181 | Reclaiming Wellness: The Inflammation Nation Mindset

Join us as we explore the core principles of health and wellness through the lens of inflammation and mindset. We discuss the importance of asking the right questions in health and the differences between managing disease and crafting wellness. 

• The role of inflammation in chronic diseases 
• Mindset shifts as a key to health improvement 
• How conventional medicine overlooks wellness 
• Time constraints in patient care and their implications 
• Tailoring health solutions to individual needs 
• Encouragement to reclaim wellness in 2025 

If you would like to connect with Dr. Noseworthy, you can use the link in the description to send a web request or text him directly. 

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Transcript

Introduction to Inflammation and Wellness

Speaker 1 0:02

Hey everyone, welcome to the Inflammation Nation podcast. I'm your host, Dr Steve Noseworthy.

Speaker 2 0:08

One of the greatest obstacles to crafting health and wellness is identifying and controlling inflammation. It's at the core of all complex and chronic diseases and it's the driving mechanism that underlies the most common symptoms that people like you struggle to overcome. Join us as we explore cutting edge science and research to give you the information and tools you need to create the quality of life you want and deserve. And now here is the host of Inflammation Nation, dr Stephen Nosworthy.

Speaker 1 0:38

Hey guys, welcome back to the Inflammation Nation podcast. Every year about this time I tend to do the same type of content for the first podcast of the year and technically it's not the first podcast of the year, since I did post a two-part interview that I did on my doctor-only podcast called the Funkbed Nation, where I had a great conversation with Dr Stu McGill. Dr McGill is a world-famous expert in biomechanics and he's got a lot to say, not just about elite athleticism but what it means for regular people like you and me to get and to stay healthy when modern life is really not as conducive to that as we might want it to be. But nevertheless, this is my first let's call it solo episode in 2025. And I realize that I haven't been putting out episodes for quite a while and that's just simply because Kathy and I have been just very busy with travel throughout the US and Canada and just changes in work circumstances and just lots of projects and increased productivity. But I am back and I hope you missed me. But, as I said before, my habit is to start the year by touching base with you guys and asking how things are going right. How's that new diet? How's the exercise plan that you said you were going to start in January. Are you still on point with your diet? Are you still making it to the gym? And that's assuming, of course, that that was part of the set of resolutions that you made for yourself coming into 2025. And maybe that wasn't part of it, but maybe you just had this general sense of I need to do a better job in 2025 than I did in 2024. Statistically speaking, most of the people who have the best of intentions on the morning of January 1st have, at this point in the year, already succumbed to the magnetism of old habits, those ingrained patterns of thinking and doing that make it hard to change.

Speaker 1 2:50

I was recently a guest on Dr Russell Jaffe's YouTube and Instagram channels and we had a short but a great conversation about what amounts to mindset when it comes to getting and staying healthy, and I said something to him that I want to share with you guys because I think it's important. I said that when you're seeking to get better and healthy, you can't get the right answers about your health unless you ask the right questions, and you can't ask the right questions unless you have the right mindset or perspective. Here's what I mean by that If you were to come see me as a provider, as a functional medicine doctor, and if we go through your health history and your goals and maybe even review existing relevant labs and diagnostics, and then you were to do the exact same thing with a conventionally trained medical doctor, or perhaps even a medical doctor who does integrative medicine and I'm doing air quotes, I know you can't see me, but I'm doing it nonetheless so if you were to see me and then have the same conversation with a medical doctor, you're going to end up with two very different sets of recommendations. And the reason for that is because what we do as clinicians is driven by how we think, and I think a certain way about health and wellness. And the way that I think about health and wellness is very much opposed to what you might see or what you do see in conventional medicine. And I think this is a great place to point out that conventional healthcare again, air quotes is really not healthcare at all, because nobody goes to the doctor when they're healthy and 99 plus percent of all doctors medical doctors that is they don't know what to do with a healthy person. I might even say 99 percent of all doctors have any persuasion. They don't know what to do with a healthy person. I might even say 99% of all doctors have any persuasion. They don't know what to do with a healthy person because they're trained to find sickness and treat disease and, particularly in the medical community, they're trained to do that with medications and procedures.

Speaker 1 5:07

The first person to say this, nor will I be the last, but what we call healthcare is really disease management, and if that's what you need or want, then by all means see your medical doctor, your osteopath, your nurse practitioner, whatever. But if you want to be healthy and well, the question you should be asking is not you know, what disease do I have and how do I treat it, but rather the question you should ask is how did I lose my wellness and how do I get that back? And hopefully you can see the mindset behind each of those questions and how they differ. Remember, if you want answers, you need to ask the right questions, and you can't ask the right questions if your perspective is off. Questions and you can't ask the right questions if your perspective is off. You need to be really locked down, solid about what it is that you're looking for. Are you looking only to manage the disease condition and prevent it from getting worse, or are you trying to actually craft wellness?

