Joining me is a special guest. He is a pillar of light in the Naturopathic Medical community. Dr. Rick Kirschner has over 40 years of experience! He graduated in 1981 from the National University of Natural Medicine. He was an Oregon licensed Naturopathic Physician until 2020, when he retired his license. He is the past President of the Naturopathic Medicine Institute, the current president of the Foundations of Naturopathic Medicine textbook project, and a long-time faculty member of the Institute for Management Studies. He has worked with many of the world’s best-known organizations, including AT&T, Argonne National Laboratory, The FDA, Kraft, NASA, Progressive Insurance, the U.S. Army, the National Guard, Starbucks, and many more.
Dr. Rick has delivered his expertise in thousands of radio and television appearances, interviews, and newspaper and magazine articles from CNBC, CBC to Fox, the Wall Street Journal to the USA Today.
Dr. Rick lives in Idaho with his wife of 34 years, two cats, and four chickens, where he allows inspiration and agitation to move him to write and where he continues to serve. He created the documentary “How Healthcare Became Sickcare.” I will provide the link to his documentary for you to watch. He is the author of several books, and his most recent one is the co-author of the 4th edition of the International bestseller “Dealing With People You Can’t Stand: How To Bring Out The Best In People At Their Worst.”
Website: https://talknatural.com/
How Healthcare Became Sickcare Documentary: https://talknatural.com/documentary.html
Foundations of Naturopathic Medicine Institute: https://fnminstitute.org/
To join Dr. Rick Kirschner, ND, on Telegram group, email at: rick@talknatural.com
Podcast Episode 31 Transcript
Welcome to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast empowering you to take a whole-person approach to your well-being, spirit, soul, and body. Join me your host, Dr. Ana Lara, a naturopathic, doctor, entrepreneur, and a servant of Jesus Christ. We are not just a body. We are spirit and soul. It’s time to integrate medicine and spirituality into our healing. Let’s get started. Welcome back to Physician Heal Self, the podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Alara. Today I have a very special guest. He is a pillar of light in the naturopathic medical community. His name is Dr. Rick Kirschner. He has over 40 years of experience. He graduated in 1981 from the National University of Natural Medicine. He was a licensed naturopathic physician until 2020 when he decided to retire his license. He is the past president of the Naturopathic Medicine Institute, the current president of the Foundations of Naturopathic Medicine, a textbook project, and a long-time faculty member of the Institute of Management Studies.
He has worked with many of the world’s best-known organizations, including AT&T Argon National Laboratory, the FDA, Craft, NASA Progressive Insurance, the US Army, the National Guard, Starbucks, and many more. Dr. Rick has delivered his expertise in thousands of radio and television appearances, interviews, newspapers, magazines, and articles from CNBC C-B-C, CBC and Fox, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today.
Dr. Rick lives in Idaho with his lovely wife of 34 years, two cats, and four chickens, where he allows inspiration and agitation to move him to write where he continues, and he continues to serve there. He created a documentary that I highly encourage you all go and see. I will be providing a link to these in the description. The documentary’s name is How Healthcare Became Sickcare, and it’s very well put together, educational, and informative. He also has authored many books. The recent one, co-authored, is the fourth edition of the international bestseller called Dealing with People: You Can’t Stand How to Bring Out The Best In People At Their Worst, which I think is a book that we can all benefit from. Help me welcome Dr. K to the show.
Hi.
How are you?
I’m good. It’s great to be with you.
Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to join me on this podcast. From the moment I heard you and listened to you speak, I was like, yes, that’s the person I need to learn from. I love it when I come across bold and courageous leaders in their industries who just take a stance for the truth. That’s something that I really admire about you, especially in the last four years when things were not well in our country, in the world, in the medical arena, that I found myself a bit disgusted about how even in our community of naturopaths, how divided we were. I follow you on social media, so some of the things that you shared and posted were very encouraging to a new doctor. So I just want to thank you for that because it could have been very easy for me to say, you know what?
