 Please welcome the panel on a functional approach to healing moderated by author Journalist and host of the 10% happier podcast Dan Harris Hey, everybody, what are you doing welcome? I Thought we would start if it's okay with the panelists But have you just run down? I'll maybe I'll start with Satya and have you introduce yourself and just say a little bit about What your background is and what you're excited to talk about today. Mm-hmm. So hello everyone. Thank you for having me my background is full of a good experience from law school till marketing but my My base my being is really connected to healing and to spirituality So what I do in my life now the past 15 years is to combine science and spirituality Ancient traditions and modern therapy. So I live a long time in Amazon With indigenous tribes that I don't like to call even tribes, you know they are just people like us but with a total different setup and I've been learning with To work with them to awake consciousness because what we see is Normally the cause the root of diseases is a lack of self-awareness That bring us to have consequence on the physical body So we work on the roots of diseases and not on the consequence of having a disease That's why we call ourselves healers and not doctors and I won't say that I'm not a doctor I believe the union between medical care and self-awareness can be a step into a new Society that we all need in this moment Thank you. Thank you. I Should have said your full name before I asked you to start talking But maybe you can help me with the pronunciation Satya Rita Rocha So Satya is a name that I took it in a commitment to work with truth means truth in Sanskrit and Hita hosha is my birth name. Okay, so it's a Portuguese pronunciation. Yes. Okay, awesome Thank you and nice to meet you. Welcome. Let's move down the line now to Missy Missy Larson is vice president of philanthropy at doTERRA International. Did I get is it doTERRA doTERRA? Yeah, which means gift of the earth and they and the seven founders put together this gift of the earth of essential oils 15 years ago just last week was their 15th year anniversary the whole idea behind it was if you can if you can find the purest elements with Botanicals on the earth and get them into an essential oil element that you really and get them into every household They can solve a lot of problems that are right now trying to be solved by other ways in pharmaceutical So we'll talk about today and hopefully get into the place of how do you know things are pure? How do you work in a whole purity system knowing from the people that you're working with from the knowing that you're ethical sustainable Knowing the people that you're working with from the very ground we source in about 45 different nations and then I oversee a philanthropic model that is integrated called co-impact sourcing that we utilize Our sourcing areas and support with social impact projects I'm supposed to be letting you guys do your introductions But I have to ask what I've never known or understood. What are essential oils? So it's the essence of it's this the smell the the essence so that this the basis of a plant or a botanical so like with frankincense It's actually in Somaliland Oman in Egypt off of a tree and then it comes and then you diffuse you pull it down into the oils That come from that and utilize that as a natural product So you're taking the essence of of key plants and lavender or you know We have a number hundred and something different oils so that Siberian fur to frankincense to myrrh to you know goes back in the Bible. Yes Just thinking about that. Okay. Thank you appreciate that Jill Karnahan is the founder and medical director of flat iron Functional medicine author also the author of unexpected Finding resilience through functional medicine science and faith Jill Can you give us a little bit more of your bio and what you want to talk about today, please? Sure, so I practice functional medicine in Boulder, Colorado Back in the early 2000s I went to medical school and got an allopathic degree and got the tools of Pharmaceuticals and surgery But my goal is to reach the medical system with the other options that are available as a functional medicine expert We use root cause analysis so we're looking at the biochemical and physiological changes in the body that actually proceed disease and Things that were considered irreversible in the realm of functional medicine where we look at root cause and where you are on the Trajectory of either health or illness we can actually reverse the irreversible and so I'm here to Influence the influencers teach the teachers change the doctors and introduce a new way of doing medicine the toolbox that we use as Lifestyle diet nutrition, but going way beyond that if you've ever seen Dr. House that medical detective show, that's me I do medical mysteries and try to solve the root cause of very complex and chronic illness so I see people all over the US and especially those who have been to multiple medical centers and maybe have mysterious symptoms like headaches or Fatigue or immune dysfunction and we now know this field of psychoneuro immunology is really at the core of so many illnesses If I think about functional medicine We have toxic toxic load an infectious burden and pretty much everything I'm doing is analyzing the body on that scale and looking at what Inflammatory and immune responses happen when we have these insults in our toxic world So I am passionate about inspiring you Inspiring other physicians to think outside the box and also to give answers to those who have not had hope for health and healing Thank you. Dan butters the founder of Blue Zones LLC Dan the butler but otherwise known as butler No, no worries. We just met a minute ago Yeah, so I'm a National Geographic fellow one of the hats I wear otherwise otherwise That's a fancy name for professional truant But a long time ago. I set off to reverse engineer longevity worked with a team of demographers to find the statistically longest lived areas around the world and dubbed them blue zones We found five of them and then set off with a team of advisors to find the Common denominators or the correlates and remarkably no matter where you go and you find people living the longest and this isn't the variety of Longevity where we're going to be 120. This is making it to age 95 Which seems to be the maximum average life expectancy of the human species right now but making it to that age without chronic disease and About 12 years ago. I've written written several books and several articles for National Geographic About 12 years ago. I got to thinking could you manufacture a blue zone? in other words, could you take the principles that we find in these areas where people are manifestly living longer and better lives and Transport them to America and we started with a small City in the prairies of Minnesota, Alberta, Minnesota and within two and a half years. We were able to Raise their life expectancy represent them sample by about three years and we lowered their health care costs by