CPC #11: IS YOUR PHYSICIAN YOUR TEACHER?

READERS SUMMARY

1. Who is your resource, teacher, librarian, educator?

2. Does it matter?

3.  How do you learn to manage change?

4.  Have you realized yet that “environment” is changing evolutionary theory right now?

5.  Are you part of the solution or part of the problem?

Most doctors and scientists believe that change begins with diet and exercise. Most trainers, nutritionists, and dietician think if they get you on some form of “diet” and put you in a room/box with weights, machines, and treadmills, or other fit people you will do better. They slap some label on this called a wellness program and then set you up for a supplement consult several weeks in because they know you won’t be hitting your goals or metrics you or they set for you. Ten years ago I was like that. No, that is a lie. Ten years ago I would never have spoken to you about this. Why? Because it did not matter to me. I was taught to fix ill people not keep you from getting ill. One of the primary challenges with vetting a clinician’s recommendations or a businessman’s marketing material is that many of them make up or cherry pick research to validate their direction and beliefs. They do this so that their ideas, therapies, and products, or their success in general is pre-ordained.

One day I opened a book and looked up the derivation of the word “doctor”. “Doctor” comes from the latin meaning ‘DOCERE’ to teach. When I saw that, I was shocked. I was not taught to teach, I was taught to heal the ill. Then I decided to look up the word, “surgeon”. I found it meant to heal by working or done by the hands. This made some sense to me. I recalled the mantra in my residency, see one, teach one, do one. The reference to teaching was to another physician and not a patient. Moreover, this was a surgical mantra not a medical mantra. Doctors and surgeons are supposed to be teachers first and foremost according to the root meaning of my profession. Are we fulfilling that goal today? Have we strayed far from that path because of the economics of our guild? Unlike many of my colleagues, I can no longer subscribe to the notion of the physician mandating a therapy that a patient must accept because of the results of trial paid for by a pharmaceutical company or a medical device manufacturer. Drugs, implants, and devices play a critical role in medicine, but they should not be first line treatments for every ailment we see. Patients today come into my office with the expectation of a Rx or an operation. When I mention physical therapy or lifestyle modifications they look at me like I am an alien. This is a failure in our ability to teach our patients, in my view. We have taught them to expect drugs and operations. The system is built for these answers. Today’s physicians are made to be way to busy with paperwork and computer work to focus on patient care. This limits our time to delve into the patient’s circumstances and then explore alternatives.
Today’s physician is under enormous pressures of the business side of medicine. Most are employed by corporate America who pays them on a time basis. The more you see the more you make. If you take time to educate, there is no reembursement codes for this so are destined to make less. When you make less the profit of your employer falls and you face job security issues. This was unheard of in medicine just ten years ago. Today every physician reading this knows this is a truth bomb. Sticking to the tight schedule, giving a person a Rx allows the physician or nurse practitioner to say the magic word, in this system, called NEXT. In this way, all interests of the system is met. The patient is left with a piece of paper akin to an oasis in a desert of disease.
A ‘teacher clinician’ looks beyond the standard indicators to diagnose. We could run a standard panel of labs that would indicate what your environment was last night, but it would be more prudent to see what your environment has done to you on prognostic labs. At this moment, they might indicate your environment is fine, or we may learn together that your heading to towards a chronic disease, and now is the time we can make a change to your environment, and help you avoid a problem. Today, the teacher in me knows no patient them self should be considered impaired innately, instead there are environmental short comings that cause the impairment. This new paradigm is short circuiting the Modern Synthesis of evolutionary theory too. Medicine seems oblivious to this ongoing shift. Thus, it is incumbent on the on the “teacher” to recommend a ‘curriculum change’ of the environment their student/patient is in. In this way, medicine becomes a partnership where the teacher and students goals are in alignment. During this journey of rediscovery of what it meant to be a doctor I realized that as a specialist I lost perspective of what ‘my place’ was. A physician’s personal relationship with a patient is critical and essential for evaluating the whole individual. When you engage a person’s mind, body, and their spirit, you begin to empower them to make better decisions about their environments that enable their own transformations. Most doctors of my era were taught to avoid this aspect of medicine completely because it encumbered the doctor patient relationship. In fact, within specialty physicians, we are taught to be even more removed from this holistic approach. We focused in on our expert area. I realized this was an error. I peered into a mirror and the problem became clear. No one is the ideal person you are searching for if you’re not the ideal person performing the search.
This is when I got the idea to form a community on line. I patterned it after something I learned about the Okinawans, who are long lived. They ascribe to the theory of community building. They use a concept called the “moai.” A moai is a small group gathering of people. The Japanese isolated their young children early into these groups.   They are put together in small groups that have similar interests, circumstances, and environments. This yields a sense of family and purpose and the group tends to remain intact over their lifetimes. When you interview these people they tell you they rise up with a profound sense of gratitude and an idea of fulfilling a profound goal. Daily aspirations tend to be unselfish, such as a thought of the day, meal preparation, or tending to a neighbor’s garden when they are unable. Every one in a ‘moai’ spends their AM’s in a garden in the sun, working the dirt, feeding on yams, seafood, and pork consistently. The student in me, made me realize that these small groups helped teach these kids to make microscopic changes daily by promoting critical thinking about their health. The teacher in me, wants you to understand why this lesson is important.