I’m out of this. I’m not going to do this anymore. It can be very discouraging when you first start a business, and you’re a new doctor. So when I see you, I don’t want to call you an elder, but our elders of our medicine, our most experienced people, right, the s stages of our medicine to learn from you. I don’t usually get excited to see famous people, but, you are famous to me because you’ve provided a lot to our community throughout the year. So I want to talk a little bit. First of all, I want to know what made you get into naturopathic medicine.
Oh, wow. Well, that’s really a long story, but I’ll try to get to the bottom. First, thank you for all those very kind things you had to say. I just heard the other day that the average lifespan of an American male is 76 years, and I’m 75, so we had better talk fast. No, I’m kidding. Let’s not waste any time.
I don’t think they were including people who live a healthy lifestyle in that study. That’s true.
You’re not the average. You’re not the average.
I think I have 20, or 30 more years left of me. But anyway, when I was very young, I went to live in Israel after the Yom Kippur war, I felt called to go to Israel and see if I could help out. I dunno if your audience knows much about that war, but it was devastating for Israel because it was a surprise attack on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, and thousands of Israelis died, everybody lost somebody in the Yom Kippur surprise attack. So it took me three weeks to get there, and when I got there, agriculture had come to a complete halt. The country itself was in a real depression, really just the heartache of what had just happened. And there was really not a lot for somebody like me to do. And I found my way to, at the time, a vegetarian village in the mountains that overlooked the Galilee. So you can see the city of Galilee right over the edge of the mountains, and there was no work there for me either, but a really nice family said, well, we have a cabin, and you can stay in our cabin. So I wintered there and was always looking for work. And the only job I could find in that village was with the village doctor who was a naturopath. Her name was Ur. She was 83 years old.
Wow. She was so vital, so youthful in her energy, and people would line up at her door for her treatment. She grew all of her own medicines, and she needed somebody to apprentice with her. And so that was the work that I wound up doing. And I remember when I was watching her, I was just so impressed by her because she was so alive and so connected to life, and she could run circles around me and mentally run circles around me, physically run circles around. I was like 19, 20 years old. So I remember thinking, boy, I wish I could learn what she knows. So when I came back to the United States for my brother’s wedding, he wanted me to be his best man.
I was in a health food store in Cincinnati, and I ran into the little sister of a guy I played rock and roll with in high school, Ginger Meyer and Ginger had papers under her arm and I just casually said, Hey, what’s that? And she says, I’m applying to a naturopathic medical school in Oregon. I was like, you can learn that. And I had that flash of light like this is where I’m supposed to go. This is what I’m supposed to do. So, I needed to do three years of pre-med to get into that program. So I got to work, and that’s how it all started.
Wow, that’s very interesting. So you went to Israel, and your first exposure was there?
Yeah.
Wow. It was meant for you to do it.
It was meant for me to do it. It was clear that a path was being laid out before me. And I have to say my whole adult life, a path has been laid out in front of me and my sole obligation is to be true. So it’s taken me a long way. I’ve had an amazing life. It’s been quite an adventure, and I’m very blessed.
Yeah, you sure are blessed. So what have you seen, I mean, you are a pioneer in our community. What differences have you seen in naturopathic medicine early on in your career versus where it’s at now? Because I’m a newbie. I graduated in 2017. So what are the differences that you’ve seen the good and the bad?
Okay. Well, when I was in school, nobody knew who we were. Nobody had ever heard of it. The whole world had forgotten our profession, which was by design. In my movie, I tell that story. So I got involved in what I would consider the resurrection of it, an almost dead profession. And almost everybody I went to school with had a kind of revolutionary fire in them. We wanted to learn how to help people without drugs and surgery and how to restore health. There wasn’t a lot available to us. The school itself was impoverished, which would be a generous word.
It was in the old postal building in downtown Portland on the third floor. A greasy spoon restaurant and a pawn shop were at the front door. And we were, all the people that were teaching us were maybe three years ahead of us, except we had a few elders, people who were my age now back then who were still around. They were very kind and generous, and they helped us learn some amazing things. And that would include Dr. Bester and Dr. Boucher were names that in our profession were quite well known at the time because they were the keepers of the flame. So when my speaking career began, and I started traveling around the country, nobody knew anything about naturopathic medicine. I developed a little speech that I gave at the front end of a speech where I’d say they’d introduce me as Dr. Rick Kirshner.
