 Well, good afternoon everybody. Welcome to another episode of Dr. Jill Live. I am here today with special guest, Dr. Jeffrey Ridinger and you are in for a real treat. I know you've heard me say that sometimes before, but today it is just an honor to bring this doctor here who's really talked about some cunning edge science around spontaneous healing. And I know if you've listened to me, you understand there's more than just the physical body and that often even through our thoughts, the way we emotionally interact with our environment and all the things that have happened to us affect our health and our journey in that process. And we're gonna dive deep into that, but also just into the science of how the mind affects the body and how the mind affects the immune system. And many of you know my own story overcoming breast cancer and Crohn's. So this is a topic that's especially personal to me because I've been on that side of facing my own mortality in the face at 25 years old and not knowing if I was going to survive. And now I'm one of your stories. I could have been in your book as far as how this happens. I've lived it. And so I still related to those things. Let me just introduce him formally and then I wanna let him talk. Dr. Jeffrey Ridinger is a physician and best-selling author, popular speaker. He's an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and the medical director of McClain, adult psychiatric and community affairs at McClain Hospital. A licensed physician and board certified psychiatrist. He has also a master's in divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary. His research with remarkable individuals who have recovered from incurable illness has been featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Dr. A's shows among others. He's been nominated for the National Broadwell Leadership Award and has received numerous awards related to leadership and patient care. His best-selling book cured, Strengthen Your Immune System and Heal Your Life is available at Amazon, local bookstores in multiple languages. And I wanna be sure if you're listening here you will have the links to get that book because I just think it is one of those things you will not want to miss reading it. I just finished myself. So Dr. Ridinger, would I always love to start with this story? Because as you know, story is so profound not only in our own healing journey but even like how we get into doing what we're doing. So tell us a little about you, your background. How did you get into this journey to where you're writing a book about spontaneous healing, especially with regards to the fact that you're a very conventionally science grounded, well-respected physician and this is kind of bridging those two worlds. Yes, well this has been a very personal journey as well as a professional journey for me. Similar to you, I grew up in the Midwest on a farm in a very conservative tradition. My father came out of the Amish tradition. My grandfather was a blacksmith in the Amish and we left the Amish community outwardly when I was two, but my parents didn't so much leave inwardly. So we moved to a small farm about 35 miles away and we had tractors and a car and those kinds of things but there was a lot of suspicion and rules against listening to the radio. I was supposed to be on the bus but tuned the radio out on the school bus. You know, now many people know this but I didn't have a TV grown up either. It was in the closet and it was like this big secret. So even television, I so understand that because even though it wasn't the exact same tradition. Yes, right. The exact thing where it was like you don't listen to a lot of the media. So I totally... That's right. Yes, it took me years actually before I could start letting myself psychologically hear the words of this sinful rock music. Exactly. So but yeah, a lot of restrictions and fears around TV, around science as being evolution and the tool of the devil. And so the long and short of it, I was growing up in a very different culture at home than I was experiencing at school. There was a lot of good things about growing up in such a conservative form. My parents grew some of their own wheat. So we had a whole wheat bread. We had a lot of very healthy foods but it was also a very emotionally constricted and physically and emotionally violent home. And so I think that also fed a lot of my questions and my life has been an effort to study the things I needed to learn in some ways. I was trying to figure out what's true when the world views at school and at home are completely incompatible. It's challenging. And so I began at a really young age trying to figure out how do you know what's true? I was pretty rebellious as a kid mostly because I just wanted freedom to think for myself and went to college and then in college I had these wonderful professors who helped me begin thinking about what are the interdisciplinary underpinnings for how you understand what's true? These different disciplines all are next to each other and they are trying to answer similar questions from a different vantage point. So then I went to seminary at Princeton that was a continuing journey to figure out how do we know what's true? And then began to study the relationship between science and faith and theology and spirituality and became convinced that science is a great tool of truth. It's a partial and limited tool of truth but very important. So then went to medical school. I came home one weekend to Indiana and my best friend's mom from high school asked what I was going to do with all my education. And I was at seminary at the time studying a lot of great ideas and I said, well, I'm going to be a professor. And she said, you're going to get all that education and not do something to help people. Oh, I love it. So I was still living in two different worlds. Right. And so education was suspect. So when I then decided to go to medical school that's something that people from the world I came from understood much more easily. It was a world that they valued and made more sense. So going to med school was a perfect solution for me, it gave me something practical to do that the world I came from understood but also left me free to study ideas and theology and spirituality and psychiatry and all that. So that's what I did. And then right after I finished residency at Harvard back in 2002, an oncology nurse from Mass General in Boston came to me and asked for help explaining to her son that she'd been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. That's a devastating diagnosis as you know. Usually people die shortly after diagnosis with a brutal, painful, really difficult death. And so I helped her explain that to her son