med school students do. It has different
• 40:01
  burdens because it doesn't have the curiosity that you're talking about because AI doesn't necessarily
• 40:06
  imagine the world the way it isn't. And I can just alternate and kind of garbage and garbage out
• 40:12
  all those things. Getting better and better for sure. But, but the reality is is that, you know,
• 40:17
  and I had somebody the other day make a statement about AI. Well, studies show and before he even finished,
• 40:23
  I went, can I hold on for just a second? I want to point out to you that any study that actually
• 40:27
  got published about AI is out of date before the publishing date. So let's not refer to what studies
• 40:33
  are showing about people's reactions to AI's right now. And it was like, it was literally like
• 40:38
  mic drop in the meeting because it was literally like, don't tell me what the study showed because by
• 40:43
  the time the study was published, all the data was obsolete. Like it's moving at such a rate right
• 40:48
  now that we're not even recognizing, you know, a month, two months out. Just the evolution is so
• 40:55
  different. I'm curious on a couple of topics because I have opinions. And I know a lot of people in
• 41:02
  this AI meets, you know, Medtech meets traditional medicine kind of space. And being an avid AI user,
• 41:11
  and, and, you know, I'm gonna say, I'm going to use the word advocate, although it still scares the
• 41:17
  daylights out of me in a lot of ways. I also believe in being an early adopter to a technology
• 41:21
  that's not going away. I'd rather become friends fast than, than enemies slow. Sure, yeah.
• 41:27
  So the question that I have for you is, how do you see this starting to affect? And I want to
• 41:33
  preface that question with, there was a recent, and I wish I could remember the name of the
• 41:38
  institute to publish it. It wasn't MIT. That was a different study about brain atrophy. But there
• 41:44
  was a study that was published recently, or it was like, MRI changes in people that used
• 41:49
  chat GPT. Well, that was the MIT. That was the MIT study that actually showed the FMRI scans were
• 41:54
  showing brain atrophy for people who were frequent AI users. And I don't think it's AI users. I
• 42:00
  want to qualify for anybody listening. The atrophy was for people who went to AI for answers before
• 42:06
  actually thinking of how they could come up with the answer. It actually showed diminished brain
• 42:12
  capacity over time because they weren't exercising that muscle, so to say. The one I'm referring to
• 42:17
  is actually relating to doctors. And they actually took patient files and uploaded an entire series
• 42:26
  of patient files to AI models. And I want to say they were using Claude or one of the others.
• 42:30
  It wasn't chat GPT specifically. And then they gave the exact same patient files to a group of
• 42:37
  doctors. And the question was, who could diagnose with the greatest amount of accuracy?
• 42:44
  And the doctors were able to diagnose from the file at about a 20-ish percent accuracy rate.
• 42:50
  The AI diagnosed with over an 80 percent accuracy rate. And I work in marketing. Now granted
• 42:58
  pretty specific to the healthcare niche by and large, but I'm already looking like, okay,
• 43:03
  how does this change our dynamic? How do we do things differently in our space? How do we adapt
• 43:08
  all of this? I can't imagine the world where doctors become irrelevant because patient diagnostics
• 43:16
  and you mention wearables and continuous glucose monitors and you know, everything from aura rings
• 43:23
  to whoop, you know, to whoop bands and all this kind of stuff. Like if all of this data is available
• 43:28
  about me, do I have an avatar that just keeps me on track to keep me the healthiest I possibly
• 43:34
  can be without the help of a physician? Like, how does this play out for you as a consultant in both
• 43:41
  worlds? Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting. I mean, so on the AI side, I mean, I frequently
• 43:49
  consult with MedTech and I live in that world and there's this whole new universe of your digital
• 43:53
  twin, right? So create like a virtual mark or a virtual Sanjay and give him this medication and see
• 43:59
  what it would be and kind of model that out. But you know, it's interesting. Number one, I think
• 44:04
  that you can't be afraid of progress. You have to embrace it, like you said, right? Like, there
• 44:09
  are people who didn't believe in cars and they still walked or rode their horses and, you know,
