The Berman Method
The Berman Method
Episode #167: How Many Months Do You Have Left To Live?
Balancing the chaos of life with work and family isn't easy, as we know all too well with two kids and a third on the way - not to mention our spirited daughter, Vera, giving us a run for our money. In our latest episode of the Berman Method Podcast, we open up about these personal challenges and the lessons they're teaching us. We also tackle some big topics in healthcare, challenging the status quo and questioning the roles of insurance companies and pharmaceutical interests. Ever thought about how the lack of nutritional education in medical schools affects your care? We have, and we're here to support you in making informed decisions that enhance your quality of life.
Inspired by Damon John's moving keynote speech, we reflect on the fleeting nature of time and the importance of prioritizing relationships that lift us up. From maintaining physical activity to surrounding yourself with a supportive community, we explore tangible steps to improve longevity and quality of life. We also introduce you to the Berman Method itself, sharing insights from our physical therapy and wellness services. Connect with us online, download our free reports, and join us as we share stories and practical advice to inspire your journey toward better health and wellness.
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This is the Berman Method podcast, featuring Dr Jake Berman and physician assistant Jenny Berman. We are here to treat problems and not symptoms. Disclaimer this podcast is for entertainment purposes only and not to treat anyone or to give medical advice. If you are interested in any information that we are giving and would like to use this for yourself, we recommend that you contact your primary care physician or reach out to us and ask us questions about yourself specifically. Enjoy.
Speaker 2:And we are back, baby, with the Berman Method Podcast. Dr Jake Berman here with my beautiful co-host, jenny Berman, physician assistant. Good morning, good afternoon. We are changing it up today. We are recording on a Sunday, which this has never happened ever in the history of podcasting with us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, probably not. Usually, if it's on on Monday, it's a different day of the week.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so life is happening right now. Things are absolutely chaotic, at work at least, so both Jenny and my schedules are absolutely nuts right now. All in good things, it's all good stuff right now, but anyways, we have to do this on Sunday, so hopefully we can keep the energy going. We're kind of I'm kind of a little bit holding back, just a little bit, because we got Vera sleeping in the room right next to us.
Speaker 2:Yes, we don't want to wake the crazy Vera. Oh my goodness, this past week has been a major, major test for Jenny.
Speaker 1:I think she senses change in the house, maybe baby coming, or maybe this is just Vera. She is very strong willed and is just showing every sense of that this week.
Speaker 2:So we're out on the boat yesterday and it was the worst that Vera has ever been in her whole entire life. I mean non stop whining crying, screaming.
Speaker 1:Crying, screaming, not not whining.
Speaker 2:Crying and screaming and it's not real. It's fake the whole time. It was fake like she knows exactly what she's doing.
Speaker 1:So I thought for sure that either jenny or vera was not going to live to see today we're just, you know, I would think that me and the other tourists that's in the house would be the ones to battle a little bit more.
Speaker 2:But well, you guys do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I guess Stella and I can battle.
Speaker 2:You and Stella battle royale. It's just completely different.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, vera's just completely different. Yeah yeah, vera's tough man, and the thing that was the worst about yesterday is usually she is her happiest self if we are outside. So the fact that she was acting the way she was on the boat has never happened and it was just brutal. She was very, very tired. We transitioned her to a new bed this week Friday night. We had a very late night so she didn't get enough sleep Friday night. Yeah, it was tough, but here we are.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you both survived Sunday. She's sleeping like a little angel right through these walls, right here. She's so precious she is. Yeah, so that little dimple is sleeping like a little angel right through these walls, right here. She's so precious she is yeah, so that little dimple is really something and the countdown is on for baby berman, number three any day or week now part of the reason we're podcasting on sundays, yeah, so yeah, because that's making life busier also yep all the preparation for that so things are fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah, here we are. Yep, here we are. Topic for today is I wanted to talk about months, so let's take a step back, real quick, high level. The whole purpose of this podcast is to help you make better decisions about your own health care. We we do not believe, jenny and I do not believe that the insurance companies, big pharmaceutical companies, western Medicine we do not believe they have your best interests in mind. And here's the sheer facts of us based medical schools don't even have one single class required on nutrition. 80 of us medical schools curriculum revolves around pharmacology. Right, and we already this is we've we're almost 200, 200 episodes into this where there's not a single pharmaceutical that doesn't have at least one side effect. So we're talking about client retention, not curation, not trying to help you get healthier. They are profiting off Americans staying sick. We're just trying to help you make better decisions about your health care, regardless if that leads to you directly doing business with us or not. That's not the purpose of this.
