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Category: Podcast

Mind-Body-Spirit and the Placebo Effect

In this episode, you’ll discover:

  • The radical science that destroys materialism and forces us to rethink health. ([5:39])
  • The one health decision that could transform your health (you don’t need to go to the gym or cook healthy meals for hours). ([10:18])
  • The truth about surgeries (if you don’t know this, you might risk being cut open for no reason). ([12:39])
  • How to use the placebo effect to your advantage (this works even if you know your treatment is “fake”). ([17:35])

Did you enjoy the podcast? Let me know by leaving a short review and be sure to hit that subscribe button so you don’t miss any future episodes!

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Resources:

  1. The Placebo Effect Article
Read Full Transcript

00:19 Welcome to episode number three of the health sovereign podcast. In this episode, we'll be diving into points number three and four of the health sovereign tree. Let's dive right in. Number three, I understand that mind body spirit is a system and a multi-way street psychology affects physiology and vice versa. All levels affect all levels. We talked about this a little bit last time, that the different levels which I like to label, physical, energetic, mental, emotional and spiritual, all interplay with each other, and this is important to recognize with healing. So even though you have a physical pain in your body, for instance, you can work on that and sometimes a block is a mental or emotional. One of story just popped in my mind as I was doing my EFT certification. This is emotional freedom technique. I worked with a woman who had a shoulder pain.

01:22 This was chronic shoulder pain that she had for years. I don't remember exactly how many, but quite a few years, maybe eight or 10 or something like that. So we started tapping around it specifically addressing the emotional trauma around when it happened, if I'm remembering correctly, there's probably some other aspects in there that we worked on. At the end of our session, the pain was gone, so it was something she had been carrying. Physically understand, most of us think of pain as a physical thing, but well, pain is actually tricky in a hard thing to measure with this woman. We did some tapping on some meridian end points and saying some stuff around the story and the feelings of it and her pain went away. One of the analogies I like to think of is, well, not an analogies. Science is showing this, right? So every single cell in our body gets turned over.

02:15 Even the, the most dense of materials, our bones, those cells actually get replaced every seven or so years. Other parts of our system, like our blood cells get turned over much faster, like month to month. So every single cell in your body is changing yet a chronic pain such as shoulder pain, back pain, whatever. This can stick around for 20 years, the whole lifetime. So what is keeping that pain in the place? Is it necessarily something physical? Most people would just assume. So once again, this comes to our worldview. What if the thing that is keeping that in place is some sort of mental, emotional or even spiritual block and energetic block that is stopping the body from engaging in the natural healing processes that it possesses. You cut yourself. Do you have to actually do anything for your body to heal? And in fact, can you do anything to make it heal even better?

03:10 I think you certainly can influence this, but the body heals by itself. So when something does not heal, often there is some sort of block there. And these blocks tend not to be physical. That's my experience. And this is why it's important with the thousands of different methodologies that we talked about on the previous episode that you look at ones that do not just focus on the physical because all this stuff interacts. So a little bit of history on how the mind and body got split in the first place. This really, from what I've seen goes back to Descartes, the guy that said, "I think therefore I am." Cognito Ergo sum, if I'm remembering the Latin correctly. This was an interesting thing to take place and how it really shaped our worldview for hundreds of years. The mind and body got split and this can be seen in kind of the split between science and religion.

04:04 There was the okay science, you take the physical, you can take the body, you can take everything that you measure, but we're going to deal with the soul or the spirit here on the religion side, and this was kind of like a division of labor and to one degree or another it seemed to work out, but now we still have this fighting between science and religion, but even within the physical right determinism and behaviorism where you think that human beings and all animals out there are just stimulus response. Descartes, He did some interesting experiments or cruel experiments depending on how you want to look at him. He thought of everything in nature as just like mechanical gears wound in a clock. And it was funny because what actually led him knew this was a mystical experience that he had. He saw like the whole universe turning these cranks like a machine and so he was dissecting dogs while they're alive in order to understand them.

05:05 So with this really, it came down to this philosophy of materialism, which I believe I talk about that in some of the future points. So I won't go super deep into it now, but this idea that everything, just the physical exists and everything can be explained by materials. So even our brain, the mind becomes just the firing of neurons in the brain. All consciousness even can be explained on this. And there's people that still believe this, that we will have it figured out at some point in the future. This is sometimes called promissory materialism because the promise that this philosophy of materialism is going to prove itself out. And of course, materialism has led to lots of great things as well as negative things by looking at the world through this lens, like the hard sciences work. But even with that, right, they figured, oh, we have the whole world mapped out.

06:02 We figured out everything in the universe back in the 19 hundreds they thought there was basically just some t's to cross and some i's to dot. Or more specifically a few more decimal places to make their calculations and they'd have everything figured out. But then boom, in came quantum mechanics, quantum theory, which made it so that this materialism could never solve all the problems. Why? Because Heisenberg's uncertainty principle basically says that you cannot measure everything, that the mere fact of measurement changes the outcome of what is being measured. That consciousness can be involved in things like the double slit experiment looking at light which behaves as a particle and a wave, which one it behaves as, depends on what you are trying to observe. You had a parallel with this golden rules, incompleteness theorem which said essentially that any logical set of conclusions is based on certain things with outside of that system that basically you cannot explain everything going on without assuming certain things are already true.

07:09 So what does this have to do with mind, body and spirit? Although it can be helpful and this is something we do with language, we divide things out. It can be helpful to look at these different components. We have to recognize that it really is all a unified whole. I mean our science is saying everything is all one sign says that. Now mysticism has said that since the very beginning and you have a few mystical experiences, you can enjoy this perspective for yourself. So although this duality of say, mind or body or body and soul can be useful to think about, it is false. Just boil it down, that means it is false. Well, if it's true, right, then we can think about, oh, we can do these physical practices for the physical body and we can let religion or spirituality handle the soul. But once again, that's not how the world actually works.

08:02 So this stuff all needs to be brought together. So healing is not just a physical thing, but exists through all these levels and everything affects one another. This is very important because once again, a lot of us get trapped. Physical body, physical symptoms. Therefore this is a physical problem. Sometimes just physical treatments will work, but oftentimes, and even if it is, that is the case, right? There is mental and emotional trauma built around those physical symptoms. So if you get diagnosed with cancer, we can say, okay, there's a physical tumor in your body and we can treat this with the standard Western methods of chemotherapy, radiation and surgery, all physical treatments, right? Or we can treat this well, of course nothing can treat cancer besides the standard western medical approach, but we can look at other alternative methods and see that a lot of these also work on physical methods, nutrients, detox, changes in diet, in lifestyle or physical things, but also more than that.

09:09 And there are methods that look specifically around treating the mental and emotional trauma of getting a cancer diagnosis. My viewpoint is that cancer or chronic illness, all kinds of things that we have our best looked at as course corrections. You can just treat them on the physical level and then unfortunately you're not going to get the deeper impact in there. So recently I had poison oak really bad on my eye and my genitals. How I got it there, I got some of the oils on my hand. I thought I was washing them off, apparently not well enough. So I had the poison oak oils for people not familiar with poison oak had similar to poison ivy or Sumac, I believe there's tons of it here on the west coast of the u s so I got these oils on my hand and then spread them to these other areas and it got very swollen, both my eye and the other area.

