hol+ by Dr. Taz MD

[00:00:00] We are broken in medicine, we know that we know, for example, that almost 60% of Americans today have a chronic disease. We know that 40% have two chronic diseases. We know that 68% of us are on a prescription medication. This is why I believe that holistic health and holistic medicine is the future of medicine, wellness, and healing.

So is holistic medicine evidence-based? The answer is yes. That merging of patient outcome and clinical guidelines and experience is evidence-based medicine. Welcome to Whole Plus, the podcast that embraces and tackles the holistic way, bringing it all together, science, research, innovations and technology, and our collective human experience.

This is where science and Spirit come together. I'm Dr. Taz, your host and a double board certified medical doctor and integrative health expert, a nutritionist and an acupuncturist. I'm also the founder and CEO of whole Plus. A digital and clinical platform where my team and I [00:01:00] practice evidence-based holistic medicine every single day.

I know and I hear all the health and wellness noise that's out there. I want this show to be the one to empower you with the knowledge you need to heal. Not just your body, but your relationships, your communities, and our world. Welcome to Whole Plus. We are on the brink. We are on the edge of something, something really big and something really exciting, but we don't know what it is.

I'm talking about health and medicine and wellness and all the change. I can feel it. I'm sure you guys can too. Let's just take a step back and think about it. We've got Maha making changes, taking junk out of our food, looking at policy, looking at vaccines, and so much more. We've had amazing guests on here talking about those very issues.

We've got new changes when it comes to how we deliver health and healthcare and how we even think about wellness. [00:02:00] You know what I'm talking about, right? We've got functional medicine, integrative medicine, all these different forms of medicine. We have concierge medicine, we have new models, telehealth labs you can do and then try to figure out what to do.

There is so much going on right now when it comes to health and wellness and medicine, but we are still broken and we still have a problem. So when I'm asked what is the future of health and wellness in medicine, I have a lot to say and that's why I wanted to do this episode. Most of the time in the rooms where I sit or where I speak or when I travel, guess what everybody is talking about?

They are talking about the fact that the future of medicine. I'm gonna let you guess the future of medicine is ai. Yay clap. Cheer jump for joy. AI is gonna save us all. It's gonna solve food deserts. It's gonna take care of the fact that we don't have enough [00:03:00] doctors and nurse practitioners to take care of patients, and it's going to be the answer for the future.

So in 20 33, 20 40, maybe you can check yourself into a hospital and an AI robot can show up, take care of you, and boom, you're fixed. You're done. Isn't that exciting? It's actually terrible and really frightening because AI can only go as far as we humans allow it to go. I was talking actually recently, I.

I was at an event. It was super interesting, and I was talking, and you know, somebody who's an expert, by the way, at AI and you know, really programming and health and wellness. They were telling me about a study that they did and they said that they took a group of doctors, a group of AI robots, and they also took a mix of the two, where the doctor used some AI tools and then in turn, each group was responsible.

For treating patients. So she asked me, which group do you [00:04:00] think did the best, had the best outcomes? And I'm like, well, the doctor, of course, right? Or maybe the doctor who had a few AI tools that they could use, you know, to make themselves more efficient. And she said wrong. And the AI robot was actually more efficient and more accurate when it came to diagnostics.

Guys that bothered me. I had to sit and pull back and I'm like, what are you talking about? And then I understood what the gap was. When we think about medicine and we think about health and wellness as a set of biomarkers that we chase and check off boxes and list and have this very linear mentality, right?

Well, you know, my A1C is here and my insulin is here, and my CRPS over here and my hormones are over here, so boom, I'm fixed. That is a very limited approach to medicine, health, wellness, and at the end of the day, the goal is healing. It's not [00:05:00] fixing. We are broken in medicine. We know that. I can throw a bunch of numbers and statistics at you.

We know, for example, that almost 60% of Americans today have a chronic disease. We know that 40% have two chronic diseases. We know that 68% of us are on a prescription medication. And 43% of us are on two or more prescription medications. We know about the obesity crisis. We know about the mental health crisis.

