0101 The Hidden Link Between Mental Health and Physical Disease

What if many physical illnesses actually begin with mental and emotional stress?

In this episode, medical practitioner Dr. Bob Smith challenges the traditional approach to healthcare and argues that doctors must understand their patients’ mental health, life circumstances, and emotional wellbeing before making accurate diagnoses.

Modern medicine often focuses on treating symptoms or isolated pain points, but Dr. Smith believes this approach misses the bigger picture. According to him, many physical diseases stem from psychological stress, trauma, anxiety, and unresolved mental health struggles.

Dr. Smith explains why medical education needs to change, criticizing universities for not embedding psychiatry and mental health training deeply enough in medical programs. Without this training, doctors may unintentionally overlook the root causes of illness.

By taking time to truly understand patients- their mental state, lifestyle, stress levels, and personal history-  physicians can provide more compassionate care, better diagnoses, and more effective treatment plans.

🔎 In this episode we discuss:
• The connection between mental health and physical disease
• Why symptom-based treatment often fails
• The role of psychiatry in modern medicine
• How doctors can improve patient care and compassion
• Why medical schools must rethink their training models

This conversation offers a powerful perspective on the future of holistic healthcare and patient-centered medicine.

💬 Should mental health training be mandatory for doctors?
Let us know in the comments.

Transcript

Why Medicine Misses Mental Health

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Does not address the psychological and social dimensions of patients. Only 2% of total training time through four years of medical school and three to five years of residency is devoted to mental health.

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Do you feel like uh social media is playing a very big part in um pushing for this change?

SPEAKER_01 0:38

We're working day and night on doing just that.

From Football Dreams To Medicine

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Bob, welcome to Multispective. I'm so thrilled to have you on air with us to share your journey. Um can you just begin a little bit from where it all begins for you? Where does your story begin?

SPEAKER_01 0:56

Sure. Well, thanks first for having me. Um begins a long time ago. I was raised to be an athlete. Um my father was very interested in athletics, and of course, then I was, and so he wanted me to become a pro football player. And I was no bigger then than I am now, which is about 170 pounds dripping wet. And while I did okay in high school, it got different. Uh, when I I went out to the University of Iowa, they were at that time ranked top five in the nation. And uh it soon dawned on me that people there were a lot bigger than I was used to, you know, over a hundred pounds heavier than I was. And so after getting hit a couple times, I decided uh I'd better find another career. And that that's kind of how I got started into medicine. Now, my dad was uh general practitioner, so I had I had that influence as well, but he was more interested in athletics than being a me being a doctor. But uh that that's how I got started in all of this medical business.

SPEAKER_00 2:04

Were you always into medicine?

SPEAKER_01 2:06

Were you always like curious about medicine along the way, or was it just yeah, no, I I would at times go on rounds with my dad, and he would take me to surgeries where he was assisting. He didn't do surgery himself, but he assisted in it. And so I would I would do that, and I would go to medical meetings with him. And so I I was having an influence, and in my own mind, I just always assumed that's what I would do. It wasn't any revelation. Uh and I'm I I can't remember I told you this. I don't think I did. I'm the sixth consecutive generation of physicians in my family. And so my my grandfather, my uncle, and on back before that were all physicians. So it was really probably in my DNA, but I football was the main emphasis. And then I but I had a good fallback.

SPEAKER_00 2:56

So walk me through your um course through medicine. Like what path did you take? Uh what path was most interesting to you, and yeah, how did it where did you land up in?

SPEAKER_01 3:08

Yeah, no, I uh I went to medicine then. I uh I was already in pre-med while I was trying to play football, but that didn't last long. And so I then focused entirely on on pre-med courses, and uh i it's pretty much the same today, but it was a little worse back then, is there was all kinds of emphasis on uh science type stuff, physics, quantitative chemistry, all of that sort of stuff. And yet I what I found as part of the pre-med, I liked organic chemistry and I liked chemistry. But I found also I liked Western civilization courses I took, and I liked literature courses that I took, and things like this, equally as well, if not better. And so I was there was always that tension in in which of these directions to go. There really wasn't a question. I knew I was going to medicine, but I I recognized that I liked some of that. I took French, and I thought that was just fascinating, and uh I just loved all of that stuff. In fact, I liked that stuff better than I like the actual sciences, I think.