Speaker 2:The purpose of this is to help you question whether or not you should be listening who you're listening to. If you don't want to have a knee replacement, maybe you should question advice you're getting from an orthopedic surgeon because they specialize in knee replacements. They do not specialize in helping you avoid knee replacements. So one of the most common things they'll tell you is wait as long as you possibly can to get a knee replacement. And that piggybacks into what we wanted to talk about today is wait as long as you possibly can to get a knee replacement.
Speaker 2:That means that you're suffering. You're now suffering. Your quality of life is suffering because you're waiting as long as you possibly can, because that's what the orthopedic surgeon told you to do. So I can't finish golfing anymore. I can't finish a round of golf. I used to walk 18 holes four times a week. Now I can't even ride in a golf cart one time a week. I can't play tennis. I can't play pickleball. I can't get down on the ground and play with my grandkids because the doctor the orthopedic surgeon told me to wait as long as possible. But it's not that bad yet. I'm still living.
Speaker 1:Right. So it's still impeding your quality of life, but if you do it now, then you might have to do it again, so wait.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's the whole scary part, that they're putting the fear of you in that. So on one hand, they're telling you to not get it in your place, but on the other hand they're saying screw your quality of life and just live with it.
Speaker 1:Right, because they're also not telling you an alternative option to okay, you're in pain and this is your knee is, quote unquote bone on bone, which we already all know, if you've listened to this podcast before, that that bone on bone is not necessarily causing your pain. However, you're in pain, they're telling you that you're bone on bone, so you need a knee replacement, but yet then they're telling you to wait as long as you can and not giving you an alternative option as to how your knee can actually feel better. And no, the alternative option is not injections.
Speaker 2:Yes. So where we're going with this is. I want to tell a real quick 90 second or less. Hopefully I can hold myself to that story about this.
Speaker 2:This guy I just met a few weeks ago. He's one of our brand new customers. He just had a total hip replacement seven and a half weeks ago. As of today, it was seven and a half weeks ago. It was an anterior approach. If anybody's contemplating having a hip replacement, please have an anterior approach. Posterior approach is archaic compared to anterior approach. So if your surgeon doesn't do anterior approach, find somebody else, because it is night and day the recovery time. But anyways, this guy had an anterior approach hip replacement and he calls me up because his PT from up north found me and knows that this guy's primary goal is to get back into golf and thought that he should come see me after he goes to the cookie cutters. Are us to get him back into golf shape? So, long story short, he calls me and we end up meeting. The first 30 minute session is on me, free session, just to make sure I can help you. And one of the first things that he says just knocked my socks off almost, because I never heard it said this way.
Speaker 1:You don't even wear socks. Side note, if you know Jake Berman, he doesn't wear socks, so that confused a lot of people when you said it. I wasn't the only one that just thought that I don't wear socks because I don't wear shoes. So I don't know what it knocked off, but it wasn't your. Hopefully it didn't knock anything else home okay, so it blew your mind.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because one of the first things he says to me he goes listen, I'm retiring in february, which was is four months from now at the time of this recording. I'm retiring in February and I've only got 240 more quality months left to play quality golf. I want to do it the right way. And I said, excuse me. He goes yeah, I look at the rest of my life in months. I've got 240 months left that I can really have a realistic expectation of a high quality of life golfing, because 240 months from now I'll be 80 and I just don't think that I'll live much past 80 or I just don't think that I'll have a high level of golf ability at 80. So everything I'm doing today is all geared towards knowing that I've only got 240 months left.
Speaker 2:So I do not want to waste a single month not golfing to the best of my ability. And I'm going. Holy cow, my mind is blown. My socks are not knocked off, my mind is blown because I never heard it like that. When you hear it like that, it's almost morbid, but it's explicit, it's reality, it's going. It makes so much sense to me because how long do people live in pain?
Speaker 1:Right, just expecting that it's going to go away, right, right. And so you know, if you're living in pain for the next month or you're waiting X amount of months to be able to get into the right physical therapist, or to be able to afford the right physical therapist, or to be able to make time to do something, then you, now you have less quality months to be able to live because you're wasting your own time.
Speaker 2:Exactly. It is nuts to think about it, and I think about it all the time because I work with primarily people over the age of 60 and I cannot help but think about it. How many more years do you realistically have once you're 60? I just Googled it before we started recording this and the average life expectancy in America for males is 75 and for females is 80, based off of which resource you look at. So if you're 60, you've got 15 years left on average. If you're 70, you've got five years left. If you're 70 years old on average, you're not going to make it much more than five years. And if you're hobbling around on a bad knee, a bad hip, plantar fasciitis, a bad shoulder, bad neck, you can't golf, you're not doing the things that you really want to be doing and you're just kind of living versus L-I-V-I-N like, oh man, I can't believe. I just spaced out Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused. If you're not really enjoying your life, what's the point of it?