10:06 I ended up going out to this event despite my disfigurement and while people offered me some physical medicine, some things that would have brought down the swelling, I decided not to go that route because well I don't take pharmaceutical medicine. That's just kind of something I personally decided to live by unless it is absolutely necessary. And since making this part of my philosophy, I've not found a single case where it is absolutely necessary for me. I ended up working with some energy healers and they were there at the event. They offered their help. I was like, yes, let's try it out and see what happens. So low intervention type of treatment and is interesting because in doing this mental and emotional stuff came up. I could even say that there was a spiritual lesson, and this goes to how I'm framing things, right, but definitely mental and emotional lessons around this where I got it on my body, what that was involved in, and I won't go into all the details of that, but it was very interesting to see these layers of healing be involved in this physical symptom of swelling of the eyes and genitals from physically touching this oil.

11:16 But there was more than just the physical there and had I just treated it physically, I would not have gotten these other layers uncovered, which I found very illuminating. So that was very good case in point and I feel like I got this just so I could learn this lesson, although that wasn't even everything there. It was very interesting to see how the mind, body and spirit all work together with something like contact with poison oak, which seems to be keep getting me for a reason. I hope I've learned those lessons and will not need to suffer through that again. So now I want to move onto point number four. Think I've covered 0.3 quite well there you either get it or you don't. Point number four, I will understand and harness the placebo effect for my own betterment a the placebo effect. This is a very fun subject.

12:06 I've been interested in this for years. It really started getting interested in it when I started delving more into psychology with my neuro linguistic programming training and even further as I continued down health. Just looking at all these things, I wrote a great article about this over at lost empire. herbs.com/placebo-effect. We'll link to that in the show notes, but I'll be talking about some of the points covered in that article as well. To me, most cool things to learn about the placebo effect that most people do not know is placebo surgeries perform as well as actual surgeries in several circumstances. Certainly not all. So what they do in these cases is they get the person prep for surgery, they will a man, they anesthetize them. Then they do like an incision in the area, but there's no actual surgery performed and these performers as well as real surgeries.

13:01 Right. So we often think of surgery. Okay. It's a physical thing. It is the height of western science and medicine and it's not doing more than placebo in some cases. And there's quite a few different ones. Things around the heart looking at joint surgeries with the knees, all kinds of different cases. They actually have not performed that this many of them because they say there's an ethical problem with doing these placebo surgeries, which I find kind of ridiculous because if you don't find out whether surgeries are actually useful or not, then is that not an ethical problem in and of itself. So again, height of technology of Western medicine does not perform as well as or only performs as well as placebo in some cases. The next time a surgeon tells you you need to get surgery, think twice about it. You have to understand to a doctor they want to use their tools.

13:55 Who a surgeon, their tool is surgery. So they're going to see the need for surgery in more cases than is actually necessary. And this is even if they're well meaning they really care. They probably believe it themselves. You have to look at more than one opinion. And once again go outside just the standard medical field for those opinions. I would encourage, another thing about placebos is they work sometimes in some studies, even when you know it's placebo. So you know it's not a real intervention. You know it's a sugar pill or I don't know if they've done this with surgeries, but you know you're not getting real surgery and yet it still works. How so here's the thing about placebo effect and why I say in this point understand and harness the placebo effect for my own betterment. You can make use of this. So as I said before, nothing works for everyone.

14:49 No method, no modality works for every single person. There's placebo effects in everything. So even if something has a real effect, if you believe in it, it may have a greater effect than it actually does. So this means it would be wise if you want to get an effect to really believe in anything that you do, whether this is chemotherapy or homeopathic medicine, anything that you do, having your belief behind it is likely to make it work better. And this can happen on top of of real effect, but certainly happens on top of no effects. So that's why I want you to harness it and to harness it. You want to understand it. Some things about placebos is two pills tends to work better in one. A injection using a needle works better than a pill. A more expensive placebo works better than a less expensive one.

15:39 Behind these three things we can look at. The reason why is that a bigger intervention tends to put more skin in the game. So by having it be more expensive or doing something that's an injection rather than pills or more pills. These things we tend to believe in. The more we have a higher expectation that they'll work because they are a bigger, a more expensive intervention. We can also see that different color placebo pills work better for different things. Why is this simple? Things like the Association of the color to in effect, so like a blue pill for most Americans in this different effects in different countries. With this, a blue pill is going to be more sedating than a red pill. This is important stuff to understand because then we can see that if we can use certain things like color associations, we can possibly use some with lower types of interventions, but ones that actually work say on the mental and emotional level, I don't pass it as much.

16:36 That might be interesting to do. An interesting story I heard about this long time ago, the founders at NLP, Richard Bandler and John Grinder wanted to market and sell placebo pills saying they're 30% effective for everything. They actually did some research as far as putting this out there and didn't go through with it for one reason or another, but today there is someone selling placebo pills. The x pill by Robbie Richmond. I actually met him at an event and we did a whole ceremony around this. It's very interesting, but the guy is selling placebo pills. Why? Well, there's a methodology behind it. If you set your intention and work with this placebo pill, then people are finding it works for stuff. Why? Because the placebo works. If we know placebo works, even if we know it's a placebo, then why are we not harnessing this effect for herself and why are we focusing so much on, I mean, there's reasons to focus on the whole gold standard of science in medicine is to test something against a placebo in a well-controlled style double-blind.

17:41 So people do not know the placebo effect because that will influence it. Even though we've shown that when you know it's a placebo can still work, this whole thing is set up so we can find things that work better than placebo. And yet how much attention is aimed at actually just harnessing the placebo effect for ourselves. I would argue that since we're getting such great results with placebo, then it's a good thing to do. And yet still there's drugs out there, right? That have been shown to not be working any better than placebo, like SSRI as antidepressants and there's still a widely sold, widely used and sure they're probably helping some people, but they're also giving really bad side effects to some people including some murderous rampages. It seems that is one of the worst side effects that happens with those. Some other important details to know is that there can be placebo side effects.

18:32 This is known as the no CBO, so placebo in Latin means I shall please, nocebo means I shall harm. This can be a tricky one too because placebos is, we might think of that as no intervention, but depending on how it's set up, side effects can happen as well. So if people are told they're taking a drug and this drug has such side effects, then they often get those side effects. This is something we need to know and something we need to look at further. But if we take something like homeopathics right. I talked a little bit about this in the last episode, so was low intervention. I'm not aware of homeopathics having any side effects. So people say there's nothing there, so how can it possibly work? Well, a reliably works as a placebo if nothing else. I've had good results with homeopathics.

19:18 Many other people have and some studies are showing that they work even though the actual best use of them seems to be in a clinical setting. And here's something about that clinical setting, right? So we understand that mind, body, and spirit are not separate. If we do any intervention, can we understand the psychology behind setting up that and intervention to best coax out this placebo effect and doing that in addition to something that actually has a real effect too. Why are we not researching and figuring out how to do this? Well, I'd be really good clinicians because they have a lot of experience in doing this. Actually do that. There's also the reverse placebo effect. So sometimes this has confused with nocebo, nocebo specifically has to do with placebos that caused side effects. The reverse placebo effect. That's why I like to call is can you stop something from working because you don't believe in it.

