I like the metaphor this doctor uses to explain how to achieve health. She says she sees herself as the mother of the 40 trillion cells in her body. The cells are like little babies. They can’t talk, but they can make symptoms to let her know if their needs are not being met. And there are only a few needs that they have. So it’s not hard to keep them healthy usually. And for the more difficult ailments, she has advice on how to do online searches to find the best remedies for them too and how to find better healthcare practitioners. She says it’s time to find better alternatives to the corrupt mainstream among the uncorrupted mainstream. I made a transcript of the second half of the video below where she discusses positive actions to take.
How Doctors Are Paid to Keep Us Sick | Guest: Dr. Casey Means
{POOR PUBLIC HEALTH.} {Public health is} terrible ... in the United States, like 6 of 10 adults have chronic illness; ... over 75% overweight or obese; 50% of American adults with pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes, almost totally preventable; 30% of children with pre-diabetes (that was zero % 50 years ago); 45% of children overweight or obese; nearly 20% of kids with fatty liver disease (things that doctors would never have seen in their career 50 years ago); 40% of 18 year-olds with a mental health diagnosis.
{TO THE RESCUE.} ... But I'm very optimistic, because we are ... living in a time where just in the last two to three years there's sort of this Personal Empowerment Revolution ... in our health care system. Part of it's technology and part ... of it is I think the response from COVID. People are feeling a lot more like: I need to ... be more of an active participant in my healthcare, because the healthcare system really let us down during {Covid}. So with the technology side just in the last few years, there's now tons of companies doing direct-to-consumer lab testing. So you don't have to like beg your ... doctor {to do} basic lab work on their timeline. You can literally go online and order 100 biomarkers {for} 409 dollars ... and with ... deep interpretation. So that's one. There's now wearables, {so} you can really understand a lot of your core vital signs. ... This is an aura ring. ... So this tells {me my} sleep, my steps, my oxygen saturation, my heart rate variability, stress levels, all sorts of things. So that's really amazing; if I start to see something going in the wrong direction {I can} take action myself, ... before it gets to be a problem. We've got biosensors, like continuous glucose monitors, that can tell you in real time what's happening with your blood sugar, as opposed to waiting a year from now for your doctor to give you a single data point about your blood sugar and maybe say it's getting worse or whatever. {So} you can see it now in real time without having to go to the doctor. So there's these trends of personal empowerment and data that are very, very exciting. And currently they're expensive, {so} those aren't ... necessarily accessible to everyone, but it's a movement.
{IT’S SIMPLE.} ... A big message that I wanna really share with people is that ... it's not as complicated as we've been led to believe. So if we think about symptoms anywhere in the body, liver, kidney, thyroid, ... all symptoms that we have are necessarily the result of dysfunction within ourselves. They have to be. ... Our entire bodies is just like 40 trillion cells and we don't have a symptom arise out of thin air. It has to arise out of dysfunction and how our cells are working. And there's not ... actually that many things that affect how our cells function. It's literally like food, sleep, movement, stress, temperature, light and toxins. Of course there's genetics. ... {So} look what the biomarkers are saying. So if you have symptoms and your biomarkers are off, it means you turn some knobs probably on those dietary lifestyle things ... pretty simple how to do that. It's like get more sleep, move more, eat more real food, ... less processed food, etcetera, again all outlined in my book. But starting there with ... a real first-principles framework about what's going on, I think can be really, really empowering.
{BE YOUR OWN NANNY.} One of the ways I look at my body is ... I'm like the mother to my 40 trillion cells. And they're all like little infants and they can't speak in words. So if they're not getting their needs met, they speak in symptoms. And just like a baby, there's not that many {problems} that you would necessarily adjust if you have a crying baby. It's like you need a diaper change. Are they cold or too hot? Do they need to sleep? Do they {need} milk? Like with our cells, you kind of just run through a checklist as well. It's like food, sleep, exercise, stress, temperature, light, toxins, etcetera and it's just really doing an inventory of ... what these cells need and then how do I not overburden them with things that they don't need that are cause them to break just little machines. They're little factories. We know how they work. Like that's the beauty of our scientific world is that we do really know how cells work. ... That all sounds a little intimidating, but ... it's actually not ... that challenging. The {healthcare} system wants us to think it's complex, but if we {got} ourselves into this chronic disease mess in 50 to 75 years, clearly, it's not that ... complicated. ... We know how the environment changed. We know how to protect ourselves. So we have to be empowered, understand a little bit about the biology, understand a little bit about how to interpret our own biomarkers....
