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 4 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.
How to get in contact with Dr. Rick Kirschner, ND:
Website: https://talknatural.com/
How Healthcare Became Sickcare Documentary: https://talknatural.com/documentary.html
Foundations of Naturopathic Medicine Institute: https://fnminstitute.org/
Podcast 32 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 Thyself, the podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Ana Lara, and we’re going to continue our conversation with Dr. Rick Kirschner, a naturopathic physician. So welcome back, Dr. Kirschner.
Glad to be here again. It feels like I never left.
We never left. We were just continuing the conversation. So we ended off with reading a message you shared on your social media, and I mentioned to you a little bit about how I feel really empowered to turn and help students. I’m actually going to be speaking at the medical school that I graduated from to a group of students next week, and also, at the beginning of the year, I’ll be doing another group that invited me. I did not seek them, but they seek me.
I felt called to, okay, if they want to hear from me, then I must go and share. They are hungry. You mentioned in our last segment how people are hungry and I see that our naturopathic medical students in the schools are hungry. They’re hungry to know how we heal people. How do we help people heal? What are some things that you would share with medical students right now who are in naturopathic medical schools? What would you share with them as they’re embarking on this journey?
Well, I think maybe the biggest thing missing for so many of our doctors is confidence. Confidence in their ability, their intelligence, and in medicine. So I saw myself when I spoke to our students as providing a model, just saying you can do something with your life. I’m living proof of it. I think that it’s essential for them to look to you, for example, and go, okay, she’s one of us, and she’s doing this. If she can do it, maybe I can do it. I think that a huge ingredient in doing good in this world is having confidence that you’ve been given an incredible inheritance. Put it to use. That’s it. Just do what’s given to you to do, and everything else is above your pay grade, and you don’t have to worry about it. Do what’s given to you to do and pass along that confidence.
That’s one thing. I also think it’s really important to tell your story because human beings have stories in their DNA, we pass along teachings through stories. Stories that are thousands of years old still exist because it’s in our DNA, and we resonate with them. Some people actually say our DNA is a storybook about each one of us, right? I love that. And it’s unfolding. It’s an unfolding story, but the whole story is written there. What was it? A friend of mine talked, one of my friends up here that I know through the political stuff that I do, he said to me one day, he said, everybody is born with a conscience.
It’s written into our DNA. He says, think about that word conscience con science with science, with knowledge con, science with knowledge. So everybody knows in their core of their being the difference between right and wrong. Everybody knows in the core of their being that this creation is magnificent, but that doesn’t mean we all pay attention to it. So, telling your story is a way of leading people into their own story, right? Giving them a chance to discover, wow, I have this written in me too. So I think that’s a really important thing to do when talking with our students. And I also think it’s important to share the great truths of your life. There have been some amazing gifts that have been given to you that you’re discovering as you go through your life and they’re great truths for you, things that were messages to you. And I know you know that you are guided. I know you know that, and I’m guided. I can’t take credit for any of the amazing things that I’ve gotten to do with my life, all glory to God. If I told you the story of how I wound up here, you’d be like, wow, that’s just one lucky break after another.
What’s one story that has never left you? I can’t believe that happened.
Alright, so when I was in my third year of naturopathic medical school, one day, I got called to the dean’s office and that was Jim Sig at the time. And he says I want you to go on a TV show and represent the school. I’m like, what? He says, yeah, there’s a show, it’s called Town Hall. It’s a moderated forum, with 70 to 80 guests in the audience who are stakeholders in whatever the issue is, and I want you to represent our school. And I was like, why me? He said, no one else is available. So I went on this show, I swear that’s exactly how this started. I went on this show and the moderator told everybody, alright, here’s how this goes. He says, he says, if you have something you want to say, you should get your hand up early on because by the latter half of the show, everybody’s going to have something they want to say, we’re not going to have time.
So if you need to say something, make sure you get your hand up. I’m sitting there and I’m thinking, well, maybe I should get my hand up. So I put my hand up, and he’s just starting the show and he stops himself in his intro, and he turns to me, and now I got two cameras racing towards me, and I don’t know what I’m going to say. I was just trying to get in line and I have no idea what I said. To this day, I have no idea. In those days, everybody didn’t have a camera in their phone to record these things, but whatever I said, there was an MD in the audience who was so moved by it that he spent the next three weeks calling the clinic, trying to get a lunch appointment with me to make me an offer.
