One may assume that a socialized healthcare system, in which the government pays for the majority of medical expenses, would be more concerned to prevent illnesses in the first place. Nevertheless, Dr. Max Gulhane, a general practice registrar, describes the Australian healthcare system as one that operates more like the profit-driven healthcare system of the US.
The change in the population's diet and nutrition - one that promotes eating more grains, more bread, and more carbohydrate consumption - has led to an increase in the prevalence of metabolic illnesses. Yet despite the overwhelming support from credible studies that a low-carb diet helps with disease reversals, it still isn't widely accepted.
Listen to Dr. Max Gulhane as he talks about animal-based diets as a key to reversing chronic diseases, why doctors are trapped in a system that heavily favors disease management more than disease reversal, and how pharmaceutical industries are weaponizing science.
Quick Guide:
0:50 Introduction
07:17 The comparison of the Australian diet and the American diet
11:48 Availability of lambs
14:33 Nutritional reason to eat lambs or beef
16:15 The state of obesity and diabetes in Australia
21:34 What’s the community’s response toward the low-carb diet
26:35 A look at the US and Australia’s healthcare system
40:14 Glaxo has known Zantac is linked to causing cancer
45:50 Science being weaponized by pharmaceutical industries
48:25 Closing and contacts
Get to know our guest:
Dr. Max Gulhane is an Australian physician who practices family medicine. He advocates animal-based diets for metabolic health and regenerative farming. He also hosts a podcast called Regenerative Health.
“Perhaps as long as you have someone in between your relationship with the patient and the doctor, in our case, Medicare, which is a government-funded health care system, who pays us as GPs to administer care to our patients, until there is, I guess, more of a direct relationship with us in the patient, you're gonna get, I guess, outcomes or treatment outcomes that aren't necessarily directed at the patient's disease and reversing the patient's disease. So yeah, no, it's not very land down here from a disease reversal point of view by any means.” - Dr. Max Gulhane
Connect with him:
https://linktr.ee/maxgulhanemd
Email: regenerativehealth@proton.me
Episode snippets:
08:32 - 09:57 Th
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
One may assume that a socialized healthcare system, in which the government pays for the majority of medical expenses, would be more concerned to prevent illnesses in the first place. Nevertheless, Dr. Max Gulhane, a general practice registrar, describes the Australian healthcare system as one that operates more like the profit-driven healthcare system of the US.
The change in the population's diet and nutrition - one that promotes eating more grains, more bread, and more carbohydrate consumption - has led to an increase in the prevalence of metabolic illnesses. Yet despite the overwhelming support from credible studies that a low-carb diet helps with disease reversals, it still isn't widely accepted.
Listen to Dr. Max Gulhane as he talks about animal-based diets as a key to reversing chronic diseases, why doctors are trapped in a system that heavily favors disease management more than disease reversal, and how pharmaceutical industries are weaponizing science.
Quick Guide:
0:50 Introduction
07:17 The comparison of the Australian diet and the American diet
11:48 Availability of lambs
14:33 Nutritional reason to eat lambs or beef
16:15 The state of obesity and diabetes in Australia
21:34 What’s the community’s response toward the low-carb diet
26:35 A look at the US and Australia’s healthcare system
40:14 Glaxo has known Zantac is linked to causing cancer
45:50 Science being weaponized by pharmaceutical industries
48:25 Closing and contacts
Get to know our guest:
Dr. Max Gulhane is an Australian physician who practices family medicine. He advocates animal-based diets for metabolic health and regenerative farming. He also hosts a podcast called Regenerative Health.
“Perhaps as long as you have someone in between your relationship with the patient and the doctor, in our case, Medicare, which is a government-funded health care system, who pays us as GPs to administer care to our patients, until there is, I guess, more of a direct relationship with us in the patient, you're gonna get, I guess, outcomes or treatment outcomes that aren't necessarily directed at the patient's disease and reversing the patient's disease. So yeah, no, it's not very land down here from a disease reversal point of view by any means.” - Dr. Max Gulhane
Connect with him:
https://linktr.ee/maxgulhanemd
Email: regenerativehealth@proton.me
Episode snippets:
08:32 - 09:57 Th
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
S3E27 Dr. Max Gulhane
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, patients, lamb, australia, eating, guess, health, low carb, point, problem, doctor, diet, medical, beef, socialized medicine, carnivore, zantac, diabetes, paying, drug
Announcer 00:10
He was a morbidly obese surgeon destined for an operating table and an early death. Now he's a rebel MD who is Fabulously Fit and fighting to make America healthy again. This is Stay Off My Operating Table with Dr. Philip Ovadia.
Jack Heald 00:37
Well, we're back. Thanks for joining us here on the Stay Off My Operating Table podcast. Phil. Who do we have today? This is... I think this may be our first official Aussie, am I correct?