Humanities To Holistic Patient Care

SPEAKER_00 4:18

How do all of these like uh little interests uh come together for you? You know, you talked about you know history and you talked about French and all of that. How did those ideas come together for you in the field of medicine?

SPEAKER_01 4:29

Yeah, well, I I I I think and my own way I've put it together is that that interest in some of the broader dimensions of medicine ha has come back to the fore. I mean, I went through medical school and it's all very science-oriented, and I I mean talking about physical sciences, anatomy, physiology, pathology, you know, diabetes, all the physical diseases. Um, and modern medicine does not teach much of that. But I think part of the probably intrinsic to my own psyche was to be interested in some of these broader dimensions, like Western civilization, French, literature, uh, music, um, and and I think th that came back to me in medicine with my desire to see the patient as more than just a physical disease scientific problem, and to see them more as a human being and a psychological and a social person, if that makes sense. I'd never quite thought of it until you asked.

SPEAKER_00 5:37

But I that that's that's uh that's really interesting. This is uh sort of like m I guess what we would call like holistic uh medicine in a sense.

SPEAKER_01 5:45

That's exactly it. That's another term for it, yeah. And and that that uh training in French literature and so on, all that stuff, is more holistic. It talks more about the human being, the the s the social existence that we all have. Whereas medicine focuses almost entirely on the scientific that that's a bad choice of words, but I think you know what I mean, on the physical disease, the chemistry of the body, the the uh the non-human aspect is another way to put it. And so medicine I I I I'd liked it, I just love all the physical the chemistry and stuff, but when I got into practice, it was apparent to me that there was more to medicine than just physical disease. Um and uh uh the the this whole human dimension to medicine, and it wasn't just my medical school, it was everybody's medical school, and they're still taught this way today, even as long ago as my experience was. Um and so uh that was one of my revelations as I then got into practice.

SPEAKER_00 7:00

You must have had a pretty unique angle coming into it uh with your creative side to understanding the human being as a whole, um, but also probably might have received quite a bit of backlash because I'm sure in school they try to encourage you to focus on the only science so that you don't get too emotionally entangled with your patients. And you know, it's better to not look at a patient as a human being so that you can diagnose them more objectively and you can remove that element of feeling in from it.

SPEAKER_01 7:30

Um Jenica, corroborating what you just said is we were often told, don't get too involved with the patient's personal issues. It will destroy your objectivity.

SPEAKER_00 7:44

What do you think the pros or cons with feeling for your patient or like learning their story and their background? What are the pros and cons of doing that? Of of emotionally allowing yourself to understand the human being, that human person that you're dealing with.

The Training Gap And Prevention Failure

SPEAKER_01 8:00

Oh well the uh the pros are infinitesimal both for the person of the doctor themselves and also, of course, for the patients. I mean, right now medicine does not address the psychological and social dimensions of patients, and so that's why we have a mental health crisis. Doctors, doctors like me in primary care conduct in the U.S. 75% or more of all mental health care. But medicine didn't train us in mental health care. Only 2% of total training time through four years of medical school and three to five years of residency is devoted to mental health. Mental health is the commonest health condition in the U.S. that doctors face in practice. And so here's medicine not training its practitioners to care for the most common problem they see. Has medicine lost its mind? That's where the title of my book comes from. I said that. I was giving yeah, I was giving a lecture one day on this, and I just popped out on my mouth. Has medicine lost its mind? And oh, that's the title of the book.

