The Anthony Amen Show

Why Most People Don’t Heal — And How to Take Control of Your Recovery with Dr. Karen Shanks

• Anthony Amen • Season 6 • Episode 3

Share episode

Send us a text

What if your recovery plan and daily health choices mattered more than any diagnosis code ever could? In this powerful episode, Dr. Karen Shanks joins us to break down why true healing starts long before medications—and why movement, nutrition, sleep, trauma awareness, and agency are the real drivers of recovery.

Dr. Karen shares her journey from conventional internal medicine into a prevention-focused practice built on systems biology, root-cause thinking, and actually listening to patients. We talk about why chronic fatigue, post-op pain, and slow recoveries often remain unsolved—not because people are “broken,” but because the system is.

You’ll learn why graded movement accelerates surgical healing, how gentle loading reduces pain, why lymphatic flow matters, and how immobilization delays progress. We explore evidence-to-practice delays, flawed incentives in healthcare, and outdated measurements like BMI and low-fat dogma still taught today.

Most importantly, we dig into agency: you are hiring your clinician, not giving up control. We discuss the mind–muscle connection, epigenetics, neuroplasticity, and how everyday choices—protein intake, strength work, sleep, stress, connection—reshape your biology from the inside out.

Whether you’re recovering from injury, navigating chronic symptoms, or simply want better health, this episode gives you clear tools to start today. Share it with someone who needs direction, and comment with the one action you’re taking this week.

Support the show

Learn More at: www.Redefine-Fitness.com

SPEAKER_01:

This is Health and Fitness Redefined, brought to you by Redefined Fitness. Hello, welcome to the brand new Anthony Eamon show. I'm your host, obviously, Anthony Eamon, and we are still working on our intra-outra videos, so don't mind them saying health fitness redefined, but it's just an old taste of what has passed over the last four and a half years and what's to come, more fun stuff so we can continue doing the show for you guys. And before we hop into today's guest, super important to note the only way we grow is if you share this with people. Let everyone know we rebranded to a new name. If they want to find this show, listen to some cool topics. Uh, maybe you're bored for a week straight and want to listen to every single episode in a row. I think there's enough content and it can make you go at least a week with no sleep to listen to every single episode. So without further ado, let's welcome to today's show's guest, Karen Shanks. It's a pleasure to have you on today.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01:

Excited to have you on here and talk about obviously everyone's favorite topics, health and fitness. But before we do that, just tell us a little bit of what got you into the health fitness world.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I'm a doc. I uh didn't know what I was doing 40 years ago when I thought medicine was the way to um form deep, connected, good healing relationships with people. I thought, oh, oh well, I guess uh becoming a doctor will help me do that. Um and so that started me on this journey of um being traumatized by Western medicine as a trainee and then um as somebody who needed help from um conventional Western medicine, and led me on this whole journey of just sort of redefining what healing means for people and what it should be and how it can encompass more of the whole of who people are, which includes health and fitness, but it includes a whole lot of other things, including a lot of human intangibles, spirituality, emotions, uh past trauma, etc. That isn't accounted for well enough, I think, by the current the way medicine is practiced today. And so that's my journey. That's my um that's my call is to help people understand how much what how much wider um healing is and how many inroads there are to living fantastic lives.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I guess the first point of curiosity is one, what type of medicine did you go end up going into? And then what was that first moment of disconnect that you noticed?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so I trained as an internist, internal medicine. The first disconnect was in medical school. I I spent the first year of medical school learning all the human sciences, biochemistry, cell biology, physiology, anatomy. Loved it. I mean, it's it because it was a symphony of all this systems, biology, and you know how the human body works. And I thought, I thought that was like the beginning, like we were gonna then gonna take all that gorgeous knowledge and we were gonna put it into some incredible practice, which is not what happened. After that first year, we abruptly shifted into human pathology. What's what is the disease? What's its name? What does it look like under the microscope? What is the drug that we fix that, that we treat that disease with, and so on and so forth. And so we shifted from this beautiful, you know, the complexity and um, you know, dynamic uh systems biology into like a whole, uh, a completely different model of how to look at people and how to explain their suffering. So that was the first disconnect. And then the next really abrupt disconnect that led to me shifting in a different way was really my first days and weeks in practice as a doc in the community, and realized I didn't really learn things that help most people with chronic problems that that aren't suffering from an acute or catastrophic or life-threatening um problem, which is what Western conventional Western medicine is very, very good at. Like that's their bag and that's their their their genius. But for just the everyday person with you know aches and pains, and I don't, you know, I don't I don't have enough energy. Um I didn't I didn't learn that in medical school and in my training. I didn't learn about fitness, I didn't learn about nutrition, I didn't learn about sleep, I didn't learn about all those incredibly important things that people need to know in order to live their best lives. So that's when I started to shift and started to study nutrition, found the Institute for Functional Medicine, did all their training and uh trained in um trauma and how to look at and address um trauma and address how that so profoundly affects people's general health because it it shifts genetic expression. So and and then and then just learning that um how the the the terrain of being a human and all the things that make us us, how every single bit of that affects our genetic expression, thus becomes an inroad to us improving our function, our well-being, um, how how we want to live. And the completely different model than what I was trained in.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. I I totally understand that it's a lot different. It's something I talk about a lot, is uh my whole family's physicians. So I know the path all too well. It's one of the main reasons my grandparents were the pioneers for osteopathic medicine, as opposed to going this traditional medical doctor route. And there's just such a disconnect to how we work with people. And I liked what you said where Western medicine's bag is the like you have something like wrong with you, you're dying, like they could bring you back. Like they are great at those things. And this has been a hot topic between my wife and I is we are very much in the middle between both worlds, between Eastern and Western. And there's not a lot of people that are like that. They're either one too extreme one way or one too extreme the other way. And it's always been a bothersome for us because if we make a decision that might lean something one other way, people assume we're fully that when it's just not true. As a good example of that, if I have cancer, I'm going to an oncologist and getting chemo. Like that's that's happening.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes.