Dr. Philip Ovadia 00:50
We had Anthony Chafee. So, our Aussie. Yeah. Although Anthony isn't native. So maybe he only counts as half an Aussie living there. So, Dr. Max Gulhane is our first native true Aussie on the program. And really excited to talk with him this week. We connected on Twitter, and Dr. Gulhane is very much into metabolic health, and bringing that message down under and really leading a movement down there. So really excited to introduce him to our audience. And with that, Max, I'm going to turn it over to you, why don't you give a little bit of your background, what you do, and kind of how you got to where you are today?
Dr. Max Gulhane 01:49
Okay, yeah, thank you so much, Dr. Phil. And thank you for the opportunity to speak to your audience. Look, I'm a general practice registrar. So, family medicine, we call that general practice here in Australia. And my background is in a basket, I found low carb around 2017. And I was in medical school at the time. And I went through a period later Medical School, where I thought eating a plant-based diet was the right thing for me and the right thing for the environment, the right thing for my health, the most benevolent thing and something that I could actively do to kind of improve the state of the world. And that was in 2017. And with a good friend of mine, and it was a very, very instructive year because we ate a diet that was very rich in grains and legumes, we were eating tofu. And we had relatively low amount of animal foods in the diet. Just a little bit of lean, lean kangaroo meat, actually. And now our oils were overwhelmingly, olive oil and avocado. And this was a very, very important time because it showed me personally that this type of diet wasn't suitable for my physiology. Some of the symptoms I was getting were quite intense, bloating, irritable bowel type symptoms, just recurrent upper respiratory tract infections. And particularly one that was an aesthetically pleasing symptom was quite severe acne. And as you can imagine being mid to late 20s, in medical school, and still having acne, there wasn't something that I enjoyed having. So, what I did is, somehow, I stumbled upon the Low-carb Down Under YouTube page. And for those US listeners who aren't aware of it, it's an amazing repository of videos and interviews and presentations with metabolic lifestyle and doctors using a low-carb approach. And what I did is I cut out the grains, I cut out the fruit, I cut out the honey, I cut out all the bread and the legumes. And this acne started improving, and the gut symptoms started improving. And then towards the end of 2018, I simply was looking down at my lunch when I was in medical school in my final year, and I'd prepared some meat with salad. And I looked at it and I'm chewing down on the spinach leaves. And I think to myself, well, do I actually even need to be eating this? And at that time, I started listening into some, or I started watching some videos from Dr. Paul Saladino or Dr. Shawn Baker, who were doing a more carnivore approach. And at that point, I thought well no, let's try this without the salad. And yeah, I went carnivore for a pure strict carnivore for good probably 12 months. And yeah, I can distinctly remember the point that I went carnivore because I had what I think, reflecting now, back to a period of intense, probably about four to five weeks of intense, almost euphoria, which I believe it was when I first went into deep ketogenic metabolism for the first time. And the amount of energy I had was unbelievable. And just a very, very profound, subjective feeling of health. So that was, I guess, the point where I was fully converted to this idea of ketogenic and very low-carb nutrition. And at the same time, I met my current mentor, who I'm working with down here in Auburn, New South Wales, Dr. Rob Sabo. And he is one of Australia's leading lifestyle GPs for reversing type two diabetes with low-carb and carnivore. So, all that to say I just did a lot of self-learning and did a couple of years after medical school doing hospital work and working in the emergency department. But now I'm here down in Aubrey, and I've just started my family medicine training with Dr. Sabo, and I'm very much focused on low carb and carnivore for all kinds of uses and indications.
Jack Heald 06:21
So how did your classmates in medical school respond to your biohacking?
Dr. Max Gulhane 06:30
That's, yeah, there's a lot of there a lot of kids in the class, you could say, and I made a couple of comments here and there, but at that initial stage, because it was still quite an embryonic experiment on myself, I was more, I wasn't maybe pushing or talking a lot about my personal journey, but a couple were interested and but on the whole, and Dr. Phil can attest to this in terms of our medical colleagues, people do their own thing. And a lot of people have fixed beliefs and strong beliefs, especially about diet. So, it wasn't really too much of an opportunity for facilitators or, I guess, convert anyone.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 07:17
Give us an idea of kind of what the lay of the land looks like in Australia. What would you say kind of the background diet is? What were you eating before you kind of went to the plant-based? And then I kind of follow up like to hear about what the acceptance of kind of low-carb keto has been in Australia, that we can maybe contrast with what's going on here in the US.