He wanted to hire me as his physician’s assistant, and I refused to take the call for three weeks. I was like, I was busy. I had a baby. I had the amount of 25 credit hours a semester. My marriage, there’s just no way. So I just kept deflecting. I said I don’t want the call. Well, one day, the lab director said you must take this call. This guy is bothering me every single day. Just take the call. In those days, calls were on phones attached to walls. So there was a payphone in the hallway and that was the number the guy had called in on. So I go in the hallway, hello. And he introduces himself, and he says, I’d really like to have a chance to make a job offer to you. And I’m like, I’m not interested. And he goes, you haven’t even heard the offer.
I said, that’s because I’m not interested. I was so flippant. I was in my twenties, I was not interested. He said, look, how about you meet me for lunch, I’ll pay for it, and you hear what I have to say? And as soon as I heard free lunch, I was a student. I was like, alright, can I bring some of my fellow students? And he is like, because you got to look out. So I brought three of my other three students from my class with me, and we met this guy for lunch at a natural, I got to pick the restaurant. It was a natural foods restaurant in downtown Portland, and two of the guys ate and left. The other guy was Rick Brinkman, who became my business partner for 26 years. He stuck around and this guy said, I want to hire you as my assistant.
He says I’m the head of the OBGYN department at a big hospital in Portland. And I was so impressed with what you said on that show, I want to hire you, and I, I’m not looking for a job. My plate is full. He says, then let me mentor you. And I was like, what do you have to offer me? I don’t get this. And he goes, there’s two things you need to learn that you’re not learning in school. I was like, oh yeah, what’s that? He says, you need to learn how to listen and you need to learn how to talk. I was like, why? He said that most patients would get better if their doctors would listen to them. And most doctors make their patients sick by the way they talk to them. And I had what you call a blinding flash of the obvious.
And I was like, all right. So Rick and I decided to let this guy mentor us in how to communicate with people in a way that touches their nervous system and their immune system, the mind-body connection, and how to speak to that. And he guided us. He gave us books to read, he sent us to training programs, and we did all of these extracurricular while we were in school, but it was so compelling. Every day was a day of discovery. But I didn’t make any of that happen. Not a single part. I mean, the only thing I said was, well, okay, that’s a good point. Alright, mentor me. But I was guided into that situation, so I’m going to keep going with this. So Rick and I were so taken with what we had learned, we felt a moral obligation to share it with our fellow students. So we offered a workshop and it was going to be 10 weekends. We had done a lot of training, so we offered a 10-weekend workshop. I remember we were very shy about asking for money. About $23, my favorite number, about $23 about it was about don’t want to ask for money, all that kind of stuff. Half the student body showed up and after the first five minutes, all our nervousness fell away and suddenly, we were like, wow, this is fun.
Let’s really have fun with this. So Rick and I just turned it into a great game for our friendship. We had the best teaching time and I thought that would be the end of it. But no, half of the students who didn’t come wanted us to do it again, they heard all this great stuff about it. So we’re like, okay. So we did it again. And somebody in that class brought a cousin who was going to the chiropractic school and he said, would you come and teach this to us? And we’re like, okay. So we went out to the chiropractic, western states, chiropractic, we taught the class there and somebody there brought a relative who worked in the aerospace industry in California, and he said, will you come and teach this to my employees? I’m like, no, no, no. This is for doctors. He says, no, it’s not. It’s for everybody.
Oh wow.
That’s how my whole speaking career happened. And that led to on and on and on.
I would say that’s how you got into speaking at all these great organizations. I’m wondering how you ended up at NASA.
Yeah, you’re retired. That’s how all of it happened.