SPEAKER_01:

If I have some crazy infection, I'm going on antibiotics. There's no question about that. I just had surgery. Like it's something I needed to have done. It's like my muscle was torn in half and needed to be stitched back together.

SPEAKER_00:

It was a great process.

SPEAKER_01:

Where it's wrong is they there's no prevention side of anything. Everything is a reaction to something going on, and there's nothing to show how do I prevent myself from getting sick? How do I take other actions inside of it and to help make myself feel better? I've got kind of leaning into a personal example to let you know and everyone remind everyone else, is when I tore my chest open and I had the surgery, traditional medicine said, great, now you're not gonna do anything for a long, long, long time and let that thing help them recover. And I'm like, that's wrong. I I don't believe in not doing anything. Your body, our bodies were designed to heal in motion. So instead of saying don't do anything, say don't put direct impact on that area, but you can work the rest of your body. So I did a leg day, day five, post-op. Like once I got off the medicine and everything, and I always use the example after like literally 10 minutes into that workout, the blood that was pulled up in my chest that was causing me such pain dissipated out. All that bad blood moved out, new blood came in, and it the pain was gone. And I didn't have to take even Tylenol from that moment on. And now I'm hearing being almost like seven weeks post-op at this point. Everyone's like, wow, how are you so far ahead? You have such better range of motion than than most people, your muscles are a lot stronger than most people. It's like because I leaned into a little bit of that eastern medicine we can call it, which is doing those workouts. I supplemented with things I know that work, like creatine to help make sure I'm pulling water to the to the muscle. Like I added in some mobility. I once the swelling really slowed out, I added in some infrared sauna. Like you can do that stuff as a blend to help carry over. And I wanted to get your reaction to that as a specific example.