Speaker 1 5:56

Because crafting wellness is not managing disease, nor is it treating illness. It is different. It's holistic in the science-y sense of that word, not the kind of like ethereal or foo-foo sense of the word. Holistic, I mean it in terms of referring to the whole being more than the sum of its parts. And even though there's a lot of talk in integrative and functional medicine circles about treating the whole person and finding root causes and all of that, very few clinicians really pull that off and they fail to do so for maybe three reasons that I can see. I'm sure there's more if I kept thinking about it. I kept thinking about it.

Speaker 1 6:48

But the first reason for that is that we are all myself included bound by the limits of our training and our bias. Now, I was initially trained as a chiropractor, which means that I was taught to think like a chiropractor. I was taught to think a certain way about problems. The same is true of your medical doctor, your naturopath, your acupuncturist and so on, and part of the path to becoming a well-rounded clinician is to recognize the limits of our training and bias and to take intentional steps to break out of that, meaning learning to see things from new perspectives.

Speaker 1 7:20

But most practicing doctors are so busy they don't have time to do that, even if they are interested in that. All they have time to do that, even if they are interested in that, all they have time to do is to see the next patient and then see the next patient, and see the next patient, and so on. And I will tell you that, as a practitioner, it takes time and dedication to keep learning once you start working in your profession. And for most doctors, at some point their busyness not their business, but their busyness outweighs their desire to learn more and all they can manage to do is to stay on that hamster wheel while it spins and spins, and spins, and spins. And so the first problem is at best, we all have a limited view of the human body and how it operates, and what we see and what we do is governed by how narrow or how wide our training and our education has been. That's the first problem. The second problem is a consequence of how busy practitioners are, and that affects root cause investigation.

Speaker 1 8:26

You see that there is a tension between and I'm speaking about practitioners, but I think, as a healthcare consumer, this is important for you to know. There's a tension between not attention, that's not the right word there's a trade-off between seeing lots of people in the run of a day or a week and how much time that you can spend with each one. The more people you see in less. The more people you see, the less time you can spend with them. And when a doctor states that he or she treats the whole person and works on root cause, but they only spend 10 or 15 minutes with you in a session, there's a massive disconnect here, and all you have time for is managing parts of a problem, not the entirety of them. And so some doctors try to get around this by hiring staff to do other things so that they can just keep seeing more and more people.

Speaker 1 9:24

If you, you, if you really want to do root cause, whole person type care, you have to manage so many different things, and it's difficult for one person to do it all unless they're willing to make a sacrifice. And then sacrifice is seeing fewer people. But most docs are trained to define success as the number of people that they see in a day or a week or a month or a year, and so you might see the doctor that you're engaging with for your first visit, but then you get farmed out to the doc in training, or you get farmed out to the health coach or the nutritionist or some other staff member who may not really have the scope and knowledge that you wish that they really had, and so your care gets fractured. And the more people you have on the team, the harder it is for them all to be on the same page, and pretty soon communication starts to break down and everyone is doing their own thing, but they're still calling it whole person root cause medicine. So, again, doctors have to make a choice in terms of how they run their practices. They either spend more time with people and, as a result, limit the number of people that they work with, or they see more people and they spend time. It's a trade-off that has to happen, and so a clinical practice can either be high volume or high engagement, but it can't be both. And the final reason here is that there is a tendency for natural medicine doctors to develop let's call it a shtick, like a way of doing things that's easily repeatable and easily explained, and this allows them to see more people and give the illusion of whole person root cause medicine. So here's an example A lot of docs that do functional medicine are kind of stuck in the 1980s when it comes to their clinical applications, which means they tend to blame everything on one problem and they build their entire clinical process around that.

Speaker 1 11:30

And so you have docs who say that all of your health problems are from heavy metals. Usually mercury is the one that gets blamed, so mercury is the root of all health issues. Another doc might say well, it's, you know, all health problems come from parasites. Or maybe a doc steps back a little further and says well, that's not true, but certainly all health starts in the gut. So we have to fix the gut for every person who comes in. And on some level they're not entirely wrong, because for any individual person that may indeed be true. But to adopt a blanket approach where everyone does a mercury detox or everybody does a parasite cleanse or everybody does a gut protocol, and the protocols are all the same from person to person to person, makes it very easy to administer from a business standpoint, but it doesn't make much sense clinically.