I insisted on that. You got to call me Dr. Rick Kirshner. I am a doctor. You got to call me that. So I get up on stage and the first thing I’d say is, so I am a doctor, and you may be wondering, what kind of doctor is he? I’m not an MD. I’m not a DO. I’m not a DC. I’m not a PhD. What does that leave? Then, I would wait a moment while the audience scratched their head. So now I said this in Texas, and a guy yelled, quack, but actually, I’m a naturopathic Medicine physician. I went to a four-year medical school after three years of conventional. I learned that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If you treat the cause of a problem, you may be able to eliminate the problem. But if all you do is treat the symptoms, eventually, they kill your patient.
I learned the alternative to giving people petroleum derivatives and cutting off troublesome body parts. And if you’re interested, come talk to me on a break. And people would wind up on the break, and they’d go, where can I find one of those? Where can I find one of those? I feel like in the early part of my speaking career, I got to be an ambassador for an awakening profession and to inform the world about what it was. It was a really pleasurable part of my experience to be able to do something like that, to bring something new to people that was good for them. So that was kind of the condition back when I went to school. And in the years following, well, my goodness, as I say in the movie, we wound up with many schools, and some of them have a lot of property and real estate around them.
People all over the world have now discovered that there’s a thing called natural medicine. Before COVID started, the whole world was moving in our direction. An interesting effect of the COVID thing was it distracted people from that direction, and a whole bunch of people fell under the spell of the pharma industry and began to believe that health comes from a needle and a mask. So that kind of slowed down all that momentum, and whatever division existed in our profession was exacerbated by that because there was, I’d say, a part of our profession that had this idea that the way to survive in the world is to go along, to get along, to take the table scraps from the medical industry if they’ll just let us have a seat at the table if they’ll let us play. I always was part of a different mindset, which was we just be true to ourselves.
That’s our job. The rest takes care of itself. That’s out of our hands. But if we’re true to ourselves, we will be blessed and rewarded by that. So, we saw this division happen in our profession. A lot of people went and got these experimental gene therapy shots in our profession, which just blows my mind that anybody would trust the drug industry with their health with an experimental product. It just shocks the daylight. So just thinking about it still, I can’t really. It’s almost impossible to get my head around that. But they did. And not only did they go for that, but they were insistent that we all go for it. Some of the leaders in our profession were demanding that you go get your shot. You have a moral obligation to society to go get a shot, which is ridiculous. So I wound up becoming outspoken. It’s my nature that if something’s wrong, I feel like I have to do what I can to speak the truth and as I understand it. So that’s all I was doing. I was just like, well, I won’t be buried under this thing. I’m going to stand up.
I took a lot of heat from it, as you might guess.
Sure did. You took a lot of heat.
Anytime I could interject, I would.
But I have to say everything you’re saying. It’s nourishment to my soul because I feel the same way. I feel like if there’s anything I’m going to do in my life, is stand on the truth. Anything other than that would be death. I couldn’t live with myself. So I applaud individuals like yourself, especially regarding the naturopathy community. Because, as you said, back in your days when you guys were resuscitating, reviving, we were this medicine that’s been ancient. You have to go back to the beginning of the existence of life. How do humans survive? There weren’t any of these pharmaceuticals and all of these other modern medicine. Everything was connected to nature: how we ate, the quality of the food, making sure that no one was spraying chemicals on their food our air and our water were clean and we were sleeping better, and we didn’t have the stress that we do now.