SPEAKER_00:

I believe you, I mean, I agree with you 100%. And um I agree that you know prevention isn't part of what Western medicine does. And I would say that what you did with your rehab, that's all based on very current, very well-vetted science. Um, and why that is missing from your care, your post-surgical care is a mystery to me. I mean, that is like, what? And I, you know, I have my own anecdotes too. I had had a supraspinatus repair a decade ago or so, and they required me to be fully immobilized for six weeks, which was the most devastating part of the whole thing was being immobilized, losing all that muscle mass, all my I mean, it was it was terrible. And then since then, when I've had injuries and I know more now, and I have good therapists who are more who think like you do, like, okay, we've got to keep we've got to keep this moving. We don't move it the way we did before we were injured. Where there's a smart way to move and a smart way to reprogram the muscles, build the strength, help them heal, move the flu, you know, get the lymphatic flow going, um, all those things. So it it's it's made uh a night and day difference for me. I have got, I have a I'm hypermobile, uh airless stand low syndrome, hyper hypermobility syndrome, so I get hurt very easily. Um, but as I've learned about functional mobility and um some of the more current rehab um ideas, I don't really get injured anymore. Like I I just I know how to get stronger in a way that isn't going to hurt me, that isn't going to uh overly stress my you know unique connected tissue and such. So um, but I've had to go to people who are like outside the mainstream, you know, the mainstream physical therapists are still gonna just do, you know, well, rest rest and immobility for six weeks, and then you know, here's here's a protocol for gradually um getting back into action. Um that isn't really built on current science, and I think puts people back, makes it much more difficult to get back to a baseline that's really solid, a solid foundation for moving forward. So, and and I wouldn't even call it Eastern medicine. I wouldn't call it alternative medicine. I'd call it we're keeping up with the science. Smart people are looking at this stuff, and they're looking at it in a very um appropriate way, with evidence that you know makes a lot of sense and I think um uh holds a lot of uh of weight. And um I don't I don't understand why it takes so long for medicine to change. Like we can, and the estimate is that when there's some new idea that's been discovered using the scientific method um with very positive, very strong results, it takes on average 18 years for that to get into mainstream clinical practice. And I would argue that there are some ideas um very well vetted, lots of strong science, that it's taken 30 to 50 years to really get into mainstream practice. And that is just that's baffling to me. It's like people get locked into their way of thinking about things and they don't have a capacity to like be curious and and you know move into new territory and try new things with their with their clients and their patients, you know?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I think I'm gonna address a couple things you said and get some insight to you being in the world. So first, the point of why I believe someone like me that went through all that was given this bad advice is true. And I think the simplest question, I mean the simplest answer, sorry, is physicians at least my from my but my brother was told me that he said day one of medical school, the doctor who was teaching said, Listen, guys, every single person in your room is gonna be sued. And you're gonna be sued more than once for multiple things. So then what happens now if after my surgery, a doctor tells me to go, clears me to go do things, and I go get hurt, right? So the doctor gets afraid of getting sued, so the advice they give you is so it doesn't matter who I am or what I'm doing, it's I'm gonna not screw this up to the point that even if it's a half a percent chance that something goes wrong, that I'm not gonna sue them. So they're just protecting themselves when they give advice, and that's why I think everything gets like diluted down to that sense. I think that's one side of the coin. The other side of the coin is now that I'm going through the process of like physical therapy and talking to physical therapists like I do in my industry, they get paid so little by insurance companies that they have to have four or five people on at once. So they don't have the opportunity to really work with people. So they get to do like the hands-on stuff for five, ten minutes, and then it's okay, go do these workouts. And the people that are watching them maybe are not even physical therapy assistants, they're just students, they don't know how to push people properly. So the you watch like at PT, and these people are doing exercises, and I'm putting that quotations because like there's literally no resistance, they're just sitting there looking around, like maybe doing a gloop bridge when you really need some weight on that to get some blood pumping, but yet again, they get reimbursed poorly, so they're trying to shove everyone in. And then on the consumer side, you you think to yourself, why would I go hire a trainer? Why would I go pay out of pocket for physical therapy when I pay$2,200 for insurance that I need to be using because I'm paying$2,200 for it? So you just end up in this like vicious cycle of nuanced nonsense, and it's just a totally broken system. And I think that's just uh the generic side of it, if that makes sense. I don't know if you have anything to add from that from your input from being on the inside.