• 44:14
  where are they now? Like Brooks from Shawshake, it's been about 13 minutes until last movie reference,
• 44:20
  right? Like the world just went and got in such a big hurry and I saw an automobile once and,
• 44:24
  you know, before I went in and now they're everywhere, you know, so I think that to be a
• 44:28
  denier of a new technology that's invariably going to change humanity, like you can't do that,
• 44:33
  right? I think that as with any new technology, people are worried and I understand why and like,
• 44:38
  you know, maybe you don't need as many doctors or maybe you don't need as many factory workers
• 44:42
  when robots come out or maybe you don't need as many whatever. And I think one thing that is unique
• 44:47
  and we touched on it before when we're talking is that there's an interesting kind of there's
• 44:52
  there's like a sanctity to the doctor patient relationship that I don't think you can get with
• 44:56
  chat GPT, right? So I think ultimately you want to have a human that you can interact with,
• 45:01
  or at least that's what I feel. I think that I think that I think though just before you
• 45:06
  jump in, this 20% business doesn't surprise me at all, right? I mean, I think that that doctors,
• 45:12
  we are, we are, you know, we are prone to our own biases, things that we see, you know,
• 45:18
  the things that I saw in Michigan are very different than the things that I see in Southern California
• 45:23
  and I bring with me those preconceptions and pre-test probabilities and things, you know, like that
• 45:29
  happens. But I think that we have to not maybe think about as affecting physicians so much in
• 45:36
  their diagnostic capacity, but rather making it so much more efficient for patients to get the
• 45:40
  care that they need, right? And so, you know, I think that when you look at it that way kind of
• 45:45
  flipping the script, not I have to do this, but I get to do this, you know, like those kind of mind
• 45:48
  tricks that we play on ourselves, that will ultimately benefit patients. I don't think that the
• 45:52
  profession of medicine is going anywhere. I definitely think it needs to be updated in the way that
• 45:57
  like, for instance, when I was in medical school, I remember getting, you know, quized incessantly
• 46:02
  on rounds of lists of this that we know, what are the top 10 causes of heart failure? What are the
• 46:08
  top 10 causes of glomerular arthritis, this and the other? We don't need to memorize that stuff
• 46:13
  now because we all have these devices in our hands where the entire knowledge of humanity is
• 46:16
  available within three seconds, right? So, it doesn't so much become about your IQ anymore,
• 46:21
  but about the EQ and how you can connect the dots and motivate people. And then if you're a
• 46:26
  procedure-based person like I was, you know, I don't think that surgeons are going anywhere, you know,
• 46:30
  maybe robotic surgery and stuff may make you better, but maybe it's a short-sighted view, but I think
• 46:36
  that you still always need a human involved in that process. So, you know, I don't think we need
• 46:42
  to fear it, but I definitely think we need to respect it. Sorry, go ahead, Mark.
• 46:45
  No, where I wanted to jump in there was the idea of patient advocacy because here's my belief.
• 46:50
  We talked about patients needing to own their own health and that doctors are there as coaches
• 46:56
  and experts, but ultimately, you know, that all the chips are on my life. So whether or not I do it
• 47:03
  or whether or not I ask about it or whether or not I believe the doctor I'm talking to because
• 47:07
  one may be trustworthy and one may be not, it's me ultimately to pay the price if something goes
• 47:12
  wrong and patients need to have that. I recently, I took all of my blood, my blood work that I had
• 47:19
  done a couple months ago, and again, this is me with a greater than average amount of knowledge in
• 47:24
  this field, right? I took all of my blood work, I took all of my heavy metals and mineral testing,
• 47:30
  I took my own liver tests and everything else, and I took all of these documents, and I use a
• 47:35
  more advanced version of AI than most people, you know, access on their phones. But I took all of
• 47:42
  this stuff and I loaded it in and my belief is where the AI is concerned that the only thing that's
• 47:46
  limiting us at this point is people's imaginations on how to ask a question because, you know, it's
• 47:51
  Henry Ford, you know, if I asked the customers what they wanted, they decided faster horse.