We know that we have a problem globally in so many different aspects of health rising cancer, rising chronic disease, rising autoimmune disease. Again, we're tackling all of that on this show to really try to get underneath it all and understand what's going on. But when I pull back and I watch what's going on, and I pray and hope for a new way to think about medicine and health and wellness, it's not happening, and AI is not the [00:06:00] answer.

If we're going to think about health in a way that actually heals people, not numbers, you're not a number. You're certainly not a machine. You're certainly not a robot, and you deserve better. The answer so far, right, and I've been in that with you guys. My journey, you know, I started out ER doctor, ICU, doctor, I was gonna fix things.

I was gonna fix people. I loved procedures. I'm not gonna bore you with that entire story, but that obviously led to my own health going downhill very quickly. And as my health went down, I went on that journey that I know so many of you have gone on over and over again trying to get answers, doctor, after doctor, chasing different things.

I found holistic medicine. I found integrative medicine. I became an acupuncturist. I became a nutritionist, and I had to work really hard as a doctor with medical education and science behind me. To figure out what the hell was going on with me, [00:07:00] and it took me a really long time, but that was 25 plus years ago.

That was a long time ago. Here's what's happened since, and this is what I have a front row seat to, which I, by the way, feel so privileged to be able to hear these stories and understand what's going on and, and be able to really put everyone's pieces together. Here's what's happening now. Medicine like it was then, like it is now, continues to be broken.

We have a global health crisis. We have a doctor shortage. We have an inability to take care of patients effectively to match the needs of today's time. But what's happened in the 20 plus years that I've been in the space of holistic and integrative medicine, there's been this hum or roaring of the desire to really do something differently.

So here's what's evolved, and you guys are probably, you know, if you're listening to my show, you're probably right there, you know, involved in a lot of this stuff. So we've had the [00:08:00] evolution of integrative medicine, right, which Dr. Andy Weil, one of my mentors started. And it's more about merging together different systems of medicine, still thinking about the patient as a person, not as a number.

Integrative medicine is beautiful, but for whatever reason, functional medicine came behind. It took off and is soaring ahead in terms of attention, viability, and really what people now can recognize and latch into as an alternative way of thinking about medicine. Versus the old term, which is alternative medicine.

Right. I used to cringe when people would lump me or call me an alternative medicine practitioner. I'm an md, I'm double board certified. I'm a nutritionist. I've done all this credentialing and work to get to the point of where I am today or even where I was back then, but I was alternative because. I was doing things differently, and it's honestly not fair to the thousands of practitioners who work really hard to be called [00:09:00] alternative simply because they think differently.

But that was then, and since that time, things like integrative medicine and functional medicine are slowly but surely getting more recognized. In fact, I looked at a number recently and. I started out over 20 years ago, I used to be called a quack. That was a quack doctor down the street. But now almost 50% of conventionally trained doctors actually accept functional medicine.

That's progress, right? So that's super exciting to me. But functional medicine has an issue as well. There are almost 40,000 functional medicine doctors today in the United States. Functional medicine is about a $28 billion industry projected to be at $233 billion by the year 2033. So why am I not cheering up and down and super excited and saying, go, go, go.

The reason is, is we're [00:10:00] still not there yet. We're still broken. Let me show you how or why I had a patient yesterday in my exam rooms. Here is a direct quote from my patient. I have been to four Vy League doctors. I have been to three functional medicine doctors. I have been to two air quotes, alternative medical practitioners, a naturopath and acupuncturist, and a chiropractor.

I have spent so much money. And I still don't know what to do and I still feel like shit, and I'm so frustrated. In our whole plus clinics, we hear this over and over again. We comb through pages of lab work, comb through all these different regimens that patients have been put on, both by their conventional doctor, their functional medicine doctor, their alternative medical practitioners, and their just as [00:11:00] confused as I was 25 years ago.