about 30% And based on that We ended up scaling it and now we're in 70 cities nationwide cities as big as Phoenix and Fort Worth, Texas and Naples, Florida and every city we've been in so far for more than four years We've managed to lower the BMI and I actually get paid by insurance companies for outcomes So if I can lower the BMI of a city by 1% and a city with a million people It usually occasions about a quarter of a billion dollars in health care saving So I take great pride in taking the wisdom from these traditional people living around the world and applying it in that modern context And I I take even greater pride in the discovery which I just made for my new best friend Jeff Founder of functional medicine that I'm also doing functional medicine. So Pass the baton Thank You Dan Buehner appreciate that Jeffrey Bland founder and president of Big Bold Health Letter it and thanks and thanks all of you for allowing us to play with some new ideas Hopefully some news to use so I had an epiphany personally about 1982 I was a medical school professor kind of on a on a standard track And I took a sabbatical leave for two years invited by Dr. Linus Pauling two-time Nobel Prize winner at his Institute at Stanford And it was a life change. I did a crazy thing gave up my tenured fact Physically positioned to start a company to teach doctors how to do Nutritional medicine in their practice had no business plan had no way of thinking how I was going to support family had young kids a Mortgage all those things somehow it worked out over those years And I've learned throughout these years that there is something more than what I was taught in school What I was taught in school is that if you want to improve people's health in the medical system You want to reduce the risk of disease by certain biomarkers the kind of the standards of identity that we use cholesterol triglycerides blood sugar and so forth What I came to recognize that those are false gods they actually don't teach you really what the person wants to know What they want to know is how they're functioning how they're physical functioning their cognitive emotional and behavioral and metabolic function Which are not quantified in medicine at all and we say it again. They're not quantified in medicine I spent all those years never learning about what's really important that relates to resiliency and to the Compression of morbidity which are functional indicators. I learned about pathophysiological cytological histological indicators and the ICD nomenclature the international classification of disease Which doesn't relate to what people really want to know that then became the birthing for me of the Institute for functional medicine and The concept of functional medicine 1990 How do you distinguish between? functional medicine Alternative medicine and integrative medicine so I Look at functional medicine and I think dr. Carnahan said it beautifully as a operating system It's not a medicine that it was standard of practice. We don't have conventional rules We don't have protocols what we have is a zeitgeist the way of thinking about that person related to the Complex interaction of their genes our unique book of life in 23 chapters that we got no ability to sign up for it Just was the luck of the draw but in those genes are all sorts of pluripotential outcomes all the way from magnificent health and exhaustive You know bliss to Disasters and they all reside within each one of our genomes and the difference between those that have the blissful life And those that don't is the experiences that we have which are Modifiable therefore functional medicine and why Dan butener is producing and and really a leader in community-based functional medicine Whether he knew it or not is it's delivering the things that really make a difference We spend 3.75 trillion dollars on chronic disease management 83 percent of our health care budget And yet those are not actually treated at the causative level. They're treated the phenotypic level to reduce symptoms There's something wrong when we talk about cures. It's wonderful the progress we're meeting I'm awe inspired by this meeting and the kind of things we see of cures, but the real below the waterline Issue are these chronic issues that are related to the mismatch between a person's genes and their environment and lifestyle That's where the action can really change the health care system and deduct the health care system from the disease care system Right now it's all disease centric. That's how I was trained everything was around a disease Even when we talk about risk reduction, it's disease risk reduction It's not related to the outcome that people are really looking for is health span and and reducing the reducible Aspects of disease. Let me just stay with functional medicine in a specific way a narrow way for a minute Jill let me go to you All of this sounds super intriguing it sounds commonsensical in an elevated way And yet functional medicine has really fierce critics who derided as quackery So what do you say? I want to give you an opportunity and both of you actually to push back against the critics What are they getting wrong? Outcomes So I 20 years ago was integrated medical director at a hospital system And I remember very vividly sitting in the board meeting as a medical head of a department and the CEO showed us a slide of Each department and the beds filled And I sat there and looked at that slide and said I am in the wrong location Because I'm trying to keep people out of the hospital and that marker did not resonate with me or what I was doing Integrative or functional medicine So the real thing is when we deal with a car accident heart attack some Acute illness our medical system in the US is still one of the very best in the world But if you have an autoimmune disease you have thyroiditis you have lupus you have MS you have obesity you have diabetes drugs don't cure these diseases But functional medicine when we go to root cause and we look at the gut and we look at the immune system We look at the metabolic markers that are creating disease and inflammation We can actually find out what happened to induce we call them antecedents and mediators that keep that condition going and we go to that level and change the inputs and Actually change the trajectory. So like I said in the beginning We've seen things that were considered irreversible to become reversed So years ago when I was in that medical clinic and my colleagues the rheumatologists the gastroenterologists and neurologists And what in the world is dr. Jill over there doing the proof was their patients came back to them off the meds off the Immune modulating drugs and they said dr. Jill, you know Help me with this and all of a sudden they started asking me What are you doing over there and that's the way we change this as we show outcomes We show healthier with health span and lifespan and I want to just mention in this realm of autoimmunity The gut is huge But one of the other passions is our soils because we used to say autoimmune disease begins in