You were guided. Wow. That is an incredible source. It’s like, okay, it’s all like take the call. You were called to be there and you were instructed to, Hey, if you’re going to say something, start early on. You were just obedient to the call. You heard you did it, you showed up, you did it. You were obedient and it was just all these things just kind of stack up on each other. I think that your story and your journey are something that I can relate to myself, and I’m sure a lot of people listening to this can find moments in their life that they were guided through, that God is guiding them through. Just show up. Just be there or do this or say that. And it’s really important. One of the things that I really encourage, I started to do this more in the last four years with my patients because of what was going on in the world is telling ’em, look, I’m not going to sit here and Bible thump you, but you need to hear God’s voice in your spirit. You need to have that connection because you’re never going to be instructed to do something that’s going to be harmful to you. The supreme power is always looking over you, and your wellbeing, and it does. And these are classic experiences that just happen to be that way. You said something that I wasn’t planning on talking about, but you said it and once again, I’m guided to go there. You said you brought up money.
What is it about naturopathic doctors who feel so shy about taking money in exchange for their knowledge, their time, and their expertise? I mean just money in general. For most people it’s like a dirty word. And I know that a lot of times, people are working with insurance, and there’s this expectation that someone should pay for my health and the help that I’m getting. But I see this consistently, and I struggled with this early on and on and off. Someone told me you have the Mother Teresa complex that you want just to give it all away, but you’re not looking at how much you’ve paid into this, the sacrifice because it is really hard getting through naturopathic medical school. What’s your take on why naturopathic doctors are just afraid of accepting money an exchange for their work?
Well, I have a few things to say about this particular topic because I’m retired now and I’m able to retire and I’m having a great life in my retirement because I had the money to do it. The first thing that I think of is you can’t give from an empty cup. Your cup has to run over to have enough to share people who give away what they don’t have much of wind up joining the problem that they’re giving themselves away to. So if I give my services away for free, and I learned this the hard way, by the way, I went broke twice in the 1980s when my town went into a recession and I kept seeing my patients for free and I wound up being broke like them, and it was a very hard time for me. One of the lessons that I came away with I want to be coherent about this.
One of the lessons that I came away with was that you don’t get paid for your time and money isn’t dirty. Many people go, well, money is the root of all evil. I’m like, no, it’s not. The love of money is the root of all evil. Money is not evil at all. Money is a medium of exchange. Money is a benchmark of value contribution. So one of the things that I learned was that it truly is easier to give than to receive. But giving and receiving go hand in hand and you have to be just as good at receiving as you are at giving for you to be successful with money. Think of it this way, the universe wants to shower you with blessing, but if you have a wall up to receiving that, you can’t get it. If I do this interview with you and I say something that has an impact, that should have an impact on you, but you don’t receive it, what did I accomplish?
I need you to receive the gift of what I’m saying for me to succeed in giving the gift. So, giving and receiving go hand in hand. One of the things I observed in a lot of people in our profession is that they’re terrible at receiving. If you say to them, I love that shirt on you, they’d be like, ah, it’s just some shirt. Get rid of it. Put it out of its misery. It’s like, don’t say something nice about me. I can’t handle it. I’m like, you need to let people give to you and money is one of the ways they can give to you. And receiving that money allows them to something back. It’s a medium of exchange. So I tell people, you don’t give your time away from money. You give your skills, your knowledge and your experience to people as a gift, and then they give you money as an exchange for that gift and you receive that gratefully, and then more can come to you. I used to teach people this thing. I’d say, I want you to throw your hands up in the air and repeat after me. I am open to receiving all the good that wants to come to me because if anyone can do good with good, it’s me.
Amen. It’s true.
So it’s so powerful just to acknowledge that, to be open, to receive, not to give, to receive. So some people have this idea that it’s selfish to receive, that it’s a form of taking, and I’m like, no, it’s actually a gift to receive because if I give you a gift and you receive it, I receive the gift of getting to give you the gift. If you don’t receive it, I don’t get anything. So that, to me, is the mindset of being open to receiving from the people that you serve for their benefit. I used to make this joke to my eyes, say, do it for them. Receive from them as a favor to them. Let them give something to you. If it’s better to give than to receive, let them give something to you.
Do them that favor.
