Conversations on Healing

Welcome to the Conversations on Healing Podcast, where host Shay Beider speaks with renowned healthcare leaders, practitioners, and thought leaders to explore the world of wellness, the incredible powers of self-care, and what it truly means to heal today. Join us on this journey to become more whole, healed, and connected.

Shay Beider Hello everyone, and welcome to the Conversations on Healing Podcast. I’m your host, Shay Beider, and I’m so glad you’re joining us today. I’m thrilled to welcome our guest, Dr. Stephen Dahmer. Dr. Dahmer is the Director of the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine, where he serves as a leading voice in the movement to transform modern healthcare through integrative, evidence-based, and compassionate approaches. Dr. Dahmer is a triple board-certified physician in family, integrative, and lifestyle medicine. His global work has taken him from Brazil to New Zealand to the Navajo Nation, and his career includes academic and clinical positions at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and the University of Arizona. He’s also held key leadership roles, including being the lead physician at Iora Health, Chief Medical Officer at Goodness Growth, and the founding primary care physician at Sana Care. His research centers on the real-world outcomes of integrative therapies and the healing potential of medicinal plants.

In today’s episode, we explore what it truly means to layer integrative medicine alongside Western medical care. Dr. Dahmer makes a compelling case for moving beyond the outdated “either-or” mindset and instead embracing integrative and Western medical approaches in service of deeper, more personalized healing. We discuss the pioneers who opened these doors, the research that’s validating what many have intuitively known, and the practical ways patients and physicians alike can begin integrating these approaches into everyday life. What emerges is an invitation to see healthy living, not as a burden or restriction, but as an adventure in possibility. I think this conversation will leave you inspired and perhaps ready to take your own next step. So let’s begin. Well, I’d love to welcome you to the Conversations on Healing Podcast, Dr. Stephen Dahmer, thanks so much for joining me today.

Stephen Dahmer Oh, Shay, what a gift to be with you here today. And I think you know I’m a big fan of the work that you do in our community and beyond, and that we get to talk about healing.

Shay How fun is that? I was like, “Oh my gosh, I have been in this field called integrative medicine for more than 25 years.” And over the course of that, what I’ve seen and the amount of change- and I know you’ve also been in for so many years- and a way that I wanted to start the conversation today was just take a moment between the two of us, human being to human being, to acknowledge some of the change that you’ve seen over the last several years in your career. So I’d actually like to open it there- just a little bit of, here is this thing that we’re calling integrative medicine, and feel free to define that in your own words since you now serve as the Director of the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine. And then share a little bit of what you’ve seen evolve over the past several years. So let’s start there.

Stephen Well, for podcasts, I always like to share a story. And I think that one that I like to share that I think integrative medicine is just a part of all of us in so many ways. And we have seven core tenets of integrative medicine and there are things like movement, and connection to nature, and eating good foods. And I’m paraphrasing there a little bit, but they’re things that all of us in some way or another may have been raised on. And I was, in my family, the son of an immigrant- a Hungarian immigrant- where we had a garden in our backyard and my mother was very health-conscious. And my first formal introduction to integrative medicine must have been in 1998. It was a lecture that was in medical school, and it was a single-credit elective that very few people signed up for, but who’s now a friend of mine, Dr. David Kiefer, one of the earliest fellows and graduates of our program here at the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine, taught a one-credit elective in medical school about botanicals and herbal medicine.

And back at that time, it was just unbelievable. No one spoke about it. It was something that we had never heard of. And yet I sat there almost mesmerized that this topic was coming up. And when I discussed it with a lot of my friends and colleagues, both in medical school, they’re like, “Oh, what are you doing?That’s not medicine.” And I think in many ways, even starting that early, we were the black sheep and it was really on the fringe. And even Dr. Weil’s story himself was kind of based on a trailer off campus to now this huge movement- and I think we’ll unpack it a little bit- but just it’s this movement on a national perspective and a wellness industry that supports it. And here I sit in this amazing role as the Director of the Andrew Weil Center in a beautiful home that speaks to built environment and really infused by many aspects of Dr. Esther Sternberg’s work, where we live and practice what we preach.