the gut And I believe now it's actually beginning in the soil so our soils matter to us as health and in functional medicine Looking back to you Jeffrey the just just to be clear. I mean that I am super intrigued by the idea of Addressing root causes. I am primarily mr. Meditation these guys but these days But I've been it's been pointed out to me that the root of meditation and medicine Is the same for a reason. These are modalities to help people heal and I think meditation can have and also just working with the human condition and human thriving human flourishing can really have a Whole can be a holistic approach That being said I was surprised as I started researching your field the extent of the criticism So I just want to give you as well as it just as I do with Jill a chance to address it for example I've even if you just Google it Functional medicine the first result on Wikipedia says quote functional medicine is a form of alternative medicine that encompasses a number of unproven and disproven methods and treatments so Totally wrong or partly right where what do you make of these pushbacks? Yeah, thanks You know a good critic keeps you sharp and it refines your model and we like criticism We like these points of controversy as it were trying to seek out a health care system that really deducts from disease care Which is so costly both financially and in terms of experiential Adversity and so the functional medicine model is built around a central principle that was very different than the way I was trained in a traditional medical school education We I'm going to make this this really quickly kind of simple and probably overly simple We would study as Jill will will I think confirm Chapter at a time or the textbook at a time and then we would close the textbook and we take a test So it'd be the gastrointestinal system be the nervous system It would be the cardiovascular system would be we go through systems approach each as if it was individually partitioned and compartmentalized From anything else then we would take a test and think okay now I can move to the next organ system, and then if we really got deep in this we could become a super specialist knowing more and more about it Less and less until we knew everything about nothing. I said that is an exaggeration just to make my point the functional medicine model, however Recognizes in a systems biology approach what we've learned in the 21st century And that is that all these organ systems are interconnected So when Dr. Karnahan talks about the immune system connected to the gut microbiome connected to the nervous system These are systems that are working 24 7365 by cross communication. They don't just work independently They're working together therefore if you're intervening at a systems level you're treating the cause not the effect So when people criticize functional medicine, it's that they really don't understand the basic science that underpins this Or we have over 20,000 references from the peer-reviewed literature supporting these concepts But it takes at least 20 years for medicine to catch up with new ideas And that's why when we talk about advancing cures it cuts across everything not just treatment of in-stage disease But the actual improvement of human performance often takes the disbelievers as as I think Who was it the the classic Nobel Prize winner in physics who said? Quantum theory was accepted one funeral at a time and that's what happens in medicine You have to have this evolutionary transition But right now we're compressed with AI and all the things that are happening what used to take ten years now Takes a year so we're in a very very advancing quick change in which now medical school are adopting this question this whole approach We're seeing in the Cleveland Clinic has a center for functional medicine That's one of the most active clinics in the Cleveland Clinic We're seeing the VA and the DoD picking up on this with now veterans approaches. So it's catching on Dan and any any reconsideration of whether you want to be called to functional. No, I'm very proud to be among these people So you have to realize that almost nobody makes money if you stay healthy pharmaceutical companies rely on you to get a prescription Hospitals rely on you to rent a bed most doctors even though I know they want to cure you at the end of the day their paycheck relies on you getting sick and coming in for a Test your procedure and my colleagues up here are you know, I've known enough about it that there's a proactive approach In fact that that Missy Yes, Jill. Jill. Sorry missies It's talking about the the Microbiome beginning with the soil tells me that they they are they are Considering the problem as a whole not some sort of a surgical intervention where you could you know be reimbursed on so Could I make a quick comment because I want to leave this a way to to missy So Jill talked about the soil and one of the things that I've I've learned we've learned And I'm now into regenerative agriculture never thought it's going to be a farmer But I in this portion of my career now we own farms in upstate New York and we're bringing back this ancient food 4,000 years old called tartary buckwheat and blah blah blah, but we were doing by regenerative agriculture techniques And what we learn is the micro rise of the soil Directly relates to the personality of the genes of seeds and how they express their function into the plant Which then influences how that plant germinates as final product seed or fruit and how that then when Consumed by animals produces an effect of consistent outcome. That's related to the health of the soil We've actually tracked this we just published a paper on this soil micro rise and its effect on tartary buckwheat Flavonoids so this construct that we have to take a much broader view of health Starting with the fundamental things upon which we're all nourished all parts of the ecosystem Even the planet has its own immune system the carbon hydrogen nitrogen phosphorus sulfur cycles are part of the planets immune system Plants have immune systems which translate to the human immune system when we eat the right immune system from plants So I'll go over to missy because that's one of the basic precepts of your whole approach in your in your company Well, it's an interesting thing because you And and I'm in the world of philanthropy so half of what he just said was right over my head But but I will say that It's really fascinating I think probably everybody in this room has had something medically that when you get up against your choices If it's bad enough, you're willing to look into this right here because You haven't found your answers in what was given to you so you start seeking and And I have found on my own and it wraps right into the question that you just asked When I treat myself in a way where I'm allowing that sustainable Resource to whatever come to me and it's a little bit of where you're going as well that If we're treating the people on the ground in a way that they are not used to in a lot of these areas when