Yeah. Wow. That’s very powerful. Very powerful. I mean, you could really see this in many ways because some people come to see us to get better, but I can see that they’re not even able to receive the healing. They’re not ready to receive healing. Obviously, there’s trauma, there’s other limited beliefs, there’s things, there’s layers to people. That’s the thing that there are layers to people that as nature paths, we’re not just saying, here, take this. We’re doing what you were trained by this wonderful doctor who put you through the training of listening to your patients and learning to communicate effectively with them. Because oftentimes, I have found that just listening to our patients has a lot of value to them already because no one has been. They start getting better, getting,
They start to get better. I remember this young woman; she was in her 23, 24 years old. Her OBGYN and other doctors had told her, you have this medical condition, and you might as well just get your ovaries and your uterus out. You’re never going to be able to have babies. And she’s in my office crying, and I’m like, no, I allowed her to talk, and you gave her some words of encouragement and here’s what we’re going to do. Let’s do this research first. Let’s find out what’s going on. During the visit, she tells me, I already feel better. She says, you are the medicine that I needed a comment on, a compliment like that would’ve been very difficult for me to receive. She’s not giving me money at that moment by giving me that compliment. Yet, many people will reject a compliment like that. I’m not medicine. What are you talking about? Don’t put me on a pedestal is what would happen typically. I looked at her, and I had this moment of a pause and I acknowledged, like, yeah, I just by listening to her and encouraging her, lifting her up, I was medicine to her. So sometimes medicine is not in a pill. It’s not in a herb. There are just some things that the soul craves to be seen, to be heard.
So that’s the therapeutic doctor-patient relationship. The relationship itself should be therapeutic.
Yes.
You are providing a role model. You’re providing direction. You’re providing a safe place for people to explore how they got where they got to. When I was in practice, I saw people get healed from some amazingly difficult things, and it was so easy. I mean, it was shocking to me. Sometimes, I tend not to tell these stories because they’re hard to believe they are, but they’re my true experiences.
They are your true experience. You said that before, tell the stories. Because our truth is that, just to wrap up this story, this woman ended up pregnant three months later.
Nice.
We didn’t even do much, but it was just that what happens that makes that happen? I can’t explain it, and I don’t need to explain it. I just know that something happened in our conversation, and just in the few things I told her to do she was able to get pregnant and she had been struggling for a couple of years, and so what a blessing to then see her come back pregnant and what a blessing to then see her child as a patient,
To have this baby there where someone once said, you’re never going to be able to get pregnant, so you might as well take this organ out because it’s giving you a lot of trouble. The difference a naturopathic doctor can make in our lives by just standing on our truth, being authentic, and being real. We are the medicine. Humans are the medicine to each other. Now, in a time when there are so many things that people disagree with, We spoke a little bit before we started the podcast about how many, but there’s just a lot of chaos. People take different sides of the story. And just as we are medicine to each other, we can also be toxic,
Right?
So let’s talk a little bit about that. How politics and what’s going on in society and all in our relationships impact our physical health. Because if we’re going to talk about taking care of ourselves, it’s not just let’s eat right, it’s exercise, let’s do all these things. But if our relationships and the way we communicate with others and the way we allow others to communicate with us, if it’s not healthy, I tell people, you might as well have the cheeseburger and fries and the coke because the constant stress that you’re under, it’s changing the physiology, it’s creating a cascade of events that you might not see. You might not feel right away, but it’s happening. Let’s talk a little bit about that because we see that there’s a lot of craziness in this climate.
It’s a very divided time, a very polarized time, a time full of fear and anger for so many people and they can’t seem to get past it. So, it’s probably a good place to do a little plug from a fourth edition of my book, dealing with People, You Can’t Stand How to Bring Out the Best in People at their worst. Because one of the things we set out to do with that book was to teach people how to have a healthy relationship, even with people that are unhealthy, which, if that doesn’t describe the doctor-patient relationship, I don’t know what does, but it does apply to everybody. So we talk about how whatever a person assumes in their life, they will act like it’s true. And look for proof. If you presume nobody likes you, you’re going to act like nobody likes you. You’re going to look for people that don’t like you.