SPEAKER_00 9:13

It's quite true because you know, the root cause of a lot of the physical diseases that people live with has started from a medica from a mental place, right? From a place. Oh, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 9:22

Oh, sure. People smoke too much, drink too much, eat too much, don't exercise now. These are all psychological and social features of people. And but medicine doesn't train in that. These are ingrained traits that people would rather not change. They'd rather keep smoking and drinking and eating. And so it takes intensive training in some difficult skills to ever have an impact on that. Uh but medicine doesn't do that any more than they teach mental health. Here we have medicine. You could prevent many diseases if you simply if medicine's idea was to prevent problems rather than wait for them to happen and then treat them. And right now, when you're taught all this physical chemistry, physical disease-only stuff, you're kind of like a robot sitting there. You know, where is this, where is it? You never get to know the patient. You don't know their social life, you don't know their personal life, you don't know their interests.

SPEAKER_00 10:31

It kind of plays a little bit into the issue of like the big pharma right now in the US. It's like by detaching themselves from the patients, they are able to prescribe medication without guilt because they don't feel so attached to the patient. They can prescribe medication to target the specific area where the problem is, but actually not really solve the problem for the for the patient. So they keep coming back and so you keep making more money. And there's there's that big issue that's kind of going around there.

SPEAKER_01 10:57

Oh, yeah. I mean, just to link what we talked about before to what you just said, Jenica, prevalence. I mean, just how much that term means how much there was out there of obesity in 1990 was 15% in the US. Today it's almost 50%. Now, medicine, if it were oriented towards the psychological and social, would have prevented all of that from happening. But medicine doesn't do that, they wait for the problem to happen. Now Big Pharma comes out with these new anti-obesity drugs that cost$1,350 a month when they came out, and they make tons of money off of it on people who will be helped by it. It's a wonderful drug, these GOP agonists. Uh, it's a wonderful drug, but why not prevent the problem in the first place? Then you don't need the drug, you don't need all that cost, healthcare cost. Uh the whole system is paying for that. And if you prevented it, you wouldn't have that cost. Now, the pharmaceutical industry wouldn't like that. The pharmaceutical industry and much of medicine, medical industrial complex, is vested in staying in the status quo. It's not to their financial advantage to prevent all of these medical problems. In the 2025, it was shown the U.S. healthcare expenditures were$5.6 trillion. That's with a T,$5.6 trillion. We know that we can prevent, data should support this all over the place. We can prevent 80% of all heart at heart disease, strokes, diabetes. We can prevent 40% of all cancers. But medicine doesn't do that. Let's just say we could prevent half of all these problems. You could save a good chunk of that, probably in the one to two trillion dollar range, by simply preventing problems. And that's one to two trillion dollars in one year. But right now, medicine is not involved in prevention, and so a very few people in the medical industrial complex, and it's not just big pharma, it's hospitals, insurance companies, equipment companies, and medicine itself. There's a making a lot of money for a very few people at the expense not only of the health of a lot of people, but at the cost of society.

SPEAKER_00 13:48

Alternate medicine right now is starting to become a thing though. Like people are talking a lot more about alternate medicine. The only issues, and I'm gonna ask you this, is like insurance doesn't cover things like acupuncture or stem cell stem cell treatment. So how does that work then for someone who's more interested in trying alternate forms of therapy or psychotherapy, that kind of stuff? Like, is is does insurance even kind of cover therapy to help a patient?

Opioids, Suicide, And Psychiatrist Shortage

SPEAKER_01 14:12

No, and and I I'm being hard on medicine right now. But medicine is doing something about the problem. They they do try to uh provide better payment to primary care doctors like myself for mental health care, even though we're not trained. And the primary care doctors in the US at least, and I know a lot of them, have worked very hard to bolster their skills in mental health care. And it's not their fault, they simply weren't trained, but they have worked hard to do this and have been more effective than you could predict for somebody that wasn't trained in it. Alternative medicine, I I'm not that familiar with insurance as it applies there. I do s I I do hear that it's not covered very well. But now psychotherapy is is much better covered than it used to be in the US. And that's what led me to say medicine is doing something about it, but it's kind of tinkering at the margins with these things. The real problem is medical education, and so you have them basically ignoring psychiatry as a discipline and not training then the primary care doctors like myself who end up providing mental health care. And the results are absolutely disastrous. I mean, there are unnecessary opioid overdoses, you've heard of that. 200,000 people have died by now from doctor prescribed opioids. Doctors, however, it's not their fault. They're not trained in chronic pain, that's why you give the opioids. They're not trained in opioid use. And so along comes Purdue Pharma and tells everybody these medications are safe and they'll cure pain. And so everybody started prescribing opioids to paint people with pain. And finally, it's been recognized that they don't do any good for that. And that people are dying in droves. There are still 15 to 17,000 people a year die from doctor-prescribed opioids.