So medicine guys is still broken. And while we're trying our hardest, everyone is trying. We're trying, and we're struggling to get the answers and to figure out the way forward. All I'm hearing, sitting on my end is a whole lot of noise. This is why I believe that holistic health and holistic medicine is the future of medicine, wellness, and healing.

And I've been saying this for a really long time with a lot of people shutting the doors in my face and laughing, right? And saying that that's simply not possible. But all that's happening is we're running up the budget and we're running up the healthcare debt, and we're getting nowhere. So I love the fact that we're changing legislation, that we're addressing food quality, that we're looking at women's health more [00:12:00] critically, that we're talking about hormones, that we're talking about our children and what it means for them when they get too many vaccines or too many medications, or too many additives and preservatives.

I love that. Let's do that. Let's keep doing that. We're gonna do that here. But if you guys think that AI. And that all these like subspecialties of medicine is going to bring people into wellness and onto a healing journey. We've gotta reconfigure this because everybody is simply more confused when we talk holistic medicine.

We are talking about the fact that there are many determinants when it comes to somebody's health. It's not just about the numbers, it's not just about biohacking and it's not just about looking at functional health labs and saying, Hey, yay, you get a hundred today. Good job. We all love that, right? We're all like gunners making, trying to make straight A's all the time.

I. It is about a lot more because we're human [00:13:00] and a part of being a human and a part of a human experience is that there are so many different confounding variables when it comes to our health. That's why medicine has failed the idea of medicine as only a research-based clinical trial. Has failed. It's failed you.

It's failed people. It's failed systems. That transition came probably in the late 18 hundreds, early 19 hundreds, maybe a little bit more into 1920 or so where medicine went from. It's about you and me and our healing journey together in a collaborative. Partnership and I was gonna be with you all the way along that journey and making sure that you had somebody in your corner to quarterback and understand what was going on, not just with you, but with your family and your community and your entire sort of village or tribe, however you wanna describe that.

But we changed with the industrial revolution [00:14:00] and we moved into this very heavy, pharmaceutically based idea of medicine. Where we reduced everything down to a randomized control trial where we took one variable, maybe two at the most, and evaluated people based on one or two different determinants, and then made judgements about how to treat them or how to take care of their health.

We have done such a disservice to so many women and children and even men when it came to this model of thinking about medicine. You may not know this, but there are studies on women's health that were actually not done on women, but we take it as gold standard, as the Bible, as the way to really treat people and assume that we're gonna get a good result.

I. And all of us as doctors, I love doctors. They're my colleagues. I'm right there with you. But we've been brainwashed into thinking that this is the [00:15:00] only way to think about healing and wellness and medicine. So that term, evidence-based that everybody likes to throw around all the time. Do you guys actually even know what evidence-based medicine is?

I bet if you answered me back. You would say it's about the science. That's the first answer everybody has. It's about science. It's not just about science, it's about research, but it's also about clinical outcomes, patient outcomes, that's you, how you are feeling given a certain situation or circumstance, how your experience with a particular treatment played out.

That merging of patient outcome and clinical guidelines and experience is evidence-based medicine. So, so many of us have been practicing evidence-based medicine, whether there was a research control trial or not. And so it's not fair to sit there and label the work of so many amazing [00:16:00] practitioners for so many years that have spent so much time with patients, with people and say that their work is not evidence-based.

'cause evidence happens day in and day out in the exam room. And that evidence is more important than a paper coming out of a lab where maybe someone worked on a, a mouse or a set of rats to tell us what to do about you. So is holistic medicine evidence-based? The answer is yes. It's evidence-based, when it has structure, when it looks at you, the patient, when it keeps evaluating your outcomes, when it continues to revisit what's going on and how we can change that, and how we can move forward.

And when we establish a structure and a methodology to this way of practicing medicine, which actually by the way, is not that novel. Everyone thinks I'm so innovative. It's really not that novel or innovative. It was done thousands of years ago. [00:17:00] Then you, the patient. Actually gets a result that matters.