and then she took off for a healing center. She began to write and call me saying that she was seeing some amazing recoveries and she was hoping I would look into it. I declined thinking that nothing likely was going on and couldn't be explained through normal medical science but I owe a lot to Nicola because she was very persistent and she began telling people to send their stories to me to send me their medical files. Wow. I continued to decline for a while but I did begin to look at the reports and although most of them I could explain through being a great chemotherapy responder or something like that, the upshot was there were some of the stories and medical files I had no explanation for. Yeah. And so in 2003 I began to study this formally and the last 19 years has been a journey of incredible professional and personal transformation and I talked about turning worldviews upside down. It's turned upside down many of the assumptions I had learned in med school and even in seminary in my residency in psychiatry and so it's been a journey that has met the world to me because it's improved my own understanding of what illnesses, what healing requires, what our lives are about, what my life is about and so I've been a slow learner but I'm very grateful for the opportunity. That is amazing. And I hear in your story there's some things that are really profound and I could tell from the book. Number one, I love that you're a truth seeker and I feel the same drive in my own heart because it's almost like if we really, truly desire truth and to find it, then we can take things from all different backgrounds, philosophies, religions and even science backgrounds and pull them together and what I loved you said something else that I've always found, I'm like I have a very strong spiritual belief in faith but I also have a very strong science background and I never feel like one is more important than the other. Like we talked right before we got on, I'm a medical doctor and I feel like in the allopathic world I'm still well respected because I use great science and how I treat the patients but I'm open-minded enough to say, you know what? I don't know why this happened or how this works which is what your journey has been but I'm willing to look at it and maybe ask the questions, what else is possible? Like with your healing as my patient or with and those things honestly, I see among our colleagues are kind of rare. There's not, this way I saw your book and heard you and I'm like, this is a man after my own heart because I know that seeking for truth and even the combination of and faith can be whatever background we're not saying it has to be how you or I believe but it's like whatever place you come from that idea that there's more to life than just like that meaning, that purpose, that depth which we'll talk about and the science and you don't have to take one or the other you can actually have both and have a deeper, more meaningful understanding of life, right? Yeah, that's so well said. I think that's fundamentally true. There's things that science can study because science is about the evidence, the five senses it's about the things we can see and touch and that's really important for understanding our world it's the gift of Western culture to the rest of the world but there's also more than our hearts can tell and those are things that are harder to prove you know, we can't prove the existence of love we can't prove the existence of what it means to have a really quality relationship not all of those things can be captured by science but yet they're really important and so being able to use both our left brains and our right brains is harder but really important and very meaningful. So Truna, it sounds like you started the journey kind of like me, I was a bioengineer I was all analytical I was completely left brain, very masculine driven you know, all that, my family was all engineers farmers, definitely like high level and then what happened is when I've been practiced a little over 20 years and what I learned is the most important ahas and healing and things that I've seen are actually trusting the intuitive side and that thing that doesn't always make sense and I always say it's almost like this old analog computer, the analytical mind can do this process of data calculation and can do maybe thousands of data points but when we go to a heart centered intuitive place and like take both I feel like millions of pieces of data in an instantaneous second or subconscious can come up with answers that aren't possible through just purely analytical, that kind. Yes, I think that's absolutely true and so well said, there's these different ways of knowing and science is important but it's not the only path to knowing truth and right intuition and what we know at deeper level in our hearts or our guts is pivotal and critical. So you've got so many stories in your book and you clearly, you know, encountered some amazing and now you probably have a mailbox full of people wanting to share, right? But tell us just maybe a one or two or a few of the things that maybe were changes because I wanna talk about maybe a story and then like what are some of the foundations that you saw in healing that were common and I love that you said it wasn't always diet, it wasn't always like in fact, many times it wasn't there was this, so let's talk a little bit about first just maybe a story or two that kind of got you thinking in a different direction of one of your patients. Yeah, yeah, I mean, there's so many stories so it's hard to know where to begin because every story is kind of a universe into itself and it's so, there's no way to capture that magnificent nuanced universe in one short story in the book and so I did the best I could to capture as much as I could to capture the essence but these stories are amazing. So I start off with talking about Claire who was diagnosed in 2008 with pancreatic cancer, actually the worst kind of pancreatic cancer, pancreatic adenocarcinoma diagnosed by biopsy so we know she had it, we know that was the right diagnosis and I wrote, I started off with her story because there's something about the way she tells it that's universally human, it's both very specific to her but also it touches on so many universally human parts of our journeys. So she went about to retire, like just looking forward to her, I think that. That's right, yeah and a person she believed in science but she decided after investigating what the Whipple surgery is which was going to remove a lot of her abdomen and leave her with side effects the rest of her life and probably still not leave her with a clear path to recovery but with chronic pain was likely. She decided that in