Dr. Max Gulhane 07:48
Yes, so Australians have a history of eating meat. And lamb particularly is very popular, beef is very popular. We have very high-quality lamb and beef in Australia. So, historically, that was the food that everyone ate. If you ask our great grandparents or our grandparents, people, especially when I talk about seed oils and animal fats, people said, “oh, yeah, my great grandpa used to have bread with dripping essentially, animal fat on bread.” So, there's a deep history of eating plenty of animal foods. But more recently, there has been a push toward consuming grains. So, lots of Australians eat bread, eat a wheat-based cereal called Weetabix for breakfast. They eat Milo which is essentially like a chocolate malt powder that they mix into milk. So, there's a lot of carbohydrate consumption, muesli which is granola, muesli bars, granola bars, very, very common. And from a fat point of view, Australians and I'll ask patients in the emergency department or in the clinic, “what oil do you cook with?” And almost overwhelmingly, it's either olive oil or vegetable and canola oil. And no one is cooking with butter, no one's cooking with tallow or anything like that. So, and that's instructive to me because I wonder about the quality of the olive oil and everything that they're using, and almost universally in restaurants and fast-food takeaways, it's all seed oils, vegetable oil, and canola oil. So, we don't have a lot of seed oil, sorry, soy or corn oil, and less cottonseed oil, but it's mostly sunflower, canola, and blended combination, which we call vegetable oil here. So that's a bit of a background about what most people are kind of eating. So, everyone’s eating a little bit of meat but there is this basis of carbohydrates that we, that everyone is consuming, and in terms of your second part of your question, how can we contrast that, I'd also make the point that I don't think there's much highly refined food that people are eating on the daily basis. We don't have high fructose corn syrup. And I suspect, we might have less like glyphosate contamination of our food cause we don't have as much genetically modified wheat, and corn. So, perhaps those are the main differences.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 10:33
And then my understanding is that all of the beef there is 100% grass raised essentially, you don't really have the factory farming operations that we have here in the US.
Dr. Max Gulhane 10:48
I'm not sure the exact percentages, but we still have grain-fed or feedlot-finished cattle. So, my good friend and regenerative farmer down here, Jake Wolki was mentioning to me that there'll be some beef that's called grass-fed, but essentially, they're putting the beef in a feedlot, and they're feeding it pelletized grass. So, it's hardly the same thing as being on pasture. But the access to grass-fed meat in Australia is very good here. And the lamb is usually, even the commodity lamb that you get in the supermarket is grass-fed, and grass finished. So, there is really good access, which is a very big positive, and you can rely on the fact that it is a local beef. Even if you're going into a supermarket is going to be Australian beef, unlike America, where it's a bit of a lucky dip from what I've heard, you can source local, which is very good.
Jack Heald 11:48
I have a question about lamb versus beef. I love lamb but being able to buy lamb is... I live in the desert. And well, it ain't local. Let me put it that way. My understanding is that, for example, in Great Britain there in England, lamb is very popular. And it's because they just don't take up as much space as cows do. It seems like, my understanding is that cows are probably the best form of red meat protein we can get. Not so much nutritionally as just simply from an efficiency standpoint, if you've got the space to raise cattle, you can get a lot more beef out of a cow than lamb out of a sheep. All else being equal. Cows are better for ranchers than sheep. Australia is a big place. Why is it sheep instead of cows?
Dr. Max Gulhane 13:09
Yeah, that's an interesting question. I think that there is some difference in terms of the grazing habits of the two animals. So, the sheep, I understand, are grazing closer to the ground. I think for certain farmers, the unit economics works out better, depending on where they are, and the scope or the span of Australian pastoral land lends itself in certain areas to different animals. So, in the northern parts of Australia, and the far western parts of Australia, with a very, very marginal arid land, we run a lot of cattle called who are adapted to these rough conditions like Santa Gertrudis and Droughtmaster. And these types of I believe they're Indian-originally breeds that have been kind of adapted to this area, whereas the lamb that you'll usually find is, I believe that they're more improved pastures and less kind of rough, but there is a push lamb as well. So yeah, it's a bit of a mix. And I think often it's a bit of a farmer's preference and what the farmers had been doing. Historically, there was massive world trade in Australia. So, whether that's a bit of a legacy as well, it's also a possibility.
Jack Heald 14:33
So, I'll throw it to the two medical doctors here. Is there a compelling nutritional reason to eat one rather than the other?
Dr. Philip Ovadia 14:45
So, I'll say that lamb may actually have some advantages over beef. Lamb tends to be higher in omega 3, and less polyunsaturated fats, typically in lamb I mean, it's going to depend on what the lamb is eating. Lamb is a ruminant animal. So, a lot of the same advantages that beef has. I know lamb is often nicknamed land salmon because it's nearly as high in omega 3 as salmon is. So, there may be some advantages. I agree with you, I love eating lamb, it's just harder to source here in the US. Most of the lamb we get is actually from New Zealand. But depending on where you are in the country, you can sometimes find some local lamb. But lamb is certainly no worse and maybe better in some aspects than beef.
Dr. Max Gulhane 15:51
Yeah, and I was gonna say the same thing, from my understanding it has a more favorable fatty acid profile with those omega-3 fatty acids. It's, it's also a taste like some people really, really love the taste of lamb.
Jack Heald 16:05
It just tastes fantastic.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 16:15
I was just gonna ask while we're kind of getting the background as to what you're dealing with, what's the rate of metabolic disease and do you see obesity and diabetes, is it as rampant as it is here in the US?
