From Surgery to Supplements: How an Orthopedic Surgeon Discovered Functional Medicine

What happens when a Navy orthopedic surgeon scheduled for elbow surgery finds healing through two simple supplements instead?

In this episode of Ultra Life Today, Dr. Douglas Rowles shares how collagen and turmeric (curcumin) completely changed his personal health — and reshaped his medical career. From his 24 years in the U.S. Navy to training residents in Oklahoma, Dr. Rowles reveals how his wife’s persistence led him to functional medicine, how he challenged 31 patients with a 6-week natural healing protocol, and why he believes medicine must bridge surgery with nutrition and lifestyle.

This is the story of a surgeon turned functional medicine pioneer.

Listen to the full episode here or watch it on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/_VYIM6omUKw

Visit UltraBotanica.com to learn more about us and how you can get a free sample of our products.

Transcript

0:00:00 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): My surgery was scheduled for March of 2020. And if you remember what happened in.

0:00:03 - (Adam Payne): March 2020, I do everything shut down. Yeah.

0:00:08 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Including my surgery. That is literally when my wife stepped in. So, you know me being the typical male, I whined and moaned and cried about how much my elbow hurt every day at home. So she finally started force feeding two supplements down my throat. Six weeks later, pain free.

0:00:37 - (Adam Payne): Welcome to Ultralife Today. My name is Adam Payne, CEO, founder and inventor of the protozorb technology, makers of Ultracur, the curcumin you can feel. We're here live in our studios here at Ultra Britannica in Oklahoma City, continuing our interview series with functional doctors and naturopaths that are breaking ground and in the business of changing people's lives. I think everybody's going to get a real benefit out of meeting today. Dr. Douglas rolls. Hey, Doc.

0:01:07 - (Adam Payne): Welcome to Ultralife Today. How are things going?

0:01:10 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): It's going great. Thank you very much for having me.

0:01:13 - (Adam Payne): Well, I think your breed of medicine is the only breed of medicine that we should have in the country for the primary physician. Right. Because it's a different paradigm. Maybe you could introduce yourself to our folks here in Ultralife today by giving us a little bit of your background and how you got here. What journey brought you to this place here, Doc?

0:01:44 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Well, grew up in Rhode Island, New Englander, went to college in Rhode Island, Providence College. Kind of decided on not just medicine, but I kind of knew that I wanted to treat athletes at a young age. So it's kind of.

0:01:59 - (Adam Payne): Is that, is that because you were an athlete yourself or.

0:02:02 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): You know, I tried to be. I mean, I was decent, played all the sports, but I never, you know, knew I didn't have a future in it, you know. Sure. But you know, just from being a fan and just going to all sports events and everything. But, you know, I kind of went to college and subsequently medical school knowing I wanted to do orthopedics, you know.

0:02:21 - (Adam Payne): Oh, interesting.

0:02:22 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Which was kind of a mixed blessing because it made everything else kind of boring to me, you know, but, you know, I ended up when I was applying to medical schools, you know, money was, money was short at that point. So I came across a school that didn't have an application fee, you know, and it honestly, at that point, I was so strapped that I didn't even look and see what the name was. I'm like, oh no, let me put this on there.

0:02:46 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): And sure enough, I got an interview. When I showed up, the first thing I noticed is, wow, they have unbelievable parking for free. This is incredible because at the time I was in Washington D.C. parking, forget about it. You know, and push came to shove and I ended up going to the military medical school called Uniformed Service university in Bethesda, Maryland. Right.

0:03:05 - (Adam Payne): Wow.

0:03:06 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): NIH actually. And then from there, you know, 24 year career in the Navy with lots of, you know, bizarre type of experiences that most physicians aren't going to get.

0:03:19 - (Adam Payne): Sure. The Navy is kind of, you guys see the fringes of the universe that almost that none of the other armed services see essentially because you're, you're on a mobile platform. Right. Were you out to sea at all or were you mainly at bases?

0:03:33 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Well, it's funny, when I was going through, after I did my internship at a naval hospital in Virginia and at that time, it's changed now. But at that time they didn't let you go into residency right away.