So holistic medicine embraces this idea of you, the patient, you the human that needs support and help. And that is not just a set of numbers that we're gonna check off of a list. Holistic medicine embraces the idea that there are multiple determinants to health. The research is just catching up to this idea, barely catching up to this idea.

It's about your physical health for sure. Right? But that's one dimension. And if we were robots or machines, maybe that would work and maybe AI would actually work as well, but we're not. We have emotions. We have energy. We have a mental cognitive process. We have family, we have community, we have finances that we have to manage to function in the world that we live [00:18:00] in.

We have a planet that lives and breeds like an organism with which we live and influence one another. So if we're gonna think about medicine in one dimension, we're gonna continue to struggle. And that's where, whether we use the term functional medicine, integrative medicine, conventional medicine, ai, robots, whatever we wellness, whatever term you want to use, we're gonna fail.

But if we instead shift our understanding that health and healing and numbers change, when you embrace the entirety of our human experience, that's when things really matter and that's when the effort to become better, whole, vibrant, have longevity, any of the terms you wanna use. Actually become realities without a lot of effort and without a lot of expense.

So the [00:19:00] future of medicine, wellness, and healing is holistic health. If we try to go in a different direction, we're gonna fail. And if we try to go in a different direction, not only are we gonna fail, we're gonna continue to spend and spend a bunch of money and end up with the same result. I have patient after patient telling me, you know, patients with resources running around the country, running around the world, trying to spend money to get the answers they need, willing to do anything.

What about the person that doesn't have the resources? What are their options? And as I sit back and I look at all of this, and I think about all of this, we have to change. We have to change the model of medicine that's being delivered day to day. And that change requires multiple things. It's a system overhaul more than what you're seeing talked about, more than what you're seeing heard about, and it begins, it has to begin on multiple fronts.

[00:20:00] It actually starts with you. I. You have to change. You have to change your expectation that just because I checked you off when it came to a number on your lab report that you are now, okay? You have to understand that health and healing and wellness, if we're gonna use those terms, is about all these determinants of health.

And that you have to have some accountability to yourself, that you are gonna have to check in with yourself and understand, where am I today, mentally, emotionally, spiritually? Are my finances in a good shape? Do I have community? How are my relationships? Because you can't out supplement a bad relationship, and you can't out nutrition a bad community.

You have to be able to put all of that and wind all of that together. Now, if you're sitting there listening to me and you're walking, or you're watching me, or you know, wherever you are, you're [00:21:00] probably like, okay, okay, I, I get it. But how, how do I do that? That sounds like so much, you know, just gimme the pill.

Just tell me what to take. Gimme the shot. Right? That's been the answer for so many people. We have to have a mindset shift, and if we can collectively have a mindset shift, we will get better. So it starts with you, the patient that, but that's only one piece of the puzzle. It has to start with us, the practitioners as well.

Right? We have to embrace the fact that any patient interaction, whether it's the exam room or in the hospital or wherever it may be, is an opportunity for healing and that we can't just manage labs. So many doctors today are just about managing the lab work. And so many telehealth companies are just about managing your labs.

We can't just manage labs. We have to manage people. So yes, while your lab may say, for example, let me give you an example that your CRP or your [00:22:00] inflammation marker is way outta line. If that's the only thing I focus on, while you're also having issues maybe with your gut or in a high stress phase of your life, or you're jumping on planes left and right, then I've done you a disservice.

So the integration of all the different determinants of health is what holistic medicine does. It's not about dreadlocks and Birkenstock. It's not that there's anything wrong with that, right? But that's used to be the image people had in their head of somebody who is quote unquote, holistic. It's really more about embracing the fact that there are multiple determinants to health.

There are multiple ways to heal, and the art and the joy of medicine, the joy of being a doctor, a practitioner of any kind is being able to pick the right thing at the right time for you, the person. Now you're gonna tell me an AI robot can do that. I'm out. AI can look at data. AI can [00:23:00] organize data. AI can absolutely make us more efficient, can definitely make us more aware of all the different opportunities and diagnoses that may exist in a particular situation.