SPEAKER_00:

You're right. And it's and these are some hard issues. Like, I I don't have the answers, I have suggestions, I don't have the answers. First of all, that whole idea of being sued. Well, it's all what's also true is that when you know your person and you've connected them on an empathic level, you're listening, you let them say everything they need to say, they know you care about them, they're not gonna sue you. That's just how it is. There's studies that have looked at this, so you're not gonna get sued if you spend enough time. And studies have also shown that if you let someone tell their whole story without interrupting them, it's usually less than two minutes. So it's not like you have to sit there for an hour to make that person feel seen and cared about. So just shut your mouth. Be quiet, doctors, and let your person let them tell their whole story. It's gonna be okay. It's not gonna take an hour. Um and but I don't docs are so rushed and they're so, you know, their mind is somewhere else. And I'm not saying that there aren't lots of incredible human beings practicing conventional Western medicine because there certainly are. Um and yeah, the reimbursement issue is a problem. I don't know. The physical therapists I go to give me 45 minutes of hands-on manual therapy. How do they figure that out? I mean, there there are physical therapists doing it, and then they are associated with a gym. So they know the trainers out there on the floor, and they, you know, they they create a partnership, and so all your services are offered with different price points. So everybody gets paid a living wage, and there might be something out of pocket for the patient, but we have to, we gotta pay people, we have to pay for the services we want. And it's unfortunate that not everybody can afford them. Um and it's unfortunate that insurance, the medical industrial insurance complex, such has such a stronghold over, you know, every aspect of how medicine is practiced. And there's the only real answer is for it to all come crashing down, and we start over because it's it's terri it's terrible. Insurance companies have no business dictating how docs treat their patients, and that's all they do is dictate.

SPEAKER_01:

I will never forget tearing my chest. I am a trainer, I know exactly what it feels like. And the insurance company was giving the doctor a hard time because they wanted to get me an MRI. They said, no, he needs x-rays. And they're like, the chest, he popped his chest. It's like black and blue. This is why do we need an x-ray to check his bones? We need to check his muscles, and no, no, x-ray, x-ray, x-ray. And they had to argue back and forth until I eventually got approval because the doctor really like put their foot down. But it's just like shows just an insurance company doctor who hasn't met you from a hole in a wall doesn't give shit about you, is dictating your health when the doctor that's there with you trying to help you, it like just keeps getting denied, so they keep going with a different option to push things up.

SPEAKER_00:

Right?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, it costs them double at that point.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so um, and and it probably wasn't a doctor, it was probably that's their protocol, and it was whoever the the poor nurse on the other side who had, you know, it's just a protocol that they're following. Um, you have to have an x-ray before you can have an MRI. That's how it always is.

SPEAKER_01:

It's wild. It's and now as a patient, I'm getting unnecessary x-rays that we know obviously, like one or two is not going to do anything, but hundreds of x-rays are gonna lead to issues. So, why would we take that even small nominal risk of doing because later in life I might need a bunch of x-rays? Like if I end up getting some quote of sort of osteopenia or osteoporosis or osteoarthritis, like x-rays are great for that, but why would we do it now when I don't need it? Like, why do I have to keep getting it?

SPEAKER_00:

Do it at all when you don't need it? Why do it at all? That's bad medicine. To order a test that is not needed is just bad medicine. And somebody's paying for that. We are paying, we are paying for it in our insurance premiums and in the overall cost of all medical services.

SPEAKER_01:

Let's talk about a topic I've never talked about on this show, which I think is perfect for right now, and a good branch into this. How I personally feel about health insurance, and more importantly, what the answer is, because answers really are what dictate everything. Now, there's a lot of arguments on both sides saying one health insurance needs to be public, one health insurance needs to be private. And we, I could tell you from a fact, this middle ground is what's driving everything insane, and was what is not working, why premiums keep jumping and reimbursements going back. Now you dive into both sides, public private. Public health insurance, go to freaking England, go to Canada, go look out weight lines and see how long it takes to go see a doctor. On top of that, you want to talk about now the government having control about where you when and where you can't go for certain types of treatments. Now talk about the physicians. People like making money. That's a fact. Physicians, like yourself, go through a shit ton of school. Karen, is school cheap? Medical school?

SPEAKER_00:

No.

SPEAKER_01:

Hundreds of thousands of dollars, some would say, right?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yes.

