Transcript
Tommy: Welcome to the Physicians for Ancestral Health podcast. Physicians for Ancestral Health is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to educate the medical community worldwide as well as the general public about the principles of ancestral health as well as provide an open forum for physicians to explore these topics. We believe ancestral health provides a much needed perspective of understanding how to prevent and treat chronic disease by integrating human evolutionary history and some other medicine. Our podcast aims to highlight the important principles of ancestral health, why we believe they should be incorporated into modern medical practice, and how physicians within our society and elsewhere are doing this. Here we go. Welcome to the Physician’s for Ancestral Health podcast. My name is Tommy Wood. I am current president of Physicians for Ancestral Health. And this podcast is a new endeavor to try and bring physicians for ancestral health out into the wider world and let people know about us and what we do. And [0:01:00][Inaudible] podcast, Dr. Josh Turknett. Say hello, Josh.
Josh: Hello. Josh.
Tommy: Sorry.
Tommy: So, to give a bit of background about Physicians for Ancestral Health, what we do, that’s kind of how we wanted to start on this first episode. And I know, Josh, you were actually a part of the society before I was. So, maybe you can give a little bit of background of the society, and how you came to know about it, and what the initial goals were, and how we’ve sort of evolved from there.
Josh: Sure. I wasn’t one of the founding members, but I think I’ve gotten on it fairly close. Maybe it had been going on for about a year. It was first launched I think as part of one of the initial Ancestral Health Symposiums. So, that’s part of the Ancestral Health Society, which is an organization that’s kind of aligned with similar principles to ours. They host an annual or semiannual symposium. And I think there were several physicians there who realize they need to perhaps start a separate kind of sister organization of like-minded physicians. And so, a small group of folks I think gathered and formed that initial group. I think the first kind of main event was the winter retreat that they held with the initial founding members and that’s kind of been the core of the organization since then, is our sort of annual winter retreat, which kind of frames the things we do over the course of the year. And so, I got in. The Ancestral Health Symposium was in Atlanta a few years ago and I’m based out of Atlanta. So, I was there just to attend the conference and somebody just happened to mention that there was a group of physicians who are into ancestral health and had an organization and were looking for members. And so, I jumped at the opportunity and then later on that year attended the first of my winter conferences, which we held in Scottsdale, Arizona. And I’ve been I think to three others since then, so four of the winter conferences now including the one we just wrapped up. So yeah, that was it. And the last one we just wrapped up was in San Diego. So, that’s kind of my history of the organization. That’s what I understand about its origins.
Tommy: And I think it’s something that’s important to point out early on, is I guess the goals of the group. And there’ve been a lot of people who are instead in what we do, but who aren’t physicians and have maybe felt that they would want to be part of the organization and felt that it was sort of exclusive somehow, but I think the initial goal of creating the society was that there are a number of ancestral health organizations out there which we are members of too and we interact with our community [0:03:43][Inaudible] people who are more traditionally trained. So, specifically, we focus on MDs and DOs over here in the U.S. and then sort of MDs and the equivalent elsewhere around the world. It’s often very difficult to talk about some of the stuff that we’re talking about. Sleep, or diet, or stress, or movement, or any of these other things that might come under the umbrella of ancestral health or what we like to think of as ancestral health, often you get met with rolling eyes by your colleagues because, you know, that’s just not what doctors do. So, absolutely, people who want to help or work with us or help support our society, we interact with people very frequently. It’s a big part of what we do. Anybody can absolutely come to our winter retreats, which is, you know, every year. Next year, it’s gonna be in Scottsdale. It’s always a lot of fun. It’s always great talks, but then also a lot of more social stuff too. But in terms of what their society does on a day-to-day basis, it’s much more sort of helping to teach other physicians, discussions between ourselves, maybe put it like a safe place where people can come and discuss things that maybe they’re less willing or less able to discuss with their colleagues on a more expanded basis just because, you know, none of this stuff is designed to creep into modern medicine, but we’re still kind of on the bleeding edge or whatever. We’re still sort of out there at the moment. And I think that that’s kind of what we aim to do.