0:03:47 - (Adam Payne): Oh, interesting.

0:03:48 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): You two years as what's called a general medical officer. So I was on a ship. I was on the USS Carolina, South Carolina for two years. Wow. The last nuclear guided missile cruiser in the Navy. In fact, I was there when it decommissioned too.

0:04:02 - (Adam Payne): Wow.

0:04:02 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): And then right from there to residency at the same place in Virginia.

0:04:06 - (Adam Payne): So that boat could essentially travel around the world without needing to refuel. What a thought.

0:04:10 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Yeah. Well, you know, a couple things I didn't realize. When you're attached to a nuclear ship, that means you can't be at, you can't be at the pier with the nuclear reactor. On Monday through Friday, we would be about three to five miles off of, off of the shore, which was by the way, just out of stem cell range. And that did not count as underway time. So Monday through Friday, I was living on the ship.

0:04:42 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Go home on the weekends and then rinse and repeat. That didn't count the several deployments we had. So it was a long time on that ship.

0:04:51 - (Adam Payne): Wow. That I'm sure you had you. If you close your eyes, you could probably memorize the layout of all the different places that you would, you would serve and rest at. It's probably not, not too many.

0:05:06 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Well, you know, Navy ships are basically floating factories, you know, and I wasn't prepared for the fact that I was expected to be the dentist. Oh no.

0:05:14 - (Adam Payne): Really?

0:05:14 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Well, because once, you know, this was an old fashioned ship type. When you look at the Navy vessels nowadays, they have more of a blocky kind of shape to them, which makes them, you know, better in the rough seas. The South Carolina was one of the last that had that bulleted kind of sharp point edge Right. Meaning we were taking between 30 to 45 degree pitching holes, you know, all the time.

0:05:36 - (Adam Payne): Oh, my gosh.

0:05:37 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): So at least once a day, one of the fellows on the ship would. Would headbutt a pipe, you know, and show up to sick bay with a broken tooth. And I'm like, well, okay, I don't know what to do, you know?

0:05:51 - (Adam Payne): Well, I can diagnose you. You have a broken tooth. Congratulations.

0:05:56 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): I recommend soup and yogurt. Correct.

0:06:01 - (Adam Payne): Wow. You know, it's. There's so many life experiences that kind of drive us in a different direction. Do you know that kind. Was there an aha moment when you were serving in the military that. That set the stage for what your life was going to be like after.

0:06:21 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Retirement, you know, not during the military. No.

0:06:26 - (Adam Payne): Okay.

0:06:27 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Moment came when I got out. Yeah.

0:06:30 - (Adam Payne): So what was that moment? What. What happened? Maybe you can describe it for us, because I. You know what. What I find, Doc, is each of us, especially when we're in the business, if we're truly in the business of. Of wellness and healing, there's a spark or an impetus that carries us through the raging difficulties that you have to navigate through in order to get and to actually just be in practice.

0:06:58 - (Adam Payne): Right. I mean, it's quite a gauntlet. I mean, you had that for orthopedics, Right. You wanted to do that. But moving into functional medicine and naturopathy is. It's quite a transition. What. What was that moment? I mean, did you just wake up one day and say, you know what? I'm gonna. I'm gonna learn all the things I can learn about herbal medications and their ability to help. Help wellness? I'm sure it has to be something different.

0:07:27 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Oh, yeah. I actually had two. One introduced me to it, and the other just put me over the edge.

0:07:34 - (Adam Payne): Okay.

0:07:34 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): The introductory. And I should preface that by kind of giving my wife credit. She's been with me ever since I was in medical school, and she's always been chirping at me how much she didn't trust pharmaceuticals. You know, she's always been that way.

0:07:50 - (Adam Payne): Didn't that rub you a little bit wrong, being that you were in the business of prescribing pharmaceuticals?