Dr. Max Gulhane 16:33
Yeah, so it is very, very prevalent, I mean, off the top of my head, I'm not familiar with the figures, I think the weight of BMI over 40 so morbidly obese, or those type of BMI, our fraction is less, but the prevalence of people who are just a little bit, I guess, overweight, and if you put a tape measure around their waist, it would be elevated, very, very, very common. And even in younger people, in the early 30s or even late 20s, it's very, very common to see people just beginning that process of nudging these higher BMIs. So that's what you see, just typically, and I mean, in my two years in the emergency department, everyone that I would see, no matter what the problem was, almost invariably would have a raised BMI and have a raised waist circumference. And it makes you really wonder everyone's presenting for these issues that are unrelated to or seemingly unrelated to their metabolic disease. But it just speaks to the fact that there is probably some underlying association about susceptibility to probably infection, susceptibility to all these other conditions that require hospitalization if we are overweight or metabolically unwell.
Jack Heald 17:57
So first of all, you're singing all fire, our play sheet, we love that. And I'm gonna leave it there because I got another question I want to follow up with regarding metabolic health, and specifically the obvious element of poor metabolic health, which is obesity. I'm old enough to remember when it changed in the United States. I graduated from high school in 1978. And I've still got my high school yearbook, if I pull it out, and flip through the pages, you will not see any fat kids. Any. Now, it wasn't a gigantic high school. There were 800 in my high school, but we didn't have fat kids, period. There were a couple of chubbies and chubbies back then were fat. We thought they were fat because everybody was slender. And in the mid-80s, I mean, I remember this so clearly, when the usual suspects declared that margarine was good, butter was bad, eggs were bad. You know the drill. And that's when I saw the waistlines explode. And most of what Dr. Ovadia’s doing, what you're doing, Dr. Gulhane is pushing back against whatever the heck it was that happened back then. My question is with that as background, did it happen at the same time in Australia? Or did it take a while to roll through? And if so, when did it happen in Australia? Do you know?
Dr. Max Gulhane 19:48
Yeah, that's a great question. And I guess the McGovern report was the first event back in 1977 when they first started recommending the replacement of polyunsaturated oils in the place of animal fats. And then subsequently, dietary guidelines in the US kind of perpetuated that kind of trend. Australia, just like all the other countries, basically mirrored that. And our dietary guidelines, I believe, from the 1980s said something similar. And I think that since, I mean, since I've been around, ever since I can remember and that was even in the early 2000s and the late 90s, people weren't as overweight as they are now. And I really think that it's accumulation or a compounding of the advice that everyone got. And yeah, as you mentioned, the initial event may occur in the mid-80s. But what we're seeing now, and especially with the push towards a more plant-based diet, I think it's just exponentially up ticking. So yeah, I mean, what I think since I can remember, and again, that's mostly to the 2000s and the 2010s is that people are, kids are more overweight than ever. And it reflects the fact that we're eating such a high proportion of seed oils, carbohydrates, and other ultra-processed foods in the diet.
Jack Heald 21:34
What's the response of your community, the community that you serve as a physician, to this outlier type of approach to health? Here in the US, there's been, it feels like an organized opposition to eating in a way that's metabolically healthy. Anybody who sticks their head up above the parapet is gonna get shot at. Dr. Ovadia has got lots of folks shooting at him. And of course, the saying is if you're taking flak, you're over the target. Are you taking flak?
Dr. Max Gulhane 22:18
I'm not yet. So maybe I need to make a bit more noise. But I think there's really people, the average person that, I like to think, I think they're being gaslit, too. They're in a stage of I mustn't be doing, I mustn't be dieting hard enough. I mustn’t be exercising hard enough. There is this mentality that it's them that aren’t doing anything right.
Jack Heald
It’s their fault.
Dr. Max Gulhane
Yeah, it’s their fault. And that's the pervasive kind of climate that the narrative and the messaging is promoting, which is if you're overweight, and you're obese, it's actually your fault. And there's no realization or very poor realization that it's in fact that these patients, and our patients, aren't being served by the advice that they're being given. And overwhelmingly, I see patients who are overweight, and they're making a real effort and they're exercising and they're still putting weight on. And I have to say to them, “Look, it's not you that is doing the wrong thing. It's you haven't been served the MP told the correct advice.” And a lot of people were very relieved when they hear that, but I think it feeds into the bigger problem, which is that there's been a subsequent and successive messaging. First eggs are bad. Now saturated fats – bad. Meats - bad. Eat this, eat that and patients are just so confused. And rightly they're just at sea with this whole diet and exercise point of view. As for taking flak and putting your head above the parapet, you might know about Dr. Gary Fettke. If you don't, he’s an orthopedic surgeon from Tasmania, and about four or five years ago, he was essentially taken to our medical disciplinary board, having been complained by a bunch of dieticians, who were essentially protesting his use of a low carb diet for his patients. And I believe that the charge was inappropriately reversing his patient's diabetes, essentially. It's bizarre and hilarious.