SPEAKER_00 16:29

Isn't it them their obligation to inform the patient of the addictive nature of opioids? So surely they understand that what they're prescribing is potentially going to get their patient hooked.

SPEAKER_01 16:41

In fairness to the doctors, they were told they were not addictive. They were led to believe they were not addictive. And this went through Congress and other organizations, formal organizations, were encouraging doctors to do this. They even had an idea of, I think it was 2000 to 2010 was the decade of pain. And this was the idea. We're going to cure pain. And you're going to do it with opioids. Um, and so there are downsides to this. Suicide's another thing. There are 48,000 suicides a year. Half of these people, almost half, see their primary care doctor in the two to four weeks before they commit suicide. This is an ideal circumstance to suspect it, diagnose it, and see that it's treated. But doctors aren't trained in suicide. The most they might ever get is a lecture once or twice through medical school and probably never through residency. And that that when you if you talk to medical deans and to medical educators, they'll say, Well, we do train in suicide, and we do train in opioids. We got two or three lectures a year on them. Lectures don't cut it. It's important to have the knowledge that lectures convey. But to be effective in managing opioids, chronic pain, suicide requires supervised care or supervised instruction in the care of real patients with the problem. Which is to say you would need a psychiatrist or other skilled person supervising the student with an actual suicidal patient.

SPEAKER_00 18:31

What are the kind of situations, circumstances, or diseases where a doctor is legally obliged to refer the patient to a psych psychiatrist? So, like if you have a patient come into the hospital and they have attempted suicide, is it legally the obligation of the doctor to bring in the psychiatrist to look after? So what kind of circumstances would that be?

SPEAKER_01 19:38

There's no legal requirement for it. Um and part of the reason for that is that something of among rural counties in the U.S., 50% of them have no psychiatrist in the entire county. There aren't psychiatrists out there. There's this idea, well, we'll send them to a psychiatrist. It doesn't, it doesn't cut it out there, because there aren't any. Even there, it takes from nine to ten months to get somebody into a psychiatrist. And so the only answer to this is to start training the primary care people who are out there. Plus, we do need to train more psychiatrists. There's no question about that. And this is certainly not anti-psychiatry, that, but it there's more to it than just training more psychiatrists by far. But there's no legal obligation to do that. Um again, to their credit for somebody who is suicidal or psychotic, they will usually, doctors will recognize that when they're overtly so, and they will probably put them in the hospital and then try to get some mental health consultation from there.

SPEAKER_00 21:03

Right.

The Scale Of Mental Illness

SPEAKER_01 21:03

But the problem is greater than that, though. It it's not suspecting when someone might be suicidal, and asking about it in a patient-centered, respectful way. Rather than saying what doctors are trained to do, they will say something, you're not suicidal, are you? Well, of course they're gonna say no. And and again, it takes special training and these psychosocial, relational dimensions of medicine to address this. But medicine doesn't do it.

SPEAKER_00 21:36

We're still talking about the quite obvious cases if a person has come in with quite obvious signs of suicidal attempts. But then we go into the more abstract forms of, I don't know, disease, like a person coming in with cancer. You're not even gonna link it with the stress of that person or their childhood and what they'd experience as a child. You're just gonna be treating the cancer as it is.