spite of her deep belief in science that she didn't want to pursue the surgery because she didn't want to live with that kind of pain and complications so whom you have a grudge for example and she'd struggle with some issues with her mother for example and that was 2008, time began to go by she'd been told that she had a year to live or so and next thing you know it is 2013 she's been making a lot of changes in her life not immediately but progressively and steadily and she had an abdominal CT in 2013 for unrelated reasons and the cancer was gone and so that was a shock and so then she began to backtrack and figure out how it just happened. One of the reasons I started off with her story also is that she has a website and so people can go into more detail than I had room in the book it's living with pancreaticcancer.com and Claire just writes very humbly and humanely about her journey about mistakes she made about things she learned and she and I she's one of the people that taught me that not one diet fits all that it's not about a particular dietary approach it's not about a particular type of meditation it's really about finding the steps towards healing and well-being that work for each one of us and there's a lot of variation around that but there's some common very common threads and pillars so that's what she did and so she faced death she was one of the people who taught me among many others that it's facing death can often become its own release its own doorway into a different life because if we die to a less authentic version of who we are and become more authentic in our lives and our relationships that death then renders a person with a different kind of life and different kind of boundaries in relationships and even changing relationships letting some relationships go letting toxic relationships go letting more emotionally nutritious relationships come into one's life so it's just a fascinating journey I was very touched by her story I love that and I think like I deal a lot with environmental toxicity and there's metals or mold or other infections or things in those complex chronic cases that end up being chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia or cancer but what I found is kind of what you're talking about here is that transformation so I'm writing a book right now too but the bottom line was it's gonna be kind of about environmental toxicity and toxic load and these things but what I found is the biggest deepest healing even if these patients who maybe don't have cancer is the toxicity of relationships, personal trauma the identity, all these deeper issues of like those things are so powerful to shift the needle even more so than living in a clean house breathing clean air, drinking clean water and eating clean food and I really like to extend that because there's a lot of books out there about cancer that say this one diet does it and you and I know that's not true maybe for a few people it worked but the truth is not a one size fits all and I really love that you talked about that because a lot of people still think oh maybe if I would have eaten perfectly or done all the right things and it sounds like to me where your book has gone it's really the level above that are how we think our relationships and like you said when we face death I know that because I've been through that at 25 facing cancer it really did almost shed a level of caring about also I could just be like you know what I've already faced death in one I always joke it's like I have nine lives so what the heck why not risk it a little bit more and so often we're afraid to risk in it can be afraid to risk even in showing up as our true selves tell me more about that because it feels like that's such a route that was really underlined most of the healings is something about finding the true self living authentically or we can also go into the default mode network one of my favorite but talk a little bit about this piece of identity and what is that relationships how does that play into this healing that you've seen? Yeah yeah I mean it's certainly true that the of the four pillars you know whether it's healing ones nutrition healing ones relationship with stress healing ones immune system those are certainly important but the pillar that over and over was the point in the conversation and in the interviews where people would sit up they would get a light in their eyes and they would say this is why I'm so grateful for the illness because this is the thing that changed my life I became convinced that some people could eat cat food and still get better I mean because they made such deep changes in their understanding of their value and the elimination of false beliefs so it's shocking how deep this goes one can walk around this trying to get a sense for the size of this it's shocking for example how often when a person is diagnosed with cancer they will be of course terrified at one level but sometimes at another level more often than you would think there's this kind of relief like well I guess if I only have six months to live I don't have to take over the family business like the pressure is putting me on from parents or I don't need to go to law school just because everyone's expecting me to or I don't need to do this or maybe I don't need to be taking care of everyone else in my life because now I have a reason to focus on my own needs and I have in their minds a legitimate excuse for beginning to finally focus on what they need for their own well-being and that decision to begin letting go of a false self that's taking care of everyone else instead of also paying attention to our own authentic needs and our own right to have a life that has well-being to it that shift is what I believe is about the healing of identity and waking up to the value of the magnificence the goodness of what we each bring into the world and beginning to focus on that and to heal our traumas to heal the critic in the back of our minds that's telling us we're not good enough or we don't value or there's something wrong with us or something defective with us and those false beliefs cripple us more than I think we easily see and limit us. Yes, so well said because if I hadn't put in a nutshell some of this like real amazing healing not only in my own self but in my patients it's really been with I grew up in a culture maybe similar to you, maybe not where to love yourself was like false like you're supposed to be humble you're not supposed to use as a love others more than yourself, you know, love your neighbor and so there's this real like emphasis on giving of yourself sacrificing yourself martyrdom, which is all beautiful like it creates wonderful loving beautiful people but