[0:05:00]
So, this podcast is essentially for physicians. It’s each month we’ll release an episode. It’s going to highlight the work initially of members and what they do, how they do what they do. And from there, we’ll obviously expand out further into the medical community, but just sort of give other physicians an idea of how you might incorporate some of these things so then maybe if somebody else is listening to this, if you know a doctor who might be interested or know your doctor might be interested, then you can share this and we can sort of expand that way. And I think that that’s a really important thing to start to do.
Josh: Yeah. I think that the idea behind the organization was to provide a place specifically for physicians. Because if you’re a conventionally trained MD and you get into this area of ancestral health, like a lot of our fellow members have oftentimes through some kind of sort of personal awakening and you start to realize the value of implementing these things and in not just your own life, but then your patient’s life, it can be a lonely place to be in in the world of conventional medicine. So, I remember how thrilled I was just to know that there were kind of other like-minded physicians just out there and had an opportunity to connect with them. And I think there are probably many more folks out there in a similar situation who may not realize there is a community and there’s a growing community of people who are trying to figure out a way to integrate this into a modern medical practice. And so, it is part our goal with this is not only to introduce people to the ideas we care about, but also to find those like-minded folks and give them a place to connect with us.
Tommy: Absolutely. And I feel like every time I meet somebody new at a winter retreat, they’ve just found out about us and they come and join us, they always say, “I thought I was the only one, you know. It was just me crazy out in the wilderness, but there’s actually quite a few of us who think about we want to give people. And through the podcast, you know, those guys come to us, members. You can talk about your work, meet other people. So hopefully, we’ll create a way to sort of spread the word. Okay. So Josh, why don’t we start by me just asking you what ancestral health is.
Josh:: Yeah. It’s a good question. I imagine that may be a term that’s not familiar to everybody or it may mean different things to different people, but it’s kind of the thing that frames sort of the entire organization. We all kind of fundamentally believe in this idea of sort of looking to the past, looking to our ancestors for understanding human health. And I think it probably all goes back to the famous quote “Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution.” You could also probably say nothing in modern medicine makes sense except in light of evolution. And I think that we all know, those of us who were in the clinics day in and day out, we’re seeing almost exclusively diseases of lifestyle these days. And the makeup of the medical clinic now compared to half a century or century ago is entirely different. So, we have this kind of growing crisis of diet and lifestyle diseases and we’re not making a dent. And clearly, what we’re doing hasn’t been helpful. We believe that sort of the best way to understanding not only, you know, why this is happening, but what we can do about it is to understand what evolutionary biology has to say, in particular kind of how the modern diet and lifestyle differs from that of our ancestors and that under which, you know, our biology evolved under for a few 100,000 years. And we know that the environment has changed dramatically not just since civilization, but accelerated even more over the past century. So, there are all sorts of ways now that our lives are misaligned from that of our ancestors in the past who were living a hunter/gatherer lifestyle. And so, we can understand there’s plenty of evidence to support it that you can understand why chronic disease emerges in these modern context by understanding where these misalignment or what we call mismatches are. So, when our current modern diets my lifestyles are mismatched to that our ancestors, so that misalignment not only brings along disease, but also offers a framework for understanding what is probably going to be the most powerful ways to both prevent and even treat and reverse those conditions. And so, most people in the organization not only understand this on an intellectual level, but also have had personal and many professional experience in seeing what a dramatic impact it could have. And so, we realize that, you know, if we could bring this to a broader audience, that it can have the kind of impact on chronic conditions that are bloating our healthcare system that our current treatments aren’t. And so, our goal is to kind of get these ideas out there, get people interested in them, and get research going as well on how best to use them.
Tommy: Absolutely. I think it’s worth mentioning that the idea isn’t to reject modern medicine. Right?