SPEAKER_01 21:56

And so again, you know, this It almost blows your mind that we're even having this conversation and these facts are as bad as they are. But and again, the mental health problem is the most common health condition in the U.S. It's about 92 million people at any one time have a major mental disorder. Mental disorders are more common than heart disease and cancer combined. One in four people in the U.S. at any one time will have a major mental disorder. And it's one in two over a lifetime. And so if you think of that, we've talked about tens of thousands of deaths from poorly trained doctors. Now talk about tens of millions of these. People who are undiagnosed and therefore untreated with, say, depression, anxiety, drug addiction. Okay, what happens? Divorce, job loss, school failure, addiction, incarceration, uh homelessness out on the street. Our homeless and prison population today is something like 50 to 70 percent have a major mental disorder. Now, all of this can't be prevented. You can't prevent every divorce, you can't prevent every kid that fails in school. But a lot of these, if recognized and treated, can be pre ameliorated if not altogether prevented. And this is extreme carnage that's being wreaked on our society. And we're talking about the I'm in the US, so I talk about the US. But basically, my understanding of it is all of Western medicine suffers from the same problem. This whole idea of this isolated physical disease approach, this so-called scientific approach, began in Europe. Um, and so this is widespread throughout the world, at least where Western medicine is practiced.

SPEAKER_00 24:01

Is it just as big of a problem in Europe today, or has has it do you think that it's evolved a lot more there compared to the US?

SPEAKER_01 24:08

From my conversations with many European colleagues, the problem is just as bad in Europe as it is here.

SPEAKER_00 24:16

You know, this is really interesting that we're talking about this because I just recently did an interview with a wonderful lady. She's actually a stem cell uh doctor, and she has a clinic in the US, but she's from China and she studied medicine in Beijing, Asian, like Eastern medicine, and then went over to the US and studied Western medicine and brings in kind of like a beautiful explanation of the both and how they all work together or how they're quite different from each other. And she said the same thing, but she said that she really struggled to contend with how the Western medicine focuses on the target or a specific area and not actually uh the human body as a whole. She doesn't talk so much about the psychiatric part of it or like you know, understanding the patient's you know mental state, but rather the energy that flows throughout the body. How if you are experiencing pain in your arm, how that's connected to other parts of your body and how they all work together um to to create what we you know what we understand. So they look at pain as um information rather than oh pain, we gotta we gotta target it and medicate on it.

SPEAKER_01 25:16

And the whole Eastern Western aspect of this is that I know very little about Eastern medicine, but yeah, we're coming around, I think, to the same place of recognizing it. And I'm certainly not the only one in this country that recognizes what I'm saying. And there uh uh probably no one will dispute the facts I'm talking about here. Uh and so there are significant numbers of people like myself in psychiatry, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, medicine, osteopathy, what have you, that understand what I'm talking about. The problem is medicine won't budge off the dime to change its educational practices.

SPEAKER_00 26:05

Why? Because I'm like, what is their reason for not what are they losing by having an extra course on this part?

SPEAKER_01 26:11

Well, part of the problem is what I've said already. People are so brainwashed in this isolated physical disease approach, four years of medical school, three to five years of residency, and maybe fellowship training after that, that it's all they know. And so it isn't just practitioners who are this way, but the deans of the medical schools, the program directors of education programs, the leaders of the American Medical Association and every other association, the governmental people. This is all they know. And so that's part of why it doesn't change, and it's part of why we need to go beyond medicine to resolve the problem. If the public finds this out, which they do not now know, they will insist on change. And the first place to change is medical education. We need doctors who are not brainwashed in this isolated physical disease approach. And again, I've emphasized this before. Doctors are not bad people, they're just doing what they've been taught. But they are effectively brainwashed. Um these the psychosocial aspects of medicine are anathema to them. They they may value them, and they'll they'll look at somebody with a mental health problem and say, boy, that's too bad. I think you should see a psychiatrist or a social worker. It doesn't register that it's part of their job.

SPEAKER_00 27:43

Me as a person who's not in the medical field, I only assumed or that medicine worked the way it is shown on TV. So you watch Grey's Anatomy, for example, and you see these doctors, they seem to be so loving and caring to their patients, they build deep relationships with them. And so I've assumed that that's just how medicine generally is, that there are doctors are there because they care about saving and helping these patients.