We don’t have the toxic burden that we are exposed to in our day now than if we did a hundred or 200 years ago. So somehow, as people evolved into this modern and convenient world and the conveniences of the world, they have disconnected themselves from nature itself and understanding how all that works. If we look at certain cultures around the world, tribal cultures, they’re connected to the earth, they know the foods, they’re growing their foods, they know what’s in their food. And so your generation of nature paths really created this movement. You had to. It was a movement of reviving this medicine to keep it going. I completely honor and respect that foundation because if you guys didn’t do that, I would not be able to do the work that I do now. I feel like I am the privileged child coming into this field of medicine, to be honest with you because I have not taken the hits that you have in the 40-plus years that you’ve been a naturopathic medicine physician. Right. So yeah, I was little, not a little. I was a lot disappointed. I was very disappointed to see some of these very experienced nature paths that were just so driven by fear.
Even going through medical school, I went to Southwest College, which changed its name to Sonoran University. I remember seeing my colleagues, some of my classmates, and thinking, they shouldn’t be here. They should not be in this program. They should go to a conventional medical program. That’s where they belong. This is not my last choice. This is my first choice to be a naturopathic doctor.
I had a similar experience to you. This is a thing I didn’t even know it’s a thing, and there’s a school right in my backyard. How convenient is that? God walked me through this, and it just happened. But I remember seeing classmates and thinking, I like to study psychology, as I’m sure you do too, and behaviors and so forth. One thing that I noticed in any profession is that if you do not know who you are as a person, you will not be good in the role that you take because you’re trying to fit in being accepted by others.
And that’s what I see some naturopathic doctors and students do. They’re trying to fit in. I’m trying to stand out. People are tired of that. They’re tired of being ignored. They’re tired of not having solutions to their problems. I mean, sometimes they’re not even getting the proper diagnostics to assess them or find out what the root cause is. What’s going on here? There’s so much. I mean, that’s my whole day. I get new patients that come in and they’ve been to this specialist, that specialist, but there’s just this one thing they never even bothered to look at, and that’s where the problem’s at. So I’m not trying to fit in.
I’ve heard you say before there’s a time and place for everything. I respect all doctors. I respect them. There’s a need for surgery. There’s a need for things when it’s the right time for that. However, I’m not trying to be like them. First of all, we’re trying to prevent people from developing diseases. And if there are disease states, how do we remediate them? How do we restore a person’s health? And so yeah, I know we stand on the same principles of truth and what’s happened since 2020, but you did very well. You manage yourself still very well. I know you took yourself off of social media a couple of times because you’re just like, I need a mental break from this lunacy. Right? It was just crazy.
It was insane. Absolutely.
Yeah. But I’ll tell you here in Phoenix, I got really busy that year and moving forward because every one of my naturopathic colleagues who listen to this and who are not on the same fence, might not agree, and they might not like it. But all those doctors that were encouraging this therapy, this approach, they said, no, I did not come to see my naturopathic medicine doctor to push these things on me. So then I’m getting all sorts of calls, and I’m making myself available in person, not just over a computer. I was flooded with newborn babies and adults and all sorts, men and women. I saw an increase in, like I said, here in Phoenix, Arizona. I just saw an increase in people because of those nds that were not being truthful and honoring their patients’ wishes. But that was the year that you also decided I’m stepping away from. Were you practicing at the time in 2020, or were you not practicing medicine anymore?
I retired my license in 2020. When I moved to Idaho, I was like, well, I don’t want to jump through any more hoops. We moved here when I was 70 years old. We knew nobody here. We started from scratch. We love our community. We’ve met so many wonderful people, and they love us back. What I left behind me was a lot of fear, a lot of anger, and a lot of hate and a lot of refusal to have dialogue. That’s what we left behind. We came here and I decided this is where I will make my stand for medical freedom where there’s still a chance. One of the things that has changed in the profession is the way people provide education to our students. Many of them knew nothing about our medicine. And some of the elders who knew about our medicine were somehow thrown out of our schools. I’ll never quite understand why that was.
Dr. Jim, who to me was like George Washington and the modern profession. Jim had taught at all the schools. He was a founder of almost all of our institutions and organizations, NMI, which I was president of when he passed away. That was his final contribution to the profession. But he was involved in the CNME in the nex. He was involved in the founding the ANP. He was involved in all kinds of state licensing laws. He was such a pioneer. And they fired him and me at the same time from your school. So they wound up with teachers who didn’t know about our medicine. So, a lot of the students in those schools came out of it with no knowledge and no confidence. And that was kind of across the board. And this was an attempt to appease the medical industry that led to this.