[0:09:59]
We are all physicians trained in the best principles of modern medicine including evidence-based medicine and there were some things that the modern medical system deals with very well, you know, trauma, and a lot of surgery, and acute infections, and sepsis. That stuff, we want to go to the hospital for those things and be treated with the best types of modern medicine. However, like you said, when it comes to more chronic disease, you know, we’re really just dealing with symptoms and basically trying to keep patients together alive as best we can, but not really doing the many favors all the time in terms of trying to reverse the disease, which we know is actually possible. So, integrating those 2 things, allowing on medicine to do what it does best and then preventing those patients becoming patients that have to come into the modern healthcare system is really one of the overarching goals.
Josh: You could even argue that part of the problem is that our actual healthcare system is now mismatched to our patient population. Right? We have a system that was developed primarily to care for a few single variable illnesses like you mentioned. And now, the entire population has changed to where we’re not seeing that primarily. We’re now seeing chronic multivariable conditions that aren’t gonna be amenable to the types of treatments that were developed for that other population. And so, now we’re faced with how do we address that and we think the best starting place is understanding ancestral health and evolutionary biology.
Tommy: Absolutely. So, when we do episodes, we’re basically going, like I said, to start with members of society. So, we’ll go back through the history of the organization to new members who all practice medicine in actually very different ways. Some within traditional medical systems. Some who have chosen to leave the traditional medical system to go out on their own for whatever reasons. So, bring all of those kind of perspectives in, you know, how people are doing this kind of stuff and then sort of go into their work in more detail. So, to kind of start off this first episode, we’re gonna do a set of questions that will ask everybody. So Josh, I’m gonna start by asking you a lot of questions and then you can turn the mic and throw them back on me and just sort of give an idea of how future episodes are likely to flow. So, the first question I have here— In my notes, it says who are you, but I figure we should probably rewrite that for when we’re interviewing people because then maybe a bit more polite. Right? Maybe you can give us a bit of background about your education. You mentioned that you’re based in Atlanta, but in terms of your medical practice and a little bit of how you got to where you are today.
Josh: Yeah. So, again, I’m Dr. Josh Turnett. I have a degree in neuroscience from Wesleyan University in Connecticut. I went on and trained at Emory Medical School and then went on to do my residency training in neurology at the University of Florida. And then from there, I went back to Atlanta, which is also my hometown, and have been in clinical practice in a private practice for a little over a decade and that’s kind of what I did day in and day out. I started getting into the whole realm of ancestral health probably about 7 or 8 years ago and it was actually first just through a few things on the internet and then reading Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes and then sort of going down the rabbit hole. And what I ended up doing myself was kind of changing a lot about my own lifestyle and diet habits and so on. And inadvertently, that had a profound impact not only on lots of ways I felt, but also ended up profoundly impacting my own migraines. So, I’m a neurologist and a long-time migraine sufferer and sort of ironically stumbled upon this great way of treating migraines by accident. So, not only was that up humbling, but that was also eye opening to say that, you know, there’s a lot more out there than we realize and that there’s probably a lot more power and potency in this approach and many people know that we’ve even scratched the surface on. And so, that experience kind of changed a lot about how I thought about medicine and how I approached my own practice and, you know, made it harder for me to figure out how to deliver the care that I wanted to bring to people within the confines of a traditional healthcare practice. And and part of what I did to try to just figure out how can I actually reach these people, how can I make a difference given the constraints that I’m currently in, one of the things I did was wrote a book about using an ancestral health approach for treating migraines and that started a community that continues to this day and continues to grow. And that’s been a rewarding thing to do for me. And so, that’s changed kind of how my practices evolved. And it’s also changed kind of what I’m doing now with my career, but I’d say it was years ago with that initial experience that kind of sparked this path that I’ve been on since then of trying to figure out how I can personally integrate this stuff into my own life and career and then how we can get this out to a broader audience because it’s so desperately needed in so many ways.
[0:15:00]
Tommy: So, what does your practice look like now? Maybe you can also tell us a little bit about the transition because, I mean, you transitioned to a less traditional model very recently. So, maybe tell us about how you do that.