Biopsychosocial Training And Better Care

SPEAKER_01 28:09

And that word care is what makes them all of these doctors I'm talking about do care. They are concerned, they are interested, they want to establish relationships. It's just that they have not been trained in how to do it. And it's more than just being a nice guy. Uh, you have to be a nice guy to, I think, to be in medicine in the first place. But there's a l there are complex skills and attitudes that need to be addressed in education that is not now happening. And it's not uh you can't just pick this up on a weekend course. Has medicine lost its mind, my book. In the appendices, it talks about exactly what needs to happen. But it it also talks in there in the in the last chapter about how to effect this public information and to make m basically make medicine change. Medicine's not going to do this on their own.

SPEAKER_00 29:10

Did you take a separate, or did you do a separate degree in psychiatric care as well? Do you have um yeah, qualification?

SPEAKER_01 29:17

No, I'm I'm uh uh general internal medicine is how I trained. And I then and when I realized how inept I was in practice with mental health problems, and they were just all over the place, I I realized that. I started working on my own, trying to do it, and I got better. And and doctors can get better on their own and attending meetings and stuff, and got better. Patients liked it better, they would give feedback. Oh, you're somebody's finally listening to me, they would say. But I I realized eventually that I still didn't know psychiatric diagnoses, psychiatric treatment. And so I went back to the University of Rochester in upstate New York and trained in what's called biopsychosocial medicine. And I did some inpatient psychiatry, I did psychotherapy and something, and basically learned um primary care psychiatry, primary care mental health is what the my interest was. And my intent there was to learn enough about this so that I could help train other doctors so they didn't run into all the problems I did and everybody else was having.

SPEAKER_00 31:12

Can you tell me about the some sp specific cases that really stand out to you where you had um really merged the physical care with the psychiatric care that made a really big impact on your patient?

SPEAKER_01 31:27

Oh, yeah, there there are many of them. Um I mean, a woman came into me once who had just refractory uh pain right here in her left arm and the crook of her arm and the shoulder, and uh she was incapacitated by it, and she'd been seeing doctor after doctor after doctor, and they really couldn't find much. And so I saw her, talked to her, and again, in a patient-centered way, where we're listening and drawing out what she had to say, rather than trying to figure out if she had a disc in her neck or a tumor in her arm or something like that. And in talking to her, it quickly came out that she'd lost a baby, and that worse, her church had chastised her for losing the baby. And when she told me this, what she did, Jenica, I'll sit forward, I can show it. She said, the baby sat right here after he died, and she was pointing at right the exact area where her pain, her refractory pain was. And she and I worked, she was depressed, and she and I worked on that for months and months, and she finally came around quite nicely. She was a very courageous young woman and and went through a had been through a lot of pain in real life and unnecessary pain and her medical care up until that point.

SPEAKER_00 32:58

So it's like um understanding, I guess, to an extent, that's that pain. I guess in medicine they would call it phantom pain. It's not actually coming from anywhere legitimate. There's no tumor or anything. It's just it's all mental. They call it phantom pain, but these pains are legitimate, they exist, and they come from a mental place.

Forcing Reform Through Public Pressure

SPEAKER_01 33:17

Yeah, and so uh much pain today. I mean, it was recognized during the war. Soldiers were coming back with tremendous amounts of anxiety and depression, but also with lots of pain in their body and weakness and fatigue. And the stories they would get the doctors would elicit were that they'd had a near, they were nearly killed, or that their buddy sitting next to them had been killed. They weren't injured, but they were still terribly distressed. That's what today we call post-traumatic stress disorder. But that back then they started to recognize that. And these people would then come back to see the doctors in the uh hospital. They were severely incapacitated, and the doctors would sit and scratch their heads and say, I can understand why they're anxious and depressed, but they don't understand all this pain they're having. There's nothing wrong with them. And so the doctors, imbued with this idea of physical disease, couldn't find a physical disease. And so they didn't get the holistic picture that this all went together. And this is much of the problem in chronic pain today in the U.S. Is that doctors keep looking for some physical disease explanation for it. And when they don't find it, they gave them opioids. They don't anymore. But uh we're not just a physical body, we're not just a psychological, and we're not just social. It's all three go together. And uh it's whatever balance that individual person has to have is what leads to health or suffering, and all the integrates in between that. But medicine does not teach that, and it's to tremendous downsides for patients, as I said.