Speaker 1:Well, the other side of that is the less we continue to do, the more muscle wasting we have. The older we get quicker. So if you're staying active and have the ability to stay active and the ability to continue to activate your muscles and to lift things and to play golf, not only are we enjoying our life more, which is going to impact our overall longevity but we're also continuing to activate muscles and holding onto musculature, which is going to increase longevity too. So now, as we allow pain to come in, not only is it changing our quality as far as the happiness we have to experience, but we're also using our muscles less, which allows our muscles to waste faster, which actually decreases the amount of years that we will live.
Speaker 2:It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like it is nuts, Absolutely nuts.
Speaker 1:And I love that you're bringing this up because, you know, I personally have never thought about it in my own life, you know. Certainly I think about with my parents getting older every year, like how many years do we have left to live with them? I think of it in that sense, and I also think of it in the sense of our kids. Is Stella's four, which sounds so young, but we really only have 14 summers left to spend with her before she leaves us for college.
Speaker 1:14 summers isn't that many summers? I mean, it's very few actually. And so when I think about it in that sense, I'm like man. We really need to be taking every moment and cherishing every moment, all these summer trips that we want to do, and actually cherishing them, because we only have 14 more years to be able to do these summer trips before she's like mom and dad, I'm going on a cruise with my friends, I'm not hanging out with you, right? So if we think about it in the sense of our, our parents and our patients, and we think about it in the sense of the time we have left to spend with our children at home, why aren't we counting our own years as months and how many quality months we have left, and what are we wasting our time on?
Speaker 2:I love it, absolutely love it. And when you say it in the sense of summers, you remember Damon John being the keynote speaker at one of our masterminds a few years ago. Damon John is he's on Shark Tank and the founder of FUBU, and he was one of the keynote speakers at one of our mastermind meetings a few years ago and he said this in his keynote and I'll never forget it because it was so true and so relevant to me personally at the time. He says a very similar thing he goes.
Speaker 2:I look at my life as how many summers do I have left? Because I believe he lives up in the Northeast, which means that summertime is the best time, because they go to the lake house and they spend the summer at his lake house having fun with friends and family, and he goes. If I've only got 18, I think his number at the time he said this at best I have 18 summers left to spend on this planet. I'm going to choose who I spend it with. So he was talking about eliminating at least one friend or family member every single year from his life, and it sounds explicit, it sounds ruthless, but he goes. Listen, if you're not bringing positivity into my world. If you're not helping my life be better, I'm not going to waste my energy on you because I've only got 18 summers left to spend on this planet.
Speaker 2:So, I'm going to spend it with people that I really want to spend it with. So we've got three different versions of it here. How many summers do you have left with your kids before they graduate and go off to college and move out of the house? How many summers do you have left on this planet to spend with family members? But then, if you get really detailed, how many months do you have left to live a high quality of?
Speaker 1:life, and what are the excuses that you're providing to reduce the quality of life you're living? Are you saying that you can't afford something, you don't have the time to do something? You're going to try something else first and then come back. But how many months are you wasting in that time that you're gonna quote unquote try something else or try it on your own, before you actually get the help the quality help that you need? You're wasting these limited amount of months that you have left to live.
Speaker 2:I love what you just said there. Try it on my own. If I had a dollar for every single time I heard somebody say you know what? You're too expensive, I think I know what to do. I'm going to go try this on my own because I think I got it. If I had a dollar for every time, I heard that we'd be retired right now. No joke.
Speaker 1:We still hear it Clients that do come to us and do make progress and then say I think I got it, I'm going to go do it on my own now, knowing darn well that the accountability is not going to be there for them to go figure it out on their own, or that they still have unanswered questions every single week when they come in for the visits with us, that we're answering and providing something new to them, but yet now they're going to go do it on their own. And that's where the regression comes in.
Speaker 2:It's where the regression comes in, but, more importantly, that's where time passes, it's where time flies by and it's something that we're all guilty of, where it's like how long have you lived with something, because it's not that big of a problem. However, it's actually to me this past summer where I had a left hip issue that I barely I don't even know if I told you about it, but it was changing the way that I was exercising in the barn and I kind of just slack ass doing my homework and then, ultimately, it went away but, I, had it for at least three months.
Speaker 2:Three months where I was not giving it my all in the gym because I couldn't, versus what I should have done was I should have put myself on my own schedule and had one of my team members assess me and give me homework, then hold me accountable to doing the homework, and I could have easily been out of this problem in three weeks max, not three months.