So there were people that wound up in our schools who really shouldn’t have been there. I’m not sure why they were there. Maybe it was there. They somehow thought it would be easier than regular medical school, which is kind of a joke. I worked awfully hard to get through school, and I bet you did, too. So it wasn’t easier. It was, in some ways, harder because you really have to know your stuff. It’s not a cookbook in conventional medicine. It’s a cookbook. They go tag it and bag it. Here’s your drug. That’s it. We’re more like, no, let’s get to the root cause. Let’s see if we can get your vitality going. Let’s restore the conditions for health. It’s a totally different model of healing. Students weren’t really getting a lot of exposure to that because as I became more of an elder in the community, we got kind of pushed to the side by the forces that got control of our schools.
So that was part of the problem. But I have to say, I think there’s a real hunger in our profession or knowing medicine, just like there was in my time. There’s a real hunger, and a lot of the younger people really want to learn everything they can so they can be great doctors so they can really help the human race. That’s why I got involved with NMI, the Naturopathic Medicine Institute, and I recommend that all of our doctors support the Naturopathic Medicine Institute because they’re the keepers of the keys to our kingdom. They are teaching how to be a naturopath, how to think like a naturopath, and how to practice like a naturopath. And even if you’re already good at all of those things, they deserve support because they’re helping pass that along to future generations way more than I think the schools are.
So I was thinking when you were talking about what the world was like when I went to school, there were people doing really unhealthy things and still doing just fine. I think of a comedian from my childhood, a guy named George Burns. George Burns, I believe, lived to be 98 or a hundred years old. He smoked 18 cigars a day. He drank scotch whiskey every day. He ran around with young women, just a wild lifestyle in his nineties. An interviewer asked him on a TV program, what do your doctors say about your lifestyle? And he goes, what can’t they say? They’re all dead. So how’s it possible that he could take such poor care of himself? Well, the truth is he grew up in a world that wasn’t so polluted, and he benefited from that epigenetically. He gained the benefit of that, genetically and environmentally.
He gained the benefit of that. Same with my grandparents. They were stronger than the current generation. Now you see, the sickness is so deep. It’s almost like the cushion of stupidity or what Bucky Fuller would call the womb of acceptable ignorance ran out. Suddenly, we find ourselves facing the consequences of big decisions that have been made that affect all of our lives and our health. And this is where a guy like Bobby Kennedy comes in because Kennedy has observed this phenomenon and wants to do something about it in a world that’s oblivious to its own demise. Here you have somebody like him standing up and saying, you know what? We’re sick, and we should fix this. We should talk about it. We should figure it out. We should fix it. So this is a great moment in medical history right now. It’s an unprecedented opportunity for doctors who are focused on restoring health to play their role at a very high level.
I’m very excited about it. I was very disappointed in the lack of support in our professional community for Bobby Kennedy, for the promise that offered us to do something about this thing that all of us have witnessed and are burdened by. So this is a great moment, and it’s a great moment for people like you who have a platform and a voice. It’s a great moment for our schools to course correct to start bringing the medicine back in. It’s a great moment for our organizations and institutions to really evaluate the choices that they’ve made and the consequences of those choices, take some ownership over all of that, and do something to correct the course. So people ask me how I keep my energy up so much, and I’m like, well, I vacillate between being an optimist and what I call an Irish optimist. So let me explain. So an optimist is like, it’s going to get better. A pessimist is like, it can’t get any worse. An Irish optimist is like, sure it can.
Yeah, I have to agree with you. This is a very pivotal moment in our country. I’ll refer to our country because when we compare statistics across the board as it relates to health, our country is one of the sickest countries. As rich and powerful as it is, we have the highest number of sick children and adults with chronic conditions. It’s a very pivotal time just across the board, not just for nature paths, but for everyone. That is, I completely agree with you that I think a lot of people are oblivious to the overall conditions of individual health. So, I have taken more of a sense this year of speaking on larger platforms and going from that because of what I am seeing in the clinic. I’m like, just, I’m not the doctor who just sees people for two minutes and moves on.