0:07:54 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): You know, that's just it. My. My specialty, in fact, my subspecialty within orthopedics was sports and means. I scope people. I. I like to say I just play video games for a living, you know, and within orthoped, we don't really treat systemic disease, you know, so the only medicine. Right, I ever dealt with were antibiotics and Pain relievers for the most part. So I was kind of sheltered, you know, and that's probably what kind of got me. That kept me going. You know, I didn't really have a reason to.

0:08:23 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): To think one way or another about chronic disease or anything systemic. You know, I was kind of stuck in my little. My little area. And I just, you know, much like most of the doctors are, I mean, when you have a specialty, you're kind of.

0:08:36 - (Adam Payne): You're. You're stuck.

0:08:37 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Yeah. You live in a box, you know, you just think about what you have to deal with. So I was kind of sheltered, you know, but the wake up moment for me came right around, well, I retired from the Navy in 2015. When you retire from the service nowadays, you have to basically get anything that's ever been wrong with you. You have to get worked up. Like an MRI of everything.

0:08:58 - (Adam Payne): Wow.

0:08:58 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): You need to document for the rest of your life in case the military has to pick up the dime for. To fix what the problem is. So at the time, I had chronic tennis elbow in my left elbow. Now, that being a condition that I treated, you know, I ordered myself an MRI and I looked at my own mri, and sure enough, I saw the chronic tennis elbow. But what I also noticed this was in 2014, a year before I retired.

0:09:24 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): What I noticed was I wasn't expecting was my left common biceps tendon, which connects to the radius bone below the elbow. Looked like a small grenade went off in it, you know.

0:09:35 - (Adam Payne): Oh, wow.

0:09:35 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): At that point, I had no idea.

0:09:37 - (Adam Payne): So what had happened? Do you know, do you have any. Any theories?

0:09:40 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Well, no injuries. I think it was just chronic wear and tear, you know, back in the day, used to lift heavy weights and, you know, played all the sports and all that. So I certainly had some mileage on me. But at that point, no pain, no symptoms, no weakness, nothing. And that continued on. I tried just to forget about it, you know, out of sight, out of mind.

0:10:00 - (Adam Payne): Forget about it.

0:10:02 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Well, I got.

0:10:03 - (Adam Payne): You're the tendon connecting your arm to the, to the muscle.

0:10:05 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): That's.

0:10:06 - (Adam Payne): Forget about it.

0:10:07 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Well, you don't go looking for trouble if, if, if it's not active yet.

0:10:10 - (Adam Payne): Right. But I mean, it, it. What did it even occur to you that maybe this could have been a degenerative process that could be. That could progress or.

0:10:19 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Yeah, no, but I, at that point, you know, I hadn't. I. I haven't been lifting weights. You know, I'm like, right, right. You know, I kind of figured, well, I'll worry about it if it becomes Worse or if it becomes symptomatic. But that finally happened four years after I got to Oklahoma. By 2019, I was literally wearing an elbow brace. You know, we trained residents at Oklahoma University, so I would have to have whichever resident was with me actually lift up people's legs and put it on the OR table for me during surgeries. I mean, that's. I'm left handed.

0:10:49 - (Adam Payne): Wow.

0:10:50 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): So it was a big problem. I was actually scheduled to fly back to my last duty station in the Navy. Hawaii. I know it's tough because I have had a prior partner that fixes these tendons in a unique way.

0:11:06 - (Adam Payne): Oh, really? Oh, good to pray tell. What. What. What is he. What are they. What have they been doing? Well, because that's. That's a. It's. That's a significant problem. Losing that attachment can be quite painful and quite difficult to repair.

0:11:21 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Well, I say unique. Maybe that's not the right word. He had a different approach to the surgery.

0:11:27 - (Adam Payne): Right. Okay.

0:11:27 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): So most of the time, and all the ones I've ever done, you're making the incision in the antecubital fossa, which is right in here, and be a long incision. He fixes them through a small incision on the other side of the bone right here. And he can work around the ulna and get to the radius just by rotating the wrist.

0:11:47 - (Adam Payne): Oh, interesting.

0:11:48 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Now, that doesn't work for displaced tendons, but it works for high grade partial tears, which is what I had.

0:11:55 - (Adam Payne): So.