Shay Which is so exciting. And those seven core tenets of integrative medicine that you’ve now defined and that can be embraced and that you teach in your physician education are now becoming absorbed really on a global level, which is a fantastic foundation to have established for the center and to continue to help to kind of shape the field. It’s striking to me the amount of change that’s occurred even in the last 20 years. I think it was literally 21 years ago that I was at a hospital in Los Angeles, and we were doing a very rigorous randomized controlled clinical trial where we were doing some very gentle infant massage in the NICU. And we had like, a whole protocol. It was designed with one of the top researchers there. And I still remember at one point, one of the physicians who was unfortunately incredibly powerful there sent out an email because back in the day you could send an email to, like everybody in the whole hospital.

They don’t let you do that anymore. But, like back then, we still had that like “email everybody” thing and basically he used the word “witch.” I was like, “What is happening?” We’re doing gentle infant massage on vulnerable babies in the NICU, and suddenly it’s like witchcraft. And even then there was an incredible pivot. So two years later we had a front-page story in the Los Angeles Times, the cover of the Health section, and it talked about one of his patients and the parents speaking to how valuable this program had been and the impact of what they had seen. And this physician did come back to me even in just that two year period and acknowledge that he had heard from so many of his patients’ families that this program had made an incredible difference and that he was very appreciative. And that was a long time ago, and in just a couple of years of continuous work and some research to anchor people so that they felt more comfortable.

And as you know, since then, we’ve had a tremendous body of research that’s been conducted in so many areas of integrative medicine. And I’m sure that one of the things that you’ve seen from the Andrew Weil Center is that it does get easier to kind of promote this work in Western medical settings because so much of it now has gone through really rigorous trials. So yeah, feel free to speak to some of what you’ve seen in terms of the evolution of the research and in terms of how other physicians and colleagues are embracing integrative medicine.

Stephen Yeah. I think there’s a couple of aspects I’d like to explore a little bit more because, again, I absolutely agree with you. And maybe we’ll trade stories a little bit longer, just because in residency, I recall very clearly, I was reading the latest literature about probiotics and we were really seeing- it was kind of newer at that time- C. diff infections, which were severe and lethal, life-threatening. And to see that, wow, there is this intervention by offering probiotics to reduce the recurrence of C. diff. And I looked at the evidence, and it was very convincing to me, so I went on, for lack of a better term, a crusade to get probiotics formulary. And I just kept pushing and pushing and finding a way. Then we’re finally at Beth Israel in Manhattan, we had probiotics as formulary and they may have even been overprescribed. But to your point, I mean, what doesn’t have a probiotic in it today? And the number of criticisms or concerns- and there are very sick people in the ICU, in the hospital- and I was treating them.

So we had to be very careful with certain patients that could be harmed even by a probiotic. But it was such a crusade that I earned the nickname “Doctor Probiotic.” And so many of my colleagues made fun of me for a long time for what just made basic sense to me. And my last name being Dahmer, I actually didn’t mind that. To change from Dr. Dahmer to Dr. Probiotic for a while was a nice thing.

And I love to look back. I think it’s so important. And again, you and I, as long as we’ve been doing it, stand on the backs of giants who have been doing it even longer. And I think it’s important to look back at how far we’ve come. And I would agree with you- we’ve made tremendous strides in the literature where it’s hard to find a guideline that doesn’t focus first on lifestyle, basically a form of integrative medicine as our first line treatment across the board. I think though in our roles- and I’m sure you’ll probably agree- is that I wake up every day thinking about how far we have yet to go, how much work that we have yet to do, and how many situations where there isn’t access to what is just this “makes-intuitive-sense” approach to health that is integrative medicine that many people still haven’t heard about. And the challenges in doing the research, because oftentimes Reiki therapy, traditional Chinese medicine- these aren’t reductionistic, single-constituent molecules from a pharmaceutical model that are easy to study. And even those are hard to study, but it is much more complex to study many of the things that we offer in integrative medicine. And I know you have firsthand experience in that to try to get that level of evidence that will not just turn the naysayers, but open up bigger doors that more people have access to this.

Shay And I think it’s also that conversation, which you and I have touched on, about what is the difference between curing and healing, right? Because we’ve had very much, a disease model in medicine where we want to cure the disease, right?