SPEAKER_00 35:17

Tell us a little bit more about your book. What are some other revelations you have that you wrote about in this book?

SPEAKER_01 35:24

Sure. Uh uh the bottom line recommendation in it, I'll tell you first, is that the public needs to be informed. This is why I wrote this book. Um, the public needs to be informed, just what we're talking about, Jenica. And okay, now the public's informed, we'll say. What do you do? How do you dislodge a recalcitrant medicine? And again, they're good people. Medicine's not bad people. It's just they're brainwashed this way. So how do you change them? And uh my idea is that we set up an independent commission. Could be a federal commission, congressional commission, could be the Academy of National Academy of Sciences, it could be a private foundation like the Carnegie Foundation or Rand. But some independent commission would investigate medical education to see how effectively it is preparing its graduates for mental health care, for prevention, and for cost savings.

SPEAKER_00 36:34

Have you ever tried to reach out to any news channels to publish it?

SPEAKER_01 36:37

We're working day and night on doing just that. I'm also talking to politicians, and I'm also talking to people trying to get them to do this and so on. But it takes it's a lot of work, and it means getting the public informed and you know, getting editorials in newspapers and the like. All sciences except medicine now use a systems approach. Medicine is the only science that still adheres to an old reductionistic approach. And again, it worked in the last century. It's not working in this century, and that is a conceptual intellectual failure on the part of medicine.

SPEAKER_00 37:17

Do you feel like uh social media is playing a very big part in um pushing for this change or what are the opposite?

SPEAKER_01 37:24

Um that's what we're hoping. That's what we're working on. Um yes, I think it can. I in fact, I think it is the main avenue. Uh many people will be watching and listening to you, and it also stays on the various social media and websites and so on. So not only at time zero when you publish this does it have an impact, but it stays there. And people come back to it. It gets referenced in Google and Amazon and so on, and people, it's uh yeah, I I think that's I think it's key to succeeding.

Closing Thanks And How To Support

SPEAKER_00 38:03

I agree because I think it's just like it's it's easy to spread information, but also we live in a world where there's just so much information and there's so much fake information coming around with AI and stuff as well. So it just kind of all gets like entangled in into each other, and like sometimes the true message gets lost. But you know, we have access to people in ways that we never had before, you know, and all it takes the right person to hear the right, you know, yeah message.

SPEAKER_01 38:28

Yeah. This is what I'm advocating is a major scientific revolution in medicine. Now, in the past, when people communicated, it might have gone by horse and buggy, and it might have taken two months for somebody to send a letter to another investigator or person and to get every turn back on it. Today it's instantaneous. You're in Shanghai, I'm in Michigan. We're in it's just instantaneous. People do not lack for information. What you're saying is they probably have too much information.

SPEAKER_00 39:02

But Bob, this was so insightful. I really appreciate you sharing this with us uh on air today. Um, I can't wait for this episode to come out and for people to be enraged by what they by what they hear, but also just to be informed as well, you know. And you know, I hope that this message really does get spread far and wide. I really, really appreciate you being here and sharing this with me today.

SPEAKER_01 39:27

Well, thank you for having me, and and thank you for playing a part in airing this very problem. We're talking about people like you are critical in doing this, and it will be to your credit when all this takes place.

SPEAKER_00 39:45

If you enjoyed the episode and would like to help support the show, please follow and subscribe. You can rate and review your feedback on any of our platforms listed in the description. I'd like to recognize our guests who are vulnerable and open to share their life experiences with us. Thank you for showing us we're human. Also, a thank you to our team who worked so hard behind the scenes to make it happen.

SPEAKER_01 40:07

Lucas Theory at Stefan Menzel.

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The show would be nothing without you. I'm Jenica, host and writer of the show, and you're listening to Multispective.