Jack Heald 24:40
You just healed them in the approved fashion.
Dr. Max Gulhane 24:43
Yeah, exactly. So, he was seeing truckloads of patients with end-stage peripheral diabetic foot disease and subsequent lopping off toe, then more toes, then foot, then blown even above knee in his patients in his community, and essentially went down his own health journey, which, as I talked to Dr. Phil about is kind of the catalyst for doctors like us. We have to walk the path ourselves before we realize what was going on. And he walked a path in his own way, and then implemented it with his patients and sort of reversing diabetes. And what he did was basically offensive to the status quo. And particularly, the dietetics profession, and...
Jack Heald 25:30
I'm sorry to laugh but this is just such a familiar story.
Dr. Max Gulhane 25:34
Yeah, isn't it? I mean, there's always a silver lining. And then and what has emerged out of that issue was that Dr. Fettke got completely cleared, and he was served an apology. But his lovely wife, Belinda, has done a deep dive into the interests and into the powers that were basically pulling the strings behind that smear campaign. And she's done amazing work to reveal the influence of the Seventh Day Adventist Church through companies like Sanitarium and all these grain companies, and the food industry, and basically these dieticians were for the lack of a better word, they were the puppets of larger interests who were worth feeling threatened by such an effective use of a low carb diet.
Jack Heald 26:29
So, we need to get Belinda, Belinda, that was her name?
Dr. Max Gulhane 26:32
Belinda Fettke
Jack Heald 26:34
Belinda Fettke on the show.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 26:35
Both Gary and Belinda would be great guests, I'll start working on that. In. So, you guys have a largely socialized medical system. The government pays for the vast majority of medical care there. And you would think that that would give them the incentive to promote good health and keep people from getting sick. And yet my understanding is that's not what happens. I'd love to hear kind of thoughts on that. Because one of the sort of discussions that goes here in the US is our medical system, being a largely private medical system is driven by taking care of sick people doing more procedures, prescribing more medications, and it's kind of a profit-driven system. But you would think in a socialized system, where there's a limited pool of resources, you would be more focused on keeping people from getting sick in the first place.
Dr. Max Gulhane 27:47
Yeah you would think so, and unfortunately, it isn't the case and very much our general practice approach and what I'm learning, and what I've seen, is that it's very much focused on managing chronic disease, management or facilitating, and what this means for diabetes, hypertension, is just a series of increasing number of prescriptions, as you slowly watch the patient deteriorate and become sicker and sicker. So, you’d think that I guess the powers that be would be incentivized to, I guess, to have more outcome or reverse people's disease in terms of profit point of view, but I suspect that the influence from entities that make money from the, I guess, this disease, kind of complex, are overwhelmingly dictating or perhaps influencing the way medicine is practiced. And yeah, I think that it is good evidence, Phillip, of the fact that and unless you have, perhaps as long as you have someone in between your relationship with the patient and the doctor, in our case, Medicare, which is a government-funded health care system, who pays us as GPs to administer care to our patients. Until there is, I guess, more of a direct relationship with us in the patient, you're gonna get, I guess, outcomes or treatment outcomes that aren't necessarily directed at the patient's disease and reversing the patient's disease. So yeah, no, it's not very land down here from a disease reversal point of view by any means.
Jack Heald 29:44
I think it's fascinating that we've sat and watched this whole medical debacle unfold over the last, I guess, 15 years, 14, 15 years. Barack Obama was elected president and part of what drove people to vote for him was the promise of what eventually became Obamacare. The entire bill was written by the insurance agency. And now we're shocked by insurance companies. Now we're shocked to find that insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies are making massive amounts of money while the rest of us are getting sicker and sicker and sicker. And yet, to a certain extent, we turn, and we look at the health care practitioners, and we realize they're largely handcuffed by the system itself, even if they want to do the right thing. Doing the right thing literally means risking your livelihood. Now, having said that, it seems like it'd be even more direct in a socialized medicine environment. Can you comment on that? Are you taking crazy chances with your career by going down this path?
Dr. Max Gulhane 30:59
Yeah, so from a financial point of view, and from I guess, a practice point of view, so from a financial point of view, the low carb doctors that I have worked with in studying under Dr. Robert Sabo, particularly, he describes life was easier when he was doing the take and flick medicine
Jack Heald
Take and flick, I love that.
Dr. Max Gulhane
Take and flick, yeah, McDonald's medicine, where you’re seeing patients in seven minutes and then sending them on their way with a new script. And now after he went through his low-carb journey and is talking about lifestyle, he's got 20-minute appointments, because that's the time you need to discuss about why people are getting ill and how to really take the time to help them. So, it's not an easier path by any means. And so that's a main barrier. And if we think of the average doctor, not only do they have that, they can perhaps be working more for less money. They haven't yet even intellectually or from a knowledge point of view understood the benefits of the low carbohydrate approach. So, and metabolic medicine, so there, and I guess there's a trade-off at job satisfaction. I mean, of course, you're gonna enjoy your job a lot better when you're actually helping people. And you're really, really taking people off lots of medications. So, I guess we can think about those as the headwinds and they're universal and in medical systems is that the headwinds are the system that you're working on, and potentially even the financial remuneration of actually solving our patient's problems.