And that’s been a predominant feature. My master’s was in public health at UCLA and a lot of what we looked at there is how the system of medicine was established. It was really for things like epidemics and acute care, and, that the medical training model was really based on kind of a military model. Even how we trained physicians started with those kinds of roots. And so when you look at those roots, and then you look at obviously, chronic illness being predominant in today’s world, so it’s a very different paradigm of what the health challenges are currently. You see that, like, we’ve shifted, but yet a lot of things in the system are in a process of trying to shift to accommodate all of this change. And I’ll never forget- so Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, also really a pioneer, I would say, in the field of integrative medicine, even though she may not have used that word early in her career because she was someone that’s provided to physicians in medical school.

And I know so much of your work at the Andrew Weil Center is on that physician education side through your fellowship program. So I also want to give you a chance to speak to some of that work.

Stephen Yeah, and maybe just to hold that space for a little bit, because Dr. Remen- what a remarkable individual. And I had the privilege of meeting her, and it was in 2003 that I first did the Healer’s Art and participated in that. And Dr. Victoria Maizes, who for 23 years was the director, executive director of the Andrew Weil Center, really Dr. Remen was a mentor to her. And Dr. Larry Dossey and Dr. Ricker really spearheaded along with Dr. Maizes, the Healer’s Art here in Tucson. And I’ve had the privilege to participate the last two years since I’ve been here in Tucson with Healer’s Art. And what a remarkable course. And I get the honor of giving a lecture on awe and wonder- what a beautiful, beautiful lecture. And there’s always, I think, for many of us that have grown up in modern healthcare, I call it a naysayer on my shoulder of, “who’s got time to speak of awe,” or “why are you talking to these things that are on the fringe?”

And yet now as I get older and get a couple more gray hairs, I’m more and more confident of how absolutely essential these things are for our own well-being as healthcare practitioners, for our ability to get up every morning. And it’s not an easy profession either. And to deal with everything that we do in the health professions, these conversations are absolutely essential. And I think about, to be Dr. Remen, back in the day, as a woman, to really bring this to the forefront- unbelievable and tremendous respect, and yet still, it’s so hard. And one of the things it really brings up, and what you were saying is really important for me- I think, 25 years in this kind of field myself, one of the biggest things I still see is that we take a binary approach.

It’s either-or, and it’s either cure, or it’s healing. It’s either Western medicine or- even back in the day, it was called “alternative.” And I really see the movement is going in the direction of, what we offer in integrative medicine can augment any therapy that’s offered within the healthcare system and likely- very likely- improve outcomes for the patient, without, as we mentioned before, again, without a lot of risk, without a lot of cost, and sometimes without a tremendous amount of effort on the side of both the patient and the practitioner. And I think that we’re getting beyond that kind of binary look of these two worlds and starting to say, wow, this is a perfect match of that. Like you mentioned- acute care medicine, that’s remarkable. I have a pneumonia, give me the antibiotic. I break my leg, take me to the orthopedic surgeon, but there can be an integrative layer on that that can support a patient going through this harrowing experience.

There can be that integrative aspect that in my mind, can help our bodies come back to the homeostatic point and heal.

Shay Yeah. I actually feel intuitively that where we are is a little bit of a flat-earth, round-earth moment- back in the moment when people were like, “Oh, the earth is definitely flat.” And then there was like, “Oh, wait a minute, actually we’re getting information that it might be round.” But there was this tension between it can’t be round- how could that possibly?- And I could understand, of course- I think we all can- if you were living at that time, how it would be so easy to resist that thinking. And I actually think we’re in a very similar paradigm between a materialist view and a more energetic view, right? And we know it. I heard somebody that had looked at it from more of the physics angle say, “If you really look at what we’re learning from quantum theory and kind of where we’re heading in physics, that it’s very likely that the future of medicine is light and sound.” And it’s like you hear that if you go, “Wait, what?” “Hold on.” Even though we actually already use a lot of light and sound, right? Lasers and- it’s not like that’s not in medicine already, but it’s like a pause moment of, okay- It’s not like the material world is going away, but if we’re going to look at this in a completely new paradigm, then medicine will have to shift alongside of that, right? And I think we’re just in the very early stages of even beginning to understand what that means. And I’ve seen it too. There was a wonderful woman- she was at UCSF. She came in to give a lecture that I listened to, and she was like a lab researcher. She’s in there with the Petri dishes and the cells. And she was suddenly in the field of psychoneuroimmunology, where based on people’s beliefs, they were giving her a Petri dish- “This person believed X- what did their cells do?” “And this person believed Y,- what did their cells do?” And she was like, “I never would have believed any of this. If I didn’t see cells in a Petri dish change based on belief,” she said, “I would have thought this was freaking crazy. What is this? ” And she’s like, “But I saw it in my lab with my own eyes.” So I’m like, our beliefs are changing cellular expression. From a materialist view, you’re like, “What the heck?” But when you start to think about what we’re learning in terms of energy and then you start to go, “Oh, okay. Well, there are some explanations for that. ” And so my hunch is that we’re in a pivot point where there’s an inherent tension because there’s a new model that we’re shifting towards. And it doesn’t mean you give up everything, but it’s a paradigm shifting moment I think that we’re in.

