Ask Dr. Cheryl

Topics discussed in this episode:

• Educating ourselves despite a broken healthcare system (1:56)
• When does the healthcare system help and hurt us (3:57)
• The key to chronic disease prevention and management (6:09)
• A lifestyle of health (9:05)
• Dr. Cheryl’s philosophy on nutrition and lifestyle medicine (11:57)

Transcript:

Welcome to the wellness table, I’m Dr. Cheryl, and today we’re gonna talk about how the healthcare system is broken.

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One of the things I hear so often from friends, family, patients, and even providers themselves is the word broken as they describe our healthcare system that we have today in America. And I find that to be really interesting because as we think about broken, what's making us feel broken and what's happening and what's the real, how do we help people feel like they’re a whole person, they're not just siloed into here's a specialist here, here’s a specialist over here, but they feel like sometimes what I'm hearing from that I'm not look at his person, and how do I actually feel today? Or also, as we look at it, are we searching for a diagnosis that we can then feel like okay, I have this diagnosis, are we also looking for a, a medication? And so we're very trained in healthcare to what's the diagnosis, what's the standard treatment, and kind of go down these pathways and I think sometimes people feel lost in the process. We also find in the insurance model, we do need a diagnosis. We do need that well, the diagnostic code, so that we know how we can bill. But we also have time allotment for that bill. And so in that, as a provider we have so much time to provide a service, and there's not a lot of money that's given for education. Or to teach someone how to eat well, or how to live well, or to talk about are you exercising? Some of the lifestyle habits and some of the things that we know make such a difference.

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And so as we feel this broken system, I began to search for how can we get insurance to pay for prevention before we have our first symptom and how can we get more education at those visits or teach more about, these are the things we can do, the very, very simple things like we talked about making more water gives us 20% more energy. How can we feel better, how we balance blood sugar, how can we lower blood pressure when we talk about, I come to my appointment, and I learned I have high blood pressure. It's a little alarming. Now I have this new diagnosis and in that model now we figured out we have a diagnosis now what's the right medication for it and we're sent home to take that medication and when we take that medication, we might also Google oh boy I have high blood pressure, I don’t know if I want to take this medication, do I have to take it for the rest of my life, what other things I can do and sometimes we might Google Oh, if I exercise or if I was lose a little bit of weight or I do some things other things, I could also lower my blood pressure. So if we go back to our visit, three months, we get a follow up visit and our provider is asking us did you take your medication, did you do it as prescribed? Yes, I took my medication, it's 20 milligrams, I take it twice a day and then we can come back and realize that blood pressure lowered. That's exciting. But at the same time, we might have started drinking water more, we may have started walking a little bit, or maybe we decided maybe we should lose that maybe five pounds that can, might make a difference in our blood pressure. We might have added those blueberries and listened to a podcast that said eat one cup of blueberries and that made a difference. But when we go back to our visit, what I found and what I was observing as I moved into healthcare as a health care professional is that the medicine gets the credit. The medicine so often gets the credit for everything cuz we sort of remember that what that medicine is, and we are taking that medicine as prescribed.

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When people are looking at our healthcare system is broken, and that we have research showing that like in the United States, we're spending the most money on health care, and yet we have the worst outcomes with chronic disease. And I'm looking at it and saying, Well, what if you had a heart attack? And what if you had a car accident? When we look at acute care, and when we look at trauma, I think we have a really awesome system when it comes to saving lives. What I see is broken is the chronic lifestyle, preventable diseases like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, high blood pressure, these are things that we see in lifestyle and in nutrition, that we can prevent most of these diseases, or delay them by up to 10 to 12 years by just doing a few simple things. And what we find is that this is also what's debilitating, so many people. So it's chronic disease management is where we see the broken and acute care we're doing really well. And in trauma we're doing really well but also as we chase siloed medicine where it's here's a specialist if I have a kidney problem, if I’ve have had a stroke I go to the neurologist, if I’ve had a heart attack, I go to the cardiologist, we can start to feel like we're not a whole person, that system of whom I go to and who's gonna look at all of me and my quality of life, and then we move into the insurance model. So I feel like our insurance model sometimes mandates, well it does mandate, how we get our health care, we have to get a referral from a provider to show that we definitely do need to go to this provider and this specialist. So we begin to feel like we are a broken person in pieces. And insurance only covers things that match the protocol or the model for a diagnosis. And yet at the same time, we feel like well, if there's prevention, if I could prevent this, I really want to do that. Well, some people aren't interested in prevention. They do seek care at the first symptom of many times a heart attack. So the key to chronic disease prevention, management, and treatment and where the insurance model fails us, is nutrition and lifestyle medicine are the answer for chronic disease for for prevention also to live younger longer to improve quality of life. And that piece is a part of nutrition lifestyle medicine which is not covered in the insurance model.