• 47:56
  Faster horse, right? Exactly. But I took all of my tests and I actually loaded them in and I put
• 48:01
  all of these things in and I don't remember exactly what my prompt was, but my prompt was,
• 48:05
  I want you to take all of this testing information, I'm a 50-year-old male, XYZ, these are all the
• 48:10
  things, this is my height, this is my weight, this is my, my typical lifestyle, this is my typical
• 48:15
  eating pattern, I want you to take a look at all of these testings and I want you to explain
• 48:22
  any interactions between all of these things, and then continue to prompt through what are the
• 48:28
  concerns that you see out of these things, which of these factors is actually a comorbidity with
• 48:35
  another one, like if I have high zinc levels, is that causing me to have, you know, low adrenal
• 48:41
  function or something along those lines? All right, draw these connections that make the
• 48:46
  connections, tell me where things are connected, and then tell me what lifestyle and changes that
• 48:53
  you recommend that I make from the perspective of a panel of functional doctors including,
• 49:00
  and I would list names of people, and I want you to include Mark Hyman in the conversation,
• 49:03
  and I want you to include Dave Aspery in the conversation, like I want the opinions of these people,
• 49:07
  and I want a cardiologist who graduated from the Mayo Clinic to be part of this conversation,
• 49:12
  like I want all of these things to be included, and literally ended up, you can see it's a 25-page
• 49:19
  report that's going into everything about how PEMF may be useful for me in dealing with inflammation
• 49:26
  issues, everything from my cardiometabolic markers, and you know, the difference between my HDL and LDL,
• 49:33
  and why this is a problem, and this is not, and I mean, it's absolutely fascinating to me, right,
• 49:37
  except my curiosity doesn't end there, so of course I go a step further and continue to ask
• 49:42
  it multiple questions beyond that, but then I took all of this, loaded that document back in,
• 49:49
  and I keep a separate spreadsheet of all of the supplements, you were just commenting about
• 49:53
  the supplements behind me on the desk, I keep a spreadsheet because why I use them, what I use,
• 49:58
  and so on, and I uploaded my spreadsheet, and I said, this is what you know about my current
• 50:03
  health and everything else you know about me, go review everything that I take from a supplement
• 50:08
  basis, and I want you to tell me if what I'm taking is what I ought to be taking, if there are things
• 50:14
  I need to remove, if there's things that you believe that I'm taking too much of, and is there anything
• 50:20
  I'm missing that I would need to supplement based on the things that you're seeing out of my,
• 50:25
  out of my reports, and again, I ended up with this crazy beautiful spreadsheet that walked through,
• 50:31
  and it sorted them into, you can remove this from your from your regimen, you can remove this,
• 50:36
  some of it is things like it told me like I take C60 oil and it's like yeah there's really no
• 50:40
  scientific proof for it, don't worry about it, I would just get rid of that because it's just one
• 50:44
  thing you don't need, personally I actually believe the science of C60, so I'm like yeah for
• 50:48
  anti-acidation it's not doing any harm, if nothing else it's just additional coconut oil in my diet,
• 50:54
  but it's telling me you know you may want to get rid of this and this because this is actually
• 50:57
  very similar and ingredient to this, one of the things that pointed out was that I take several
• 51:01
  supplements that all contain vitamin A, well I never really gave that, correct but it didn't
• 51:08
  really cross my mind even though that's something I'm very attuned to and that is too much vitamin A
• 51:13
  can actually lead to cardiovascular issues and I'm like well yeah you're right I actually am getting
• 51:18
  a lot of vitamin A from this and this and this, and so it was interesting because then it kind of
• 51:24
  went through and was like you know you need to make sure you're adding boron because based on
• 51:27
  what you're seeing this is our recommended dosage and I say all of this and I went through and
• 51:32
  like changed my supplement panel like I went online I was like okay I need to get some of this,
• 51:36
  some of this and like changed it up and again I'm a freak about this stuff but I'm curious