20:08 It's just the same power of mind. Spirit. However you want to talk about it working in the opposite direction. So don't believe in herbs even though they're proven to work and it's not gonna work or less of an effect. So this is very important stuff to understand how our psychology affects the things that are happening out there. And if you can understand this, then it can be involved in what you do. So any intervention you're doing for your health, it is best to not work on it or think about it as a detached, observant scientist subject and object being separate, which quantum physics showing, not actually. So why not? Instead, fully believe that you're going to get results with something and sure it's not always gonna work and you can't necessarily just easily change your belief, although there are processes of doing that. But if we can harness the placebo effect on top of real effects, why not do so?

21:04 There's a lot more about that. Once again, I will link to the article in the show notes. This will be health sovereign.com/three the numeral three will take you there and you can see the link, read about more details and link to all the primary research in which this kind of stuff was done. To recap, mind, body and spirit is all one thing. We can look at the different levels to hopefully guide through our lives, but to recognize them as separate is false. And we want to really bring them together to recognize how that affects our health. And then the placebo effect is showing exactly that. Our belief in an intervention can change the physical. So it's putting the previous point right in action there. So with those knee surgeries, if you look at the actual case study, so there's a guy like crippled to the point of being in a wheelchair, gets the placebo knee surgery, and he's out playing basketball, completely changed his life of a placebo knee surgery.

22:03 Understand that, understand we know next to nothing about how health really works in the standard worldview. But this information is out there. I'll look it up, learn, educate yourself, take responsibility for yourself, become a sovereign. And you'll get better results. Once again, this show is made possible by the work of lost empire herbs, which you can find at lost empire, herbs.com herbs that really work for your health. What we specialize in is herbs that you can actually feel an impact from. I think so many people end up taking supplements based on faith and that can be good. Faith can be a good thing. As we've just shown faith in an intervention seems to work out quite great, but if you can have a feelable impact from a nervy take some then and you feel it, feel its effects in whether that's more energy, mental clarity, better sleep, what have you, then you know that thing is working for yourself.

22:58 Sure. Some people might say it's just placebo effect, but hey, I'm interested in results, aren't you? So lost empire herbs so you can go take those herbs and remember, believe in the herbs too and you may get even better affects that real effect. Plus the placebo effects lostempireherbs.com that's gonna wrap it up for this episode. We will be back again next week with the next couple of points. I hope you're really enjoying this. As always, leave a review on iTunes. Send your comments in, love to hear what you want to hear on the health sovereign podcast in the future. Thank you very much and I'll talk to you next time.

Self-Responsibility and Hundreds of Health Modalities

When there’s something wrong with your health, you probably go to the doctor—because the doctor knows what’s best for you, right?

Some of the time, yes. But other times, this conventional approach and the medical establishment’s recommendations won’t help you or even make the problem worse.

The truth is: If you want to be truly healthy, you have to become responsible. No one will ever care as much about your health as you will. You have to be in control of your health and decide what’s best for you—whether that’s going to the doctor or healing yourself with a different health modality.

In this episode, you’ll find out how to take responsibility for your health so you can stop abdicating control over your health and become a strong person that radiates healthy energy.

Show highlights include:

  • Why taking responsibility doesn’t mean ignoring your doctor–and the alternatives to consider before you do listen to him. ([4:22])
  • The “incentive problem” that ruins health education online AND offline (not even med school is safe!). ([7:35])
  • The no. 1 difference between conventional medicine and alternative medical modalities. This difference might be the cause of many problems in our society.. ([13:34])
  • Why “mystery illnesses” currently torment society—and how you can keep them from sneaking into your life. ([19:04])

Ready to learn the fundamentals of becoming truly healthy in a complicated world? Head to https://healthsovereign.com and download the Health Sovereign Creed FREE!

Read Full Transcript

00:18 Hello and welcome back. Second episode, what I will be starting in this absurd, talked about it last time and we'll be continuing for the next number of episodes, may interrupted with some of the first interviews here, but I'll be picking the points in the health sovereign creed and talking quite a bit more about them. I'm thinking two points per episode. So to dive right in, we're gonna start with that first point and I'll read it again in case you're not familiar, you can go to health sovereign.com and download this or see it on the website. They're all 16 points. You can also listen to the first episode if you miss that and you will find the whole thing. Read out loud there. So point number one I understand that health starts from a place of self responsibility that no one, not a doctor, especially not insurance nor the government will care about my health or the health of my loved ones as much as I do.

01:16 Therefore I will educate myself taking radical responsibility for both my actions and inactions. Quite a few things in there that I really want to go into further. So self-responsibility and there is a reason this is point number one because if you do not have or are not coming from this place of self responsibility are not coming from this place of sovereignty as we've talked about in that first episode, then you are putting your health out there, you're reactive in your health, things will happen to you and you may not think it's your fault or you were not responsible for them and then it's on to other people in order to cure them and that is really what our western medical model is all about. I want to read this thing. I wrote one of the, if you follow me, I lost empire herbs or social media.

02:05 It's on Facebook and Instagram, but lately I've been doing these writings called the medical monopoly Monday musings, so I want to read one of these because it is specifically about this points self-responsibility versus blind following of authority. Specialization has benefits and drawbacks. The most obvious benefit is that allows someone to go deep into a subject possibly deeper than has ever been done before and that can then benefit everyone else. The obvious drawback is that when such a thing is done, such an area becomes a subject that a lay person sometimes cannot make sense of. And so let's look at doctors. There's four years for a bachelor's degree, then four more years of medical school. This is followed by three to seven years in residency and fellowship to further specialize. Have you heard the joke about the left kidney doctor who won't operate or discuss the right kidney?

02:55 That's a lot of time. That's a lot of knowledge and experience that is far removed from the layman. So doctors are held up as this almost holy bastion of authority within the culture. Rightfully so to some degree, but we have to look at the dark side of this pattern. All that education, which is ultimately funded and therefore created by pharmaceutical and medical device companies means eye doctor is indoctrinated into a specific way of thinking of viewing the world. One that generally doesn't allow for outside viewpoints, Aka anything in alternative medicine. Some doctors become ego-driven by such authority and how dare anyone questioned them. That's on the doctor's side, but what about the patient? You and I understand that doctor did all that schooling. We understand doctors are smart people probably smarter than you or I, they have authority. Our culture holds them up in that way, so you should listen to them right after all, who has the time to actually look into the health subject deeply themselves?

03:52 This combination of factors and more is why the responsibility of health has largely been given blindly to doctors, but there's agency problem here. The average doctor sees 20 patients per day. Even if that doctor cares really cares about you, they can't possibly care as much as you do. They do not have the same skin in the game as you do for yourself and your family. So ultimately, where should responsibility lie self? If the interest is in health, it must start there. That doesn't mean not to listen to your doctor. You can do so just not blindly. I know there's this idea that you shouldn't confuse your Google search with a medical degree. Sure. If you spend 15 minutes or blindly believe the first thing you read, that is good advice, but also a doctor's proper place is as an adviser. They should not be the only one.