they are sourcing The agriculture that they're able to source within Kenya or Bulgaria or these different areas And it's the highest risk of human trafficking in the world in agriculture And so labor trafficking is a much larger number of the human beings on this earth than than a sex trafficking, although Both are horrendous They are all linked to how human beings treat human beings and When you take this model where you know you're sourcing agents right on the ground And you're treating them with kindness and respect fair on-time payments for the first time in their lives Where they can get paid year-round that they can actually plan for their children to attend school because they have water in their systems That they are they're not and we talked about this earlier in the philanthropy one They're not taking six hours of their day to walk somewhere to pick up water to bring back to something and the whole Community lifts because of what you're sourcing there and it goes back to your question on when people are treated better They they give back in a way that is sustainable That is ethical and you see the whole lift happen together And that's what happens in a lot of our essential oils areas and they're all over the world. It's in Brazil It's copaiba Which is a beautiful oil that's right up against CPD. You should look into it It's there's frankincense in an area and really really hard areas of tribal Conflict in Somaliland and we put a hospital that in an area 12 hours in where there's no surgical care in three years ago We there's a concept Otero put the money behind it and we opened it last year First time people are able to have surgical care in that region And you start to see the whole lift of an area and the people Wanting to be part of these solutions and they've never had the option before so exactly what you're saying in in the products come then you know to the user and And they're in pure form and and and then we test purity We do all of the things we work with the University of Mississippi to test purity along the way and make sure that What is coming in that bottle is exactly what was given at the source and this is why we call it functional I want to emphasize it prior to us choosing this term functional. It was a pejorative term in medicine It was either rehabilitative or it was psychosomatic. That's the way those terms were used Someone asked me in 1990 when we started down this road. Why did I choose that term? It seemed that that had a negative connotation. I said because the Puck was moving in the scientific literature towards functional radiology functional cardiology Functional interchronology was talking about the precedent to pathology. That's where all the action is by the time you get to pathology That cell is undergone that tissue that organ that organ system a lot of irreparable damage and now you're into patchwork Magic medicine that's where pharmacology and surgery comes to play before that are functional changes and function means Across all aspects of the systemic function. That's why I talked about Physical function metabolic function Cognitive and behavioral function. They have to be intermerced so it requires a systematic approach Which we're not doing in the way we train doctors or we were not training doctors that way I think it is in change But the system that we have which we call health care is a total centric disease care system in which health is not actually Advanced as an operative value system that we call that a public health model Which is a stepchild to the disease care system of patchwork interventional medicine We only need to have a comparable balance between health care, which is around function and disease care We don't give away disease care. We're lucky to be in this country and have the world's best probably Disease care, but we need a health care system that deals with function such a lot of bring you in Missy said something a few moments ago that that struck me is I think Inarguable that there are times in many of our lives or the lives of people we love where there's a condition that may drive us to seek outside of the traditional health care system When you're in that position though, how do you know whether you're in good hands? How do you know whether you're working with somebody who's actually qualified and is gonna help not hurt? I believe in this time We still have to have a lot of references of these people because there's a lot of How do you say people that they are not qualified to help others? But I would like to bring this to another topic that is highly important that is I Believe that in our health care system not only in the United States But in Europe we we give much more attention to the consequence of the disease But we don't ask ourselves why this person is in pain. What is going on with them? We ask what is wrong with them? Yeah, and when we ask what is wrong with them. We immediately Put a boundary between how can I really help this person to recover their balance their own wisdom and Health not only wisdom on the emotional level or mind level, but physically One of my biggest fights now it's in the United Nations is how to introduce Awareness classes awareness self-awareness classes to the educational systems Since they are kids to University because what I really see By working with people the last 15 years more than 60,000 people with cancer politicians mothers engineers anyone that you can Point is We all have a lot of traumas all There's no one in this room outside that you don't have trauma All that trauma causes pain pain that is in your body is manifesting in your cells not all in the Bones or tissues in the vibration of your cell Pain in your emotional body in emotional body We can say emotional system where you will not allow yourself to feel certain Emotions because you are defending yourself Against the pain that wants you felt so you will pass your life Running away from situations that you believe that can bring you more pain So that doesn't allow you to really live a fully life. So that happens mentally So you have belief system that you got from your childhood and from your social life, but not only by your genes So when we need to look to a human being we need to look from a more Holistic approach, how can the quality of your thoughts your inner dialogue every day are influence your metabolism Inflammation immune system how the emotions that you repress are not allowing yourself to overcome your own fears and honestly by working with a lot of politicians and People that they are leading companies They tell me Satya. I already did everything therapy meditation and one of the biggest tools that we can give to people is a Safe space for them to be highly honest With themselves and it's not easy to look where you were hurt and how your body is Manifesting that pain and how you defend yourself So you don't allow yourself to really go to healing that is the cause the root of your pain and By doing this. So I was sexual abuse. I mean I come from a very high standard culture family Okay, I never went to difficult