• 51:44
  you're a doctor and I'm going through and from a patient advocacy standpoint I'm probably the
• 51:52
  patient you would dread talking to because I'm going to walk in and this is not doctor google
• 51:57
  kind of stuff right because doctors make fun of doctor google and we all laugh about everybody has
• 52:04
  cancer the minute you diagnose something on web MD and you'll be dead in a month like everybody's
• 52:09
  symptoms are killing them in a month but I mean this went into such specificity with explanation
• 52:15
  and everything and I'm like man like this would be what I would be showing up to a doctor's office
• 52:20
  with because then I go a step further and I'm telling it like we all need to be in tune with our
• 52:27
  bodies but I'm saying based on what you know about my health based on what you know about my lifestyle
• 52:31
  based on what you know about my supplementation what would be the most likely symptoms that would
• 52:37
  present in a most likely problem that I could eventually have so what should I be listening for
• 52:44
  out of my body yeah well and it's difficult to predict the future right and so you know models are
• 52:50
  exactly that models right and how many times did you know you watched the weather channel and it says
• 52:55
  there's a it's going to rain and it ends up being sunny right so so we have to tell me
• 53:01
  about spaghetti models their limitations to what we can do and you know but this is in Shem
• 53:08
  where you know the more data we get the more robust the machine learning gets the better the AI
• 53:14
  can be and so maybe it becomes more predictive I'm going to time out and close my door
• 53:19
  sure not a problem but that's some of the stuff that that I'm talking about like and it's not
• 53:25
  asking AI to predict the future for me but the same way as a physician would tell you if you don't
• 53:31
  change this you could end up with this well yeah and and so you know a very robust model I think that
• 53:39
  you know number one again it depends on the doctor that you get on the receiving end of that right
• 53:43
  like I would look at this and I'd be like wow I don't know half of this stuff let me take a moment
• 53:48
  to digest I think when you have you know seven point three minutes per patient encounter a lot of
• 53:53
  times people just kind of blow that stuff off but we have to understand that there is a lot of
• 53:58
  information out there in the public domain and it's not garbage information it's real science right and
• 54:03
  and now we have these tools to be able to synthesize things I think that I think that it becomes
• 54:10
  very intriguing particularly when you are looking at your past self right meaning loading in labs
• 54:16
  and and you can see trends and data meaning the AI can see trends and data that humans can't pick up
• 54:22
  right I mean I was a I was a psychology major and I remember in cognitive psych they said that our
• 54:28
  capacity to to understand information is limited to seven plus or minus two chunks that's why
• 54:33
  phone numbers are all ten digits because if we did more than that or seven eight plus and minus two
• 54:37
  whatever it was yeah but you know that's why because it overwhelms our capacity and similarly
• 54:44
  you know when you have eight hundred data points you you get you know anytime you get a lab
• 54:49
  drawn you've got to see like a complete bud count complete metabolic panel lipid test even
• 54:54
  globin A1C whatever you're probably looking at 50 data points now you take that back 10 or 15
• 54:59
  years that adds up pretty quickly not to mention this x-ray and that x-ray and this and that
• 55:03
  and these findings so I think it becomes very difficult so so what we need to do then as physicians
• 55:08
  particularly to talk about AI is not so much find it but kind of realize it that it's compiler that
• 55:13
  that can make a lot of show us patterns that we couldn't see before right and and really ultimately
• 55:20
  do what exactly what we're talking about before is give patients back the ownership of their health
• 55:25
  right now I think to the majority of my patients and my cardiology clinic they're not going to have
• 55:31
  the access to advanced AI models or they're not going to have the organization to find last
• 55:36
  month's labs much less labs from six years ago and so that's where we can leverage electronic
• 55:40
  medical records to kind of do some of this stuff I was I met yesterday with someone in I hear