Speaker 1:Right, right, I was going to say we do it ourselves. We are 100%, not perfect. So even ourselves and our own family, we make the same excuse as everybody else, but the difference is being able to recognize it and make a plan to make a change.
Speaker 2:Exactly so. I'm going to do something here that I don't normally do.
Speaker 1:Oh boy.
Speaker 2:Go get a hip replacement, go get a knee replacement. Just get it done and then come see me and I'll get your life back, get your quality of life as high as possible as fast as possible. Now, that is assuming that you've already tried coming to see me to avoid the hip replacement or knee replacement, because that's really important. There are hundreds of people in this town every single week that are getting hip replacements and knee replacements, that do not need to get them. So this brings me back full circle to our mission statement. The mission statement that we came up with years ago in our business is to help as many people as possible avoid needless surgeries while maintaining a high quality life. It's that simple Avoid surgery, avoid pain pills while maintaining a high quality life. If you can't maintain a high quality life, then avoiding the surgery is not important anymore. Right? Just get it done. Right, Because how many months have you been avoiding it and your quality of life's get going downhill.
Speaker 1:Right, right, you're exactly right. Same thing with. I mean, we could just go on and on about this. It applies to so many different diagnoses and qualities. Same thing with our patients with their gut health or their allergies, then going to the allergist every single week and getting allergy shots, as opposed to investigating what is the actual problem here? How much time are you wasting going and getting allergy shots every way every week? How much money are you wasting? But, more importantly, how is it affecting your quality of life Because you won't go outside and spend time with your kids, or you won't go outside and do different events, or you won't go to different restaurants because you can't figure out what you're going to eat, rather than talking to a specialist that deals with all these things every single day, so you can have your quality of life back.
Speaker 2:Exactly so. The last thing that we're going to leave everybody with is be objective with yourself. Identify something that you're currently living with that is not as good as you want it to be, whether it's your gut health, your autoimmune issues, your eczema, your back pain, knee pain, shoulder pain. What are you currently living with? Because it's not bad enough to make it urgent, but it's not good enough to where you can objectively, realistically, honestly do exactly what you want to do. Did that make sense?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I like it. How many months do you have left?
Speaker 2:How many months do you have left? Do the math If you're 40 years old and you're expecting to live to 80, that's 40 more years. 40 times 12 is Are you asking me?
Speaker 1:No, I wouldn't ask you that.
Speaker 2:If you're 60 years old and you're planning on living to 70, how many more months is that? If you're 80 years old and you're planning on living to 100, how many more months is that? Because you have an idea. Everybody has their own idea. It's very rare that you don't have an idea of how long you think you're going to live. Whether you're right or wrong is not the point, but you have an idea based off of how long your parents lived, how healthy quote unquote healthy your lifestyle is. You have an idea of what you think you're going to make it to. Whether you're right or wrong is irrelevant. Do the math, see how many months you have left. Now, once you have that number whether it's 100, whether it's 1,000, whatever your number is subtract three from it.
Speaker 2:Because on average, people are living in pain for at least three months before something has to give.
Speaker 1:Right, right. What do you have left after that? Right, good, I like it All right.
Speaker 2:I think we survived. I don't hear her screaming right now.
Speaker 1:Not yet All right. I hope everybody has a great week. If you have any words of encouragement on how to get through the terrible twos before they're even two with a very strong willed child, my mom told me yesterday. She said you know what. You and I made it out with a lot of love, so I think you're going to be all right. Vera is a lot like me as a toddler, so I'm getting my payback is what she was saying in nice words. That was her nice way of saying that. So she told me that we'll make it. And there it is.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. Like subscribe. Share this with somebody that you know has an issue. I don't care if they're 30 years old, 50 years old, 80 years old. Everybody listening to this right now knows somebody that is living with something that they don't need to be living with and ask them hey, how many months do you have left to live? And they're going to look at you weird. Then say listen to this podcast.
Speaker 1:Ciao for now. Thank you for subscribing on your social media and podcast platforms to the Berman Method Dr Jake Berman with Berman Physical Therapy and Jenny Berman, Physician Assistant, with Berman Health and Wellness. You can find more information on our website wwwbermanptcom for physical therapy. Wwwbermanptcom forward slash wellness for the health and wellness. You can also find us on social media, Facebook, Instagram and on your podcast platform, so be sure to follow us, like us, subscribe to us and, if you would like any further information, definitely visit our website and reach out to us. You may also find our free reports on the websites as well, where you can download this free information for yourself. Have a great day.