0:11:55 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): So, yeah.

0:11:57 - (Adam Payne): Okay, so you still had some attachment and what you needed. What you needed is to reinforce what you. What you still had there.

0:12:05 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Correct. I mean, the typical thing for a chronically torn partial. Torn tendon is you have to scrape out the diseased part of the tendon, the one with the chronic inflammation, the scar tissue, freshen it up, so to speak, and then repair it solidly back to bone, you know, put me in the oven and let it cook. So, long story short, I was all set. I had six weeks of practice blocked off. I had plane tickets. I mean, I was ready.

0:12:33 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): My surgery was scheduled for March of 2020. And if you remember what happened in March of 2020.

0:12:39 - (Adam Payne): I do. Yeah. Everything shut down. Yeah.

0:12:42 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Including my surgery. That is literally when my wife stepped in. So, you know me being the typical male, I whined and moaned and cried about how much my elbow hurt every day at home. So she finally started force feeding two supplements down my throat six weeks later, pain free. What? And I'm free. In fact, just as a test, I even started lifting Weights a little bit. No problem at all, you know, so that literally shocked me to the core because.

0:13:11 - (Adam Payne): Did you. I'm curious, doc, did you reimage the area to see what had changed?

0:13:16 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): I have not.

0:13:16 - (Adam Payne): No, you have not.

0:13:17 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Okay. Not interested. Not interested.

0:13:20 - (Adam Payne): Okay. Not interested.

0:13:21 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): I mean academically I am, but personally I don't want to know, you know. Okay, but.

0:13:26 - (Adam Payne): But the. But you felt 100% better or a thousand percent better?

0:13:30 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Yeah. Yeah. And when. When I tell you that shocked me, that's an understatement because I have probably repaired at least over a hundred biceps tendons in my career, you know? I know. I thought I knew that very well. According to my education and my experience, it's a. It's a problem that is only treated with surgery because we need blood supply for things to heal. And that tendon does not get. I thought.

0:13:54 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Does not get enough blood supply to.

0:13:56 - (Adam Payne): Sure. Yeah. It relies on the inner. The. That fluid that kind of sits in the interstitial space for like.

0:14:04 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Yeah. Just having little arteries and veins too, you know?

0:14:07 - (Adam Payne): Yeah.

0:14:07 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): So. And that's the same thing as with a lot of other body parts. Same thing with rotator cuff tears, meniscus tears, ACL tears. All of these things have been presumed to be non healable and required surgery. So that was what opened me up.

0:14:24 - (Adam Payne): So you're kind of hinting at what you found that work, which is a combination of a powerful natural anti inflammatory and then providing the building blocks for the tendon, which is the. Which is collagen. Right. So tell us a little bit about how you even found out about that. And you said that was through your wife. But what, really, what's. What set the. You weren't expecting there to be huge results? Were you just kind of taking the medicine so your wife would shut up?

0:15:07 - (Adam Payne): Or was this. Were you hoping that something would happen here?

0:15:11 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Well, I certainly wouldn't word it that way. I get where you're going with this. In no way, shape or form was this placebo thing.

0:15:20 - (Adam Payne): Right.

0:15:20 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): I was thinking, when are the quarantines going to end so I can get my surgery rescheduled? You know, literally.

0:15:27 - (Adam Payne): Right. Because you're like, man, I need to get this thing fixed.

0:15:30 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Well, I mean, I'm left handed and it got to the point where I literally couldn't pinch pick up a pen off a tabletop without paying. Like, wow. I was getting. It was interrupting my sleep and everything, so.

0:15:42 - (Adam Payne): I understand that.

0:15:43 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Shocking. It was shocking to me, you know, I mean, I took it every day. I mean, I was home happy Wife, happy life. So, you know, and I knew this stuff was healthy. You know, I had a general idea of what they do, but I never, you know, I certainly had never looked into it. Sure. And tell you that your normal MD medical school doesn't teach you anything about any of this stuff.