• 55:47
  in Southern California in one of the big life science companies that that you would recognize and
• 55:53
  she and I were talking about exactly this and she was saying that their their company is looking
• 55:58
  to partner with Microsoft or Google or someone who is used to dealing with tons of information how
• 56:03
  to make sense of it like the way that that like hedge fund people or you know like day traders are
• 56:07
  looking at thousands of variables at a time to look at their volatility charts to make decisions
• 56:12
  about which way to go they're just you know they can't compile that much data that quickly but they
• 56:17
  have something that that shows it to them in a dashboard where they can make quick decisions
• 56:21
  right or or decisions and what they need and so that's what we can look at in terms of our
• 56:25
  our healthcare is not just think about what's happening now but you know as I get involved in
• 56:30
  precision medicine we're looking at the proteins that your body is is synthesizing so it's called
• 56:35
  proteomics and how that like engaging that in part of the conversation not something that's done
• 56:40
  routinely but looking at your proteomics can give you predictive models of what's going to happen
• 56:45
  10 years from now like 10 years from now you have xyz likelihood of cancer so what can we do
• 56:50
  today to kind of fix that so it's just it's just expanding our minds expanding the data sets to
• 56:55
  get better information right like if you clip between twice and you hit heads both times that
• 57:00
  doesn't mean that you'll hit heads if you do it a hundred times right to get those standard
• 57:04
  distribution curves you have to flip a coin thousands of times right to get that information so
• 57:08
  well and that's and that's where I put the the the onus back on the patient and I say
• 57:14
  you know as far as I'm concerned and I say this and again I'm not arrogantly but I say this
• 57:19
  as a PhD in functional medicine right like so clearly I'm approaching this with a little bit more
• 57:23
  information than the average bear right I had to go through this report because there were
• 57:27
  several things in it that I had no idea what it was saying well and I'm like holy smokes like I'm
• 57:33
  ahead of the curve a little bit I'd hope and I'm like and I'm struggling to understand some of
• 57:38
  what it's saying I mean certainly it's making some cool recommendations and how sauna therapy could
• 57:43
  you know help with heavy metal detox and so on but I'm with you on all that kind of stuff but
• 57:48
  I mean once it starts going into you know adrenal function and and hormone panels and everything
• 57:54
  else I'm like oh that's all right yeah I get it but you're right I wouldn't have made these
• 57:59
  connections because we can't be experts at everything and and as soon as the doctors or any of us
• 58:06
  realize our limitations that's when we can grow right to be able to say you know what like
• 58:11
  this is not something I can do but I have a tool that can help me do this right that's where I
• 58:15
  think the roadblock is for so many people is in you know engaging in AI modeling and and you
• 58:20
  don't necessarily have to be an expert like no more so that I'm a car mechanic you know I don't
• 58:25
  know anything in my car then windshield wiper fluid but I can drive a car right so you don't have
• 58:29
  to know what the car is made out of to be able to use it so similarly you know I think what we
• 58:33
  have to do is get AI models that people can make sense of right that can speak to us in normal
• 58:38
  ways yeah I mean maybe not everybody will will understand you know why we need to worry about our
• 58:43
  copper to zinc ratio and it for for better cognitive function but if it tells you you know what
• 58:48
  eat more of this or that make it tactical for folks then it becomes a much better tool and it's
• 58:52
  funny that you mentioned this because I actually bought the domain name son doctor Sanjay Sanjay
• 58:58
  AI.com and and looking to create kind of this where you know you can upload labs and get that
• 59:05
  information you know from a conventional and functional standpoint to really give yourself a
• 59:09
  robust kind of picture of of what's of what you can do so you're kind of you're you're you're
• 59:16
  thinking the way that I'm thinking is that you know we we need to empower people to take over but
• 59:21