04:39 After all, that is what second and third opinions are about, but you might also want to look at not just talking to doctors, but functional medicine specialist, acupuncturist, health coaches, energy medicine practitioners, Shamans, et Cetera. I know that many doctors would laugh at this idea, but many of them have just as much schooling, different worldviews, different advice, and ultimately your health choices are yours, self-responsibility and health. That must be the starting point of our new health paradigm. Will you claim years back today? A lot of good points in here as well. One thing I do want to point out because it confused someone when I posted this on social media is that when I'm saying that the doctor's education is funded by pharmaceutical and other companies, I'm not saying that they fund the individuals themselves, but they are funding the schools themselves as far as creating that education, that is definitely a big piece in there and why the education is steered in certain directions.

05:36 Of course, the doctors pay a lot of money to go through medical school and then they have a lot of debt. Well, everyone going through college these days has student debt and so they get trapped in this machine. This is another of the systemic effects where they really need to operate in a certain way in order to be able to make money and pay back this debt. So that's one of the reason that many will not opt out of the system in place because that system in essence, financially controls them or definitely financially incentivizes them to stay part of it with kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies and all kinds of other stuff that is in play there. But that's getting a little bit off topic of the self responsibility though it is important to understand that this stuff happens and therefore not only may your doctor not have this skin in the game that you do, but if they're being financially incentivized to do things that may not be in your best interest, that is crucial detail to know.

06:33 So what else do I want to say about this self responsibility here? It really is about radical responsibility. What I mean by that is, well as I said here, taking radical responsibility for both my actions in and inactions whatever you do, everything that you do is going to impact your health to some degree. And also the things you don't do impact your health. So you have to take the responsibility for these things. So the food that you eat, the air that you breathe, the water that you drink. Yeah, it sucks that these things are polluted to a large degree and that these affect our health. If you are not going to do the things to clean those up and that can only be done to a certain degree because of this web of ecology we live in, then you must understand the results of what you're doing.

07:21 So if you are taking and consuming a pesticide heavy food, right, and that's your daily fair, you just eat conventional food, there is a cost to that. Your actions in eating this food are going to have a cost. Now, this is where the education piece comes in and education is so important to self responsibility. If you don't have the education to know that pesticides are going to have these negative longterm chronic health effects, then you're kind of shit out of luck there. Unfortunately, that is the case, but that's the thing about self-responsibility, right? You have to come to understand these things. What does that play in the world? In order to be sovereign with your health in order to effectively make choice, you must have the education because a lot of this information is all, there's too much information out there, but there is this information about these things that all the pesticide companies want you to keep consuming that pesticide laid in food.

08:18 Why? Because they profit off of doing so. So you have to look at all these different effects and that's what radical self responsibility is about is understanding all these factors at play so that you can make the best decisions possible. That's a really hard part. Right? So who has the time for this? You know, it's easy for me to talk about this, right? Because my career essentially is in the health field a little bit funny. It's not that I wanted to go in this place, it's not that it started in this place is from the fitness and really wanting to excel at that peak performance level that I started to get into health and I just kind of went further and further down the rabbit hole. I'd like to think that even if I was not, did not make this a career, if this was not any part of what I was teaching you, I was not recording this podcast where you hear that I would still be interested in health.

09:14 Health is one of those areas that everyone needs to take an interest in. This is once again, self-responsibility. Why? Because ultimately your health is up to you. You cannot abdicate health to a doctor because unfortunately the doctors do not know everything. They can't care as much as you, so it is going to come down to what you know, what you don't and here's the, if you get some sort of diagnosis or something going on, you can do research, you can read books, you can listen to podcasts, you can educate yourself. It's not something that's hard to do. A give just another example, right? Finances important to everyone because we unfortunately or fortunately depending on how you look at it, we need money to operate in this world. There are negatives and positives to that, but we all need to work with money, so isn't money something you should learn about?

10:02 You should get educated in so that you can properly use it rather than getting up to your eyeballs in debt and just kind of going through life in a consumerist mode. It is important to do this. So money is not something that I teach about. I wrote a little book covering my system of how I manage my money just because that was a fun project for me, but money is not a main thing of what I do as far as my career teaching in the world. But I have managed money both personally and for my businesses, so it's something that I have read plenty of books on that I have listened to podcasts I've studied, gone to workshops, not a part of my career, but important. And so finances and health, relationships, fitness, parenting, if you're our parent, all these things are important facets of just being a human in this day and age.

10:48 So you need to take self-responsibility for them. Obviously, if you do go into one of these fields, that makes it easier to really go deeper on it, but every human needs to take self-responsibility in these places. So I think that is a good point to wrap up on point number one there. Let's move on to point number two. I recognize that there are hundreds if not thousands of modalities for affecting health, whether physical, mental, emotional or spiritual. I will find those that work for me. I will not give up after one, two or 10 have not gotten me to where I want to go. Well, I want to add energetic here because in my coaching program, different places, I've been talking about the five levels of health where I look at them, physical, energetic, mental, emotional and spiritual. So they should definitely have that in the creed, the allopathic model, which is Western medicine, pharmaceutical surgery, all that stuff is just one modality and yeah, we could subdivide it.

11:48 There are several different things there. We could separate surgery and pharmaceutical medicine, different categories. Understand that these are just a couple of the things out there and they're really focus on that physical level. The surgery is a formula that like manipulation of the body and then pharmaceutical would be a biochemical viewpoint of the body and treating health, but this is just such small things. Other physical things, other forms of manipulation, right, so chiropractic would fit in there and working with an osteopath, different ways of looking at the posture and movements. There are kinds of different methods of doing this. Some other biochemical means, right? Herbalism and there's different ways of practicing herbalism, Ayurvedic Medicine, Chinese medicine, and actually the West, right? In the United States we had other schools of medicine. There was a physio medical list, there's the eclectics. Most people have never even heard of these terms.

12:46 I know I hadn't until I dove deep into herbalism history. These schools were around and we're being successful before the Flexner report came around and really put us on this path of allopathic medicine. And Trust me, we will be talking about the Flexner report a lot more in the future because that was a crucial turning point in how we got to the health worldview we have these days. So those are just some of the physical methods of working on health. But there's so much more. We often forget about the mental and emotional components, right? So we have different types of psychology. You have the old standards, like the cognitive behavioral therapy. You have Freud's methods and Young's method and all kinds of stuff. Or you throw neuro linguistic programming of which I'm at trainer in here as well. There's lots of different things and these are really built into Chinese medicine and I, or Veda as well.

13:40 Any of the systems really besides allopathic medicine is a holistic system. It kind of treats the body as a whole. So they recognize that the physical is not divorced from the mental and vice versa. That manipulations or changes on one level affects the different levels. We have all kinds of other stuff. Homeopathy is very interesting and I'll probably talk more about this later. It's not a field I've gone very deep into. I certainly saw them several Meta analysis out there saying that homeopathy is no more effective than placebo, but then I've also seen studies that showing it is working and I think it really has to do with how homeopathy is applied and here's the thing, if it gets placebo results reliably, which it seems to do then is that not worth it off of a thing that basically there's nothing there so there's no real side effects involved if you can get results.