situations in terms of economical Situation and a sexual abuse happens in every family In for example in groups retreats that I have in 40 people Normally when we do the medical inquiry in the first interview they around 20 and normally women They say that had at least one situation that they consider sexual abuse Okay, normally when we finish the retreats We have 38 people men and women that they consider that they were sexual abuse and this is one trauma There's much much more Okay neglected Parents they were working too late. They don't have the right attention. All of you went through this if I would be with you in my Office whatever is the name you would come to a place that you would feel that your trauma is still alive So all these years. I've been looking for how to really help people. So when they come with physical Pain I always send them to doctors we work a lot with doctors and most of the What they really say they can't really find in analysis because there's a lot that is psychosomatic so I went to therapy meditation all the arts of healing that I could and one that I found was natural psychedelics natural psychedelics from ancient traditions and What I see natural psychedelics is they they allow the the mechanism of Self-defense network of the brain to get low. So they have access to memories They have access to what to the truth of what was going on inside of them so when we use these natural psychedelics people has the the opportunity in a Faster way than psychotherapy to really see what is inside and by doing this by saying this I work a lot with cancer and A lot of the cancers that people have And doing analysis before with our doctors and after the retreat what we find is normally the The levels of cancers the cancer in our system drops a lot Many people I can give you percentage after many people. They really are clean of the cell cancer cells and Many people that they can't heal themselves because their body is not any more available to have the physical healing What happened is they are more than ready to accept death by saying this is to forgive what they need to forget about themselves to Make peace with people that they couldn't before That they have a true meaning. They can see the meaning of the life. What brought them to that place? and If we can help people to really be with themselves and to die in peace That is a big conquer. We don't speak about death only numbers but we don't speak how can we help people to really die in peace and For that we need to teach kids that we have Amount of time available and it really counts and we are all afraid to speak about this Yes, as we are afraid to say that I'm in pain So self-awareness Natural psychedelics. It's one of the oldest tools and one of the most futuristic tools and why? Because it helps us to come to a point of being self-aware. What is going on with me? How do I really feel? Why do I feel like that and? many people with addictions We still put them in a place that they have something wrong with them and Most of us have addictions sugar addictions TV addictions sex addictions toxic relation addictions and We need to really look to that and to help people to ask themselves. How do I arrive here? How do I got here and normally the pain emotional pain is there? Just gonna jump in just because I have my eye on the clock And I just want to make sure I give everybody enough enough of an opportunity to talk down Let me just come back to you for a second Can you disturb this discovery around blue zones? It's just so interesting and I know it's been out there for a minute But it's it's I suspect not everybody here has immersed themselves in it. Can you distill for us? The practical learnings. What have you changed about your life? After learning about the blue zones, what are the habits you have that you would recommend we all have? So by way of background so we find five blue zones the longest of men in the world live in the highlands of Sardinia the longest of women live in the archipelago of Okinawa In I went off of Turkey named Icaria You have a place where people are suffering about half the rate of cardiovascular disease and about one-tenth the rate of Dementia that we do in the United States in the Nikoya Peninsula of Costa Rica. This is a place dominated by the Contras in the 1980s But they have about half the rate of middle-aged mortality than we do in the United States And they spend one-fifteenth the amount we do on health care and by the way I just want to sort of salute my fellow panelists here because you know the health care system that we all rely on Since 1980 the number of people suffering from diabetes has gone up by about a factor of seven number of chronic disease among middle-aged people has doubled the rate of dementia has gone up by some Estimates sevenfold obesity has gone up by a factor of three it ain't working and the people sitting here my fellow colleagues They're taking the risk They're being challenged, but yet keep doing the same thing hoping for a different outcome as definition of insanity at least they're coming up with these innovative and in at least your case your your your bringing back wisdom that has evolved over Millennia and putting it to work in patients today and and I really applaud that and similarly to your question Dan about What are the insights from blue zones? Well if you look at the common denominators all five of these blue zones We did a meta analysis if you want to know what a hundred-year-old eight to live to be a hundred You can't just ask them because people don't remember if I asked you what you had for lunch a week ago Tuesday You probably wouldn't remember so you can't exactly ask a hundred-year-old, you know what's your diet? But you can find these dietary surveys and we found a hundred and fifty five of them done in all five blue zones over the last 80 years they go back 80 years and What these people were really eating as kids in middle age and newly retired and and and to a certain extent now Although that's changing 90 to 95 percent whole food plant-based five pillars of every longevity diet in the world are whole grains of every sort tubers greens Nuts and the cornerstone of every longevity diet in the world if you want to know a supplement That really works beans take 125 of them every day. It's the best supplement there It's associated with about four extra years of life expectancy. So I become mostly plant-based. I eat a little bit of fish But but the other thing you know, I wrote a cover story for National Geographic in 2005 and it was one of their most popular and I had identified that having a strong sense of purpose is worth about eight years of Life expectancy over going rudderless in life. Nobody in the pharmaceutical industry is talking about purpose In fact, there's no drug that I know of including statins that can in part seven or eight years of life expectancy You could put purpose in a pill it be a blockbuster drug Being socially connected There's this great okinawan word Moai Four or five people you travel through life with and so I've created my own Moai. I'm