They became better or more improved. Better, in this sense, doesn’t necessarily imply being cured or living longer, although every improvement is a step in the right direction, a small adjustment in behavior and attitude can produce larger changes in health than my prescription pad or scalpel.

SCALE IT TO YOUR MODERN PROFESSIONALS
Trainers, nutritionists, dietitians, and many clinicians generalize when they treat or manage a transformation. They call these things recipes, algorithms, or pathways for wellness. They generalize because they are not sophisticated enough to make a specific diagnosis of a problem. I still think it is honorable and credible to use a detailed history and labs to allow me to see how their environmental failures might show me a hidden truth. It should be acceptable to fail in this regard; there’s innocent intent in failure if you failed trying to meet a need of that patient. Without that need, an alternative practitioner become a hammer and you become their nail. You will be wallet biopsied until they tell you it is your SNP’s or your bad genes. They have a recipe for you that includes their two favorite and only environmental variables to manage, diet and exercise. They start and finish there because this is all they know about. Most fall prey to it. If those fail, be ready for the supplement talk. The first casualty in supplement marketing is usually the truth. Kindness is a nice trait, but being willing to see what might be best for this specific patient, even if we don’t accept it, has to be part of the formula. Physicians are trained to see a problem and to fix it, regardless of how or whether the patient wants it fixed. I think it is more wise to show patients the paths and possibilities that are available to them so that the teacher and student can work together instead of antagonistically. If the path does not work, another can be applied and we can move forward and readjust if need be.
The solutions offered by most practitioners is very cookie cutter; it seems different to the undiscerning eye, but when you look at how “the system is designed for wellness” the application seems to be the same, food, exercise, and supplements. The results from these variables usually speaks volumes. Anyone who looks at the data can see for themselves they lead to no long term success. You’re investing in a ponzi scheme of short term rewards. Data collection can be helpful if the people helping you have an idea of why your wellness is far from equilibrium. When diet and exercise fail, you will hear the phrases, “youre eating too much, exercising too little, and you need more supplementation”; then they might even blame your genetics. Blaming your genes is the ultimate tell tale of ignorance of nature. Our genome is designed to respond to environmental signals, not control them. People react to an inferior environment, way before their genome is altered. That is what the science of epigenetics and ubiquitin are telegraphing us, but the modern paradigm is not listening. You must, because it is the only thing separating you from your dollars.
Intelligence is knowing the right answer. Wisdom is knowing when to say it to someone. Smart is what you learn from others when you understand their perspective of their lack of perspective for your particular problem. Wise is what you learn from your errors or the errors they helped you maintain. A teacher should help that understanding, shouldn’t they? Today, I’m writing the rules for my next chapter as a teacher and injecting a higher purpose in everything I do now.
I think it is beyond modern healthcare, allopathic, alternative, integrative, or within ancestral health’s current understanding. They are all food first paradigms and concepts; while quantum biology asks how does light interact with organic matter to allow life to respire. You must expand your grip of science or risk falling from the cliff. Their solution is a neolithic conclusion where they just got tired of thinking. Most just look back a very short time in human history, instead of all the way to the most fundamental beginning of where their customers lost their wellness to their environment. Hyperlink.

Life change is not an absence of action in your gym or kitchen; rather it is buried in “timing and direction” of what you do in your environment; it must wait for just the right time to act, and requires the flow of it from outside to inside based upon for the right physical principles, to develop in the ecosystem, and in the right way to become alive. Then change can manifest. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication in nature’s blueprint. The more I’ve learned the clearer it becomes to this teacher that all the most interesting problems in physics are now in biology. Biochemistry is not deterministic as most believe; it is determined by what happens to the surfaces in our eye, skin, and gut.
The progress of science depends on a finely tuned balance between open-mindedness and skepticism. Be too open minded, and you’ll accept wrong claims. Be too skeptical, and you’ll reject genuine new discoveries. Proper skepticism must be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It is similar to loss of feedback control in a far from equilibrium system. This is where modern biology is today, stuck in a genetic paradigm of understanding when the environment and light exposure is the key driver of optimal health.
SUMMARY:

Once the mind awakens to nature’s facts, the search begins and you can never go back asleep to ignorance. A single event is capable of awaken within us, a stranger totally unknown to us. Once awake, this new perspective of truth has a ‘qualia’ that inflames us with a special resolve that will never again let us linger in the lowlands of complacency and partial fulfillment every again. Reject mediocrity to attain the summit of fulfillment that is present in our world.

Technology is killing our relationships because we give our laptops and phones more attention than our spouses, kids, and friends. Change it

Our quantized future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating today in biology. The paths to it are not found, but made by nature; our activity of making them discoverable changes our perspective of the “maker and the destination.”

If you like this idea share it with your friends and family.  Together we can change the world by focusing in our modern environment for a change.  We are not defective inside, the world we have created is breaking us down.