14:33 I've started experimenting with some homeopathic remedies recently. I had really bad allergies as I was traveling through Europe earlier this summer and I got a homeopathic formula and literally from the first dose it cleared things up 90% so whether that was placebo or it worked, it worked right. And I'm interested in the results of it, if I can take that rather than taking some, any histamine lower impact intervention, which is getting the head to other points. Very great results in doing that. So I plan to explore this area more and there's, as I mentioned, functional medicine doctors, there's natural paths, so there are these holistic medical doctors of these other things that look at not only the possible use of drugs and surgery, but all kinds of other interventions. Then we have the various energetic forms of healing, so cheek Gong and the various types of this and Tai Chi out there.

15:25 We have all kinds of energy medicine practices out there. I mean there's Reiki is one the most popular ones, but the quantum touch touch for health. I myself, I got certified in a method called Eden Energy Medicine and I've done a lot of these things. Again, it was for that point of peak performance and just talking about it here, realizing that because I have this mindset of health is not just the absence of disease, but health is that ability to respond to stressors at a higher and higher level because I wanted to perform at a higher and high level with strength training, but also in other places that my seeking of health modalities was for this purpose. And I found lots of stuff. And that's why I'd do quite well is because I've taken these other models that most people apply just to disease and symptom management and curing and apply them in these other ways.

16:18 So that's been really interest. And then you have also some of these categories that map across different levels. So for instance, energy psychology is both the energy method and working on those mental and emotional levels. Let's see what else? I've got some other things written here. Oh, it's all kinds of weird stuff that most people don't even necessarily think of for health, but it's available Shamans, so lots of people have cured problems by going down to the rainforest and jungle, working with Shamans, with the use of psychoactive substances, or not all kinds of different methods, all kinds of different shellmans from across the world. Hypnotists, you even have medical mediums, people that one way or another are getting sometimes very accurate diagnoses and then being able to cure people in different ways. And you have prayer and miracles, right? I know a lot of scientifically mindset people reductionists materialists would scoff at these things, but you can see, and you can say it's just placebo, but if someone is blind and gets cured by God or some intercessor there and sometimes there are actual results with this kind of stuff.

17:24 My point is not that any one of these systems is better than the other, especially without what the specific context is, but there are so many things here. Oh, here's some other, I forgot. Phototherapy. Helio therapy that is actually treatment from the sun itself has been used to cure certain diseases that used to be popular is not so much. We can look at other electrical methods with stem or all kinds of different stuff. Post magnetic devices, cranial, sacral, rolfing. There are so many modalities out there and if you hear the stories of healing from people, you recognize that there's always these weird paths that they have. No one method works for everyone and that is a very important thing to understand. These different methods have worked for different people. So when you try one thing and it doesn't work, then move on. Try something else.

18:16 And what I would encourage you to do is to understand that in the beginning when you have some sort of, especially chronic illness, right? So if you have your arm chopped off western medicine, acute emergency trauma, that is where it shines. Definitely do that. I would not go to a shaman or a craniosacral therapist. When your limb is chopped off in line, they're bleeding, right? So understanding that different context, certain elements or certain methods do shine. But if you are having some sort of spiritual exit sense, so crisis, you know, loading yourself up on antidepressants is probably not the best move. There are better methods for working with that if you have some sort of chronic illness. So what is on the rise today is all forms of chronic illness and often they're called mystery illness. Things that are hard to diagnose. Many people go around from doctor to doctor trying to find out what they have and thus being able to treat it in one way or another.

19:20 And although we slap labels on things, which does have its use at times, sometimes these labels can be wrong. And sometimes people then get wrapped up in the identity of the label. So there are some drawbacks to that as well. What I would encourage you is not only to work on different methods, but from the very outset it is worth going to not just doctors but these other sort of practitioners to see what they may say is the root cause or the problem. Understand that so much of what treatment you may seek out begins with that original diagnosis or original frame. So if you can understand that there are a thousand different modalities out there and you have some experience going back to the education and self responsibility, right? So you have some experience in a handful of these modalities, no one can do them all.

20:13 No one can definitely go deep in more than just a couple of these. If you have that available, then you can better from the beginning of any sort of say, injury, pain, illness, anything that you have, you have more options with which to go with it. With the predominant worldview that is going on as far as western medicine being the only thing out there. This binds so many people that it becomes hard to look outside and oftentimes the only time they begin to look outside is when Western medicine has failed them. What if instead of waiting until that point, which could be spending thousands of dollars going through untold misery cause oftentimes say like cancer treatments can be quite horrible to go through. What if you saw out some of these other opinions from the very beginning? Would that not change things up and one thing I completely messed here, just like nutrition sometimes called orthomolecular medicine.

21:10 This is the use of supplements and nutrition to heal the body. Which in chronic illnesses? Well the most chronic illnesses about two things actually most illness in the first place is about toxicities and these can be from heavy metals, various poisons, acute or chronic. That's a big subject area. Then there are nutritional deficiencies and when you understand that stress, going back to our definition of health to be able to handle stressors, stress takes nutrients to handle. It doesn't matter where it is in the body, what form it is in different nutrients will be used, but the body uses nutrients in order to handle stress, to be able to combat disease. The body uses nutrients. Therefore, should we not make sure that any sort of deficiencies are corrected? How many of the chronic diseases are actually deficiencies of some combination of nutrients? That's something we have scarcely explored at all in our western medicine.

22:11 So that is point number two. These are some of the ways that I like to think, so starting from that place of self responsibility for your health, then recognizing that there are tons and tons of methods that nothing works for everyone, but there are far more methods available. Then you probably begin to realize that having some experience in these methods then allows you to make better health choices moving forward. So I consider that part of your education is recognition of these different levels of health. I like to say five different levels, a physical, energetic, mental, emotional and spiritual, and then we can begin to place these modalities across those levels. Recognizing that one impacts another. So that chronic illness, you may think, oh, it's sure adds root. There may be a chronic deficiency of various vitamins and minerals, but there may be a mental emotional component to that.

23:08 When you can recognize that these things occur across levels, then ultimately I believe you can get better results and looking at modalities that are holistic in nature because once again, western medicine is based on a reductionist materialistic paradigm, which means the whole method is based on physical is only thing that exists. If you can understand that all these levels exist, then your treatments, although they may be focused on one level, can really hit on all the different levels, so that is two points. We'll be back with our next episode covering points three and four. Once again, you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review on iTunes. It's really going to help spread his message of health sovereignty out to other people and you can reach me at [email protected] I'd love to hear from you on how you're liking these episodes and any specific subject you'd like me to dive into.