0:16:02 - (Adam Payne): I mean, I'd love to, absolutely. Yeah. So your wife got into it and it worked. How long, I'm curious how long you started. Maybe March, April of 2020.

0:16:18 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Yeah, March, right. Mid March. Yeah.

0:16:21 - (Adam Payne): And how long did it take for you to kind of take a step back and go, wait a minute, it.

0:16:27 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Was right on six weeks later. So by six weeks, late April, I was like, holy crap, I think this is healed.

0:16:34 - (Adam Payne): Wow.

0:16:35 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Yeah. Now I was taking collagen twice a day, turmeric once a day. At the time it was turmeric. Nowadays we can go right to curcumin. But yeah, I mean that was amazing to me and that's when I started paying it forward to my patients.

0:16:49 - (Adam Payne): Well, that's, that's quite a, an introduction into the philosophy and the approach of your practice today, Doc. So let's, let's get into some of your clinical experiences. So tell us about some of these patients where, you know, the conventional route of medicine that you were using wasn't working.

0:17:12 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Well, you know, within the sports orthopedics realm is extremely repetitive. So I was seeing, you know, the average person that saw me typically had either a knee injury, acute injury or just chronic pain. Yeah, the most common things I treated would be meniscus tears in the knee, ligament tears like acl, MCL injuries, things like that. A lot of multi ligament injuries, like three or four, I used to call them all CL tears, you know, where all the, all the ligaments are torn from a knee dislocation.

0:17:44 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): A lot of rotator cuff tears, other things that can go wrong in shoulders.

0:17:48 - (Adam Payne): And those are the rotator cuff from what I've understood, having talked to my wife's a PA and she's done so many different rotations and different, different specialties, but I always get the impression from her that the rotator cuff is like really difficult to repair just with conventional medicine.

0:18:11 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Well, you're talking non surgically or surgically.

0:18:14 - (Adam Payne): Even surgically it can be, can be really.

0:18:16 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Well, it's still just a video game. Be honest with you, that that's been revolutionized. I mean we're getting a little off topic, but yeah, the arthroscopic equipment, you know, the thing, the tools we have to use nowadays compared to when I was younger and I When I began training, it's night and day. So what you sure complex multi hour case 15 years ago is a 10 to 15 minute thing now.

0:18:44 - (Adam Payne): So with, with the current tools that are available.

0:18:46 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): We've gone a long way with the tools.

0:18:48 - (Adam Payne): Yeah, but still, even faced with the, with the modernization of tools, you found that there were some patients that your conventional approach just wasn't enough.

0:18:57 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Well, I mean, no two tears are the same. So when you start talking about massive rotator cuff tears, where the whole thing is completely torn and pulled back.

0:19:06 - (Adam Payne): Yeah.

0:19:06 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): And if it stays there for a long time, it literally will heal in place there or scar in place. When you get to that point, a lot of times you can't even do a direct repair. That used to be a bigger problem, but now we have a solution for that surgically now too, where we can actually bridge that defect with a patch of dermis, believe it or not. What? Oh, yeah, yeah.

0:19:27 - (Adam Payne): So help us understand, what do you mean by a patch of dermis?

0:19:31 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Well, literally. Dermis.

0:19:33 - (Adam Payne): Yeah. Skin.

0:19:34 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Yeah, yeah. Below the skin, the thick skin. And you just. It comes in a little triangle or not triangle, a square or rectangular patch. And you know, first you get in there with a scope, you clean up the whole area, prepare it for what you're going to do, and then you take that dermis patch at one end, you sew it farther in to where so it's attached to the retracted rotator cuff, and then you attach the other end all the way to the side directly to the humerus bone.

0:20:02 - (Adam Payne): Oh, wow. So essentially you're pulling that whole structure out.

0:20:06 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Well, that's. Ideally you'd love to do that, but experience these chronic ones, you can't pull them back because they're literally scarred in and healed all the way.

0:20:16 - (Adam Payne): Oh, wow.