Josh: Yeah. So, a few years ago, in addition to writing the book about migraines and starting to build an online community around that, I also launched another business that integrated another one of my interests, which is in human learning and specifically learning music. So, I started that business a few years ago partly as a means of figuring out how I could exit the day to day practice so that it would give me the freedom to figure out how to make a bigger impact with some of these ideas with ancestral health and so on. And so, I kind of slowly backed off on the day to day clinical practice to where nowadays I’m only in in there very part time and then I also run the community. It’s mainly an online community for migrant nurse and so some private coaching for that as well as run the business that I have called Brainjo, which is currently a learning platform for people who are learning how to play the banjo and most recently the fiddle.
Tommy: That’s very cool. And we’re gonna have you on another episode where you will be the sole guest and I will grill you about Brainjo because it’s pretty cool.
Josh: I can’t wait.
Tommy: So, my next question is about incorporating ancestral health principles into a patient work. And I guess you’ve kind of given us an idea of how you do that now, but maybe you can talk about whether you manage to do it before now or whether part of the reason that you change things is because it was difficult to do it previously.
Josh: It’s exceedingly hard and it’s hard for a lot of reasons. Some of those have to do with the way our healthcare system is structured. A lot of the interventions that we’d like to implement, a lot of the testing that we would like to do aren’t possible partly because of time constraints, partly because they’re not covered by insurance, and also the current expectation of the modern healthcare practices that you come and you know you have a short visit. You come out with a prescription for a medication and you’re not expecting either your treatment or therapy to be a lifestyle change in most cases and then you put on top of that the fact that if you’re doing something that’s in addition to or even in replace of the “standard of care”, even if you think it’s by far in the best interest of your patient, you’re also putting yourself at some degree of risk. And so, it’s a challenge trying to navigate all those waters within a conventional setting. So, I definitely changed how I went about treating my own patients in several ways and I would try wherever possible and whenever the door was open for that. I would go there, you know, with particular patients if anyone said “if there’s anything else for me besides a drug”, I was more than happy to spend the time needed to talk about that, but that was still the exception to the rule. So, one of the reasons that I decided to extricate myself was to try to find a venue and a platform where I could actually deliver the value that I can deliver and where I could align myself with the people who actually were ready to receive that. And those 2 things were very much misaligned for a long time and I couldn’t myself particularly also as a neurologist in specialty practice where you don’t really get to select who comes to see you. It was really hard for me to figure out how to integrate and practice in the way I really wanted to practice within the confines of the traditional system.
Tommy: Yeah. And I think that’s gonna be a common thread through a lot of the people who are part of the society. You know, there are those who have managed to make it work. And say somebody who’s listening to this is either unsure that anything we’re talking about is even something that’s worth talking about or something they can do with their patients or unsure of how to implement that, do you have any particular advice of where maybe to start thinking about this or reading about this or thinking about incorporating it? Do you have any tips you picked up along the way?
Josh: Yeah. For the doctor who’s sort of in the traditional setting and looking for a way to integrate this. My general approach was I knew what the best case scenario was for my patients, right, and the challenge is then trying to take a patient who comes to you and figure out where they are, right, how far away are they from implementing that ideal scenario. Right? And so, for me, identifying sort of what the progression would look like if I were to take someone who’s sedentary, leading the kind of the worst possible lifestyle, and if I could figure out, you know, what were gonna be the most impactful changes that they could make right then with the least amount of friction, those are the things I was gonna go after first and I would look for any signs in a conversation that someone was ready even for that first initial step. ‘Cause if you can give someone a quick win with something especially if it’s something that doesn’t require too much sacrifice, then that can also oftentimes build momentum that they can then use to go further.
[0:20:00]
So, for me, I was always trying to figure out what those sort of high impact, low hanging fruit, 80/20 interventions were that could get someone started and then sort of you’re always listening for that little opening where I could get someone onboard with something like that.
Tommy: So, you’re using principles of maybe special interviewing. Did you have the time and the scope to do that kind of thing or was it— you know, were you just sort of— you’d hear something that then you could sort of jump on and expand from there?