And it’s going to impact not only medicine, but a number of fields. And then of course you couple that with other things like AI technology and who knows what’s happening in the near future.

Stephen Super exciting areas. And I think, again, coming back to the definition of integrative medicine, it really is care that treats the whole person- body, mind, and spirit. And I think that maybe it was time in New York, or time in the healthcare system that I have maybe a little bit of a jaded edge I try not to fall into. I think that we still struggle with energetics. And I think even a pathway to that will be- and I think, AI and technology will open this- more systems-based thinking. My entire career and even participating in randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials, we isolate to a single reductionist component. Yet our health and practicing on the front lines of primary care my entire career all over the globe – we’re so much more complex than that. And we don’t like to give credit or speak to or look outside the lines of those things that maybe in the past we couldn’t control or quantify well.

And even in Western medicine – I mean, we don’t have a term for, well, we call it vitality, but “life force.” There’s no accepted term. And look at cultures around the globe. Everyone recognizes a life force that makes its way through our bodies that is the culmination potentially of multiple physiologic aspects, but more than that for anyone that’s kind of felt it or has an element of belief in their own worldview. And we don’t touch that in most of our work. I think you’ll find amazing physicians or other practitioners that will touch that, but our healthcare system is so rooted in the physical whereby if I can give a drug to get your A1C down, the insurance company sees that as a good thing. And that is almost, in many ways, our north star and it isn’t really what matters most to you as a patient- and aspects like quality of life.

And I think that many of these things that we discuss within integrative medicine play so deeply into that. I think that many people really have such an intuitive aspect of their worldview that it’s so important to them- how can you not speak to that when we’re talking about your overall health and meeting people where they’re at, rather than kind of a one-size-fits-all, with a sword of medicine- of scientific medicine- that leads the way? I think we’re making medicine just a science and not allowing it to be that art that then those -side effects from a systems-based perspective, not just my own physiology, even the community within which we function- has these amazing repercussions that we can’t quantify. And again, that’s why I think- that’s why I searched you out, Shay, too,is just like learning of the work you do. You have maybe the patient in front of you, or your team, the patient in front of them, but it goes so much further than that when we’re doing that good work that I think these integrative therapies have amazing repercussions.

And not to say that medicine doesn’t have that, but I think that it speaks to social connection and community more so than the reductionist viewpoint that we practice oftentimes.

Shay Absolutely. And I think about, these are areas where I see the lag- that longest-running research study, they think, from Harvard on adult development that shows that your relationships at age 50 are what predict your health at age 80, and that famous TED Talk now- it’s like, oh my goodness, why aren’t we emphasizing the importance of relationships more in medicine?

Stephen Well, and I think this is such a key topic because I want to take that even a step further. Why don’t we use our best tool, which I think many of us in medicine are going to agree, that science is our best tool. Why aren’t we using that to our advantage in these areas? And I think another great example- and I love that study, and I think you’re hitting the nail on the head with it- but even more pertinent is my social media feed, I try to stay off of it- but it’s just blown up with the pyramid. The pyramid this and the pyramid that.

