The Berman Method
The Berman Method
Episode #180: Back to the basics of Treating Problems and not Symptoms
Parenting is a rewarding yet chaotic journey filled with unique challenges, joy, and love. In this heartfelt episode of the Berman Method, Dr. Jake Berman and Physician Assistant Jenny Berman delve into the nuances of raising three children while sharing personal stories and valuable health insights. Their candid discussions challenge traditional notions surrounding health and parenting, emphasizing that a full house means a full heart, not just hectic chaos.
Throughout the episode, listeners will discover how the Berman Method focuses on treating root problems rather than just alleviating symptoms. Dr. Berman articulates his philosophy with practical examples that explore the interconnectedness of bodily functions. The couple reflects on Jenny’s struggle with skin conditions in her teens, highlighting the significant impact of gut health on chronic issues often overlooked by conventional medicine. As they unravel the complexities behind chronic pain and health, listeners are invited to reconsider their approaches to wellness.
With light-hearted humor and relatable anecdotes, this episode doesn’t just share parenting lessons—it shines a light on health struggles that many face. Tune in to join an engaging conversation about love, health, and the profound connection between our bodies and the lives we lead. Don’t miss our candid insights and practical tips that could transform how you view your health.
Engage with us, share your thoughts, and join the conversation that is shaping a healthier tomorrow. Don’t forget to subscribe, share this episode, and leave us a review!
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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 rolling baby with the Berman Method podcast, with a baby on Jenny's lap.
Speaker 1:I was speechless. That made me speechless. Wow, my serenation got you so strongly that you had nothing to say, I was just watching you, right in your eyes.
Speaker 2:Wow, it was beautiful. Yeah, dr Jake Berman, here with my co-hostesses.
Speaker 1:Jenny Berman, physician assistant.
Speaker 2:Walker, ryan Bermanator.
Speaker 1:Little Walker here with us as well. Still quiet enough to hang out with us, hopefully.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we'll see how long he makes it. He seems pretty fidgety right now, three months old getting so big.
Speaker 1:I know, it has happened really fast, it seems.
Speaker 2:He's grown the fastest out of all three of them so far.
Speaker 1:I guess that may be true, but he's still like in the ninth percentile, so he really isn't that much bigger than the girls ever were. It just seems like he is. I don't know.
Speaker 2:No, he is Okay. Yeah, he definitely is.
Speaker 1:But it does feel like it's flying by, which is kind of sad, it's not sad.
Speaker 2:We want him to grow, I know.
Speaker 1:but sometimes you just want them little too, because they're so sweet and they don't talk back.
Speaker 2:They don't talk back. Holy cow, yeah, stella is giving you a run for your money right now.
Speaker 1:I would say both of them are very strong-willed. I think we've said that before.
Speaker 2:Vera is extremely strong-willed. I cannot. You guys, everybody listening, you have no idea how excited I am. I cannot wait for Vera to get a full vocabulary, because if she's even half of what Stella is, this is just going to be the best ever.
Speaker 1:Yeah, she might be brutal if she's half of Stella.
Speaker 2:Yeah, she's not going to be half. I think she's going to be double Stella.
Speaker 1:It's going to be fun regardless. It's always fun and I can't tell you how many times. When you were out of town for a few days and I had the three of them and I did a lot of stuff with the three of them, I went, I took them all to burn bootcamp. One morning we went to a park, we went to our friend's softball game. I took them out to celebration park, which is like a food truck park here in Naples. I took all three of them on a walk, where two were in a stroller and I was carrying Walker, and took them to the park.
Speaker 1:And I can't tell you how many times I heard you've got your hands full. I hear it so often You've got your hands full. And the first thing that pops in my head every time somebody says that besides yes, I'm aware, but the next thing is they're full of love, my hands are full of love. And that's my reply when people say that to me that I have my hands full. I have my hands full of love. Thank you, because, like it has to, why does it have such a negative connotation that I have my hands full with three toddlers, three babies?
Speaker 2:I don't know they say it a lot, though. Good luck, Good luck.
Speaker 1:We hear good luck all the time.
Speaker 2:Oh my, goodness, if I had a dollar for every time I heard good luck, we'd be able to buy a pack of diapers by now.
Speaker 1:I was going to say a boat. I mean, we hear it all the time Good luck, or you've got your hands full. They're full of love, people. We're loving it.
Speaker 2:It's almost like we didn't know what we were signing up for.
Speaker 1:Like we didn't know what caused this problem. I mean, it's not a problem. What caused this, this situation, situation, yeah.
Speaker 2:Being out man. We're now in zone defense, no longer man defense.
Speaker 1:And if anyone knew how hard we actually worked to be able to get to this position, then they would really regret saying good luck.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How many pregnancies for how many kids?