Josh: Yeah. Probably more likely a modified version of motivational interviewing, so not with the full time to implement that in its entirety, but that kind of idea, you know, trying to listen. I think having some kind of awareness of the concept of stages of change and understanding where people are along that and how ready they are because one of the things that you quickly realize is if you go down this path and you realize everybody needs to be doing this to get the results that you want for them, right, if you try to sit there and spend an hour with every single person doing it, you’re going to spend almost all your time just spinning your wheels without anything to show for it. So, it’s about trying to leverage your time as best you can and that’s why, I mean, I think probably every single patient encounter for me was different because it was always trying to tailor and meet the person where they were where I had that end goal in mind. I was trying to figure out where they’re at then, what the next step would be and move them along the progression and if they were ready for that.
Tommy: So then, turning the other way, in your position, you’re trying to explore the potential for a patient to maybe think about some of these things or implement some of these things. Do you have any particular resources or places you’d send them to, things you recommend they read, or anything like that to maybe sort of get that process started?
Josh: For me, the best place for me to intervene was either in the realm of migraines or epilepsy because those are 2 areas where people already have some level of awareness that diet and lifestyle matters. I had my own information fortunately that I could start to direct people to and that’s part of why I started writing and creating my own blog, in my own articles, and a book so that I could have somewhere to direct people to, you know, for information because there wasn’t a lot at that time. Incidentally, I think that’s another thing that our organization can help provide people with as well, is for sort of that sort of first step for people to take in different areas. I would listen for other areas even if they are outside of my domain if someone was having digestive issues or if they were diabetic. You know, I might suggest other resources for them along those lines or just to listen to other people’s stories and just plant the seed that there may be other approaches or complementary approaches that they can implement in addition to what they’re already doing.
Tommy: Yeah. Which is gonna be huge just doing that I think and that’s something that anybody, you know, regardless of the setting they were in can start to do.
Josh: Yeah.
Tommy: And you did kind of allude to your answer to my final question by saying that PAH society can start to create some resources maybe for physicians to share with patients, but how else do you think PAH can do its job? We want to reach more people, you know, let people know that we exist and that we can help them, we provide some value for them. So, how do you think we can do our job better?
Josh: Like I mentioned before, providing resources for patients to let them know our particular approach and how it might apply to different conditions. The more of us that are out there and that are visible in doing these things and showing that they’re both valid, and scientifically defensible, and evidence based I think is huge and sort of reframing how others might see it and moving it from something that’s viewed sort of on the fringes to something that’s seen as complementary. And I think the more of us that are out there as our organization grows and the more resources that we can put out there that are along those lines, that’s the sort of thing I want from this organization for people to feel, not to feel like they’re just completely out on the limb if they’re trying to do this and then like we were just talking about providing resources for people who are in different sorts of contexts whether it’s traditional practice, or sort of some hybrid setting, or completely on their own how they can go about integrating all this stuff in those different forms. I think those are the sorts of things because we have people who can offer all those sorts of perspectives.
Tommy: Absolutely. And we’ll have members listening to this all of whom are in completely different specialties and different settings like you say. And you know, if we can leverage their knowledge individually, it becomes a much less daunting task to— You know, writing patient guidelines, if just one person sits down and try to do it, it’s gonna be very difficult. But if each person is an expert in that one particular area, one is experienced in that one area and can put something together, you know, very quickly we can put together a body of evidence. So, those guys who are listening, we’re gonna be calling on you to help us do that. Okay. I think that’s the end of my standard questions for you.
[0:25:00]
Josh: All right. It’s your turn.
Tommy: Yeah.
Josh: All right. So, why don’t you tell us just a little bit about yourself and your background?