  we need to have the right shepherd right need the right Sherpa to guide you on that on that
• 59:25
  expedition so I have to interrupt you and not let it get too far away from that you're thinking how
• 59:30
  I'm thinking because that's a princess bride reference to go back into our movies because that's
• 59:35
  a yes but if you were thinking that I was thinking that you were thinking
• 59:39
  exactly so I got to play this game. What was the poison in the cup? I forgot
• 59:44
  hide it but I poison both cups and and whatever I built a tolerance the the the idea that I
• 59:51
  that I rule aota cane powder was that what it was? I don't remember something like that anyway
• 59:56
  somebody that checked us in the comments and and the goal of this you know my conversation where
• 1:00:00
  I'm kind of leading this is that it's not about which AI is better it's not about doctors being
• 1:00:06
  replaced it's not about any of that it's about there are tools out there that can help patients
• 1:00:11
  become better informed about their own health better advocates for their own health and I believe
• 1:00:17
  that to an open-minded physician as you are if I showed up at your office with this type of document
• 1:00:25
  you're not web-mdeen me out of the office thinking that oh I think I know everything in fact I believe
• 1:00:31
  that you've got a more educated patient and to your point all of our goal is to get the patient
• 1:00:36
  to live a longer healthier life if the patient comes in with this type of information and says look I
• 1:00:41
  had leapsed on six months ago this is what it showed these lifestyle changes that I made accordingly
• 1:00:46
  first thing I'm going to do if I were a physician is great well let's get current information and see
• 1:00:50
  if all of the changes you've made have actually made a positive trend like I think that's great
• 1:00:55
  information and and I want to I want to really capstone a lot of this conversation with it's not
• 1:01:01
  about who has a authority it's about a care team and the most important person in the care team
• 1:01:07
  is the patient but the AI and the thinking models are now part of the care team and we have to
• 1:01:15
  welcome that into the care team and they have a voice that isn't prior right didn't exist prior
• 1:01:21
  and it's I'm smiling because I'm thinking of a patient who was the first person to tell me what
• 1:01:26
  omega three to six ratio was and he goes oh you haven't heard of that you need to read this book
• 1:01:32
  by Dr. Hyman I don't remember if it was eat fit or get fit eat fat or whatever one of one of the
• 1:01:37
  books before and I'm like yeah I've never even heard of this but I'm willing to learn about it
• 1:01:42
  and and and his his first name is also Mark and and he still reaches out from time to time and I
• 1:01:50
  said this is all your fault if you hadn't come in my life I never would have learned about what
• 1:01:54
  functional medicine is you know and and and it's just you know again being a practitioner with an
• 1:02:00
  open mind like you have to learn from patients I think it's you know there's only so many hours
• 1:02:04
  in my day and and when you look at the number I don't know if you can have this but I have alert
• 1:02:09
  alerts on my phone of table of contents from five or six journals um and you know so you're
• 1:02:13
  end up getting a lot of information in the week and nobody has time to read all those things right
• 1:02:19
  like there it is impossible to think I remember when I was in medical school my goal was to read
• 1:02:24
  every New England of journal medicine article going back 10 years before I started my
• 1:02:28
  internship so Sunday nights I would just this is how nerdy I was I would like uh go and and like
• 1:02:34
  try to read as many of the back issues of New England journals I could and that was just one
• 1:02:39
  journal of thousands that we had in the medical library right and this is while you had your
• 1:02:45
  friends locked in the trunk of the car no that was undergrad this is no med school so I'd actually
• 1:02:48
  got into med school and all that stuff right so they got out of the trunk they'd find actually
• 1:02:52
  two of those guys went on to become surgeons one of them is an emergency medicine physician so
• 1:02:57
  so it was a pretty smart trunk where like we're like street smart or no street stupid book smart kind
• 1:03:03
  of I guess um as a lot of kids in in my circle were at that time uh but um uh but uh oh man