Speaker 1:Seven, total for three.
Speaker 2:Seven total pregnancies, three kids. So it wasn't easy.
Speaker 1:And it was like eight years.
Speaker 2:Eight years of trying, yeah, seven.
Speaker 1:Total pregnancies three human beings, three living children currently. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, Walker just smiled on that one. Oh, look at him smiling.
Speaker 1:You know that we tried so hard for you. All right. So anyways, speaking of fertility issues, I mean not that that's what we're going to talk about today, but it kind of leads to what we were talking about today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's great. I wanted to do a 30,000 foot level recap on the Berman method. We haven't talked about this specifically in a while. Treating problems, not symptoms that's what the Berman method ultimately is is treating problems and not symptoms. It's going left when everybody else is going right and really putting some thought into what in the world is going on here. You have knee pain. You've got bone on bone. Your x-ray says it's bone on bone or your meniscus is torn. Bone on bone your x-ray says it's bone on bone or your meniscus is torn. But why is it only the right side and not the left side? You walk on both legs. Why would one side wear out faster than the other? The knee is not the problem. It's the glute. It's your weak ass syndrome, so let's focus on that, not the knee. Same thing with you. Go ahead.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just I mean the amount of people in this world, and especially the United States, that have psoriasis and just go and take steroids and prescription creams and shampoos and medicines for psoriasis. What about looking at your gut health? 99% of the time your psoriasis is coming from your gut and food sensitivities, not the weather.
Speaker 2:I mean, look at you. What was yours? Your sub dermatitis.
Speaker 1:Sub-arachidermatitis.
Speaker 2:Sub-arachidermatitis. Say it again.
Speaker 1:Sub-arachidermatitis. Now you're going to make me struggle to say it.
Speaker 2:And you were diagnosed with this at what age 16. At 16 years old, you had clumps of hair falling out of your head. I can't even imagine how traumatic that was for a 16-year-old girl in high school, with clumps of hair falling out of your head.
Speaker 1:I couldn't even wear my hair in a ponytail because you could see the seborrheic dermatitis. It's essentially white, flaky, I mean itchy, itchy skin in the scalp. But yeah, it makes you lose your hair in clumps like huge areas, and so I couldn't wear my hair up because people could see it. It was so embarrassing.
Speaker 2:And they ultimately super long story short. They ultimately put you on prescription shampoo.
Speaker 1:And oral steroids, and oral steroids. I had to go to three different dermatologists to even get the oral steroids because they kept telling me I was too young to take them. But that's ultimately what everybody kept saying. I needed to quote, unquote fix this problem because I didn't know, 16 years old.
Speaker 2:Nobody knew back then. I mean, what year was that 16. That was 2006. So 2006,. You're 16 years old. This is way before functional medicine was cool.
Speaker 1:Right, or the knowledge about celiac disease and gluten sensitivity.
Speaker 2:food sensitivity yeah yeah, this is way before all that when we started dating. I'll never forget it. One of the first things that I was noticing was the hair balls on the rug. After you would blow dry your hair like literally a hairball, and I going, you had to get down there and scrape it up with your hands and you're like look at this hairball. I'm going, oh my goodness. And you had to use that prescription medicated shampoo for six years.
Speaker 1:A long time I would sleep with caps on my like. I would put oil on my hair and put a cap on my head just to keep things at bay. Yeah, it was years of doing that. Yeah, I had sunspots everywhere.
Speaker 2:On your skin.
Speaker 1:My skin, yeah, my arms. I looked like a leopard.
Speaker 2:Those little white spots, sunspots on your skin? Yeah, and fast forward to what was it? What year it 2015? 2015, you heal your gut, or?
Speaker 1:2016, probably yeah 2016.
Speaker 2:You heal your gut and, magically, your hair stops falling out right. Magically, sunspots go away yeah, you've not used medicated shampoo since 2016.
Speaker 1:Correct so almost 10 years.
Speaker 2:And your hair is doing just fine.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and even through all my pregnancies, I hardly even lose any hair through pregnancy either.
Speaker 2:Which is weird.
Speaker 1:It is yeah, or through postpartum, and that's something somebody commented on the other day to me is how? And that's something somebody commented on the other day to me is how silky my hair seems and how I haven't lost any hair postpartum. And they're like how do you do it? It is what you're fueling your body with. What you fuel your body with through pregnancy and postpartum, with the amount of stress your body is under delivering a baby and nursing and pumping and not sleeping enough. It depends how you feel your body to know how well you're going to recover from postpartum.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but yeah this has gone on a long story now to say skin issues psoriasis, eczema, seborrheic dermatitis, sunspots, the little red bumps on the backs of your arms. 98 plus percent of the time it's coming from your gut. If not, it's coming from medication.