24:05 Course do have a plan for the foreseeable future and lots of guests and everything, but I'd love to hear from you as well. This podcast is made possible by the work that we do at lust empire herbs. Herbalism is one of those modalities and a very useful modality. Here's a cool thing about herbs that most people don't recognize is that we think of them in general. Most people think of them as just this bio chemical type of treatment or medical use of herbs and certainly they are that. They have these chemical components in them that then act on the body, but the herbs themselves are living beings and there are methods of connecting with them and working with them that hit on the mental, emotional, even spiritual levels, so just going to leave that as some food for thought. I would say that especially the owl chemical preparations of such herbs can definitely work on these levels quite a bit more because it's kind of done with that frame of thinking about the herbs in mind.

25:04 So some of the stuff we have at lost empire herbs look for our spagyric tinctures or Ashwagandha or nettle root, our Blue Vervain, the mushrooms that it doesn't just have a physical effect, but you can work on these other levels as well. And of course there's even better things than we carry that work on these. Even more. So hopefully we can bring some of those to you. Some of this jerk essences and various other types of owl chemical preparations in the future. Herbalism is a great method to have in your toolkit, so get educated on it. Understand that herbs have always been used for ever until the last hundred years or so, except by a small minority of people. So get a few herbs in your toolkit, understand some herbs, find some herbal allies, those herbs that will help you not only become healthy, but perform at your peak. A lot more information over at lost empire. Herbs.Com that's going to wrap it up for this episode. I will speak to you again.

Why the Health Sovereign Podcast?

  • Why the conventional definition of health is wrong—and how stress helps you become healthier, stronger and better.  ([1:26])
  • How to take real responsibility of your health (and why it’s NOT as easy as taking your vitamins and going to the gym). ([3:29])
  • Why most people in today’s society lose control over their health—and how to get it back from the fangs of big pharma companies and the medical establishment. ([6:05])
  • The worst health conspiracies in U.S. history and how they keep you from becoming truly healthy in this world. ([10:26])
  • How “principles” can make you healthy, lean and strong and shield you from the sneaky lies the food and pharma giants profit off of. ([17:49])
  • The “Healthy Sovereign Creed” that distills the foundation of becoming and staying healthy. ([20:43])
  • If you hate being pumped full of drugs every time you’ve got a minor health issue, check out this website and get alternatives that won’t cause harmful side effects. ([27:13])
Read Full Transcript

00:18 Hello and welcome. I'm Logan Christopher and I want to welcome you to the very first episode of the Health South Marine podcast. In this first episode, I'm going to talk about why this podcast, what am I doing here? What am I going for with the title health sovereign? What does that mean? What I'm trying to get to here is what it really takes for people to be healthy in our modern day world. First off, let's define health. For most people, it is a very ill defined term and wrongly defined out, say for most including probably most of the medical society, health is about the absence of disease. Now, first thing to ask yourself is do you even fit this definition of health? It's becoming a tougher and tougher thing to fit as we have more diseased diagnoses and all kinds of stuff going on and just the toxicity overworld some subjects we'll definitely be talking about, but it's not even a good definition of health.

01:20 What I like to think of health as is this ability to handle stressors in life. So if we take an idea of getting some cold germs or the flu virus that's out there, right? We're exposed to this stuff all the time. It is only that we get a cold or the flu, not just from exposure. Exposure by itself does not do it, but if there is a way that our system cannot handle that exposure, our immune system cannot fight it off. The ecology of our system is such that that disease can take root in it. So our body's handling stressors all the time and stressors are not necessarily a bad thing. Think about going to workout in the gym. You are intentionally placing stress on your body in order for it to adapt as living systems do and come back stronger. So true health is about having a greater ability to adapt and handle stressors that you come across in your everyday life.

02:16 And I would argue increasing your health further is developing, not just this resiliency, but I really liked the word antifragility, which is the ability to like living systems do come back stronger from stressors. So this is what health is now sovereign. Many people may not be familiar with this word and I'm not talking about being royalty or anything like that. Even though we do have a crown on the artwork for the podcast here, sovereignty to me is, it's a very strong word and I like this definition that I heard from Jordan Greenhall. I've been reading a lot of his material lately and finding it very interesting as he talks about what's going on in our society and some things we need in order to transition chords, a new system. So Jordan says sovereignty is the capacity to take responsibility. It is the ability to be present to the world and to respond to the world rather than to be overwhelmed or merely reactive.

03:16 Sovereignty is to be a conscious agent. I really like that first part, the capacity to take responsibility. So I'm really big about self responsibility and the reason for this is after going through a dark period in high school, I kind of realized that, oh, I could take responsibility for different areas of my life and with that, starting from that seed of self-responsibility, I could then seek to improve things. This began and fitness for me translated into the business realm and really all different areas. The problem is self-responsibility is not the end all be all because we live in a web of ecology, not just what other humans, but all life and everything. Essentially sovereignty is good in that it's this independence but also this larger thing of interdependence to recognizing that we're part of this system or web self-responsibility. It is independence and it is also more than that.

04:17 When you recognize all these things that are going on, then you can better respond to that. You build this capacity and understand that this sovereign capacity is of course much more than just about health, but it is very much about health. Because if you don't have your health, you know, what do you have? Health is foundational first humans as we're here on this planet, health is something that goes along with inhabiting this body that we have. So this ability to be present to the world, to actually like understand what is going on and then respond to the world, to take proper action out of that sovereignty is to be a conscious agent. So being conscious about your choices, not just falling into unconscious brainwash state that advertising or mass media or echo chamber of Facebook would have you believe and taken and thing that you see to actually understand what may be behind.

05:14 And the the hidden things going on that is a little bit about health and a little bit about sovereignty. Putting them together. Once again, it is to get to this place where we can truly be sovereign with our health to truly have a health that fits the earlier definition. I said where you are better able to handle stressors to go about an act well within this world rather than being reactive to the things that happen and then as happens for many people, diseases seemingly popping up out of nowhere and not having a clue as to how did this arise in me. It is because the lack of sovereignty that this is unfortunately kind of a common thing within the world and our look at what can we do to fight that. So related to the word sovereignty is this word abdication, which originally in its use it had to do with kind of like a king laying down his rule.

06:10 Handing that over to someone else with abdication. I've for a while, for whatever reason since learned this word, I've used that in relation to the standard Western medical treatment and doctors specifically is we have abdicated our self responsibility for our health to other people to adopt her saying like this is what you need to do. Even to the government saying that these are the important things for health. I mean we have the USDA Food Pyramid, which was the laughing stuff for a long time. Something that no one in any field of health really agrees with what is on that. And doctors back in like the 80s would tell you that nutrition has nothing to do with disease. There's probably still a few doctors that believe that, but everyone recognizes how absurd that is. Now understand this was how western medicine looked at the world and there are issues with that.

07:02 So what I want to get to in this podcast is kind of understanding one, how we got here in the world and looking at the history, looking at the systems in place and how they interact. And ultimately what this is about is I want to see how do we develop a better system in the world, a new system that actually reinforces our health sovereignty rather than continually stripping in a way. And it is being continually stripped away, understand that we should have the right to have clean land and air and water. But do we actually have those things anymore? Maybe in some very secluded places. But overall, just about anywhere. I mean they've found DDT high up in the Himalayan mountains. So understand you can have this self responsibility for your health. You can be taking all these actions, but because of the web of ecology, the interdependence we have, there are things that are happening that are affecting your health, whether you want them to or not.