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The first system that I think began to break away and do some really creative, more education focused things is Kaiser, it's an HMO product. And when you start to think about what would I do, if I had if, I was a CEO of a company, and I have to pay for all the medical for everybody in my company or in my family or in my community and I was paying medical bills for all of your medical with no insurance. Investing in education versus giving you a medication and a diagnosis and sending you home. And the assumption for so many providers is they're not going to change. I want to see this. It's not all the providers fault or the insurance fault. They've just banked on the statistics that if less than 1% of the world is eating healthy, they're probably not going to change so I better invest in more medications. Medications people will be more likely to take than to eat differently. But Kaiser came in and said if we're going to invest, we're going to do more education. And that's where they began and they did a lot of education. But then a lot of the other insurance models began to model it so you might get eight diabetes classes if you're if you are newly diagnosed diabetes, but that’s it that's your lifetime max. And unless you have an event, you don't get any more classes if you still might be confused as to what I need to do. But there's a lot of great research that we find in different countries. I mean, Australia, I think has a lot of prevention. And when we see a lot of these natural treatments and things we'll see them coming out of some of the other countries, but so many times not as tested. And so I think it's super important as we look at maybe research is where we have to look because in research we spend a lot of our time creating the right pharmaceutical drug, like when we had COVID. How do we boost immune system? How do we get a COVID vaccine? Look at the money we put into that in the United States, in the entire world. That was a global message. What if that was put into that same money investing in preventing diabetes, or preventing cardiovascular disease? Ultimately, it was just education. It wasn't a vaccine when you showed up, but would people not listen to it? Are people interested in prevention? The majority of people don't seek care until they've had a pain point. So that's also the reality as a provider that you're trying to help people make changes that are long lasting not just for three weeks or for short term or just until the pain goes away.

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So I really think that we're so used to I have pain. I take Advil. I reduce that pain, and I forget about prevention after that, and I look at health as a process. It's a lifestyle. Being healthy is really doing healthy. It's the actionable, behavioral changes that we do every day. And when we do more of eating the foods that make us well and healthy habits that are healing, that's being as healthy as we can be today. And that's really my goal is how can I help people be as healthy as they can be today, including all the things that they love to eat, things that they enjoy doing. Because health is also part of joy and happiness. But putting that all together in a lifestyle that’s made just for you, that you feel like you can do this every day for the rest of your life. And when you feel that change in your body, when you feel more energy, when those headaches start going away, when you start waking up in the morning feeling recharged and revived, when you start when you can go to sleep at night without needing a sleep medication. When you’ve destressed and you start to really enjoy life and be present, that's real health. That's real happiness. And that's what helps us to really have quality of life. And that's what I want for everyone is like quality of life number one. And as we have that quality of life, which is true health and happiness, we will naturally live longer. So I want to talk a little bit about what our part is in the broken system because we play a really big role in it. And so we talked a little bit earlier about how people would vote to die 10 years earlier than to make a behavior change or to change the food that we eat. That's really a big deal when we really we think about it because our providers are hearing that, our medical model is watching that. So if I were to look at what's my best way to help you look healthy it is I can give you that quick fix that we want. We want that quick fix, take a pill or sometimes people will describe my nutrition lifestyle program as the golden nugget, the magic pill that everyone's looking for, but they still want us to take that food and break it down into a nutrition supplement. Our part in the brokenness is can I just buy a pill that would fix this and then I don't have to make any other changes and that's the part we have to own. So the pharmaceutical companies know that very well. And it's a lot easier and simpler than saying let's talk about your diet. So we have a way of using pills to help give you a perceived quick fix. It's often what I call feeling good on credit, you may not live longer, and it may only make it look good again when we talk about health as a static point in time.

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So when only 1% of the United States is eating healthy, and this includes children. This is super low number and we know about foods that can improve health but what we see is we're not moving that dial of changing how we eat. When we pursue nutrition and lifestyle medicine over the last 20 years. It's the people that have the money to be able to see programs like even our take 10 program and other people can go to concierge medicine and they can get some of this extra care and extra information. But nutrition and lifestyle medicine is something that we usually have to pursue ourselves. We read a book, we find a health influencer, we start to look ourselves and seek this care, and finding a trusted source is so important when it comes to nutrition and lifestyle medicine and my heart was to provide nutrition and lifestyle medicine with free resources, simple tools like the score and the plate, and move wellness into your own hands. And this whole platform of Dr. Cheryl wellness is all about taking the best of what I learned from traditional medicine, about nutrition, the foods we eat, the best habits to live, putting those in that 20 point score and being able to share that with the world and inspire healthier living for everyone and give everyone just information that is trusted. It's accurate. We've tested it and it's really free to the world. That’s what the podcast will be about, just talking about what are the best ways? What foods to eat? How do we live and having fresh conversations about cutting edge, latest nutrition science, latest information on if I have diabetes, what do I do? Or if my mom was just diagnosed with breast cancer, am I going to suffer that same disease? All these conversations? Can we change genetic expression? It's really exciting to see how food can actually change the way our gene expresses either cancer promoting or cancer prevention.

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Thanks for coming to the table, where every week we're going to talk about nutrition, longevity, and what it means to be well. If you would like to have your specific questions answered, become a member today to get access to our weekly private podcast: Ask Dr. Cheryl, where we get to talk about wellness together. I can’t wait to see you on the inside.

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