Speaker 2:So you're saying that those 3,800 commercials between every single commercial break? That's talking about my moderate to severe plaque psoriasis. Take this magic pill, oh Tesla.
Speaker 1:But yeah, it has 86 side effects. By the way, have you ever listened to one of those commercials in Spanish? No, you should. So I was at the gym the other morning and one of the TVs was blaring for some reason at the gym and it was in Spanish. And a commercial for Otesla came on the TV in Spanish and it was blaring and they went to say all of the fine print at the end in Spanish. It's hilarious. You should listen to it. It's better in Spanish than it is in English. I was like oh wow, I have no idea what you're saying, but that don't sound good.
Speaker 2:Oh my goodness. So I was at a conference a week ago out in Vegas. I joined another mastermind, and this is specifically a YouTube mastermind to help, you know, with SEO and ranking and getting your videos viewed, because we're trying to do everything we possibly can to get our voices heard, to spread this message, because, you know, we're a minnow in an ocean right now trying to create a wave and we're just trying to spread this word. Anyways, when I was out there, I was talking with quite a few of the members out there and I was pleasantly surprised by how many of them were in our world, as not in our world, in our thought process where, yeah, health insurance is the worst. You have to pay cash if you want to do anything good.
Speaker 2:Yeah, medications are all, for the most part, horrible when you're talking about chronic disease and it's just one of those things where it's like, okay, people are getting smarter. If we go back to Jenny in 2006, nobody even knew what gluten sensitivity was, nobody knew what dairy sensitivity was, nobody knew that gut health was directly correlated to inflammation and knee pain, back pain, shoulder pain can's directly correlated to poor gut health and go figure, these cases are skyrocketing over the past 10 years, skyrocketing. If you look at the prevalence of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's from 1900 to 1980, it is a fraction of what it is from 2010 to 2025.
Speaker 1:Well, that's how we talked about just several weeks ago, about the study that came out showing by 2040, the numbers of dementia and Alzheimer's are going to be tripled from where they're at now, and they've already tripled from the last couple decades.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So one of the things that I foolishly prided myself on was how I could eat an entire plate of warm chocolate chip cookies. Whenever Jenny or Jenny's mom or Jenny's aunt oh my goodness, jenny's aunt, out in Kansas City. She makes the best chocolate chip cookies in the world the best, she literally will mail me a gallon size bag of them for my birthday, and the gallon bag does not make it 24 hours, but anyways, I used to pride myself foolishly on how many cookies I could eat without taking a breath, and I'll never forget Jenny saying OK, well, that's a good way to ensure you've got diabetes once you turn 60. And I'm going what the hell are you talking about? She goes. Well, you don't have it right now, but the damage that you're doing today is going to show up when you're 60. It's going to be there. You're almost guaranteed that you're going to be a diabetic by the time you're 60. Just by doing this once every couple of weeks, it was pretty frequent for me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, pretty frequently Maybe every Sunday Maybe If it wasn't weekly, it was every other week that I would just go hard in the paint on cookies and that that was a seed. You know, jenny planted a seed and it's growing into a tree and it's to the point now where it's like I don't even want to eat the whole entire plate of cookies anymore because it's not worth it. I see what's happening.
Speaker 2:I see so many patients in my PT clinic that their hands are shaking, these tremors that are occurring, and it's almost like you can see somebody who has undiagnosed Parkinson's and I'm not talking about an explicit tremor or freezing or anything like that. It's almost like they've got this look on their face where it's like oh wow, you have Parkinson's. You're functioning great right now. But you can see it, it's almost like a stoic not a stoic, like a stoned blank. I don't really know how to describe it, but I'm starting to see it and I'm going wow, you really need to cut out all the gluten and all of the carbs or you need to go on the offensive and attack right now, because this is going to snowball really quickly, really fast, in a bad way.
Speaker 1:Right, right, and alcohol is another big contributor, and that's something else that we work with all of our clients. I tell them I'm not going to take your alcohol away. For sure. That's not a lifestyle for many people to be totally sober and not have any alcohol, but we do need to reflect on what was alcohol intake like in your 20s, 30s and 40s and how is that impacting your cells at this stage, at the at 60s, 70s, your vitamin deficiencies associated the oxidative stress, which is an internal stressor that decreases our body's ability to what we call methylate, which is in essentially to reduce inflammation and actually absorb nutrients and vitamins to help protect ourselves. And so what we did years and years ago is impacting how our body is functioning now and we have to take all of that into consideration. And again, not to take the alcohol totally away, but making modifications and making sure we're supplementing appropriately to reduce internal inflammation from it is important.
Speaker 2:Very important and that's another thing that, jenny, you planted the seed. And here I am. I'm going to be 40 this year and a little fluffier than I was when I was turning 30. And got a little frustrated with the fluffiness and you kept saying, well, it's the drinking, it's your drinking that you're doing and I'm going what are you talking about?