08:04 And there's a lot of this stuff going on. The great thing is the human body is amazing. It can do so many things and it's not just resiliency, but antifragility is something to be admired and to be respected and expanded upon. So doing such things that allow your body to handle the toxic load that we're under from poisonous chemicals, endocrine disrupting chemicals, all kinds of things in our environment, doing the right things for that so that we can effectively be healthy, that we can effectively live. You have to understand what's going on in order to make effective choice. A little bit about how this podcast got started and I could go back to childhood and everything with this and different aspects of my story. So I mentioned I really got into strength training and fitness. Everything I do at legendary strength and this was born out of not being a sovereign individual and kind of recognizing that at some point, for whatever reason I kind of saw that and that I could have power over such a thing.

09:09 And so I began, it was really with body weight exercises in the beginning that led to kettlebells that led to old times strong man. And around that time as I was getting into that, I was like, you know, this would make a good career. So business got born out of vet, started as a personal trainer, went online, started writing books, coaching, all kinds of different things and the strength and fitness led me into health in the first place. I was average American standard American diet hoc, it's cereal, all kinds of not best food ever. And as I got into fitness I recognized that the healthier I could become, the better my strength ultimately would be for a number of different reasons. And this led me deeper and deeper into health and nutrition and you get into alternative medicine and along with that, because it is there is there does seem to be some suppression of these alternative modalities by what is conventional out there.

10:07 Once again, this is very important to understand. There is some level of conspiracy going on. I mean it's provable. It's out there. There's no doubt. Yeah, we can go way deep down the rabbit hole and talk about aliens and all kinds of insane stuff. There's certainly is that out there, but we can also just keep it real grounded and look at things like the American Medical Association, beaten, sued and losing for conspiracy. Like that is a court case that is showing that proof that that happened and there's tons and tons of information out that so conspiracy does not take 12 men sitting in a room smoking cigars, plotting how to rule the world. It can be as simple as a lobbyist with a government official talking about how the revolving door works. So vote this way or get this law passed and when you leave two years from now we have a high paid position for you with tons of stock options with our pharmaceutical company, this kind of stuff.

11:02 Once again easily verifiable. It's actually kind of crazy how much of it's going on and sure there are some reasons where it makes sense where a regulator and say a lobbyist or a an official at one such company where there's that specialized knowledge that's required where you might see this happen, but yeah, you just see this as a pattern and you got to wonder what is really going on. Is that taking consumers your in my best interest to heart when you have such things like this and that's just one example. There's so many more and I feel once again this is very important, you have to understand this stuff is going on. If you want to be sovereign with your health because a certain worldview is enforced and with this worldview you are going to accept certain things and not accept others even though there may be cracks in it just by how dominant it is.

11:56 It is really hard to get to the other side and especially without even being labeled a crackpot for doing so. It's a wild, wacky world we live in and add to this, right? Like it's not all conspiracy. Conspiracy does not necessarily describe every reason why things are the way they are. You have to look at systemic effects, right? So even if you have good people trying to do good things, you just have fiduciary responsibilities. You have the drive for profit in our business models and just cutting corners essentially like small things can add up over time and over larger organizations to what ends up being some negative and bad effects. You've thrown a sprinkling of sociopaths and psychopaths, right, which congregate into these high powered CEO positions in government positions because of the drive and desire of power. Then you can see how these things can really melt together in a way that once again does not get to the best health possible for individual people.

13:00 So recently, and I have to say this is probably because I recently had a daughter, I guess not too recently, about a year and a half ago now. And with this it's interesting, right? You can be very selfish before you have kids and the kids automatically are pretty much, I can't quite say 100% of the time, but most of the time if you are a good parent at all, it's you have to subjugate your selfishness to some degree because you have to completely provide for human baby that cannot do anything for itself. Self-Responsibility then becomes other responsibility. And with that, I think for me it became kind of a looking out more in the world, you know, I was very content to kind of stay in my own bubble of what I got going on with the business. Just kind of paving my own path. But my daughter being born and with that I began to look outside of the world because I'm thinking about longer term and not just for myself, but for her.

14:02 What is the world that she's growing up in? What is the world that is what is going to be going on in 20 years from now. We live in very interesting times and it could certainly go many different directions but the world is likely going to get more interesting, not less. So with this I kind of health being one the main fields that I'm involved in, I was really looking at why is the system like it is and what is going on and really there was a few kind of like key triggers seeing the increased censorship happening around some alternative medicine type of stuff happening in the big tech companies. And Yeah just reading some crazy stories of what's going on. We can certainly go deep down the rabbit hole here of possibilities of what's going on there. But there is stuff going on and I felt I had to speak up it, I had to grasp better what was actually going on.

14:55 Cause there's a problem like it's so easy to get wrapped up in any sort of belief system. You can take the completely conventional viewpoint of things that no conspiracy exists ever. Even though that's easily falsifiable. I mean look at the NSA spying on American citizens, look at Iran Contra affair, like the government is engaged in conspiracy like that has happened before. And to think that only these things that come to light are the only ones that ever happened and nothing else is a bit naive in my opinion. So from these things I've wanted to get, like how can the system be changed and looking at it, drawing out the map of the system in all the reinforcing loops and delays and different things going on, the system cannot really be changed how it is it's going to collapse and ideally something better is going to emerge that really just kind of displaces it.

15:51 That is kind of the best thing we can hope for. The alternative as it collapsed and nothing really takes its place. So yeah, we'll be talking about those subjects more in future episodes. Oh by the way, I'll be doing some solo episodes like this. I'm going to be covering at the end here, the healthy sovereign creed and all the different points on that. And then I want to go deeper on those specific points because when the big things I want to talk about here is getting down to principles we live even without conspiracy and complex systems and what not. We live in a world of information overload. Forget the misinformation and disinformation that's out there. Just even the information is enormous and impossible to comprehend. To get to the bottom of any issue is very, very, very, very, very hard and time consuming and who has the time for that.

16:42 That is why it's really hard to make sense of the world we live in and if you think you understand the world we live in, then once again, sorry to say, but you are naive because it's impossible to really wrap our minds around that we are not meant for this level of complexity and that is leading to some of the problems that are going on in health and in other areas. I'll be doing some solo episodes. In addition, I'm also going to have a number of guests on this and I'm really going to try to make it a little bit different because you know who needs another podcast. There's plenty of unhealth out there, but I want to target it a little bit differently when I've guessed, you know, not just talking about the same old stuff but trying to boil things down to principles and they may get repetitive, but you know, if you hear a thousand people that are in a health field talk about the same kind of principles, then that's probably good health principle to live in, guide yourself by.

17:39 So I want to get down to that rather than just the like strategies and tactics. Those are important too and we can geek out on that sort of stuff. But to get down to principles that really simple rules that are true and guide your health. If you have principles and you only need a few of them, then it becomes much easier to do. You don't get swayed by the latest study or meme on Facebook as far as your health. And unfortunately that is a lot of what is going on right now. Another thing in addition to guests is I want to bring on multiple guests at a time. I want to make this more discussions with most interviews, right? It's almost like a lecture. You have one person that asks a few questions and the other person just kind of goes off in the interview sound to get more of a discussion going and even group sessions where it can, might even take the form of a debate.