Jack Heald 32:37
Phil, you should comment on this as well. You guys are doing the same thing in two different systems.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 32:44
Yeah, exactly. We've talked about it. And we've talked with other physicians here on the program. I think Brian Lenzkes maybe was one of the ones that said it best. But yeah, I think doctors are trapped within these systems. And it seems to be very similar issues. No matter where in the world you are, the healthcare systems are, in a lot of ways, handcuffing doctors, and keeping us from doing what we shouldn't be doing, which is making people and keeping people healthy, instead of just managing their sickness. And it is very interesting to me too because a lot of people here in the US say that socialized medicine is the solution to our problems. And yet, we see in countries that have socialized medicine, they haven't solved the problems. And a lot of people that are in the socialized system, say, we wish we were in the US and practicing under that type of system. Maybe we do have, there is some more opportunity here in the US, I think, to kind of break out of the system, and set up a different model. And people like myself who have done concierge practices to direct primary care like Brian Lenzkes has maybe there's a little bit more opportunity to do that here. But on a systemic level, the problems appear to be largely the same.
Dr. Max Gulhane 34:21
Yup. To me, that makes sense, because I feel like the expectation of the average person is that health care's not gonna cost a lot. It's very subsidized here. And I think when it comes to lifestyle advice, people are less inclined from a psychological point of view to actually act on the advice that they get unless they're paying money for it. And I think people value what they pay for.
Jack Heald 34:48
Wait. Whoa, I want to make sure I understood what you just said. Are you saying that what you observe in Australia, with the socialized health care, I don't know if that's what you guys call it, that's what we call it here in the States, socialized healthcare? That the mere fact that you have socialized medicine means that people are less likely to follow the advice?
Dr. Max Gulhane 35:21
I mean, I don't want to I guess, I don't want to paint broad brush and condemn people. But I feel like when it's simply my observation of a small number of patients that I've seen so far, the de facto that the times where people are most receptive, I think, is when there's been a value exchange. And just in life as well, if people have paid for something, tendency to, I guess, execute or act on whatever advice they've been given, is greater. So that's where I was, I guess, I think the value of something that Dr. Phillips doing in the direct, what you mentioned, the direct payer model, is that someone who's paid for their care completely, perhaps might be more inclined to, to make lifestyle changes. Whereas rather than just go to a doctor, here's another script for your Metformin, here's another script for your Lipitor, and your blood pressure medication and they're happy to continue doing what they're doing. Because the total cost, and it's changing now because prior to recently, there was no gap, often people would be what's called bulk billed. So, there wouldn't be any out-of-pocket costs for seeing the GP or the family doctor. Now, that's, that's changing more and more practices of having to charge a gap fee. But still, I really think that what Dr. Phillips said about the direct care, and the concierge services kind of makes sense to me in terms of helping people who are willing to make a lifestyle change.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 37:09
Yeah, I would say, I'm not as cautious as you in making these statements. I think the fact that people are disconnected from the cost of their health care is a major problem. And here in the US, even though we don't have socialized medicine, most people still expect our health care to be largely free. The cost here is on the employer, usually who's providing the insurance as opposed to the government, but people still largely aren't paying out of pocket for their health care. And they just figure when they get sick, their insurance is going to pay for it. And I think that's a major disconnect. I think if people had a more direct financial stake in their health, they would pay more attention to it. Now one of the issues we need to kind of tonker is getting people to realize the other costs that are involved with bad health, and also just getting people to understand that there is an alternative. I think the other problem we suffer from certainly here in the US, when you look around you and everyone is sick, you just say okay, there is no alternative, this is how it is, and the doctors don't tell you that there's an alternative. And so, you just go through your life and say, well, this is the best I can do is just managing it and taking medications. But when you get the message that it doesn't have to be that way, that you can reverse type two diabetes, that you can prevent heart disease. The people that wake up and listen and hear that, they are the ones that then are willing to invest in their health, and they realize that that's a worthwhile investment. So, I can say that the people who work with me are very invested in their health. And I don't have problems getting him to follow advice if it makes sense, if I'm good in giving them good advice, and they're getting results from that advice, they are going to follow it. So, I think we have many layers of problems that we have to deal with. But again, it's just interesting to me that what look like two different medical systems get the same results and have the same issues.
Dr. Max Gulhane 39:38
Yeah, yeah. And we're competing, I guess in Australia, you can really think of an independent or direct paying model is actually, has to compete against the status quo, which is oh, I can just go to my GP and get a subsidized appointment. So, I guess the barrier is in terms of offering value and price is bad, might be even more difficult to more expensive healthcare system because we're having to compete against what is essentially almost over a very subsidized healthcare here.