And I had to look up the literature. How much has the food pyramid actually impacted health? And if you look at those few published studies where we’ve actually looked at it, it’s very little. And imagine a world where we really could hone in- well, what are the three healthiest foods that we really should be incorporating more into our nutrition and doubling down on that? So, subsidies make that available in every home in the United States and got real concrete on some of these kind of integrative approaches utilizing science to get us there. What are the best three ways, as a physician I can speak to my patient to improve their social connections? And we’re getting there with social prescribing and things like that, but it still is not a part of the mainstream, despite, that the data showing us how impactful that is for our overall health.

Shay And I know you’d shared with me previously that in the United States, around 71% of primary care visits result in a prescription, and that in your work, you’re trying to shift some of that- like exercise prescribing or even things like “art pharmacy,” which you might want to talk about, or social prescribing that you mentioned already. So maybe you want to talk about some of those other ways of using that sort of predisposition that we’ve established in medicine to write a prescription.

Stephen Yeah, and I think it’s a real challenge because in primary care especially, there’s not a lot of reimbursement for the work that we do on the front lines. And oftentimes you’re given a very small amount of time to cover far more things than you’ll ever be able to cover. And we’re not alone in primary care with that. I think it’s across the board in medicine and it is a really- it’s a tremendous challenge until we fix the underlying system that doesn’t respect that, that doesn’t give credence nor value to that, it will be an uphill battle. I will say that my entire career, I fought it- and I fought it because a deep-seated belief that if we are just giving the pharmaceutical, if 71% of visits just culminate in that and nothing more, what a loss. I didn’t dedicate my life to medicine to do that.

And so you almost have to make it a part of your life, just like any type of motivation for healthy behavior. You have to keep coming back to it and say, well, I’m going to find something that I can connect to with this patient- in the realm of eating good food or in the realm of social connection or in the realm of spirituality. And 20 years of doing that with the education that the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine gives us, it really amplifies our toolbox. There are many things- and you mentioned a couple, like art pharmacy or other things- that we can go to that, in some ways, are plug-and-play, and don’t require a ton of effort on my side as a busy physician. And yet I can explore things beyond the pharmaceutical intervention, or the referral to the specialist or the pamphlet, to try to find things to address health on a deeper level.

I think that it’s important that we speak to that as well, though. I think that in medicine right now, we have oftentimes trained ourselves- and patients- to look for the quick fix, the silver bullet will save you when health goes in the wrong direction. And I think that’s a huge mistake that we’ve made. I think that our silver bullets should be icing on the cake or salad dressing on the salad rather than the salad itself or the cake itself. And it’s become the cake- where even on the patient side, and I oftentimes attract patients looking for an integrative approach. So I’m lucky there from the get-go- but we’ve trained patients through advertising on television to just get the drug and you should be fine. And we neglect this tremendous body of literature of lifestyle and how much that impacts, especially chronic disease.

Shay Yeah. And it’s kind of amazing. I had an opportunity recently to go to a healthcare conference, and it was a thousand people and many of the top people in healthcare were there, just because of the way that this particular conference is designed. And I was looking at l,ike, where are the “community as medicine” people? Because I know you and I are both advocates of like community-based care and medicine, and how you can use community to be a form of medicine. And I couldn’t find those people. I was like, it was so not present in this powerhouse of incredible thinkers and thought leaders in healthcare. And yet even in just the very simple stories of what we’ve done through Integrative Touch- so we, for more than a dozen years, we did the largest pediatric integrative medicine retreats in the country. We had about120 different therapies, usually about 350 people for a week.

And we ran them through all these different things. And it was a whole family system model. And, so we got tons of data and feedback and it was an incredible learning laboratory. And I just, one story that I can’t forget- because it shifted my whole thinking about community as medicine- we had a young girl, I think she was maybe roughly seven years old when she came to that week long retreat and she had a genetic condition and at that time had five words that she knew and was able to use. So she had five words. And we went through this week-long program- we did integrative medicine- but the kids’ programming had all sorts of fun things for kids, very interactive, whole series of things that she went through over the course of that week. We ate all our meals together, people slept on-site, so it was a twenty-four/ seven program for a week. At the end of that week, she had 35 words.

