Today’s a highly controversial episode, we’re going to hit the core of several issues that are deep down in my heart.
But we are two ding dongs that are gonna poke at the bear. And we’re not doctors who didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn last night.
We’re striving, endeavoring to be critical thinkers in some capacity. We want you to think. And so today’s episode is that we have a pill for that. So this is our first episode with a prop.
I came across this meme. And I thought, yeah, that kind of resonates. If you can’t read it, the doctor says, “You have a disease caused by your diet”. And the patient says, “Should I change my diet?” And the doctor says, “Not at all. Here’s a pill.”
It kind of resonated with me. I was like, gosh, how often do we seek the silver bullet? Maybe we’re dumping sugar in our gas tank, and asking our mechanic to check the tire pressure because the car’s not running. The easy way out, right? The easy thing to do is to say “man, I’m not feeling real good, let me take a pill.” You can’t run from your problems. You can’t, there’s no easy way out. There’s no easy solution. It takes a real facing of your fears, and you have to dive in head-on and go after them.
So true story. I am starting – well I’ve started in the past, doing a 72-hour fast. I got up to like 84 hours. I am about to head to my primary care physician for my yearly checkup. Well, that was a heck of an experiment, right? After my checkup, the doctor calls me immediately and says your cholesterol is sky high. We need to put you on statins. There was not one discussion of what happened before they did the bloodwork. They didn’t ask me if I was fasting. They didn’t ask me what my diet was. They didn’t ask me about my nutrition or exercises. It was bam, here you go. Your cholesterol was high. That’s a very touchy topic. LDL, HDL, which that’s a whole nother episode. Not to be critical of the doctor, but her hair was falling out. She was not a very healthy person. And here she is immediately giving me guidance on my body. And it was probably the first time I said “no offense Doc, I’m not taking your medicine.”
Similar story: Years ago, I worked in insurance, a career desk job. Like a lot of desk job types. I had put on a bunch of excess weight. I was probably 30 pounds overweight, and I went for a regular annual check-up. At the appointment, my doc said: “Hey, man, you have a thyroid problem.” I’m like, dude, I’m 30 some years old. I don’t have a thyroid problem. But he wanted to put me on Synthroid, and I actually took the prescription, not really knowing any better. I never filled it and I thought, you know, I’m gonna get in shape and I did. And 15-20 years later, I’m still not taking any Synthroid. But again, there’s a rush to medicate in my opinion, at times. And when we are ignoring those fundamentals of sleep, nutrition, and movement, we’re ignoring what’s essential for our health. Now, don’t get me wrong. My kid’s a type one diabetic. He’s got to have insulin, so there are absolutely certain things that you can’t fix with diet and exercise. It’s not about pointing fingers that all medicine or all doctors are bad. What I am saying is that it has become an institution of profitability, and you better do your own homework and do a complete workup of who you are having as your family doctor. If you have a doctor that absolutely cares about you, keep them.
I had one of my other primary care Doc’s, this was before the other one, and that was one that I really liked. She basically told me she was quitting being a primary care doctor. She was at a major facility and she was going into urgent care because the pressure to upsell the patient was ginormous. So, again, that relationship from doctor to patient has kind of changed because now there’s the CEO in large part that’s over the doctor, and before the doctor was the CEO. His name was on the building. And I think that’s in large part changed.
The point of today’s episode is to seek that silver bullet. I don’t care if it’s the celery juice diet or leaky gut or, you know, your doctor wanting to put you on the pill, pay attention to the fundamentals, what is the general cause of the problem? A lot of illnesses are caused by underlying issues. So maybe we can pick this up again because I know there were some situational stories about people who did massively alter their diets and saw dramatic changes.
But all right, that’s it for today, we’ll see you tomorrow. See you guys.