SPEAKER_01:

And you can't work because it's so much time consuming, then it's into your rotations and into residencies, into fellowships, which you still get paid like absolute dog shit. So by the time that you're able to actually practice and make some real money, you're in so much medical debt, like my brother's half a million dollars in medical debt, that you need to get a higher-end salary to really start paying all that off and like being able to afford just to live at this point. And if you have all these issues, what are you gonna do? You're gonna go where the money is so you can make more. So you're not gonna work in Canada where they pay you like shit and get reimbursed like shit, or England. The same thing. You're gonna move to America, which a lot of physicians from out of country do, they move here because they make a lot more money. So, what the fix is full privatization. You want everything private, health insurance companies private, because then it becomes a simple supply-demand. If an insurance company is treating you like shit, you don't use them. You go to what the insurance company is treating you, right? And then eventually, all the shit insurance companies that don't give a shit about you, that only care about the bottom dollar, that are just looking to maximize their profits, are gonna go out of business because everyone's gonna get smart and they're gonna go to the ones that truly care, truly want to help you. They're not gonna order unnecessary tests because they're trying to scrape a couple dollars to Doba because their margins are slower, because they're trying to be there for their consumers. So, full privatization of healthcare is probably the only solution out of all of this, but unfortunately, no one can agree from a hole in a wall. So I just think things are gonna get a shit ton worse. What's your reaction to all that?

SPEAKER_00:

Uh, how about we improve um how we practice medicine first? Because what you're talking about, what you're talking about is access to care. Yes, that's really important. It's very important issue. But what good what good are we doing the pop the planet if we improve access, but the medicine is shit because not and not necessarily any fault of the physicians that they don't have time to give you a give you good medicine. If they have if they have five minutes to see you and you have a complex problem, and so maybe they're just looking at this little piece of it, and nobody's putting the whole together. So you basically uh slip through the cracks, and you're you you have this evolving world of hurt. These are the these are my clients. I'm describing my clients, they have chronic complex illness, they go, they've been to the docs, the docs don't give them enough time. And so most of the time when they get to me, it's not rocket science to figure out what's going on. They don't have a mystery disease, and I don't have to be Sherlock Holmes and you know put my hat on. I just have to hear the whole story, look at all their records, perhaps do some more comprehensive testing, and we figure it out. But I but this is set up to have no time constraints. I can't, in good conscience, practice that way. I'm off the grid, I don't do insurance. Now, can I see everybody? No, because not everybody can afford to just pay out of their pocket. And I feel bad about that, but I don't have the answer. But what I can do is do good medicine for the folks who do come to me. And I know a lot of um docs who've gone off the grid and they're doing it in a variety of different ways. And some of them are actually able to see a lot of people who are low income, they've got fee for service, you know, um what sliding scale to, you know, there's there's all kinds of ways um to do that. I just think as smart as we are, as creative as we all as we all are, if we would just all like take a deep breath, quit polarizing the problem, we can come up with a bunch of solutions. It will it doesn't need to be like one grand solution, it might just be a bunch of solutions so that different populations with different needs get their needs met in different ways.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and obviously there's multiple sides to every coin to help fix the solution, right? But the uh the idea being if health insurance costs come down because they went private and people are going to choose a cheaper, better option, always, that's just human nature, then it does two things. It puts more money back into people's pockets who can then now they can spend it. Instead of spending it all on insurance, they can use this alternative medicine like personal training, like using uh like the more nutritionists and stuff like that. The flip side of it, as an insurance company, if I'm fully privatized, I have more control. If I'm an insurance company, what's my number one goal as a company is to make money, right? How am I gonna make money? It's getting people to use the insurance less. How do I do that? I get them to use it less by getting them healthy. Now I can pick doctors like yourself to reimburse higher through because I know you go above and beyond to keep people healthier, which is gonna cost me as an insurance company less money. So that's I I think in of itself, it's gonna have that trickle-down effect to push through. But to your point, and where I actually think medicine's gonna go, because I don't see that ever happening, the situation I give. I think people are just too polarized. It's concierge medicine, I think, is gonna take a big step in. I was talking to a client of mine who's a physician as well, it's internal medicine, and he's retired now, but we just like talking about this kind of stuff. I was like, if you look at someone like me, where my health insurance for my wife and I is$2,200 a month, and on top of that, there's a$6,500 deductible. That means you take that$2,200, you times that by$12, add the$6,500 in before the health insurance companies even kick in to start helping, on top of the co-pays. If I could take that money and have a doctor that knows me and only me and everything about what I need and be on call from me, one, it makes sense to the doctor to help reach out and keep me healthy. And two, I'm gonna get better results. So I just see as health insurance costs climb, people are gonna just drop health insurance and they're gonna reach out to people like you, say, hey, what's a monthly fee for someone like me to hop on for you to take care of my family? So I know I have someone to always get advice from. And if I need to pay a little out of pocket here, and ultimately it's gonna save me so much money because I'm not somebody who's chronically ill that needs thousands and thousands of dollars of prescriptions. And it's just where I see the overall the healthier population shifting towards since concierge medicine. I think it's gonna be huge.