if those same people including myself don't first love and value their own selves as a unique individual that has a voice and has a reason for being and has a purpose and meaning like you said then what happens is at the core there's this almost self-loathing and I'm sure like especially with autoimmunity there's a metaphorical connection between self-loathing and it makes sense it's a body attacking self right like the physical body is just in between the mindset of that attack and when I realized that and had to really shift and it started with not only that trusting that I knew what might be best in a situation versus relying on everybody else to tell me what I should be or should do or you know and then also actually loving myself like realizing that I was valuable and those things so simple and for those of you listening that maybe already have found that it's maybe not that big a deal but for those who haven't it's those shifts are profound because you can start living then from an authentic place staying no setting boundaries and it sounds like you've seen a pattern probably more with cancer I know for sure breast cancer I think Gabor Mate talked about those over nurturing, over caring individuals is that a common theme with cancer of the like taking care of everybody else and neglecting your own soul and self? Yes, yeah and it's a huge thing and now that my eyes are starting to open to see illness in these ways more deeply and to ask questions about what is underneath the illness and perhaps contributing to it it's really helped me begin seeing illness and recovery in a completely through a completely different set of eyes and I think you know I mean cancer is an autoimmune illness, right? All the killers are autoimmune illnesses heart disease, diabetes, lung disease autoimmune illness, cancer these are by and large autoimmune illnesses which basically means that the the brilliant cells of the immune system all these specialized battalions have turned against the body it's sworn to protect and begun to attack the body and that's part of what chronic inflammation in our bodies is whether it comes from poor nutrition or from toxins in the environment or from the constant release of stress hormones like cortisol or norepinephrine or adrenaline the chronic inflammation is the immune system gone awry that leaves us so much more susceptible to cancers and autoimmune and I believe that our beliefs if we have mixed beliefs both true and false beliefs conscious and unconsciously about our value, about our bodies then that's what the immune system is reflecting in some ways I believe and certainly that's a complicated multifaceted discussion but our deep beliefs about ourselves the beliefs that are true, the beliefs that are false if we have mixed beliefs some true and some false we will have mixed beliefs we'll have mixed results in our lives in our minds and our bodies I believe Well, I love that you say that because I think that's another core is that the subconscious stuff that we're maybe not even aware of if we have these parts that are kind of fighting like us were like I believe this and I believe I'm worthy but I'm not worthy or I believe I love myself but I really kind of hate myself and hate my body or those things are probably warring on the inside I remember understanding I had breast cancer 25 got over that and then Crohn's disease a year later and again autoimmune in nature and I remember like I'm fighting now this will make sense to you I grew up on the farm with all three brothers a sister to you but like lots of male lots of like, you know pull up yourself by the boost tracks work hard, you know don't be lazy, be strong don't complain, don't cry like all those things were part of the culture and it made me a very strong resilient person so I'm grateful on one hand but what didn't happen was I happen to be a now I know this but I didn't know back then I'm really sensitive and very highly intuitive and I kind of suppressed that part of myself so I'm in top and everything so I was a spider, right? And I came to cancer and Crohn's and I did the mental thing I always knew like the will of the mind like Victor Frankel's work on that the mind is powerful, right? And I knew in my heart like I can beat this, I can overcome it I was so confident and I did but that whole fighting kept me sick until I got mold related illness got really sick with cytokine inflammation and aid immune dysfunction and I realized about 10 years after the cancer that fighting analogy and that fighting mentality that I grew up with was actually killing me because what I was doing was revving up my immune system all my cytokines were off the charts and I was like, wait I have to change this message to my system and I literally started that day meditating on my blood cells and meditating at them being peaceful I remember just thinking of the little minions those little yellow guys in the movie about the minions and they were just like these peaceful warriors but they were whistling they were escorting the toxins out of my body there was no fight and that's the day Dr. Ridinger that I felt like my health really started to shift and there's been a lot more than that but I love that you say that because these messages subconsciously yes, it helped me survive cancer and Crohn's but had I kept going with that mental message of fighting Yes I would probably not be here today Yeah, that's such an important point I think and I've really learned that many of the women who talked to me about their recoveries they spoke about consciously shifting away from the militant battle language towards language that was more about loving the body loving the immune cells a much more compassionate and inclusive way of understanding and I think some some kinds of language work better for different people I wonder if there's some gender specificity here I mean, we all have both masculine and feminine aspects and different kinds of sensitivities I remember Jerry this battle axe of a Texan he was the Jim Bowie and the LMO reenactment every year the Texan he talked about beating two kinds of cancers and he used the battle imagery to create images of him going after the cancer cells in his body and that worked for him Yeah but so many people including Claire felt they needed to have a more loving and inclusive energy so I love it when you say both is needed though because at 25 I think I needed that bite mentality and I overcame it so I think you're right like there's this place for it but then like for me it ran away and got way too then my immune system went way overactive so it was like having to and I love the specific immune system because I feel like it's so neuroendocrine immune allergy right we have