And even when people do like you, you’re going to dismiss it because nobody likes you. If you think everybody likes you and nobody does, you’re going to act like everybody does anyway. And even if nobody looks at your lives, you like, well, they like me so much, they don’t know how to relate. We all look for proof of whatever we assume to be true. This is right out of the proverbs, or as you believe, so shall it be. So the place to start with people isn’t telling. It’s asking about their assumptions, the things they assume to be true. People will tell you their assumptions as if they are true. He’s a this, and she’s a that and they don’t care and all this kind of stuff. So in the book, we walk through a series of frameworks that tell you what the question ask is when you hear a certain kind of statement or comment that allows you to maintain your own equilibrium and to be resourceful instead of reacting to your assumptions, my assumptions can’t get along, I’m like, oh, that’s a bad assumption. I’d rather be sure they can. So let’s do that. Let’s explore that. One of the things that we wrote a chapter about in this fourth edition of the book, which, by the way, the fourth edition, I should show this to you.
It got really big.
It is twice the size of the third edition because we added so much content relative to the times we live in. We talked about social media, for example, and offered people guidance on how to get the most out of it and avoid the worst of it. I’m on social media quite a bit, and I don’t get offended by people saying mean things. I have fun with it, and people do say things, but I have fun with it. And then they go away. If they can’t handle it, they go away. If they stick around with it, suddenly, we’re having a dialogue. We have a chapter on how to have controversial conversations. How do you talk about things that nobody wants to talk about? And one of the things about that is that you need ground rules. If it’s really a hot topic, you need ground rules.
And the ground rules we recommend are we’re going to take turns telling our version of reality, and you’re going to go, I’m going to let you go first. So, your mind is clear enough to hear what I have to say. So I’m always going to let you go first, but we’re going to take turns. And the object here is not to change each other’s mind. The object here is to understand how we can think the way that we do. That’s it. So if you tell me the opposite of my worldview, I won’t listen to how you’re wrong and ask you a bunch of loaded questions to prove you’re wrong. I will listen to how that’s true for you and try to understand it. Try to put that on for a moment and go, oh, okay, that makes sense. So that’s how you have a controversial conversation. And anytime you deviate from the ground rules, if people have agreed to them, you say, Hey, remember we agreed we’re listening to understand, not to change somebody’s mind. So that’s a piece of that. The framework of you hearing this, here’s the question to ask. That’s a piece of that.
We also got, by the way, into narcissism, which is now way worse than it ever was before, and social media is largely responsible for that. Every time I see somebody walking around staring at their phone, I’m like, yo, there’s a world around you and you’re totally missing it. We just took our cats for a walk today. We got harnesses for. We just adopted these cats a month ago and they really wanted out. So we got these little jackets with a leash and took ’em for a walk around our yard, and here they are. They’re out in the yard for the first time. Every tree, every plant, every dying flower, every trail of bugs, everything. They’re just like, I got to sniff that. I got to experience that. I got to check that. They’re just so awake to the magnificent creation around them, and every element of it is just exquisite.
Well, that’s what I call a beginner’s mind, and that’s the way I listen to people when they tell me what’s troubling them. I don’t listen to how they’re wrong. I listen to how it makes sense to them. And when I ask questions, it helps them realize that it doesn’t make sense to them. If it’s not true, and I ask the right question, they go, well, now that you say that, I think I need to rethink this. I had this conversation with some of our colleagues as we were going through the last few years where I know somebody who held a very high regard for our profession, and they went and got one of the magic juice things and showed off their bandaid on social media. And a whole bunch of people went, well, it must be okay if so, and so did it. And I called that person, and I said, I’m not calling to argue with you or anything like that.
I just want to understand I think you’re a smart guy, and I just want to know how you arrived at the decision to do this. I don’t get it. And I asked a bunch of questions and I think at the end of that conversation, she was like, I don’t think I thought this through. I didn’t have to say that to him. I just asked enough questions about where he just goes, I don’t think I thought this through. So I think that’s the framework on engaging with people in a therapeutic way that you don’t listen to change their mind. You listen to understand how it makes sense. I’m going to tell you a very funny story. One of my communication mentors came to visit Rick and me in Portland when we were in school. We met at a tavern that was right next door to the school sitting at a table.
And this guy is in New York. He is very tough to talk like this. Everything New Yorkers, they’re mean. They’re insulting, and they do it. They like you. I didn’t know that at the time, but I had a patient at the time who made no sense to me. She got referred to me Rick and I developed a reputation as naturopathic psychologists. So if you didn’t know what to do with somebody, you shunted them off to us. And she had eyes that went like this. Both eyes went out. If you had made eye contact, you felt like you were falling in.