Jack Heald 40:14
I want to just get your comments on a story that just landed this week. The single biggest selling anti-heartburn drug in the world, Zantac, is over the counter, or at least was over the counter here in the US. We had a nationwide pop comedian, who was known nationwide, who’s the representative for this stuff because he was fat. And when he said he had heartburn, people would believe him. Zantac was pulled off the market. Because apparently, it is linked to causing cancer and to make it even more fun, Glaxo, the manufacturer, has known about this for 40 years. Comments, please?
Dr. Max Gulhane 41:13
Yeah, I mean, it isn't that, I mean, it's just another kind of choke it up in the book of pharmaceutical company and industry Maleficent next to Thalidomide, Vioxx, and the rest. It, to me, it just speaks to this idea of, yes, perhaps at one point, they’re providing very, very important novel pharmaceuticals that were really extending people’s life. But I think, as Marcia Angell, who was there any New England Journal head chief editor said, I think she said that in the early 2010s, that it's simply become a process of releasing drugs that have ever diminishing efficacy and increasing price and just pervasiveness of pharmaceutical treatment. So, I mean, it's not really surprising to me, that there was an awareness of harm. Because, I mean, the track record, as far as we know, is that that has happened, and I think that will continue to happen as long as profit and not patient health outcomes are the chief motivation.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 42:30
Yeah, and I think it also speaks to the failure of our regulatory organizations. I mean, when you look at this is what the FDA here in the US and the equivalent organizations around the world are supposed to be protecting against, and what we have seen is that they have largely been captured, the regulatory capture, and here in the US the FDA is basically just a bunch of pharmaceutical executives, and it's literally that the walls are sitting or watching the hands, I mean, it's really become a problem. And I think, unfortunately, we're going to see more and more stories like that, like you said, this isn't unheard of, I mean, we can go back through medical history and see many similar examples. But when you look at something like Thalidomide, and even Vioxx, those were picked up on relatively quickly. I mean they weren't on the market 40 years before these issues were discovered. So, the interesting thing about the Zantac is that it has even been known about by the regulators, there have been sort of intermittent recalls, it was initially blamed on some of the manufacturing processes and some of the generic manufacturers overseas.
Jack Heald
It's not my fault. It's not my fault.
Dr. Philip Ovadia
Exactly, exactly. So, I think it just points to the fact that the best, I've said before on the show, the best way to deal with the pharmaceutical industry is to not need pharmaceuticals because it's hard to see their benefit. When you're looking at chronic disease like you said, they've made lots of inroads certainly early on infectious diseases, acute illnesses. There's lots of things you can point to that pharmaceuticals do a great job of, but when it comes to chronic disease, it's really hard to start to find benefit of these pharmaceutical products and it seems to be getting less and less beneficial, and just focus more and more on generating profits.
Jack Heald 45:08
Well, I think it's worthwhile saying that if I have an acute illness, and there's a drug that fixes it, first of all, hurray, thank you. But it fixes it. And I don't need the drug after that. But if I've got a chronic disease, woohoo, I've got a, there's a drug that'll manage that for the rest of my life. And I'm just a crop at that point. I'm not a human being. I know, I've said this before, but okay.
Dr. Max Gulhane 45:36
Yeah. And, people aren't, people don't have the Lipitor deficiency. They don't have an Ozempic deficiency. That is not what's the problem here.
Jack Heald
I love that.
Dr. Max Gulhane
The problem was lifestyle.
Jack Heald 45:48
Lipitor deficient.
Dr. Max Gulhane 45:50
Yeah, no one is Lipitor deficient. So, when you flip it, and you pose it like that to patients, you can get a bit of traction because they realize that this isn't the silver bullet to their problem. I just wanted to make a comment about the viral comment about the drug companies. And I really think that's relevant for any physicians that are listening, particularly, which is that science has been weaponized, incredibly effectively by the pharmaceutical industry, and particularly, by hidden evidence, or unpublished evidence. And the typical examples are when five studies are done, four show a null finding, one shows a positive finding. The four that had a null finding got put in the bottom drawer. And there's a publication bias that misportrays this as a highly effective drug because you've had one out of five studies show a positive outcome. So, what I think that is a barrier or the reason why many drugs, perhaps are continually prescribed and even recommended by guidelines is that there’s some strings are being pulled at a very high level that misrepresents the efficacy through things like publication bias. And this other type of weaponization of evidence-based medicine in a way that the average doctor on the ground, who doesn't have time to sift through the totality of the evidence, is simply unable to recognize. So, they will continue to work through just based off of guidelines, which, as you mentioned, Philip, in the US FDA are a bunch of pharmaceutical executives. So, you can imagine how the influence percolates down into our treatment guidelines. And Joe, Dr. Joe sixpack on the ground, in terms of his daily treatment, isn't going through and realizing that the degree to which the things that he, the way he's been practiced has been influenced by, by an influence or interested that are disconnected from the interest of his patients.