this new science that actually brings it all together so the great thing is the stuff we're talking about now is getting more and more research it's very grounded but tell us just a little bit about what does that mean because it really is this connection of mind and immune and endocrine and how they all work together Yeah, yeah and you're right and it must be so great for your patients and your listeners that you know the science around being able to test for cytokines and things like that and it's just at a really exciting time that are different worlds of what's going on in the lab and the ability to detect these the ways in which our immune system is impacted by stress or different kinds of toxins it's a really exciting time these things are now just starting to be able to be measured and tested and captured in real time in people's bodies but yeah it's a big subject you know I mean what we do know is on the basis of both laboratory data and clinical experience we know that there's a huge difference between a body that is being bathed day in and day out with stress hormones like norepinephrine, adrenaline or cortisol and what that does to the beautiful immune cells of our body they become sluggish they begin to fire incorrectly they begin to attack the body instead of the pathogen for example and we know that a body that is in more parasympathetic mode where the mind is more relaxed where a person can experience more uninhibited loving compassionate feelings for both our cells and others that's a very different neurochemistry dopamine is about pleasure pathway and purpose and oxytocin is the love molecule or present molecule is serotonin etc so those are two really different sets of neurochemistries and the body just reacts really differently and in the parasympathetic mode it's the immune cells wake up they function correctly they hit their proper target instead of the body and it's a very different physiology and that's what allows the body to heal so Do you think now as I'm thinking and just listening to you I mean what happened to last couple of years of pandemic loneliness is at an all time high with isolation and now we're back to normal but I feel like what I've seen at least in my clinical practice is the stress levels the stressors in life the I've been at all time high right do you think we're gonna I mean I feel like we're gonna see more and more illness because of this and unless we have the tools to kind of deal with it but what's your thoughts on that because I feel like the stress levels are really escalating probably more than they were in decades past Yeah I think they are and I think we're pressing towards the need to change the way we live I wish and I've tried unsuccessfully to get a more national discussion going about these kinds of things that you and I believe and talk about it's I think it's ridiculous that we put the whole burden of dealing with COVID on just the three strategies if only things in our toolbox are masking, quarantining and vaccinations and a few things like that I mean those are important and those are valuable but that puts a lot of burden on when we have a lot of other strategies like healing our immune systems healing healing I mean we have a culture where we weaken immune systems regularly I mean in the way and even in the way as doctors you and I were taught to treat patients you know we do anti-products to bring down the fever that's fighting the infection and we give anti-inflammatories to easily I mean sometimes we give immune suppressants when we're battling cancer and so there's so many ways in which we could fire up the immune system back in the days of Pasteur and when Louis Pasteur you know he's the father of the germ theory did this great thing and it was a really important step forward but it was a partial step because he and a few others like Claude Bernard argued for their entire professional lives is it the bacteria that causes illness is it the pathogen the bacteria that virus that causes illness or is it more the the that we are surrounded by millions of bacteria and pathogens inside and outside our bodies all the time and it's just when something in the body breaks down that the pathogen can invade and Claude Bernard stood in front of his class he drank a glass of cholera which was a terrible plague in that time and he said I know how to take care of my immune system I know how to take care of my terrain what we now call our microbiome and so I'm not going to get sick and he didn't and so and so we have a well documented evidence that Pasteur who said it's all the pathogen it's not it's not how you take care of your body on his deathbed he admitted that that Claude Bernard and his colleagues were right and that the terrain is everything but that's not what we did we took the easy answer and said it's all about taking an antibiotic or taking an antiviral those are important but they're just half the story and and so we also need to create healthy bodies that can fight off pathogens and we don't do that in this country I love that you're talking about this because like you said there was great measures my thought during especially in the early days when we didn't know what was going on all there was a lot of we were perpetuating a lot of fear right and we know fear is so harmful and the second it's up here there's so much evidence that fear versus love and you think about loving your immune system versus just like the man you just mentioned you took the cholera he had no fear he was all about loving his immune system in a way you could almost simplify it that way in the early days of the pandemic we were pandering fear and the other piece was the isolation you know if you look at loneliness and mortality I think that's a bigger respect than smoking and alcohol and like all the things that we think of as high risk loneliness is epidemic and we were actually especially elderly in some of those again we did the best we could I'm not trying to comment on the right or wrongness and the measures that we gave you I don't think you're wrong but there's more right and just when I knowing that I was looking there's more wait a second and I remember like talking about vitamin C and writing about vitamin C and getting like curtail and I like wait a second like vitamin C what kind of risk are we taking like the it's just unbelievable that we weren't talking more about what we could really do and that's a minor thing for the immune system yeah other things that we do but yeah but still yes but these these factors are important antioxidants do play a really important role and so vitamin D and some basics on yeah yes exactly so yeah I appreciate that you can also walk these two worlds and see what's true and