I see people of all ages come across, like I said, from newborns to people in their eighties and nineties. But what I see is that it’s a red flag, and I’m very concerned about, very concerned about how unhealthy our young people are. I’ll tell you this: I had a 20-year-old female, and this is very common. It’s not isolated, and it doesn’t matter. Race, they’re all the same. So you can’t even say it’s more in this demographic than that. It doesn’t have anything to do with financial resources, either. It’s everyone. These 20-year-olds are coming into my office and I am checking their hormones. I’m doing comprehensive labs based on what they’re telling me, and I assess them because no medical doctor, no OBGYN, is going to run a hormone panel, an extensive hormone panel on a 20-year-old female or a 20-year-old male. They’re just not. You’re young, you’re healthy, you’re fine. That’s the assumption that’s made. But when I look at these hormone panels, I look at them, and I’m very direct with my patients. I want to really inspire them and get them to wake up and shake them up, give ’em some strategies, and say, Hey, look, if you don’t get your life together right now, when you’re my age, you may not be around. So I’ll tell ’em, my hormones as a 45-year-old female are better than your hormones at 20 years old.
That is not okay, and that is not normal. My hormones are very optimal for my age. Why? Lifestyle? It’s lifestyle, diet, exercise, managing my stress, getting out into nature, drinking water, and that sort of thing. The things that they’re not doing. They’re on their phones all night. They’re not sleeping the adequate hours at the right times of the night that they should be sleeping. They’re not eating. And if they’re eating, they’re eating food that’s filled with chemicals and poisons in there. Plus, we’re not even going to discuss what are the things they’ve received medically in their childhood that maybe someone my age or your age hasn’t received. I’ve already gotten flagged for that once, Dr. Riggs. So we’re just going to say a word, but the Magic juice.
They’re getting the magic juice. We’ve seen many doctors, and including medical doctors that have spoken up when they compare these two different populations of those who got the juice and those who haven’t gotten the juice. And there’s a huge difference in children and in young adults and so forth. I’ve had the privilege of traveling to other countries that, like in Peru and Belize, where it’s very, they live in the jungle. There is no modern anything. In my communication with the people in those areas, they don’t know what autism is. Their children are healthy. There are no behavioral issues. There’s no chronic disease in children. They’re out playing, and they’re living their life. And as a mother, as anyone who’s a parent or is thinking about becoming a parent, I would think that you want to have a healthy and happy child.
You would think.
I think it’s time. No, I know it’s time for me, for other practitioners, other doctors or whatever field they’re in, parents, people, adults, to start standing up and taking ownership of our bodies, of our health and make a stance for that, right? If not, where are these 20-year-olds going? What is their life going to look like in 40 years from now? Will they be around, or will hospitals be more filled with more sick people and clinics busier with sick people and they’re just coming every month for the refill?
Yep. It’s pretty astonishing. I just heard from one of our colleagues who is in practice that almost all the young women who do succeed in getting pregnant are having cesareans. They’re having medical interventions in their birth. That’s a big intervention. When I was coming up in the world, the year my daughter was born, 1977, two years before you.
When she was born, cesareans were the exception to the rule, not the rule. And yet I heard from one of our colleagues this is becoming the way it’s done now. So you think about all of the programming that’s gone into the mental conditioning of young people about medicine. They go to these well-baby visits that are basically juice visits, and they get drugs and pills for every ill, and their parents don’t know how to deal with fevers and all this kind of stuff. When I was a kid, I actually had pneumonia when I was in fifth grade, and I lost 20 pounds, and I ran a fever at one point. It spiked to 107 degrees, and my mom didn’t freak out. She knew how to manage a fever. She sat by my bed with a bowl of cool water and just kept a cool wash rag on my forehead so my brain would be injured from that fever.