SPEAKER_00:

I I think it I think that makes a lot of sense. And if um employers aren't having to pay for insurance, you're self-employed, but most Americans have an employer, um, then they could that could be part of the compensation package to their workers, is you get X number of dollars to go toward this concierge medicine.

SPEAKER_01:

Which would be cheaper as the employer. I have 20 employees, and we just got health insurance through our company. We just did it as an idea. If I didn't go the PEO route, which is a private equity group picking everything up, yeah, it would have costed me the base plans are like 2,000 bucks for a couple. I have as an employer have to cover half. So it's a thousand bucks per employee. Yeah, and that that adds up really expensive. Like the route we got as a good insight, it's a hundred dollars per employee, irregardless whether they take insurance, uh, health insurance. At a minimum, I need to spend 280 bucks per employee, and obviously, some offering more that take the insurance. So we're talking a hundred for everyone, and then even 50% take at that 50% now. I have to pay$250 per person. I don't have a choice to get them to take that. That's costing me a lot of money. Whereas if I just hired a physician at some point, when I get to 50 employees, I might just do that. No health insurance, but we have a doctor on staff. Like, go see them.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. The we still have the issue though of we want that concierge doc to know how to practice really good medicine, right?

SPEAKER_01:

Agreed.

SPEAKER_00:

The other side all the aspects of how to take care of yourself. And you and it doesn't have to be a face-to-face time for all that. You could have programs, you can hire nurses, you can have online programming that talk to you about sleep, talk to you about health and fitness, that you know, that cover all the bases of how to be a healthy human. You know, that's what we need. I don't want better access to the same crappy care for anybody. And I never I don't ever hear that being discussed in these conversations.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so we could talk about that too, because I think it's so important what's going on this year, and something I was really excited for. Talk about polarization. Uh, someone who was a Democrat got onto the Trump team. His name is RFK, I know everyone knows who he is. And even though he says some polarizing stuff that maybe you don't agree with, one thing he did is he made nutrition mandatory for medical school. And you can not like somebody's opinions on some things and like their opinions on other things. That's called being a human. So I can tell you for without a fact, you want to change the shitty advice. It's teaching physicians in their first year of medical school about nutrition. That's how you make specific changes. And that obviously is a great step, but there's a lot more to be learned. A good example you mentioned earlier, teaching shitty advice, things that like 30 years old, we learned stop doing this, and people still do at every practice, because obviously I go to doctors. My favorite is when they weigh me and take my height and then give me my BMI. BMI has been disproven to be accurate so long ago.

SPEAKER_00:

I know, and they do it with your coat on and your shoes on to boot.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Mind-blowing. We're still checking BMI. It's like it takes three seconds to get someone's body fat with bielectrical impedance to get a rough idea of where someone's at. We do it all the time here. Yeah. That's the second advice, which still blows my mind. Uh, eggs are bad for you. I just don't, I just don't understand at what point that's gonna stop being told to people to stop eating eggs.