18:29 So do these just some ideas I'm playing with. So there will be a mix of the solo sessions and interviews and guest podcast as well. And I do want to go deep, right? So I think that's the main thing here. What I'm going for is to distill health down to just a few basic, simple principles and help you to understand a worldview that delivers health sovereignty to you and how far this is outside of the dominant cultural Western worldview that is alive and well in not just the western world, but where it's like our dominant export is how we look at the world. Despite the flaws. And then here's the thing, every single culture has idiosyncrasies, has flaws in it, including our own. There can be a problem if you just look at all the different cultures, realize they're all wrong in certain regards and get into like a nihilistic funk over it thinking that there's no meaning as well.

19:27 So how do you really understand all that, bring it together in a way that is effective and fulfilling for you as well. So this is why I started this podcast is I wanted a new outlet, new way to explore ideas and in conversations with other people to really have some very good conversations. You know, I listened to quite a few podcasts myself. While I'm driving my car. Number one thing I do, I, I listen to plenty of music as I work. So when I'm driving, I use that as podcast time. I feel in listening to a good podcast, it's almost like a conversation, but it's not one I'm participating in. And so starting this podcast for just selfish reasons, I want to get into some really good conversations around the topic. I know many people in this field and there's a lot more out there that I do not know it's about.

20:12 I want to start having these conversations and I'll record them and you can join me as well, so I'll mention that. I've also started writing around these similar subjects. If you follow me on Facebook or Instagram or in emails as well, you'll see some stuff like the medical monopoly Monday musings that I've been doing, which I've been having a lot of fun on, and we'll be talking about many similar concepts in there. Last thing I want to do here for this episode is to read the Healthy Safir and creed. This was something I put together that really gets down to these principles and over time this will likely be adapted and changed up and hopefully refined down to fewer points. Right now I've got 16 points on it. I think it can be distilled down lower, but this is different ways of looking at health than most people do.

21:05 It is ways that I personally look at health, like you don't have to follow all of these if you don't want. I think everyone's going to be a bit different. There may be some you don't agree with, which is going to make for some good conversations, so this is posted on the website health sovereign.com or you can find it free there and no need to opt in or anything like that. Let's just can be readily available. Am going to read the whole thing here and in upcoming podcasts I'm going to be covering these different points in more detail. This is very important because I do use certain terms on here or certain ways that I kind of reflect my ideas may not be 100% clear from just the point right there. So there'll be a deeper dive in upcoming podcasts. It might just be a single point per episode or maybe two.

21:53 We'll see how that pans out. So let's read this. They're healthy sovereign creed. Humans across the world need a better system when it comes to health. One that takes the best of everything in the past and build something new, sustainable, ecologically sound and mutually enriching to move forward with. This must start from a place of sovereignty for each individual to develop their ability to respond, to think and to act, not just react in the world surrounding their own health. These are the tenants of doing so. Number one, I understand that health starts from a place of self-responsibility that no one, not a doctor, especially not insurance nor the government will care about my health or the health of my loved ones as much as I do. Therefore, I will educate myself taking radical responsibility for both my actions and inactions. Number two, I recognize that there are hundreds if not thousands of modalities for effecting health, whether physical, mental, emotional or spiritual.

22:58 I will find those that worked for me. I will not give up after one, two or 10 have not gotten me to where I want to go. Number three, I understand that mind, body, spirit is a system and in multi-way street psychology affects physiology and vice versa. All levels affect all levels. Number four, I will understand and harness the placebo effect for my own betterment. Number five, I recognize that I am not just human, but as Simeon with my microbiome that includes bacteria, fungi, viruses, and even the animal kingdom. I will act as a shepherd to my body's ecology to the best of my abilities. Number six, I recognize that I am like a bacteria or insect in size to the greater ecology of Gaia planet earth, that I cannot exist without plant life nor many other species and kingdoms in the web of life.

23:56 I will do my best to align what is good for me to what is good for the greater ecology. Number seven, I understand that my views on health are shaped by my culture and community regardless of their truthfulness, so I keep an open mind about different possibilities and a recognize that I intern come to shape my community and culture at large. Therefore having a moral responsibility to lead and inspire others in being healthy. Number Eight, I recognize the antifragility of the human body that its livingness can serve to help come back from stresses stronger than before. I will aim to support expanding my antifragility to further increase my health, not him. I recognize that over intervening when it comes to health, especially at certain times can be worse than doing nothing. There are risks and rewards to everything, so aim for the lowest scale intervention possible with any issue escalating as needed rather than jumping straight to large impact interventions.

25:00 Number 10 I understand that you can't mess with nature without downside while doing so may be positive in the short term. There are worse effects in the long term. Humans play on a much shorter timescale than nature herself, which is why to strive for lower scale in the wrench [inaudible] for self and ecology. 11 I will strive to understand the difference between what is scientific for health versus what is simply technological. The highest tech interventions are not necessarily the healthiest as shown by science 12 I will come to terms with the inevitability of death for myself and my loved ones. I understand that this will help avoid the fear induced pushing of unnecessary interventions, allowing for greater connection instead of denial. Number 13 I recognize that all of Western medicine was built on a flawed and incomplete model of reductionistic materialism while useful in certain contexts.

25:56 The flaws that this one way of seeing the world to the exclusion of all others. It misses the world views of psychology, spirituality, holistic or systems thinking, even cultural effects. I recognize that all of these are important when it comes to health. 14 I recognize that big Pharma has a track record of criminal and harmful activity. While drugs have their place. That place has been inflated through advertising, incentivizing doctors, lobbying and successfully pass in certain legislation, public relations campaigns, and more. I will strive to understand that proper place. 15 I recognize that other large industries have track records of criminal and harmful activity and releasing manmade dangerous chemicals into the environment. I'll aim to educate myself on such actions and reduce the support of such companies for the health of all 16 I recognize that we all must be able to make up our own medical choices for ourselves and our families.

26:55 I will stand up against all medical totalitarianism. That is the health sovereign creed. Once again, you can find that download it, that one page document over at healthsovereign.com that's going to wrap it up for this episode. I do want to mention that if you have not already, please check out lost empire. Herbs.Com herbs are not the end all be all of health, but they are a mostly forgotten part of our health that in the last century or so we have moved away from with this drug model of doing things and once again, drugs do have their place, but so do herbs. So think about what herbs are actually in your life. Is it just cannabis? Yeah, that's a lot of people think of verb or is it culinary herbs or what about the wide world? Every single area, every single people's used certain herbal ingredients to help support their health.

27:48 So are you doing the same? A lot of information over there and this podcast is made possible because of the cost of doing so by lost empire. Herbs are theirs. They are the primary underwriter of this podcast. I hope you have enjoyed this episode. Please do send me your comments and feedback reviews on iTunes or wherever else are much appreciated. And if you want to reach out directly to me, you can at Logan at lost empire, herbs.com we'd love to hear from you. How do you like this podcast? What are you excited about that's coming in the future? And are you on board with this mission? Thank you very much.