Tommy: Sure. So, as people can probably tell, I grew up in the UK. That’s where I did most of my education. I have an undergraduate degree in biochemistry or specialize in my chemistry and then I did my medical degree, worked for a couple of years in London. So, I was what we call a junior doctor, foundation year doctor years 1 and 2. For those who are familiar with that system, it’s kind of equivalent to an internship year and then first year of residency, something like that over here. I mainly did internal medicine, but you do a lot of different things in your first couple of years as a doctor in the UK. So, I did some surgery, some elderly care, done some emergency medicine. You sort of rotate through pretty much all the departments. Then after I’ve done that, I was given the offer of moving to Norway to do a PhD in physiology and neuroscience. So, I moved over there. I worked there for 3 years, completed my PhD a year and a half ago. And then during that period of time, I started to create a blog about sort of all things I find interesting and useful in health, generally lifestyle-based approaches to improving health. I had a podcast for a short period of time. And previously running up to that, I had learned about some of the sort of— I guess back then it was the Paleo principles of health through things like Crossfit. I’ve worked with guys like Robb Wolf and sort of implementing some of those principles into some of the athletes that I coach. So, I was a rower and I coached rowing during both my undergraduate and medical degrees. And during that period of time, it was the end of medical school. I started to do a bit of work with some family members with multiple sclerosis and sort of trying to build a big picture, a big sort of systems thinking picture of what might affect multiple sclerosis and other related neurological and chronic diseases. And a lot of what came up seemed very similar to some of things I was hearing from other guys like Robb Wolf, some people in the Paleo kind of arena in terms of things that might affect disease. And as I then had time later during my PhD to kind of sit down and research more of this stuff because I wasn’t running around the wards as a junior doctor all the time, that sort of turned into me communicating with the wider world through electronic media about just my thoughts about those things and some of the research behind it. And then during that period of time, I met Christopher Kelly who I work with now as part of our company where we do this kind of stuff specifically with athletes, but also with some chronic disease patients. And I also met my now fiancée, Elizabeth, who lives in the US. So, I moved over to Seattle after I finished my PhD and that’s where I am now.
Josh: At what point along these lines did you end up finding out about and joining up with Physicians for Ancestral Health?
Tommy: So, about a year after I started my blog, I was invited to speak at the UK’s first Paleo conference. It’s called Health Unplugged. And I went over there and I actually gave a— As I like to do, I gave a pretty contrary talk. I gave a talk about why grains and legumes maybe aren’t all that bad for health or scenarios where, you know, we shouldn’t worry about them so much. Just sort of get the Paleo guys talking. And Polina who wasn’t president at that time, but is our most recent president, she’s now the past president, she was there. She met the guy who organized the conference at PrimalCon I think. Mark’s PrimalCon. And he invited her over. She came over and then she said, you know, “Do you want to come to our winter retreat?” I guess this is about 3 months after the conference where I met her. It immediately made sense to me. I didn’t know the people. I didn’t know what it was gonna be like, but I knew I was gonna give a talk. It was gonna be a Scottsdale. You know, I had some old family friends who lived in Scottsdale. So, I knew I could like stay with them for a day beforehand. I’m a PhD student who has to travel frequently to see his girlfriend in America. So, I mean, I don’t really have very much money or any money at all, but I was like “Sure. I’ll go ahead.” And I turned up. And you know, it was just such a great group of people who just all had really interesting things to say and everybody was very open minded. And you know, there was people there who, you know, I’d listen to on podcast very frequently, so Rocky Patel. People might have heard of him. He’s done a lot of work with Kiefer like carbnite and carb backloading. Just people who like I’d listen to their podcast. You know, this guy is amazing and now he sat across to me the other side of the table and lots of really well-known guys who sort of moved to the side [0:29:31][Inaudible] You know, people like Terry Wells, Lyndon Plateau, Mark Leads. You know, some people who are pretty well known and they continue to interact with us. I thought, you know, these are the people, these are the physicians, the doctors doing the kind of stuff that I find really interesting. You know, here they are all in one room. So, that really inspired me to join and I’ve been a member ever since.
Josh: Cool. So, you mentioned that now you’re with Nourish Balance Thrive and we’ll dig a little bit deeper into all this in your hot seat session.