SPEAKER_00:

You know about uh low fat, the whole low fat is better for you thing. That was upended how many years ago? 2013. So that kind of shows you how long it takes for these ideas, old ideas to go, new ideas to come in. It's it's so frustrating. But here's the thing I a hundred percent nutrition should be taught to physicians. I mean, come on, that's the basis of their systems biology. That is like that is the most one of the most powerful tools in the tool uh kit. Um, but hey, let's let's teach kids start in kindergarten preschool. We need to, that's where we just need individual people to take responsibility for what it means to be a healthy human, how to become a healthy human, and then to have that agency about you know going about that in their lives. Uh, physicians aren't in charge of our health, for God's sake. You know, they're just our support team. We hire them when for a job that we need to have done, but we better know what that job is and how we want to go about it. That's what I try to do with all my clients, empower them to be in charge of their own bodies. And we've been disempowered, we've been disconnected from our own bodies. Some we don't even know what we feel half the time. I'm not talking about you and I, but just you know, in general, there are a lot of people who can't even just describe their pain because they're so checked out from their inner experiences and what what they're feeling and what the sensations that are in their bodies. We just need to reconnect people, not just with their bodies, but with their personal agency to run their own show.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and you know you're you're a hundred percent right. It's it's just empowering people. And I love the example, and this is my favorite line, I know I use it all the time, but it's great. Uh, we all understand we live in a home in an apartment, right? We all have those and we take control of that said living space. Like, meaning I generally know what goes going on in my house as far as when things go wrong. Let's say I have a plumbing issue, right? Am I gonna call an electrician? But yet, with our bodies, we do this all the time. We call the wrong people to do the wrong specialty to help us out and give us advice. So it's just if you want to really control your body, pick the people for that specific thing you need to get help from them as a business owner. I'm not gonna hire a salesperson to be my head trainer, right? That doesn't make any sense. I'm not gonna I uh it's so many things you can just look at this and be like, take control of it. And you don't need to know everything, you're not expected to. Like as a business owner, you don't know everything, but you know a little bit about a lot of things, and then you just need enough information to know to hire a specific person that specializes in that specific thing, not everything else.

SPEAKER_00:

That's right. And your doctor is a person you are hiring, you're not handing yourself over to, you know, the the great omnipotent person who knows what you need and how to fix you. That's just not that is just not that's that's craziness. That's not how it is. And we don't people don't know that. People don't realize that. I just want them to take control of themselves. And then like as you say, you don't have to know everything, but recognize when you need help and then call it in and and make sure you understand that you're hiring someone for a job, and if you don't feel right about it, go go somewhere else.

SPEAKER_01:

Facts. I think the next practical question is because I know we went a lot about what's wrong, but it's action steps or everything. So what is what is one big action step you would like to see people take first in order to take that control back? And what is something you would like people to focus on first to start feeling better?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, no, well, no, you can take control that it is your domain. Everything about you is your domain, it's not anybody else's. And the first thing you have to do is have a way to like check in with yourself, to what observe yourself, to be the witness of yourself, to know how you're feeling. Know, you know, if you're you're sitting with a doc and they're not listening to you and they're giving you a you know a list of things and it doesn't feel right in your body, this isn't right, they're not really listening to me. Trust that. You know, look trust that go somewhere else. So I think the first step is having some kind of relationship with yourself where you are self-aware, you know how your body is responding intuitively to the thing, you know, what's going on around you. So you know how to have a way to discover what your needs are and then to ask for what you need out in the all the arenas of your life. I think that's the first. And you know, I think that can come in a lot of different ways. One is just first, first knowing that you are the captain of your ship, that you are, and and then just to have times throughout your day where um you're quiet, you're not always doing, you're not always busy. Maybe you're out walking your dog or you're you know, you do you take on a full-on meditation practice, just some way you stop periodically and just take a deep breath and just kind of check in with yourself. Um, but you're you have some way to constantly track and observe, like you, you know train, you're training people, right? Fitness and training. You have to have a way to you're tracking metrics, you're tracking energy levels, you're tracking how people feel, you're you have so many things. That is a great um arena for helping people become their own witness is to have them in a training program, uh a fitness and training program. So, like that's one way to do it. But to have some sort of um, what's the word I'm looking for? You know, some sort of practice that you participate in every day that requires you to pay attention to yourself and your progress. And if you can do it in one arena, you can transfer that to every other arena of your life.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it's does that make sense? Find a digging into your body time. And what I what you mean by that is more when you're working out, it's not just moving muscles, you're understanding how your muscles move. Like you might not get it initially because you don't fully understand the physiology behind it. But if I'm doing a knee extension, I'm gonna feel my quad reacting, and it's like, oh, I feel that specific part of my body moving. And you start getting a little more in tune with how your body works. A funny example is everyone always uh knows like the peck dance that like the rock is doing on TV or whatever, right? All that is is a mind-to-muscle connection that he created from working out. It's it was nothing to do with how big his chest is. Like you could do that without having that amount of muscle if you just understand how to contract your pec at any any whim. You can start doing that. And it's just, oh, I can control different parts of my body just by becoming a little more in tune with it. And it's something you could should learn for everything. So you do know, like if you have aches, pains, where they're coming from, where they're stemming from. Oh, if I know this specific thing, then I you know I know the people to find a treat or I could treat it myself, but it's something I wish a lot more people knew, and I just people just don't know how to control or understand the bodies because they're always somebody else. They're they're in their work, they're in their family life, they're on their phone, they're in a movie, they're in a TV, like whatever. They're never present with themselves. And if you're someone like me with crazy ADD, because I'm not gonna be the one to sit there and say, take a break and turn your phone off, like I it's impossible for me. So, but I use my workout times to do that, and because I'm keeping myself distracted with something else, but I'm able to in-tune into that workout if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00:

And if you can develop mind muscle connection uh such that you can isolate your pecs and move them, you can you can develop that connection with any part of yourself. And um, and so I like that. I think that's a great example. That's probably hard. I mean, some of those are hard, but it does once you experience that and you have that aha, oh my gosh, all that practice in this this way, and I've accomplished this thing. Wow, that's my brain, that's neuroplasticity, that's all this potential that's like built into my body that I have control over. And so it's also educating people that they have that control. There is this thing called epigenetics where you shift your genetic expression in all these infinitesimal ways. And there is this thing of neuroplasticity that you change your brain, you change how you think, you can change anything about your brain. Um, people need to learn that. And then, you know, people need to learn what that terrain of being a human looks like. What are all the inroads to feeling better, you know? And that's part of why I wrote my book, because I did it for my my clients and for people like them with chronic complex illness and beyond. Because I want them to see what that terrain looks like, you know, that everything about being a human being, everything that makes us us, is an inroad for us to direct where we want to be, where we want to go. Whether it's, you know, the obvious things like sleep or movement or you know, how we eat, getting enough protein so we can build muscle, um, but also things like you know, the stories we tell ourselves all the time about what's possible or what's not possible. Um our emotional well-being, our the quality of our connections, all those things are make us who we are. They should they they uh shift our genetic expression. We are we are really incredibly powerful, and most people don't even know it.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I I really can agree. Yeah, I think it's we are we can do so much more than we think we can, and you're only limited by your beliefs. I I have a little for those that can't see it because you're listening to audio, it's a Batman symbol, and it says, Everything's impossible until someone does it. And there's always been things that people have deemed as impossible, but then someone goes and do it. My favorite is the five-minute mile, where for years and years it's impossible to get under five, it's impossible, it's possible, it's possible. Someone does it, and then that year, three more people do it, and now so like everyone just like, yeah, of course you can go under a five-minute mile, right? Someone just had to break that barrier of that like mental blocking, and then all of a sudden it's like, oh, we we can do that as people. So I I really couldn't agree more. Kind of do want to start wrapping this up. So I'm gonna ask you the final two questions I ask everybody. First question is if you were to summarize this episode in one or two sentences, what would be your take home?

SPEAKER_00:

Oh wow. Uh get to know yourself, be empowered. Um, you are you are the captain of your ship, whether you hand it over to someone else to to to just to steer for you or not. Um, that's your choice, but you are in fact the captain of your ship in all I love that.

SPEAKER_01:

And the second one, easiest of all, how can people find you and get a hold of you and learn more about you and your book?

SPEAKER_00:

My website, uh KarenShanksmd.com. My new book is Unbroken, Reclaim Your Wholeness. And um, it's out now.

SPEAKER_01:

I love it, Karen. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you guys for listening to this week's episode of the new Anthony Yemen show. And don't forget, like it says behind me, Finish is Medicine. Thank you guys for listening to this week's episode of Help the Fitness Redefined. Please don't forget to subscribe and share this show with a friend, with a loved one, with those that need to hear it. And ultimately, don't forget Finish is Medicine. I'll see you next time.

Contributor

Anthony Amen

Host