very clear on my sense of purpose I eat Mostly a whole food plant-based diet. I you know tend to put my family first and I have these sacred daily rituals that help me reduce inflammation every day including Taking a moment to slow down Meditation I have my own version of meditation and happy hour So in the blue zones they can have happy hour. They do have happy hour. Yes, it's a very important Especially in the Mediterranean area There's some version in every blue zone except for Lomelina, California, and they're not supposed to drink what they do What's the view from the blue zone on Oreos? They're very well-rounded meal. No, I don't know they almost Until about two thousand at the year two thousand Highly processed food was unknown to the blue zones as were sugar sweetened beverages and you can see very clearly when the American Way of eating American food culture arrives Their obesity starts to spike the diabetes spikes and their life expectancy drops And the bad news about all these blue zones is they're all Disappearing because of the influence of the United States and the way we eat and So it's very clear to me, you know as my fellow panelists as they're looking at the outside the body for Solutions for healing it's a much more fertile terrain. They continue to you know Hit the dead horse of you know pharmaceuticals to fix our problems. Jeffrey you got something I just want to really reinforce what Dan just said. I think it's really brilliant. So I mentioned this ancient food Tartary buckwheat 4,000 year old food So where's that food originally cultivated 4,000 years ago on the slopes of the Himalayan Mountains pretty hostile bad soils Horrible climate so these plants had to evolve extraordinary mechanism survival. They have their immune systems They produce 451 different phytochemicals 55 of those are members of the polyphenol family that have been shown by immunological science now to be strongly Supportive of both innate and adaptive immune system function. So these plants have a super immune system capability That then gets transferred through the ecosystem by people who eat those foods Into their ability to perform high-level work over the course of eight or nine decades of good living and When I when Dan made the comment about what happened to our food supply system and how it weaves itself into Pharmacology of today. It's a very interesting story. You recall the McGovern committee I was starting my career as a young professor in the McGovern committee in the 60s and that was the first national priority of food policy In fact, we didn't have another one until the fall last year with Biden's conference on food hunger and and health and That particular committee recall came up with recommendations close so-called dietary goals the dietary goals Got perverted. I won't go through the whole history, but let me just tell you what they said they said Saturated fat is bad. Everything else is good. I mean I'm exaggerating to make a point So what happened to the food industry the food industry was very smart because now they could take saturated fat out and replace it with Very inexpensive carbohydrates particularly high refined and sucrose that was the start of the high fructose corn syrup sweetener revolution Now in those period of years from 1962 until the McGovern Report was published as dietary goals in 70s The food industry got a head start. We never had metabolic syndrome. There was no such thing as insulin resistance We didn't even talk about it in medicine when I learned diabetes in medical school in the 60s It was an insulin deficiency syndrome now We have an insulin excess syndrome that's related to insulin resistance and where did that all come from? Is it coincidental that it came at the same time in which we were starting to see the Proliferation of high fructose corn syrup sweetened foods. We're starting to see hyperurusemia I'm starting to see gout all these things were a manifestation of a government policy supporting a food change Which then drove the pharmaceutical industry into have 12 different drugs approved for diabetes For a whole series of new anti-hypertensive medications for the whole epidemic of obesity There was a marriage of American pharmaceutical technology with the Iotrogenic cause by changing dietary habits agricultural patterns subsidy for farmers This is a systemic problem that we are forgetting to to bring back to our history and not Reproduce it what he's talking about is a whole network biology approach towards true health not disease That's what functional medicine is all about Jill. Let me bring you back in we're hearing these really interesting ideas about changing your diet Potentially looking into psychedelics adding more purpose into your life I'm wondering is a challenge for you in your practice with your patients the difficulty of human behavior change because Making and breaking habits we know from the data is is diabolically difficult So how do you deal with that and and is it a big problem? Yeah, you know, they say it's harder to change your diet than your religion And I think it's true in some cases. So behavior is is important But I feel like the foundation of what we're doing as clinicians and changing the way we practice medicine is actually How do we encounter the patient in the office? Do we create a safe space like you talked about for them to be present and feel Accepted and loved one of the biggest new terms last year. I think the biggest word search for Google was gas lighting There's something called medical gas lighting and that's when you go into your doctor. You say doctor, you know, I haven't been feeling well I'm not sleeping. Maybe it's hormones. I've had got headaches. I'm exhausted Stress is high and I just don't feel like myself The doctor orders a CBC a CMP a routine panel of labs and looks at them and says well, everything looks normal Do you want an antidepressant? Now, there's nothing against antidepressants. They're perfectly appropriately used, but this is not a depression issue This is a systemic biology issue of dysfunction and just because they haven't yet hit that code for ICD-10 to qualify for Lupus or you name the disease migraine headaches The doctor blows them off and says it must be all in your head and this is what we're dealing with And this is why it's important to start with a foundation where a patient comes in and there's this this what we used to have is the Trust Bill Foundation of a physician patient encounter and that's lost in a seven-minute visit Which is the average of most doctors. So we need to have this built-in way to have a patient come in Connect with their physician on a human level be heard and be seen for themselves And then ask about questions like what about childhood trauma? What about how does it house your sleep? What are the stressors in your life on my intake form? I say, what is your greatest source of strength? How do you relieve stress? These things are not typically asked in a seven-minute encounter and this is how we change the encounter because when you have that relationship with