• 1:03:11
  completely lost train of thought you're good because actually it's not you we're we're close to
• 1:03:15
  the end of our time here and I know it's been an hour that we've been sitting here talking
• 1:03:19
  the um but the reality is is I want to kind of capstone you know a lot of this conversation
• 1:03:24
  with and I appreciate your insights because as we discussed early you stand with your feet in
• 1:03:27
  both worlds right that you're sitting in a western world with an eastern mindset or conventional
• 1:03:32
  medicine versus functional medicine whatever nomenclature we want to put to it so your perspective
• 1:03:37
  to me is actually much more valuable than someone who just sits on one side of that world because
• 1:03:41
  you're finding ways to find harmony in the gap um and the reality is as I think as as we're advancing
• 1:03:49
  in the amount of knowledge that we have I think doctors are going to become more of those
• 1:03:54
  Sherpas right like you're going to become more of the guiding light who's going to take the
• 1:03:58
  information humanize it work on the care team in such a way that the patient feels loved um
• 1:04:04
  you know it's the people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care a kind of
• 1:04:07
  model um and this whole idea that we need to make sure that we're speaking truth to people but
• 1:04:13
  with a bedside manner um and I believe and there's a whole other conversation to be had um that
• 1:04:20
  when a patient actually believes assume that we get down to the point that this is not preventative
• 1:04:25
  but that it's actually diagnostic and then it we're part of a treatment plan the way a physician
• 1:04:31
  frames information to a patient actually has as much um researched outcome on the patient's
• 1:04:39
  long-term outcome as the treatment plan itself like the patient who believes they're going to
• 1:04:44
  get through it gets through it statistically more often than the patient who believes they've
• 1:04:49
  got a death sentence and so I believe that AI is never going to do that I believe that human
• 1:04:55
  to human interaction is important what I what I think is super available to us now though um and
• 1:05:02
  I say this even in my own industry is I feel right now that I'm putting out six to ten people's
• 1:05:08
  worth of work in a day because I'm just that good at what I'm doing now because I feel like I've
• 1:05:15
  got this amazing helper at my right hand side who who's able to just bang things out faster and
• 1:05:21
  get rid of the tedium out of my life like asking it to go through a document and just proofread it
• 1:05:27
  for me to make sure there's no typos is so much easier than doing it myself or even paying the
• 1:05:31
  hand it to a staff person and it's done in five minutes um these types of diagnostics these types
• 1:05:38
  of interpretive things are amazing and I think my prediction on the use of AI and I believe
• 1:05:44
  this goes for the medical model as well and that is the smart will get smarter and the dumb will get
• 1:05:49
  dumber that is that the the doctors who really lean into using these tools will find themselves
• 1:05:56
  knowing more and being able to diagnose more than they ever have before because they're not
• 1:06:03
  in an arrogant mode it's not about what you memorized it's not about which class did you accidentally
• 1:06:07
  skip because you were sick in med school it all of the information is available now all it is about
• 1:06:13
  you synthesizing that information and the same goes for patients like for the patients who have no
• 1:06:19
  interest in getting involved in their own care plan you're going to find people are less interested
• 1:06:23
  in dealing with you also like it it it's just going to become ultimately the patient pays the
• 1:06:29
  price regardless of their involvement yeah no I mean I yes yeah exactly I find myself yes
• 1:06:36
  that all of that all of that yes all of the above yes I love these types of conversations because
• 1:06:43
  it really does I mean getting to know you better is amazing but aside from that like getting that
• 1:06:47
  perspective from the from a from a MD who's also a plane in the functional space um but you know
• 1:06:54
  recently realizing that you've got a real flex in the functional space because like Mark Hyman
• 1:06:59
  who you just mentioned a moment ago he's also an MD like see you're not you're not talking about a
• 1:07:04