But you will never be able to get rid of the doctor who has to take all that data. That patients are processing and experiencing, and then be able to apply it to the human sitting in front of them. And that in turn is what, at the end of the day, is going to make a difference in medicine, wellness, health, and healing.

If you really wanna see. Yourself get better. If we really wanna heal communities, if we wanna bring the cost of healthcare and managing our health down, we've gotta change the model. And the model has to embrace holistic medicine, which means the model is the third determinant that actually needs to change.

It has to embrace time with a patient. [00:24:00] There are so many studies that show time. For a doctor and a patient is the biggest determinant of success when it comes to patient outcomes because the patient can understand why they're doing what they're doing, but more importantly, the patient understands that they have a relationship and a built in accountability system.

I just talked to a patient about this the other day. She wants to lose 40 pounds, right? Gave her all the options. We can go natural, we can go medication. There's dietary approaches. You could do a detox, you could do all these different things. And she's like, I don't wanna do any of that. She goes, I wanna do it the right way.

I wanna do it deliberately and slowly and methodically so it doesn't all come back. And I agreed. I'm like, that would be amazing, but how are you gonna stay motivated? Losing 40 pounds is about an 18 month journey. And how are you gonna stay motivated through that journey where you don't wanna quit and you give in to carbohydrate cravings or late night [00:25:00] eating?

She was honest with me. If you're listening to me, I hope, uh, it's okay that I'm sharing this story. But she was like, my husband and I love Chinese food, a particular Chinese fried rice every single night, and that's our way of relaxing. And I'm like, well, how are you gonna stop that? When it's something that you and your husband do together, she's like, I'm gonna make an appointment with you every three months and I'm gonna do my labs two weeks before that appointment, and that way I'm gonna stay on track because I trust you and I know that you're gonna keep me straight.

So this was about her wanting to be accountable to me as a part of her healing journey. She chose over Ozempic and Wegovy and berberine and all the other things that we know to do for weight loss. So at the end of the day, the case I'm making is that if we're sitting in 2040 or 2045, what health and wellness and healing should look like?[00:26:00]

Our centers with exam rooms where there are practitioners that understand the art of medicine. Patients that understand that this is a journey and that it's collaborative and we're gonna work together because when one of us heals, many of us heal, and as we all heal together, we're going to see the shifts and the changes that need to happen.

But if we continue to have this reductionist approach to health and healing in medicine that was started in the late 18 hundreds and 1900 early 19 hundreds, then we're gonna be on the same treadmill, the same rat race that we've been on for the last 150 years, and we are not gonna be able to answer the call of what the next generation really needs.

So when I look at my children and I think about their children and I think about the environment and the planet and what needs to happen next, I'm worried because I don't like the chatter that I'm hearing, [00:27:00] and I really wanna encourage you all to join me in this mission to move medicine in a different direction.

In a direction where we understand that medicine is not just about protocols and labs and drugs, and even supplements. It's really about embracing the entirety of the human experience and understanding that it all works together and that it creates this thing called energy around each person. In Chinese medicine, they called it Chi and Ayurveda, they called it prana.

And that determines your life path and your life course. I challenge you all to find your chi, to increase it, to find your prana and own it, to make your life path and that of your family. And maybe even once you feel good, you might be able to think about your community and the planet and where we're headed.

But we've gotta be in this [00:28:00] together, and we've got to embrace the fact that holistic medicine, holistic health, is the future of health, healing, wellness, longevity, and medicine. So I hope you'll continue to join me in these conversations where we dive deep, we force change, we push the envelope. Here's one thing I know, history will tell us that we were right.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Whole Plus, be sure to share this episode with your friends and family. And if you haven't already, please take a moment to subscribe to this podcast on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. To engage with the community, follow at Live Whole Plus and check out our website whole plus.co.

That's HOL ps.co. For more resources and information on holistic health, see you next time.