your physician That's where the healing starts Missy you want you had something yeah So I worked a lot in anti-trafficking and I started that I was Chief of staff to the Utah Attorney General and that's really where I started to really heavily getting to this issue I had seen it earlier In an organization that I found at the Utah refugee coalition because it's high within the refugee populations Once I started getting into that and I don't know if you're all aware of the Children's Justice Centers or the There's a network of Advocacy centers for children one of the books that they utilize for this trauma support is called The body keeps the score It is one of the best books on child to trauma and also trauma that came through on war and it's really that those two populations are really the most trauma-induced adults and This book talks about how the body holds this and it is a very clinical approach to this So if you want just a clinical entry into this, it's a great one to go to if your brain is just this is overwhelming you because it's one that could resonate with anybody reading it and And you see that that we are as a system we are as a nation and even internationally We're starting to recognize the importance of spirituality in our healing. We're understanding How holistic approaches to things really matter and I see it in the oils where there are trafficked Survivors who will tell me that they were put on drugs to get off of drugs because What they were using to cope in a trafficked scenario and that the only thing that is supporting them is an oil We have that is a called adaptive and I I find it like I will be at a panel with these Survivors speaking and they'll all pull it out of their person un-me-dose to me and I say to them Why do you use that? I can't live without it and it's it doesn't last long But it gets them past that trauma response of the of the immediate peak of a trauma You know if there's something reflective in and something pushes them into that trauma space So it's amazing because people tell me all the time they testified to me all the time how the oils work and And I've had my own experiences with them and that would go on a long time But I'm just saying it's just trying things and me in my own life. It's just Trying things and seeing what works and just what you said. It's the results if it's not working try something else You know, it's not a lot of these things are not Detrimental to you because they're naturally based there, you know, so just try it We've got about 10 minutes left I want to give a chance to people for people in the room to ask questions. Apparently, there's some technological thing where you can get them to this iPad But I'm not gonna figure out how to use that right now. So let's use the old way of actual Speaking so that one there's a microphone in the back. So and who's got a question put your hand up We'll get a mic to you. Oh Thank you. I always appreciate the first person who raises their hand Hi I had a question. Do you think insurance companies can play a role in pushing more functional medicine? That's more cost-effective. It seems in the long run then kind of the traditional approaches. I Can give a quick shot at that? One of the major imperatives now the Institute for functional medicine, which just is celebrating its 32nd year now Is to really work with government agencies and insurance providers to really talk through How you use the insurance system equitably to support? Improved function which is improved resilience you notice I'm staying away from the word prevention because once you get into prevention as a term then you're talking about preventing a disease You're now into the disease lexicon. You're into that whole system in terms of resilience Which then has to do with the you know compression of morbidity improving a health span the question is What would you be measuring and how would you determine outcome? What are the variables that you'd used and I'm very? Excited to say that maybe as a consequence of what we just went through with COVID It has been really a kind of a relaxing of some of the guidelines as to how one would then do an office visit Either by telemedicine or in office to actually collect the variables that we really talk about Functional capability not just the absence of pathology. I think we're witnessing the first vestiges of the creation of a new model that then gets really with Genitive AI Where we're collecting all sorts of information into systems thinking and make it easier for the doctor to collect this data set and Now we have 24 7365 information from our wearable devices for the first time in human history All that information now can be reimbursed as part of preventive care to using the word prevention And so I think we're witnessing a transformative Opportunity to really redefine the nature of a practitioner to the reimbursement system to the patient So the patient becomes center point in the intervention next question So I have a question around where does Integrative health fit in within this whole functional medicine approach because we are talking about a lot of what you are saying Seems like you know There's the disease care and then there's the health care and within integrative medicine I think there's a little bit of that where they want to go into root cause You know looking at the root cause and there are companies now which are doing that So, you know parsley health comes to mind and they're now covered by insurance companies So one is that and the other is a you know, you touched upon this thing about Systems biology and you know the different organ systems working together and a lot of eastern healing modalities And like meditation and stuff comes from there. They talk about that They've always talked about that right and Chinese medicine in Ayurveda So would love your thoughts on kind of Do of these topics? So I'll just say a quick thing and I'll turn it over to the jail and the rest of the group But I had the privilege of being invited to do a series of lectures at Beijing University Medical School and Hospital in number of years ago, and I was actually really very privileged to have the chief of staff of of the largest hospital in China that Had his whole senior staff attend my lecture, believe it or not. It was trans translated Obviously, I'm not that fluent in China Chinese and and and so at the end of the Presentation which lasted several hours We were having an award ceremony giving one another gifts and When when it's his turn to speak to me he was speaking in Chinese and he went on and on and on my Translators eyes were very big and I and I finally said what is he saying? You know he's he's going on and on and he said He just said that you're the first American that seemed to understand traditional Chinese medicine So this is a systems approach. It goes back historically through Empiricism people make these observations over thousands of years they get codified into habit patterns Which ultimately become the policies and procedures if all you have is nature to be your teacher You don't