  person who doesn't have the chops to sit at the table um and that's that's often been yeah and
• 1:07:10
  experienced right like I I know what black smells like I know the ins and outs of everything and
• 1:07:14
  again it's just adding to the toolbox like like correct learning functional medicine did nothing
• 1:07:20
  to subtract from my conventional knowledge right like it's it's just adding and making it a more
• 1:07:24
  robust data set to to help people out and why wouldn't you want to know that and I think that holds
• 1:07:29
  true in all disciplines like even I mean I've got a master's degree in theology right and you know
• 1:07:34
  totally off the beaten path as far as the rest of my you know education but I'm like I think it's
• 1:07:39
  important for me um you know I'm a Christian but at the same time I want to learn other religions
• 1:07:46
  like how am I ever even going to justify my own if I don't know anything else and sometimes I
• 1:07:52
  realize that there are things that I believe and I don't mean religious specifically but somebody
• 1:07:56
  made a comment recently and I was like well you always think you're right and I'm like well by
• 1:08:00
  definition if I thought I was wrong why would I keep that opinion like no I want you to prove me wrong
• 1:08:05
  because if you challenge me I either get better at defending my belief or I changed my mind
• 1:08:12
  because you proved me wrong both of those are good outcomes exactly yeah and that's how I feel
• 1:08:17
  about second opinions like when patients would ask me doc do you mind if I go out to Mayo Clinic
• 1:08:21
  or somewhere to get second opinion I go no only good outcomes happen number one they say exactly
• 1:08:24
  what I said and you have more faith in what I'm talking about or number two they know something
• 1:08:28
  that I don't know they share it with me and that makes me a better doc right 100 percent it works the
• 1:08:33
  same way Sanjay you're the curious cardiologist how would anybody will have all this information
• 1:08:39
  in the show notes below but how would somebody want to get in contact with you how would they
• 1:08:44
  what's your what's your website your youtube handle yeah so my website is laguna medicine.com so my
• 1:08:51
  practice is called the laguna institute of functional medicine we are going to open a telehealth so
• 1:08:56
  I'm going to open a telehealth practice soon starting in California where I'm licensed and growing
• 1:09:01
  with time so they can get me there on Instagram which is probably my most active social it's at
• 1:09:05
  doctor Sanjay MD so d-o-c-t-o-r-s-a-n-j-a-y-m-d we'll put the link in in the notes and I run a 12-week
• 1:09:13
  metabolic program so if people are looking to optimize their health dropping reducing blood pressure
• 1:09:18
  improving insulin resistance balancing hormones all that stuff without meds that's kind of the
• 1:09:23
  bread and butter of what I do and that's it's just so enjoyable to see how much we can accomplish
• 1:09:27
  without meds so yeah come find me I think that's awesome buddy thank you so much for being here today
• 1:09:32
  for everybody who's a manager for anybody listening I just want to say it's amazing to be able to
• 1:09:36
  have conversations with these people who are professionals in their field but additionally are
• 1:09:41
  bringing less conventional intelligence and thought into the conversation that that harmony that
• 1:09:47
  blend that when both sides of the aisle can come together in a bipartisan way if I may say so
• 1:09:52
  I think we get better outcomes ultimately because I think the goal is that patients live longer
• 1:09:57
  healthier lives so Dr. Sanjay thank you for what you're doing in the lives of patients and the
• 1:10:03
  expansive nature about how you have realized that your experience can actually affect a large
• 1:10:07
  group of people and not just patients on an individual basis so thank you for being a bigger thinker
• 1:10:13
  than than before and more people are being touched by it for those who are watching performance
• 1:10:17
  driven living thank you so much for sticking around for this episode stay tuned for the next drop
• 1:10:23
  that'll be coming out I'm not going to tell you who it is yet um primarily because I don't know
• 1:10:27
  yet like I don't even find out about this stuff like I get emails telling me which podcast dropped
• 1:10:32
  today so it's kind of a surprise to me too so thank you for watching we'll see you next time