When she talked, everything was metaphorical. She talked about whales and bugs and said that Leonardo da Vinci was a whale. We met this guy, this mentor of ours, and I said to him, I said, I don’t know how to help her. He goes, help her understand how it works. I was trying to put my pedal to the metal to get to a result, and he’s like, take your foot off the gas, tap the brake. Just spend some time getting inside of that and paying attention to it. When I did, she got, I don’t even know how she got a good result, but she did. And I think it was the therapeutic relationship of somebody not coming at her. And I would say the same thing about you mentioning that you are not Bible-thumping with people. It’s not effective coming at people with, you’re right, I’m right and you’re wrong, or You’re missing out, or whatever the thing is. No, no, no. People given the opportunity will tell you what they need to know. They’ll tell you. And they’ll also set the pace of change if you let them, that you don’t have to be in charge. You just have to be true. That’s it.
I love that. And as I hear you explaining all this, what all of that requires is the willingness to listen, like you said, to understand. Also, that’s the art of relationships that is being lost because everything is so instant and on-the-phone relationships or built over time, they don’t happen overnight. And so that’s one of the things that I’ve taken notice over my life is that it does pay to be quiet and just listen, ask the right questions and then let them talk, let them express what’s going on, and then really seek to understand instead of being understood. I always credit, I read, I went through a whole training in my early twenties with a company I worked with at the time. It was a financial institution, and I was one of the lucky top 10 people who were picked to be put through this program of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
With Steven Covey.
Yeah.
I was really like 21, 22, and it served me very well because that’s one of the things that he talks about, seeking first to understand and then being understood. It was engraved into my DNA and my story. Right? Yeah, it makes sense that we should listen to other people and, like you said, let them go first. Let them speak first and then understand them instead of trying to convey your idea to them. I was very young when I was able to witness within my family. I had a large family and I could see my brothers sometimes they were talking and I could, just by witnessing them, I could tell that neither of them was listening to the other. When one brother was speaking, I could see that the other one was waiting for the other to finish just so that he could start sharing his opinion perspective.
What I would notice through the conversation of just observing that communication was that they were saying the same thing, but they were just saying it differently. I was 10 or nine years old, and I’m looking back and forth; these guys are clueless. They’re arguing the same thing. Oftentimes that’s what I find. We all want the same things. We’re just saying it differently. Well, not all the same things. Some people want things that are not good for them, and that’s their choice. That’s a choice if they want that, but they shouldn’t push their choice on others. And I’m big on that. I’m big on respecting other people’s choices. And so I want you to respect my choice. I mind my business, and I’ll mind, and I’ll respect whatever you’re doing, but I don’t agree with anyone pushing something on me that I just know in the depths of myself that I’m not going to do.
Well, it creates resistance when you do that. Just another fun story. So I got a call from somebody I knew in the Bay Area a few years ago, and she asked me, I had just written a couple of books on persuasion, and she said, could you come and do a program for us on persuasion? And I forget what the thing was. They all had what their job was, I can no longer recall that. But anyway, could you come and teach us about persuasion? I was like, yeah, sure. She said, I’d like you to focus on the subject of resistance. And I was like, no. And she goes, what do you mean now? I said, I’m not doing that. She goes, why are you saying that? I said, because I’m not doing that. And she goes, why are you resisting this idea? And I said, I just wanted to get to the point where you said that to me because I don’t think resistance is a good word for describing the phenomenon that you have that attached to.
I said, when somebody is resistant to change, I think of it as them defending something important to them. So if you want to get past somebody’s resistance to change, find out what they’re defending that’s important to them and then be resourceful enough to help them figure out other ways of satisfying that. So one of my colleagues called me shortly after this and somebody I had gone to school with and she says, I have a patient that’s really resistant and I just had this whole thing happen. So I was like, how do you know they’re resistant? She said, I give her all of these things that she can do and she doesn’t do any of them. I asked what an example of all these things she could do was. She said, well, for example, she eats a lot of sugar, so she has a lot of inflammation in her system, and I try to get her to quit eating sugar and she just won’t do it.