what's distorted in both and that's so important absolutely you don't have to throw and you don't have to get all yeah for me it there's no I don't I can see all sides I understand and yet like there's more yeah can we bring more people so I yeah and I can bring that discussion for sure so let's talk you mentioned the pillars but just so people listening are clear and I want you to go all you listeners if you haven't got enough to buy this book I really want to say that again and we'll we'll have links cured is the name of the book it's so worth your read you'll have lots more stories than just here today but go ahead and mention the four pillars again and then I really talk about those but especially the last one yeah so the four pillars are about healing our nutrition and that's a big topic because there's so much misinformation about nutrition I can remember where I was sitting and what they basically short paragraph of nutrition education we received in medical school and it was IVTPN for surgery right yeah right yeah actually completely upside down in my case it was completely wrong and and I think the the the trifecta of industry who pays the academics for certain results with nutrition research and how that interacts with the lobbyists and the food recommendations that are published by the government is complicated and science is important but it's also a bit of spin science or business science and so we need to just be aware there's a lot of distortion and misunderstanding there and and and doctors and nurses and nutritionists have been given a lot of misinformation and so studying the people who who got better it had medical evidence for recovery from incurable illnesses was a really helpful window for me into a truer understanding nutrition and so it helped me begin understanding the importance of eliminating most sugar which is the favorite food of cancer and the feta and highly inflammatory for the body I completely I just want to say with my breast cancer that was a big turning point so that wasn't the only thing that I totally agree with you and we know I think it's in my studies with sugar and cocaine they chose sugar every time it's more addictive to our brains with the dopamine it is yeah it's and and you know over 100 years ago the average person in the United States eight five pounds of sugar a year not a big deal but now the average person eats 154 pounds of sugar a year our bodies just are not made to take in that level of a load and it tends to be in so many things I was at Whole Foods recently it was in the salmon that I almost bought I mean it's in soups it's in tomato sauces it's in it's in so many things and so and it's highly inflammatory and you know as doctors we're taught to basically attach a radio labeled marker to glucose injected in a person's body and if there's a place in the body that's actively taking up sucking up that glucose sucking up that sugar there's a strong likelihood that's cancer because that's cancer-saving favorite food so the fact that we don't translate that into helping our patients change what they eat or we dismiss dietary or nutritional changes is ridiculous and I can tell you a story about people who changed their diet significantly and eliminated a lot of sugar and the effect it had on their health and contributed to the disappearance of the cancer for example so the first pillar is nutrition it's important but like I said the healing of identity and beliefs can be even more powerful I think the second pillar is the healing of our immune systems that's a big deal in a world where we tend to be taught to do things that weaken the immune system and certainly don't buff up the immune system and make it the powerful workhorse that it can be and then healing our stress response is the third pillar and that's a big deal I'm always a little bit against the idea of just simply eliminating stress because sometimes stress does need to be eliminated but we also can't eliminate all the stresses in our lives and sometimes we don't really want to eliminate I mean raising children can be stressful in care of aging parents can be stressful having a job where you have to drive in rush hour can be stressful and I think we all have to decide what's the toxic stress in our life what's the challenge stress that allows us to reach into our higher self and become a larger being able to manage more stress I'm a runner running is really good for me and running a marathon can be challenge stress or toxic stress depending on who you are and how you take that in and process that so I think challenge stress helps us reach into our higher self and become able to manage more stress yeah I love that you say that because if people think like oh my gosh I have stress in my life I'm going to die or this like fearful mindset it really has a relationship with stress isn't it because if we can just have a calm like for me it's like a knowing that things are going to be okay that I will have the resources that I need so I can have really stressful events but there's a deep inner well that's like I know I'll have what I need when the time comes even if I do this moment and that really relieves that like because it's really like how we perceive stress that allows the chemicals like cortisol to go up right that's right yeah I mean if we relate to that stress with fear you're right has creates a whole neurochemistry of fear and stress and if we can relate to it in a way that we don't feel like we have to be in control we can relax we can feel compassion for ourselves and those around us and if we can experience it as challenge stress instead of toxic stress that's a whole different neurochemistry I think there are times when we have to have we have to help people leave toxic stresses leave toxic relationships if a person comes home or goes to work every day and they're just taught in direct or indirect ways that they don't matter or there's something we're not good enough by who they are that can be a form of toxic stress for a person to simply has to leave and set up boundaries against that so yeah I think the relationship understanding the difference between challenge stress and toxic stresses is really important and I love that you mentioned toxic relationships because I could not agree more my own healing and healing of so many patients really finding and often like you said when you come to a life threatening diagnosis you realize okay is this really good for me this relationship and sometimes you make it better and you heal the trauma and sometimes you say no I'm walking away and those are both good responses because but often it takes a pretty life changing event or at least some awareness to be like okay this is not good for me and