0:20:18 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): So what we do is what seems to work. Now the name for this is called a superior capsular reconstruction, which is. Doesn't sound anything like a shoulder rotator cuff, but what it really is is it gets back to what's the function of the rotator cuff. The main function of that is to depress the head of the humerus. So when you raise your arm up, the rotator cuff is a nice soft cushion, but thick and strong cushion for the ball of the humerus.

0:20:48 - (Adam Payne): Sure.

0:20:49 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): When that's torn now the humerus rises up. When you lift your arm up, at some point it's going to start rubbing the underneath of this bone right here. Oh, the, the. When I was training, the only answer to that was to get your shoulder replaced. Right. Which doesn't do well functionally.

0:21:05 - (Adam Payne): Right.

0:21:06 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): So this, this new dermis patch thing was revolutionary to me anyway, because now when you securely attach this patch to the rotator cuff that's retracted as well as the bone, it keeps the head down and it gives you that cushion back. Now, it comes at a cost of strength, so you're not going to be.

0:21:29 - (Adam Payne): You know, lifting bench, lifting a bunch of stuff. Right.

0:21:31 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): But it, but it treats the pain, which is, at that point, that's all people care about.

0:21:36 - (Adam Payne): Right. They want to be able to have freedom of movement and not experience deep pain at the same time.

0:21:41 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): They'd like to sleep, too.

0:21:43 - (Adam Payne): Yeah. Well, so. But bridging this gap, still there. There are. Some of the approaches weren't enough. And, and that. What were the. What were these moments with these patients where conventional medicine wasn't working? And how did you. What was that shift to functional medicine? How did it look like in your life and in your practice?

0:22:06 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Well, I mentioned two things woke me up. That leads to the second thing. So just to back up, after that, six weeks of turmeric and collagen cured me. That, that's, that's when I started getting interested, you know.

0:22:21 - (Adam Payne): Sure.

0:22:21 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): That's when I recognized that, okay, I didn't learn everything in medical school. In fact, I may have missed some really important stuff. And of course, back to my wife, she was championing this the whole time. She's like, I told you so, you know, And I heard that all the time. Now I'm listening to her, you know. So at that point, I did a quick little research and realized, oh, oh, wow, I've got time off. I mean, my practice during the, during that quarantine period, you know, I have an elective practice and in sports injuries. Right, sure.

0:22:50 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): So other than being on every once in a while trauma call, I was at home for like three, four months, bored.

0:22:55 - (Adam Payne): Right.

0:22:55 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): So I took advantage of that time, and we are lucky enough to have a naturopathic school right here in Edmond, Oklahoma. So I started taking some. I started taking it. You know, at the time, I didn't really know where it was going. I just wanted to learn, you know, and they had a nice structured curriculum, you know, what's the name?

0:23:17 - (Adam Payne): I'm actually, I'm not familiar with the naturopathic school. What's it called?

0:23:20 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Energetic Wellness School of Naturopathy. Yeah.

0:23:24 - (Adam Payne): Wow.

0:23:24 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Right here in Edmond. And, you know, luckily, because I had already been through medical school, I would, you know, Dr. Menzel, you know, didn't make me take all of the basic classes So I was actually able to get there pretty quickly. So within a couple years I'd finished that degree. But I mean, you know, it was wonderful learning about the specifics about vitamins, which I can't believe isn't taught in medical school, you know.

0:23:50 - (Adam Payne): Right.

0:23:51 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): As well as alternatives to all these different diseases. Now at that time, again, I wasn't treating these kinds of things. Right. I was still doing my sports thing. The difference between the military and civilian practice is profound because in the military I had endless supplies of young athletic, mostly males. You know, in fact, we would go years at a time before we saw anybody with a BMI over 30. You know, I mean, so these are all athletes.

0:24:22 - (Adam Payne): Yeah. To serve, they had to maintain different kinds of athletic standards. Right, so absolutely.

0:24:28 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): So obviously that changed in the civilian world. So when I got to Oklahoma, now I'm dealing with people with chronic diseases and all that. So that's the other reason why I was interested in the naturopathy training. I wanted to come up with a way to try and maximize the chances of getting things to heal after my surgeries, you know, So I, I still wasn't quite at the point where. Well, I take that back when I told you I started paying it forward to my patients that that's when this, this little six week challenge that they came up with, you know.