Jack Heald 48:08
Just a point of order here. In America, Joe Sixpack is a plumber. So, it's cool to know that in Australia that he can actually be a doctor.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 48:19
Yeah, but he does. He doesn't have a six-pack.
Dr. Max Gulhane 48:23
He’s holding six packs of beers.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 48:25
Yeah, exactly. It's a six-pack of beer. And yeah, so one of the best books that I read on that subject, Dr. Malcolm Kendrick, Doctoring Data, and he talks all about that really a big problem for us in medicine that are trying to figure out what is the right thing and what does science tell us? Before we wrap up, I'd love to hear, you're still early career. So, what are your plans moving forward? How do you plan on incorporating this into medical practice?
Dr. Max Gulhane 49:03
Yeah, so I am trying not to say anything yet, too controversial, too early. But what I'm interested in, I guess, is implementing more of an ancestral animal-based diet in a range of areas, metabolic health for people with type two diabetes, obesity, and fatty liver disease, that's a key pillar. I'm very interested in pregnancy and pre-pregnancy preparation, particularly improving the nutrient status of women prior to conceiving because I think that's the ultimate, ultimate form of Preventative Medicine. If you can make a baby or help a couple have a baby that doesn't have any of the negative epigenetic imprinting for obesity and metabolic disease. And a little bit about, I guess, pediatric or helping people eat a proper animal-based or a diet that is sufficient in fat-soluble vitamins so that we get proper facial development. I don't know if you're aware of the Western price stuff, but essentially facial development is self-related to nutrition. And so those are and then, obviously, the tying in regenerative farming. And I'm working with a good friend of mine down here in Aubrey, Jake Wolki, who has a regenerative farm. He’s producing the highest quality food. And what I see is that the solution if we're advocating for people to eat a lot of meat and a lot of animal foods, it's our duty to ensure that people are encouraged where they can afford the highest quality, nutrient-dense animal food. And that then tying that in and making people realize that their health is related to the health of animals and the health of the land. So, I guess those are the kind of main areas of my focus at the moment. And we'll just be working towards that and seeing how we go as those I guess progress.
Jack Heald 50:57
Well, tell us about your public face for those who aren't where they were that you can treat them but want to follow you and keep up with what you're working on and what you're talking about. What do you got? I know you've got a podcast.
Dr. Max Gulhane 51:13
So, I host a podcast called the Regenerative Health podcast. And I guess the reason for that title is that I'm emphasizing both regenerative farming and the fact that you can regenerate your body if you give it what it simply needs. And you remove all the refined foods and all the kind of toxic inputs. So, the Regenerative Health podcast and you can find that on Spotify, on Apple podcasts, on YouTube. And I do in-person consulting at my family medicine practice at the Gardens Medical Group here in Albury, New South Wales, Australia. And I guess if anyone wants to contact me directly for nutritional lifestyle consulting, they can email me regenerativehealth@proton.me. And I'm sure we could do some remote nutrition consulting and lifestyle consulting if they'd like.
Jack Heald 52:09
And I'll remind the audience that all that contact information will be in the show notes. So, you don't have to jot it down right now. All right, very good. Well, we will try to keep this as about an hour. And that's where we're at. We're at about an hour. Any last words? Dr. Ovadia?
Dr. Philip Ovadia 52:27
No. It's just really great to be connected now with Dr. Gulhane and I look forward to the day that we can meet up maybe on your side of the world or ours and maybe share a side of lamb and keep fighting the good fight together.
Dr. Max Gulhane 52:47
Yeah, great. Thank you so much, gentlemen. It was a pleasure to meet you, Jack. And great to see you again, Philip, thank you again for the opportunity to speak to your audience.
Jack Heald 52:58
All right, well, that is Dr. Max Gulhane. His podcast Regenerative Health. As a marketer, I might suggest an easier-to-say name. But I'm looking at his podcast website here, it says he already had some really interesting guests. So, for those of you in the south of the hemisphere, go to him first. Northern hemisphere and come see Dr. Ovadia first. How's that? All right. Well, this is the Stay Off My Operating Table podcast. I want to encourage you all to go visit Phil's website. ifixhearts.com He's got the metabolic health quiz there that will help you score yourself and get an idea of exactly where you are. Now go ahead and hit that like and subscribe button to hear on the podcast. We dropped a new episode every Tuesday. This one will drop early March; I believe it is. And we'll talk to y'all next time.
Jack Heald 54:01
America is fat and sick and tired. 88% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy and at risk of a sudden heart attack. Are you one of them? Go to ifixhearts.co and take Dr. Ovadia's metabolic health quiz. Learn specific steps you can take to reclaim your health, reduce your risk of heart attack and stay off Dr. Ovadia's operating table.
Jack Heald 54:29
This has been a production of 38 atoms