{BODY POSITIVITY.} ... And then {we} just have {to have} the boldness to take action in our own lives. And sometimes that means being a little counterculture and doing a little differently than everyone in the community is doing. And it's worth it because being sick is not fun. Speaking of counterculture, there is kind of a movement … we see more on social media. The body positivity movement, which I think has some positives to it, absolutely. ... But when it comes to ... the fat positivity movement, ... one thing that's coming out more and more is like how many of these nutritionists that are pushing some of these messages are actually paid for directly by the processed food companies. So you always have to follow the money.... {A} lot of these TikTok and Instagram nutrition influencers are getting direct payments from processed food companies.... It would absolutely be in their best interest for everyone to think that {overweight is good}. {Processed} foods are designed by food scientists to get us to be insatiably hungry and eat as much of it as possible. So always follow the money. ... There are people who are overweight who are metabolically healthy. It's a small percentage, but what everyone needs to know is whether they are metabolically healthy. Because if that's the case, you're gonna avoid a lot of the top killers of ... people ... and you're gonna have better longevity. But if you're not metabolically healthy, you are more likely to suffer from many of the nonlethal symptoms that are plaguing us from depression, anxiety, migraine, fibromyalgia, ... infertility, erectile dysfunction, all the way to the things that are gonna kill us, like stroke, heart disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer's, dementia, fatty liver disease. All of those are on the metabolic spectrum. So you have to know if you're metabolically healthy.
{FIVE BIOMARKERS.} ... Healthy or not, you literally have to look at 5 biomarkers that are generally free on your annual physical. ... These are the criteria for metabolic syndrome, which is fasting glucose, triglycerides, HDL cholesterol, waist circumference and blood pressure. ... And if people have a fasting glucose under ... 100 milligrams per liter, a triglyceride level under 150 milligrams per liter, and HDL cholesterol above 50 for women or above 40 for men, waist circumference less than 35 inches for women and 40 for men, and blood pressure under 120 / 85, they fit the criteria for metabolically healthy and they will likely have a much lower rate of all the chronic diseases affecting Americans today. It's that simple. Those are basically free. ... The wild information is that only 6.8% of Americans now have the healthy levels of all five of those biomarkers, {people} not on medication. ... It should be 100%. Those are all lifestyle based. ... Every American should know where they are, whether they're in that 6.8% or not, and if they're not, they should do everything in their power to get there. ... It's pretty simple to do. Eat real food ..., sleep, move your body, manage your stress, don't overload your body with synthetic toxins, etcetera....
{FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE ETC.} ... How should a patient best advocate for ourselves or our loved ones? ... The primary thing I would say is that never be afraid to ask questions and always probe deeper. You ... are the customer. ... You get to ask the questions and, if your doctor's not willing to sit with you, ... and answer your questions, ... find a new Doctor. ... Consider seeing ... a more holistic-focused doctor, like a functional medicine doctor. There's a great website { https://www.ifm.org/ }, which is Institute for functional medicine. ... And these are doctors who ... {are} looking at all your records and helping you ... put the pieces together of how they all relate. They'll also often order more extensive lab work. ... Parsley Health is a wonderful digital health organization that's very affordable and takes insurance {with any doctor} that practices functional medicine. And then I would also just consider if you have a diagnosis that's stubborn, like a hypothyroidism, ... go onto Google and search your symptom and then just {add} "functional medicine" or ... "dietary lifestyle strategies", after it. And you're gonna end up ... seeing a lot of {info to} expand your thinking about what's possible. ... And it's not like this is fringe. The Cleveland Clinic, which is one of the premier hospitals in the country, has the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine. And at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, there's Thomas Jefferson Marcus Institute for Precision Medicine, which is practicing this way. And so there's different {major} hospital systems that are ... practicing this way. And they have wait lists for ... years because people want someone to put the pieces together. But at a very ... minimum, you can start to ... shape the way you're researching online with a few of those ... extra search terms to basically see if there's {anything} that resonates with you. I also highly recommend books by ... Doctor Mark Heyman {who} has written 19 books on the root cause approach to health; many New York Times best sellers: ... Sarah Alfred; Terry Walls, an autoimmune expert who's written books about autoimmunity and root cause perspectives; Jason Fong; Cara Fitzgerald; David Perlmutter. ... All of those have impacted me greatly.