I was like, so what if it’s true for her that sugar represents something in her life that that’s something she’s protecting by continuing to do this thing that’s bad for her, find out what that is, and then help her find better ways to take care of it, and she’ll be able to let go of that pretty easily. So, the whole idea of labeling somebody as resistant because they don’t adopt your mindset is self-defeating. But the idea that people are protecting something important to them is an invitation to explore it, discover what it means, and find a more resourceful way of taking care of it. So you’re not pushing people away or pushing them towards your result. You’re partnering with them and getting something important to them.
That’s powerful. You’re teaching me right now, and I hope our audience is really listening and taking note of this because that’s very key and true. Usually, if there’s resistance, they’re protecting something, even if you don’t think it’s the right reason to protect. But it is, and we see this with people who’ve had a lot of traumatic experiences, they become very protective of things that are not healthy for them. It’s not serving their higher good, but it’s there. For us to, we need to be able to help them see that so they can make connections and heal on deeper, deeper layers. While this has been an amazing conversation, Dr. K, I think we can keep on and on and hopefully, in the future, you’re okay with doing another interview and sharing more, especially as I get feedback sometimes from people, I’m like, okay, let’s bring in this person and discuss more. What would you like to see as we wrap up? A couple of questions. What would you like to see happen in our country regarding health?
So I’m all on board with Make America Healthy. Again. This is the greatest opportunity. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to course correct, and all the reasons to do it are extremely compelling and the reasons not to do it are idiotic. I’m all on board with it, and I do believe we have this opportunity it’s a great opportunity for all of us as naturopathic doctors because this is our domain. This is what we have been. This is what all our training was about: how to help people get their health back. I want to see this RFK junior idea take root. I’d like to see people who are sitting on top of these power pyramids promote things that are bad for the health of the country. I’d like to see ’em fired. I’d like to see people who care about health be hired.
I’d like to see these agencies reconfigured to focus on health instead of disease. I’d be really thrilled to see that. I will also tell you about this project, the Foundation’s project. I’m the acting president of this project right now. It’s been in the works for 12 to 15 years. I understand we are now very close to preprinting with our nature cure volume. This is a missing piece of the puzzle in our profession. They have a book where everybody learns basic ideas about how to do this medicine. So we’re getting very close to getting that where it’s available for our students. And I’d like our schools to embrace health as their mandate instead of managing sickness. And anybody in the schools that are merely teaching how to manage sickness, fire ’em, and replace them with people that have a focus on health, because people ought to have that option and ought to be able to find people who are experts in natural medicine to facilitate the restoration of their health. So what I want to see in our country is a restoration of our country to some condition of functionality, health, and rationality where we can actually engage with one another. Again, not as enemies but as fellow citizens with a shared mission to keep the lamp of freedom alive in the world.
I told people this all through this election season. I said this election is not about these people. They want you to think it’s about these people, but it’s not. This is about, first and foremost our constitution. And it’s about our constitution because it is a lamp to the world. It’s why people have been coming here for our country’s entire existence. Our constitution is exceptional. Our founders were geniuses. Preserving that and protecting that and promoting that is the best thing America can do in the world. It’s the same thing that is true for individuals. Our constitution is individuals determine our health outcomes. So you want to restore your constitutional health. You want to let your DNA, which was designed to heal and protect you. You want to unleash that power in your life and restore your health so they live on a solid foundation instead of being scattered to the winds in reaction to everything that comes along. I want for the individual what I wish for the country, and I want for the country what I want for the individual. And the truth is the truth, every context.
Amen. Wonderful, powerful message. I hope that many people get to hear this message from you because it’s true that when people are healthy, they will make better decisions. We will be a stronger, healthier country, and that’s what we want: protecting our rights and our freedoms and standing on the truth. Thank you so much Dr. K. I really, really appreciate our time together. For our audience, I will be putting links and access to where to see the documentary and your book. And when that Nature Cure book is out, I want a copy. So thank you so much, Dr. K. I really appreciate you, and I pray that God continues to bless you with many, many, many more years of health and happiness, and enjoy your retirement and your lovely community. As always, I appreciate you and for our audience. Thank you so much for staying tuned for these two episodes with Dr. K. And until next episode, we’ll catch you then. And until then, 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, 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.