And it calmed down. I got well, and it’s different now. People have been conditioned to believe that they require medical intervention to survive living on planet Earth. If the creator didn’t design us so magnificently, our systems require medical help because they’re not very good. And the naturopathic medicine model is not; your system is a genius system. It’s a genius system, and sickness is a sign that you’re out of whack. So, let’s trace it back to its root and get you back in alignment with yourself so you can have a great life. So it’s a completely different model. One of the things I set out to do with my movie was to make the case that our profession was not designed to be a me-too profession, like the osteopaths and whoever else plays along with this thing. We were designed to provide people with a different option. Instead of managing their sickness and death, we’re supposed to help people restore their health and maintain their health. It’s a completely different mindset and a completely different practice method to work to restore health rather than manage disease. And that was the case that I set out to make in the movie. By the way, doc, you were one of the handful of doctors who volunteered to give the speech that turned into the movie. I’m pretty sure you stepped up and told me, I have a memory of this. You said, I’ll do it. I’m pretty sure that was you. Is that true?
True. I might have. I might have.
I think you did. I gave that speech at a couple of conventions and I offered it. I said, it’s all laid out. I’ll give you the slides. I’ll give you everything.
Oh, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, I did present it. It was you. Yeah.
Well, you should know this.
Very few of our docs had the courage to give that speech. So just know you were one of the few.
Oh, wow.
It meant a lot to me because I wrote that so everybody could give it. I only made the movie because people were too afraid to give the speech.
I don’t get it. I don’t get the fear. I don’t understand that fear. And some of us, I know that some of us are designed to be here in this time, right now, in this world to help people. Some are going to hear it, and some are not. It’s just biblical. That’s the way it is. Some people are going to receive the word. Some are not. I’ve watched it many times and I started to watch it again today, I am halfway through it. And it no matter how much you know about this, just going back and re-listening to it as a naturopath myself was inspiring.
It brought back the understanding of, once again, these individuals because you go through the history of people leading up to building naturopathic medicine. What was medicine like in those times? Early 17, 18 hundreds. And I was just amazed again at Benedict Luce and his wife Luisa, how they were considered to be dangerous radicals because they wanted to help people. And every single person that you mentioned in there, I’m like, yeah, they were harassed and they were accused, and they were targeted. It’s no different than it is now. So, if going into that space, I don’t expect everyone to hear what I don’t know. Maybe I’m just different.
I’ve never had someone attack me that’s not a naturopathic doctor. When I present and talk to them, they’re all ears. They want to hear more. So yeah, it’s not even other medical doctors. It’s our profession, and I’m not okay with that. We’re supposed to be a tribe. We’re supposed to be united, and you’re either for this, or you need to get out. I’m not going anywhere. I’m doing this for the right purpose. And that’s to help educate people and inspire them to regain their health and restore it.I find it very interesting that from the beginning of time, anyone who was working in the natural medicine realm was a target.
That’s right. Somebody asked me just last night, a friend of mine who lives down in California. I mean California. California said to me, how is it that we could see through all this and so many people around us? And I said, well, you’re in the habit of thinking for yourself. That’s what protected you was. You’re in the habit of using your brain for change. Instead of being told how to think, you use your brain, you have intellectual curiosity. You test what people say to you instead of just accepting them. The people whose habit is to follow what they’re told to do, what they’re told to not think for themselves well, were targeted by those who ran that whole thing to keep doing that basically. Don’t do research. They actually said things like this: don’t do your research. Don’t think for yourself. Only listen to us, et cetera, et cetera. So what saved me in this regard, why I could see it so clearly, so fast, was making that movie because that movie showed me the pattern of it, making that movie give me the pattern of it. So when all of this started, I was like, oh, wait, I’ve seen this movie before. This is the same pattern.
So I had that protection from having worked on that speech and then that film. And I put a lot of time into making that movie.
I really can tell you poured a lot of time into that thing.