0:25:01 - (Adam Payne): Okay, so. So tell us about that.

0:25:03 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Yeah, so basically I just, I would tell patients my experience exactly what happened to me and I would offer them the opportunity to take the same. Take the same thing. Right. These are all people that had a physical exam, a history, and usually MRI findings confirming something was torn, that just like my biceps tendon was not supposed to heal without surgery. The majority of these were cartilage tears in the knee, meniscus tears. I probably had about six or seven rotator cuff tears, two ACL tears.

0:25:35 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Years. And several people, which is chronic arthritis pain.

0:25:39 - (Adam Payne): Wow.

0:25:40 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): And these are people that were looking at any alternative possible to avoid a replacement.

0:25:45 - (Adam Payne): Right, sure.

0:25:46 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): So out of the. We ended up with 31 patients that accepted that challenge. Now this was over about a two to two and a half year period. You can imagine that not many people were interested in delaying six weeks, you know, so.

0:26:00 - (Adam Payne): Well, so, I mean, this was still during. Was this during the COVID season we're talking about?

0:26:05 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): It started during that, but it. I guess it depends on what you mean by Covid season.

0:26:09 - (Adam Payne): Right. Well, I mean, when everything was shut down, a lot of people had. They couldn't get elective surgeries because there was no place to do them for. Yeah, that was a good chunk of time.

0:26:18 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): It started right at the tail end of that period and extended through about maybe mid to late 2022. Well, no, the challenge kept going to 2020, 24 actually.

0:26:27 - (Adam Payne): But wow.

0:26:29 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Like I said, most people that have like an acute injury, they're not interested in any delays. Like I just, just fix it. I need to get back to work, you know, so. So it took a bit to get to accumulate the 31 people, you know, but long story short, I mean, they did the same thing I did. They took collagen twice a day, they took turmeric once a day. The naturopathy kind of started playing a role because in 2020 time frame it was only those two supplements and I did not talk to them about anything else.

0:27:04 - (Adam Payne): Well, those are the two that you had your own experience with. Exactly.

0:27:08 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Same thing for me by 2023. Now I start paying attention to everything else. Right. And that's because naturopathy thing. So.

0:27:17 - (Adam Payne): Sure.

0:27:17 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): That's when I started. I wanted to keep it easy. You know, in the military we have an acronym KISS kiss. Keep it simple stupid. Yep. Plus I was seeing a lot of folks that ne couldn't afford to buy a bunch of different supplements and everything. So I stuck with the same two supplements. But I came up with just some simple, simple lifestyle changes and simple dietary changes they can make that are basically, you know, not expensive if not completely free.

0:27:47 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): And they can just do it.

0:27:50 - (Adam Payne): So did you give a name to this six week challenge that you were challenging people with?

0:27:54 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Yeah, I wish I did. No, no, just, you know, hey, hey, try what I did, you know.

0:27:59 - (Adam Payne): Sure.

0:28:00 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): But out of those.

0:28:01 - (Adam Payne): So how would you introduce it? You'd say, hey, you know, I know you. We were talking about surgery and all these other options. What would you say to them to challenge them to, to try this as a, as an option before they went down that road?

0:28:14 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Well, that was easy for me because I've always kind of, when I, whenever I meet anybody that, you know, with an injury or a chronic problem, the first thing I will do is after asking them what's been tried already is suggest, well, here's the, you know, here's the, here's the non operative options you have. Then I would go into the surgical options after that.

0:28:35 - (Adam Payne): Yeah.

0:28:35 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): So for me, it was just the same as what I always did. But then I would add my experience to it.

0:28:40 - (Adam Payne): Sure. It was just like, okay, here's here are your options kind of deal. Well, I think that really opens the pallet for us to bring to a close this first part of our interview. And we're gonna. We'll go more deep into your curcumin and collagen success story when we come back next week here in Ultra Life Today.

0:29:05 - (Dr. Douglas Rowles): Sure sa.