Speaker 2:I drink one day a week and it's Saturday when we're on the boat, and you're like, yeah, but just because you only drink one day a week doesn't mean that the effects of that alcohol consumption last through at least Wednesday. So you're in this constant ebb and flow where you're spending Sunday, monday, tuesday, wednesday recovering from that oxidated stress from Saturday, and then you have a positive day Thursday, friday, but then you do it all over again Saturday. So you're not going to get the results you're looking for. And I'm going how could that possibly be Like? This is ridiculous. When I was back in my day, back in college, you know, I used to go hard in the paint. Now you're saying that one day a week is affecting my whole entire week. It's negatively affecting six days of rigorous exercise and five and a half days a week of really disciplined dieting. But it's the oxidated stress.
Speaker 1:Right, right, and it's the same thing when I have clients that are doing food elimination for gut healing and they're like, well, I only had gluten twice this week and my response is always okay. Say you have it on Monday. It takes 72 hours to rid that inflammation when you're actually sensitive to something and it's causing an inflammatory reaction. So by Thursday your body's feeling better and then you have another bite of gluten because it's been several days. So it's okay. You know it's been three days. I'm going to have another bite again Now. On Thursday we have another bite of gluten. It takes another 72 hours for that inflammation to come down and heal. Here we are a week later and your body's been at a constant state of inflammation, even though you've only had two bites of gluten or gluten over two days.
Speaker 1:It takes time for inflammation to come down. I always relate it to a sprained ankle. Right. When you sprain your ankle, if you put yourself in a boot and then, three days into being in a boot, take your boot off and walk on your ankle for a day, what happens? It swells right back up. We put ourself back in the boot. How many days does it take for that inflammation to come back down. It doesn't go away the next morning when you wake up. It's going to take several days, if not weeks, for that inflammation to come back down. The same thing's occurring in our gut.
Speaker 2:Speaking of sprained ankles blue light special. Whenever one of you listening sprains your ankle again. Please, for the love of God, do not put a boot on.
Speaker 1:Don't go on a boot. Do not go on a boot.
Speaker 2:Just get in my office immediately, as soon as you can, after the insult or the injury, and we'll do exactly what needs to happen and you will recover within days, instead of wearing the freaking boot. Then we have to fix the glute problem, because you're walking on an uneven surface and it never even addresses the ankle and it's just. It's a disaster. Please do not wear a boot if you sprain your ankle.
Speaker 2:Please do not wear that stretchy brace if you have plantar fasciitis, because you're not going to sleep and it's not going to do anything, because the problem isn't that you need to stretch your plantar fascia when you have plantar fasciitis. You actually need to strengthen the muscles around the plantar fascia. So don't wear the boot, don't wear the freaking stretchy thing for plantar fasciitis.
Speaker 1:Does your rant over?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's 20 minutes, so let's wrap up.
Speaker 1:So moral of all of this is we really still need to be targeting the problem and not just the symptom. You said with knee pain, it's not your knee, it's not the fact that your cartilage is just wearing out because you're old, it's because you have a weakness that's leading to more stress through the joint. Pressure issues the cholesterol. Cholesterol is inflammatory. It's not that you have bad genes and that everybody in your family had high cholesterol. It's not that everybody in your family has high blood pressure so you're doomed. It's an inflammatory process. Get out of that mill, get out of the streamline of Western medicine and figure out what is actually causing the problem of Western medicine and figure out what is actually causing the problem.
Speaker 2:Love it, absolutely love it. I think, one of the simplest high-level things that we can say. Obviously, this is not true 100% of the time, but let's go ahead and say 99% of the time, because I'm that confident in this statement. Chronic systemic pathology due to gut health Poor gut health, poor gut health.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very good.
Speaker 2:Insidious, non-traumatic musculoskeletal pain. Insidious. It just happened for no reason. My back just started hurting for no reason. My shoulder started for no reason. Non-traumatic there wasn't an accident. I didn't slip and fall. I wasn't in a car. Accident is due to weakness, not necessarily where the pain is so systemic chronic issues directly correlated to poor gut health. Non-traumatic, insidious musculoskeletal pain due to muscle weakness most of the time, not wherever the pain is. So if your knee hurts, usually it's the glute Good Like. Subscribe. Share this episode. Walker, thank you for just now waiting to get boisterous Say bye.
Speaker 1:Do you want to say?
Speaker 2:anything Walker.
Speaker 1:He thought about it, he opened his mouth. Oh yeah, there's something All right.
Speaker 2:Say he opened his mouth. Oh yeah, there's something.
Speaker 1:All right, Say bye-bye everybody. Ciao for now.
Speaker 2:Ciao for now.
Speaker 1: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.