[0:30:00]
Can you briefly tell us kind of what you guys do there?
Tommy: Yeah.
Josh: And also maybe how you kind of bring in the ancestral health view into that work as well.
Tommy: Sure. So, it’s a completely online coaching service, coaching program. And we mainly work with clients on a fully signed up subscription type service. So, when you sign up to work with us, you work with us for a year. We’ll include a whole host of testing, largely blood testing, but also some urine and stool testing. And you’ll get all the coaching you need; any kind of supplements, vitamins; anything that turns up in testing that we think that we can help if you need some kind of supplementation, which athletes particularly do. You know, they have great requirements for a number of things. And it’s generally an athletic population that we work with. And Christopher Kelly, who founded the company, he was a professional mountain biker or he had a pro license. So, he made his money doing something else, but he was riding at that level and then his health fell apart and he founded the company to try and help other athletes do the same to fix their health like he basically figured out how to do by himself because the traditional medical systems didn’t really do much for much. And I, like I said, just sort of met him online and I think I spoke to him on the phone and then I sent him an e-mail everyday with 20 references and 4,000 lines of texts about [0:31:17][Inaudible] performance athletes and eventually it was like “Okay. Fine. Just come and be part of the company. And that’s kind of where I am now. I was the chief medical officer. I’m now the chief scientific officer just because I don’t have a medical license in the US. It’s always worth mentioning that. I haven’t jumped through all the hoops required to do that because it would take a long period of time. And you know, I don’t need to be able to prescribe antibiotics to do the job that I want to do. So, that’s how we work with people. Like I said it’s entirely online and we provide everything for a given person. And where that sort of helps with the ancestral type approach is that these guys were very lucky that they have fully bought in to the kind of things that we do. So, when someone decides to work with us, they often heard me on multiple podcasts. Maybe they’ve read articles that we’ve put out. They may have heard other members of the team on the podcast and we have our own podcast, the Nourish Balance Thrive podcast. So, people know a lot about us. They know that we’re kind of Paleo or ancestral health centric and that it’s all aspects of your life that you’re gonna work on. So, you might be somebody with a specific performance goal and it’s worth pointing out that, you know, you don’t need to be a specific level of athlete. Your performance goal could just be I don’t want to get out of breath when I go for a walk or I wanna be able to play with my kids. That’s still a performance goal and we’d still gladly help you do that. But people are very much bought in and they know how we function. So, anything that fits in the ancestral health’s fare, they know that that’s gonna come up. So, if we’re talking about going outside and, you know, being exposed to sunlight, that’s gonna help your circadian rhythm. Or if we talk about a real food diet, it might be Paleo based or maybe the autoimmune Paleo type base if somebody has a specific autoimmune type issue. And that’s just kind of the basis of how we work and we’re very lucky that people know that that’s gonna be part of it and they usually come to us and they’re already implementing some of those things, which somebody comes and they’re doing everything already and they still need more help, that obviously makes them trickier to work with. You know, other people come to us and they haven’t changed anything and then there’s a lot of quick wins together as well. So, it’s different because it’s very easy for us to implement those things because we’re completely free. We’re not actually providing a medical service. We’re mainly providing a coaching service and anything else in terms of medical care will need to go through their regular physician, but sometimes things crop up that does need to be seen by a physician in person. And actually, clients have had very good success in general. You know, we can send test results. We can send letters. We can explain what we do. And if you do that in the right way, I think you can usually foster a pretty good conversation there. Actually, a lot of our clients are doctors who find this stuff interesting, either wanted to fix their own health or wanted to learn more about what we do, so figure the best way to do it was to go through our program. So, you know, there’s a lot of interest out there. I think it’s just helping people figure out how to do that.
Josh: Uh-huh. So, you’re obviously someone who is taking these principles and you’re implementing them in a very unique setting outside of the norm, but I think it’s pretty telling that you’re working with people who are not only trying to optimize their own health and wellness, but oftentimes sort of pushing their bodies to the limits. You’re able to do that without even needing prescription pad, which I think—
Tommy: Absolutely.