again this is beyond a conversation but often we have patterns from childhood or other times in our life or other people that condition us to feel like that's normal and maybe really really toxic but we just our physiology is used to it so we think it's normal and healthy right yeah that's a really important point I believe because a fish doesn't know what wet is if it doesn't know anything else and you know I think back to how many of the stories I see of people whose stories are invisible in our culture you know and that's particularly relevant in with some of the areas of real social injustice where we have whole communities that their stories are not heard they're not valued properly where they're oppressed for having a certain kind of faith or a certain color of skin or a certain kind of sexuality and you know the deepest form of oppression in our world I think is when someone is treated as less than someone else and the truth is we all bring the whether we the different spiritualities talk about this differently we all bring the light of the divine into the world and it's not like some of us have more that light than others we all have the same degree of value the same quality of light we bring into the world and we need to see behind the masks that we wear to see the value of and goodness of each person and I don't think we can really heal anything until we understand that oh I could not agree more and that's part of tell me about the last pillar and that's related to this it's about healing our beliefs our unconscious and our conscious beliefs healing our false beliefs so that we can wake up to the value and the dignity of what we and others bring into the world and you know I think we all grow up in the world we pick up beliefs some of which are true some of which are false from our parents from kids on the playground from our teachers from our partners from peers from the way we interpret different experiences we have some of them are traumas whether they are major traumas shock traumas like child abuse or physical emotional sexual abuse or just the drip drip drip of feeling like we're not good enough for being told we're not good enough in some way I think there's something in the deeper self that doesn't rest until it experiences unconditional love unconditional positive regard and I think something in us is always standing for that and we there's something in us that doesn't rest until we can find that ultimately we have to be able to give that gift to ourselves but we also need an environment where we limit the access of people to us who are overly judgmental or critical there's something in us that does not do well with criticism and judgment oh I love this and I love this kind of falling on this because that's really again in my clinic it's science and testing and doing all the stuff but it's for I've realized this and I'm sure you've seen this as well if I create a space for someone to walk in and know they are loved and accepted and I'll even call them I love you like it's that we were taught in medical school never taught you know you know first of all don't share your own experience or share it like there's this barrier right but I feel like when I show up more authentically and give them permission to do the same and then also just it's little things like giving them a wine glass filled with water when they walk in like wow I must be like it's just silly little things but they feel like they're valued and that I really do care about them and that I think yeah container for healing that is I don't know that I could scientifically prove it but I know it's true and I'm sure we'll have more more evidence if creating a space for them to be heard for them to know that nothing they can say is going to be judged by me like I can be open to anything and and that they truly are by my staff and myself like love that I think is the true true secret to helping healing yeah I really believe that's true and science is validating that more every day as it learns how to touch and test these deeper more intangible dimensions science has come a long ways in that regard in the last 30 years and so our science is getting better our understanding of the importance of intuition is getting better the cross fertilization of different cultures is helping us realize that the western left brain approach is not the only way right there's more more yes and well and I'm sorry to interrupt you know I think it's from my standpoint one of the things that people often want to talk about when we talk about these things is that all of our institutions for thousands of years have been deficit based they're based on put on what's missing from us or there's something wrong with us and then we need some kind of external expert whether in medicine it's all about the disease and we now know that the elimination of disease is not really where it's at the person needs and deserves a level well-being that's far beyond just getting rid of the disease that's not just getting rid of it's not just focusing on the disease psychology has historically been about childhood deficits instead of focusing on what's right and good about us psychiatry has been awful about reducing human problems of living to neurochemical defects yes and that's just evidence just a few weeks ago about the serotonin deficiency really exists in the question of the science behind all of the what we put on for SSRI that defaults idea you know that whole thing of a chemical imbalance that was thought up by pharmaceutical companies but it doesn't exist you know and then so our human problems of living and suffering and trauma and healing are yes there's a place for medicines but those when you treat symptoms if you want to heal you need a new and truer experience of your value in your goodness so so that's and so but then religion for thousands of years has focused on things like original sin instead of the original blessing the fact that we're all created an image of the divine so but I think our whole world is trying to groan in the direction of a more positive understanding of who we are on our value and liberate the individual from and communities from these deficit-based beliefs and so we're the we're in a very exciting time where there's a lot of fear about those new beliefs but also there's you're right the shift is happening I mean we're both it's happening and so and the science is following that and the fact that you could study this and even 20 years ago 10 years ago it was very hard to really talk about this and and remain you know respected in our field so wow that's right oh yeah yeah I remember years ago I mean in medical yeah people thought I was crazy because I was always open to other things and I was