I ruined my vision sitting in front of a computer screen for so many periods of hours and researching. I really wanted to know that story. I was like, people would say to me in my audience, go, well, if your medicine is so great, how come I’ve never heard of it? Or they’d say, well, if your medicine is so great, why aren’t more people aware of it? So I was really curious to know. Those are good questions. How’s that possible? And it turns out that it’s the same forces corrupting the world today. It’s all about money and power and control, the same exact thing that drove it. The conclusion of anybody who watches that movie and tests my assumptions is to look into it to the best of your ability. The conclusion that I came to is that the system we have today did not earn its place. It bought its place.
It sure did.
A part of buying that place was destroying competition. We just watched it happen all over again. Anybody that dared to speak shut ’em down. So the pattern is very human, and it continues and it takes courageous, ethical, morally centered people to walk into the face of these storms and cleave to the truth and seek the truth and cleave to it. Weathering these storms of human arrogance, ignorance, selfishness, and stupidity takes a lot. But thankfully, people do.
Yeah, people do. And for me, the only way that I can say I can really be bold and courageous to do that it is to be moral. It’s a spiritual force that comes upon me I feel like I know God didn’t design us to be this way. He just didn’t. And I love the Book of Genesis because it talks about the creation. He created everything, and he created humans at the very, very end. And when he created the man, he said, and it was so, so good. Everything was good, but humans were so, so good. He created all of this environment for in nature, everything, the water, the animals, everything for us to live symbiotically. And if you don’t understand that story, then you don’t understand the beginning of the existence of our being. And so I can’t go against it; I would take the risk of, and I encourage more of our colleagues to have the courage to stand up for the principles that they went into this field for, or they just need to step out and go be a conventional medical doctor. That’s fine. But you should not call yourself a naturopathic medicine doctor if you do not go by our principles of medicine and our therapeutic order and respect that foundation.
I noticed the other thing, too, Dr. Kushner, before we wrap up this segment is everyone in your documentary also had a uniquely personal experience with their health that led them to discover right there were in this journey of seeking of how they can heal themselves and they were seeking and they found the natural things to help them with their health. And I find it interesting because, including myself, many other naturopathic doctors have stumbled across naturopathic medicine as a way of life. This is who I am. This is my lifestyle. It’s not just something I do. I live this out.
And we practice what we preach. We walk it out. We’re walking this out. This is our lifestyle not just a title. I want to read something. As we close this segment out, we will do a part two. I wanted to read something you posted earlier today, and I was like, oh, this is so nice. You posted a quote from someone unknown, but it says, I want to leave our audience with this message. Take time to think. It is a source of power. Take time to read. It is a foundation of wisdom. Take time to play. It is a secret of staying young. Take time to be quiet. It is the opportunity to see God take time to be aware. It is the opportunity to help others take time to love and be loved. It is God’s greatest gift. Take time to laugh. It is the music of the soul. Take time to be friendly. It is the road to happiness. Take time to dream. It is what the future is made of. Take time to pray. It is the greatest power on earth. How beautiful is that?
Yeah.
And you share these messages all the time. It’s just beauty pouring through social media to me. Keep doing that for me, please. It means a lot. And I know there are others of us who just love you. We do. And like I said, I don’t have many people in my life that I can brag about, but you’re definitely one of them. You are a true pioneer. And I’m able to stand where I stand as the owner of my own clinic, right out of the gates, out of medical school. I opened up my clinic. I was not going to work for someone else, and that was going to set limitations on how I was to work with the beautiful people that I get to serve every day. And it’s because of you. It’s because of the doctors like you who had the courage to go out and do the right thing. I would not be able to be boldly standing here. So now, Dr. K, it is my turn. It is my turn to turn around to our students, to my colleagues, and take that mantle to say, let’s move forward. We are not giving up what the pioneers have set to do for us. They’ve laid the foundation, and it’s up to us to take it to the next level.
Absolutely.
Yeah. So, thank you for everything you shared so far. Let my audience know we’re going to wrap up this episode, but you want to stay tuned for episode two or for the second part of this conversation with Dr. K on Physician Heal Thyself. So, until next time, be blessed. Thank you for listening to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, please like, share and subscribe, help this message, and reach more people who may need to hear it. Leave your comments. I want to know what you think. If you’re interested in learning more about Raices, visit our website. Until next time, be blessed.