yet have the pharmacopoeia of single new to nature molecules then you learn about the Stories that those plants can teach you in ways that are very different than looking at the stories it from a single molecule against a Single receptor against a single outcome. So I'll turn it over to Joe I'm sort of our board certified in integrated medicine and also family medicine So I can to speak to this years ago the term alternative was everything that wasn't allopathic Everything else was thrown in this bucket. I hate that term because alternative to what and why is that you know? Ranking order the value then we got integrative integrative is Andrew While made this really popular with his classes and board certifications and many books Integrative is all these wonderful modalities when I was in medical school. That's what we brought in massage therapists Are you a vet a practitioner's naturopathic doctors chiropractic physicians and all of these types of people and many more than I'm not naming You know just for lack of time all of these people had added value and they were practitioners in their own right They had a system of healing and the integrative approach was bringing all that together And as a doctor you might do a referral to these pieces and use them and then before I knew what functional medicine was This is what I went into medical school to do and what I find my colleagues like myself Get reinvigorated when they find out functional medicine exists and what it is because we learned chemistry biology Systems systems biology in medical school, but after the first and second year we're in Classrooms we go in the clinic and we learned get a ICD-10 code. Here's your diagnosis. Here's a drug There's nothing wrong with that, but you lose that systems biology thinking so functional medicine is taking this as a clinician In my practice looking at all the data I do loads and loads of tests pretty much every body fluid you can imagine saliva urine Stool because I'm looking at the microbiome. I'm looking I'm looking under the hood of the car So I'm saying what is happening in this car? Just like your mechanic would Diagnostically to say why is it making that funny noise, right? It might be your migraine headaches. So why is this problem happening? I'm looking under the hood of the car and looking at all your metabolic processes and saying what processes going wrong in Conventional medicine were taught to give that code and that's the end of the line Then there's a drug to treat that nothing wrong with that, but you're not looking into the car So the functional medicine that is actually what you do as a medical doctor or an allopathic physician Or an osteopathic physician or any other practitioner in the clinic to look at root cause So hopefully that kind of explains those Sir quick question clinical studies. You just mentioned data the one you use and test and all that standard accusation against Functional medicine and the rest is that there's not the same level of clinical studies They're not published and appear reviewed. They're not widely available. They're not tested. Can you comment on that? Yes, I can certainly come in on that because that's one of my areas of Responsibility within the Institute for Functional Medicine I think your point is very well taken early on in the development of the model now as I said it's 32 years since IFM was first formed It was pretty much empiricism and kind of creating Hypotheses and then testing it to see if clinically patients were responding to it over the last Five or five and say seven years however because of the Cleveland Clinic opportunity and the availability of a really high-powered research staff with Informatics specialists and biometricians We've started now to actually publish outcome studies in respectable journals like JAMA and Those studies are showing very positive outcomes when compared against Standards of practice which are the best available say family practice standards of care So there's nothing wrong with those they produce positive outcomes But in head-to-head comparisons the outcome with a functional medicine model produced more positive outcomes And now there are a whole array of those studies that have been published With autoimmune disease with a variety of different maladies And as you probably know one of the things that we're experiencing now are new conditions that are coming up like pans Pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders in kids or autism or greater allergies or increasing frequency of autoimmune Disorders our genes didn't change what change is the environment in which the genes are exposed and so as requires a new model We just can't come out with new immunosuppressive drugs and treat all of these conditions We have to go upstream and ask what can we do to take away the bad things and add the right things on an individual basis to produce Better patient outcome more cost-effective and reduce this unnecessary burden of disease one last question So as somebody said that science is usually way ahead of medicine And somebody even calibrated it as something like 17 years and part of the problem is not just getting FDA approvals But it's getting doctors to Keep up with what the latest science is telling you including in areas of functional medicine So how do we change that paradigm to shorten it so that doctors who are otherwise under a lot of pressure and are well-intentioned But under a lot of pressure to make money to you know Churn their patients. How do you change the paradigm that the this gap between science and medicine gets shorter? So I want to speak to that because one of the things that has happened in my life, which is extraordinarily rewarding personally Is I was told when we started the Institute for functional medicine that we would never be able to recruit doctors into this They'd have to go back and open their books about chemistry and anatomy physiology And that's the last thing they wanted to do their lives were already complicated They're just being recertified by their annual Certification exams and they take a minimum number of courses for CEs to get the certification So I was living in a La La Land if I was thinking that people were going to go back and really put their minds to this Well, that was totally I was proven I think to be right that there are extraordinarily passionate people who want to do the best job for their patients We've had 250,000 Over the last 32 years there are 250,000 doctors come to our courses and they're not easy as Jill would say they're very demanding and What that reaffirms is this transformational opportunity for physicians to be reenchanted with why they went into medicine Which is to really help people not to become prescribers of somebody else's details But for them to actually develop an intimate relationship with their patients that produces positive outcome That's really of reaffirming for me in these 40 years. I've been in the field You brought us right up to the end of our allotted time. Thank you very much to our panelists really appreciate it Thank you guys