Josh: …would blow a lot of people’s minds. Right? Even that is kind of a revolutionary idea, but I think it speaks to the power and the potential of what can happen when you do implement these ideas. But as a member of the Physicians for Ancestral Help organization, what do you kind of see is ways that the organization could do its job better and particularly to serve someone like you who’s operating kind of in a different type of context?
Tommy: So, I think the main thing that we need to do as an organization is have people know that we exist.
[0:35:00]
And it sounds kind of crazy, but what I’ve noticed being part of the society for almost 4 years now is that we have a core group of people, which obviously includes yourself and some of the founders and then, you know, people kind of come in. Maybe they’ll come to one retreat, but then they’ll sort of disappear off again. And I think part of it is we don’t get that continual growth. And then when people do join us, we need to give them some real value, you know, some reason to be part of the group. And it’s great to come to the winter retreats, but we want to be something that’s supportive of these members pretty much continuously throughout the year. And you know, we’re gonna be starting some discussion groups through slacks if you can come up and ask questions and everybody can chime in. And it really is like a judgment-free zone. I think one real issue with doctors in general is that we feel like we’re always supposed to know the answer. And particularly, if you’ve been taught in the kind of era of paternalistic medicine, which is kind of starting to disappear, but, you know, it’s always like the patient asks the doctor and the doctor should know the answer. And it’s often similar when doctors are all in a room together, right? Everybody has to show that they’re clever and they know what they’re doing. And they have to be the person who’s the expert. This group luckily just really isn’t like that. And I think that’s one of the benefits of being part of the group, but I think just because if you’re somebody who has failed essentially to give your patients the care that you wanted to give them and then you find out this whole other load of stuff that you just had no idea about, I think it’s quite humbling in a good way and then, you know, that makes you much more open. Starting to know what you don’t know I think is really important and, you know, just making sure that we provide that for people continuously throughout the year. It’s gonna be a big part of how we can grow and spread the word. And I think that’s something that we can definitely do better and that’s something that I certainly hope to do over the next couple of years and through that and some other continuing education pieces. So, obviously, the podcast I think is gonna be important and then we will also be doing monthly webinars where we could do the same. And again, it’s a chance for members and other people that we know out in the world to share some knowledge and it’s gonna be hopefully a really good sort of continuing education piece for ourselves and then the members as well. So, that’s where I’d like to focus, is providing continual support for the members and making sure there’s real value to being a member, you know, even beyond being associated or a member of such a great group of people, which I think is a great reason to be a member in the first place, and then helping people know that we exist and that’s part of what we’re trying to do right now.
Josh: Yeah. Really is an outstanding group of people. You know, I think there’s a bit of a selection bias because anybody who kind of joins is gonna be (A) a little bit open minded and a little bit unconventional and have an independent streak and (B) interesting. And then the conference itself is kind of almost an anti-conference. We’re all dying to get out of our chairs after 45 minutes or so and there aren’t any drug reps around. And so, I think it’s a refreshing place to be for a lot of us. And I think we all come away wishing we could do it more. And I think part of the challenge with growing the organization is just because the average physician is very busy. And so, adding anything new into the routine of daily life is always a challenge, but I think we can continue to think about ways we can do that to bring more people in. If someone’s listening right now and they do wanna make sure they get connected with us, what do you think the best place to direct them to is?
Tommy: The easiest thing for now is to head to our website, which is ancestraldoctors.org. I think we will be moving URLs at some point, but everything will redirect. So, you can go there. There’ll be links. Follow us on Twitter. Webinars will be up there and then also information on how to join will be there. And if none of it makes any sense, you could always e-mail us. So, the e-mail addresses are gonna be on the website too. So, head there. If you e-mail us, you’ll be in contact with one of the board members. So, you’re talking to one of the guys who is really helping to run the society. We’re always there surrounds to answer any questions.
Josh: Excellent.
Tommy: Well, I think this is a good place to finish for our first episode. I enjoyed it and we’ll see you next time.
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