Speaker 1 12:22

But that approach ignores the very concept of whole person root cause philosophy. Again, it's much easier to do one thing really well and to trust that enough people with that one specific problem are going to knock on your door, knowing that you won't be able to help the people who need something different. And so the problem is that these docs don't necessarily explain up front how one-dimensional they really are. And so you go into your consult thinking you know great, this person is going to look at me as a whole person, they're going to finally find my root cause, when in reality they're just looking at you, like everyone else, hoping their shtick is what you need. And so they have a round hole and and you're a square peg and they're trying to put a square peg into a round hole.

Understanding Inflammation and Its Impact

Speaker 1 13:11

You know, when I stopped seeing people in person for hands on chiropractic care and I started doing functional medicine full time, at that point I had well over a decade of listening to all of my chiropractic patients complain about what they didn't like about modern medicine, and it wasn't long into my functional medicine career that I started to see natural docs making the same mistake, and so along the way I determined to do things differently and to solve as many of those problems as I could for my own clients, and that meant a few things. I knew that to do my best, I had to see fewer people so I could spend more time with them, because that is what is required, particularly for complex health issues where it seems like everything has hit the fan. I also knew that I had to up my game and learn more about more, so I could see as much of the whole picture or the whole person as I could. Now I kind of have a unique situation because I'm one of only a handful of docs who do what I do, being that I both have my own practice and I travel around the country teaching high level functional medicine to other docs from all around the world. And because I teach, I generally have to taste, stay two steps ahead of the doctors that I'm teaching. And finally, you know, and in creating my own, let's say, treatment philosophy, I decided to listen I mean really listen. In fact, I just got off the phone with another practitioner who wants to be a client of mine and she asked me what I specialize in, and she was surprised by my response. I told her that I specialize in not specializing and I had to explain that it's all well and good for a clinician or a practitioner, for advertising a promotion purposes, to say you know, I I work with gut problems or I treat Hashimoto's, or I treat head injuries or I treat SIBO or whatever the case is, because people like you healthcare consumers need clarity so that you can choose to go someone who works with the type of problem that you perceive that you have, but a true, whole person.

Speaker 1 15:38

Root cause approach looks beyond someone's presenting symptomatology and their labels or diagnoses to ask what mechanisms are promoting those things. And no assumptions are made up front. And root cause medicine demands that there are no preconceptions. There's no place for a doctor to assume that all of your complaints are from a heavy metal or a parasite, or to assume that you just need to do a detox, or the detox is the first place everyone should start, or your gut is the first place to start. None of those assumptions should be true. Not that you don't do those things, but you make no assumptions about when they should appear in someone's care program.

Speaker 1 16:22

So when I told that other practitioner that I specialize in not specializing I didn't mean that I'm not good at any one thing. I meant that my mindset is that I suspend any treatment decisions until I can gather enough effort, evidence, to make an informed decision, and the amount of type of information that takes is going to vary from person to person and it's largely dependent on the complexity of the problems. You have one problem, two problems or eight problems. So what are you looking for as you wind your way through 2025? And if you get to the point where you realize that your problems are more than you can fix on your own, ideally you'd be looking for someone who offers you better answers by asking the right questions which stem from the perspective of crafting wellness and not managing disease. You're probably looking for someone who does actually see you as a whole person and not just a collection of parts, who does actually work on root cause by not jumping to conclusions, either out of expediency for their own business plan seeing more people and more people, and more people or because what they did for someone else like you worked out well, so why not do it with you too? And you probably want to see someone who has a low volume but high engagement model, where they see fewer people, spend more time and, as a result, tend to get better results. And hey, maybe that's me, maybe it's not, but maybe it is. And if you want to know if you and I are a good fit, you can use the link in the description to send me a web request. You can email me, you can text me at my office number. All of these will be in the episode description and, because I've chosen to work truly solo, I have no staff. I will actually be the one responding to you directly and it would be my honor and privilege to help you walk through 2025 and finally get answers, results and hope to solve the problems that you've been trying to solve on your own and maybe just haven't been able to understand or put it all together. All right, guys, that brings the first solo episode of the Inflammation Nation in 2025 to a close, and I will be back pretty soon, right here on the Inflammation Nation.

Speaker 1 19:12

This podcast is for general informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine in any form or capacity. No doctor-patient relationship is formed. The use of the information in this podcast or any materials associated with or linked to the podcast is at the listener's own risk. The content of this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional and personalized medical advice, diagnosis or treatment and listeners should not disregard or delay obtaining proper medical advice when a health condition exists and warrants that. And finally, functional medicine is not intended or designed to treat disease, but rather is a natural approach to support restoring health and wellness. The use of diet and lifestyle modifications and nutritional supplementation is supportive for adjunctive care.