again still enmeshed in the traditional allopathic training model but I would always be open and they that what happened was they thought I was crazy but now 20 years later when there's a problem they'll call and say Jill this we haven't been able to figure this out do you have any ideas right yeah you were the head of the pack and it's so important now so what 20 years ago or 10 years ago looked crazy or a little bit right you know is now we know that that was on the path of what's really important so it's it is you're right so thank you for all your work what would you say would be the biggest thing that with yours so you had a lot of people kind of coming to you first and you're like I don't know if I want to go there without studying and then eventually you enmeshed yourself and wrote this brilliant book I love what you've written and want to share it with everybody but what would you say in this journey has been your biggest shift in thinking or your biggest aha and there's probably many but if you had to pick just one what was what's the biggest turning point for you and all of this well I think there's different ways to say this but one one way of saying it is that in all of my training and I think part of this is because I was trained in a western way of thinking both in medicine and also in theology I was taught that the body is who we primarily are and I don't believe that anymore I believe that now we are basically these invisible cells or souls walking around in the body is an instrument for something we're trying to learn and so because when you see these amazing shifts where a person will have a new true or experienced who they are the body changes so quickly sometimes to catch up to that new understanding I mean these sometimes healings take 10 years sometimes they take 10 months and sometimes they take a really short amount of time I mean we're talking like the day or less or hours and so it's shocking when you see some of this stuff and can document it so I think when the deeper self or soul in us has a new and truer experience of our value in the dignity we bring into the world and then there's a lot of implications for that because because now when I'm ill or when I see people who are ill I'm curious about what is the deeper self trying to say to them through these symptoms is there a message at the body's I mean the body keeps the score the body tells the story we have to get a solution so my favorite so I love what let me just paraphrase because I think I totally get what you're saying it's almost like because I remember this was a cancer early on even though it was confusing I was in my 20s I didn't know much I remember in fact for me there was a scripture this isn't for death but for a greater purpose basically also the paraphrase and I remember hearing that and being like curious and it's like getting curious and then I realized even though I anything back then I had this sense like okay yeah this is here to teach me something and I grabbed onto that like a raft boat for dear life and I'm like I don't know what this is I might die but I'm gonna try to learn something in the journey but that is kind of what you're saying and that truly in all of my illnesses and overcoming has been the such the core and even now this morning my refrigerator broke my internet wasn't working I wasn't sure all these things and I'm like okay what's going on here am I not paying attention not that everything bad happens to teach us a lesson but if we can always look for meaning and purpose and transformation in the journey it makes it kind of a fun exciting ride so I love it it really does and it's also yeah and I think that's well said I think that there's also this I think sometimes our illnesses are speaking to us about what we are afraid to see or understand they speak to us out of the shadows of our lives they speak to us out of what we're afraid to see and and so that for me requires a very painful death sometimes I have to die to old ways of believing and I have to be willing to surrender and let go so my beliefs so I can see something differently and honestly I resist doing that with every fiber of my being yeah so there are things I do not want to see and I want to put them in the shadows I don't want to see the parts of my life where I've hurt people or where I need to make reparations or whatever it is and every one of us both has the I mean I think I think good and evil cut through the hearts of every one of us they're not outside of us it's in us and so we all and I view evil as something where we make mistakes you know it's not something we often do consciously but we can hurt others about realizing that so finding ways to begin seeing what we don't want to see or what's hard and painful to see and dealing with those which are often rooted in trauma in my experience and that's where liberation and healing and restoration can occur and that's not a simple process no and so true and then at the same time the other things we're just talking about is that self-compassion like I literally learned years ago to kind of to kind of to kind of to kind of to kind of to kind of to kind of you know what you might have messed up this time but let's get up and try again and like that compassion because I didn't have that when I was growing up but when I started to shift and know oh I messed up I did something wrong I want to make it right or I want to shift my thinking but also at the same time having that compassion which you just described so well so wow yes yeah yeah yeah you mentioned Gabriel Maté and you know he says if you don't know how to say no your body will eventually send it for you yes so so true this has been one of my favorite interviews I am so grateful for your time and all the goodness you put into the world and all the deep into self-searching and kind of trying to find truth because that's where it starts so first of all thank you from me and I'm sure from all the listeners and then where can people find you what's your website where can people find your book tell us more about you yes thank you Dr. Jeffrey Reddiger dot com is my website and cured can be found in local bookstores can be found on Amazon it's in lots of languages at this point it's confusing because it's got different subtitles but it's the same text it has different book covers and lots of different subtitles because of the different translations some of which are still English but different sensibilities in the UK versus all different but it's the same text so so that's it well we'll we'll put links to your website thank you again for your time today I really appreciate it and all the work you're doing you have an amazing journey yourself it sounds like you're having me