What happened there? And her mom, who’s a doctor actually, was like, “What the hell? How did she gain 30 words in a week when she’s like seven years old? What happened?” And to me, that’s like the magic that we’re kind of not paying enough attention to is because we’re not living in the same kind of tribes and communities that we used to live in, we’re living in these isolated housing boxes where we’re quite separated and siloed much of the time very differently from how our brains, even just from an evolutionary, biological perspective, like how our brains formulated- was in small tribes and community. From what I’ve researched, a lot of change happens when you’re in groups of less than 200 people, because that’s where you hold accountability ties. And so there’s just these fascinating things that happen in those groups that are kind of very much connected to our ancestry and how our wiring sort of evolved.
And it made me wonder- when we’re in those community configurations again, and they’re highly diverse, and they’re all ages, and they’re all abilities, and it’s like every socioeconomic stream of the community is engaged- what is that doing to us collectively? And you would see examples like this. We had other examples like this where a child who hadn’t started walking- and this was a much older child who had severe disabilities. And it wasn’t one thing, it was many things. And to me, that’s like the power of community medicine. Now, I say all of that- I know it’s a lot- but then you look at our current research models, like, how in the heck do you do that with a randomized control? You don’t. So we also have to shift, I think, some of our scientific ways and methodology for how we think about research when you’re thinking in this holistic, whole-systems design modeling.
And I know you love research, Stephen. So I’m also just curious- how are you even- because- honestly, I love research too, but a lot of it I’ve been like, dang it, I’m not sure how to study this. I need more thinkers in the room to help me to figure out, how do we study this.

Stephen Yeah. I think that’s a- well, what amazing stories first, Shay. And to just witness that, I think, really gives power to ourselves to continue with the work we do. I’m sure there are stories that really fueled you along the way in an area, right? Integrative medicine is not a cakewalk. It’s not the easy path to take. And we see things like that and then you can’t neglect it anymore. You have to find ways to address that in some way. And I think that’s what we’ve been working towards in parallel lives, if I dare say- trying to find ways to showcase, yeah, what a tremendous impact this has. And it’s not just linear or reductionist and we have to look outside the box. And I think that, again, constantly trying to think of- and even one of my earlier positions was with Iora Health, where for me it was really kind of a community-based model.

And there were multiple interventions that weren’t just singular or reductionistic that we afford these things that kind of resemble a community. And I think one of the things that I learned even prior to that, but practiced at Iora- was what we call the “shared medical appointment” or a group visit. And I’m real excited because I see medicine kind of move in this area, because in my career, communities over here and medicines over here and public health sometimes tries to build a bridge between those, but oftentimes it focuses just on prevention and not some of the areas that we’re discussing. And I think these kind of group visits allow us to speak to groups that then they can interact together. And the first time I ever saw a group visit was when I took a year leave of absence between my second and third year of medical school, not because I was burned out, but I was hungry to see the world.

And my dean said, “Oh, it’s a really bad idea. I suggest that you don’t do this. You’re going to be speaking to people for the rest of your career trying to explain what you did.” And I said, “Well, I already have it organized.” And I got a scholarship from a local Rotary Club and spent a year in the second-largest favela, low-income neighborhood in Brazil- Pirambu is the second-largest to Rosinha that is in Rio, where many of the movies are about. But part of the many amazing experiences that I got to witness was shadowing a Brazilian psychiatrist named Adalberto Barreto, and he created in the favela comunidade de saude- a health community that he basically in this beautiful thatched room- would do shared medical appointments and sometimes 50 people. And I had the privilege of just sitting next to him during these. And you would watch.

And he turned to me and he would say- he said, “I used to have a line of 150 people outside my office because I offered consultations for free. And here I am now watching as they solve one another’s problems through this amazing energy that occurs here.” And that was in 1999 where I first experienced it. And seeing since then, this power of group visits- where we can still share a lot of what I might speak to in a doctor’s visit, but then open it up to a group where that social component has this magic, has this connection and energy that we can’t get in a one-on-one visit- that’s extremely powerful. And we can still measure the usuals- A1C, or someone’s weight, or their blood pressure. But I think we’re going to start looking more to things like connection and quality of life. And we recently had Dr. Helene Langevin, who was the former director of NCCIH, the integrative branch of the NIH, that they have a Whole Person Health Index.

So we’re even getting validated measures that start to look at this bigger picture. But I think that along with shared medical appointments, I think I shared with you, we just recently received a grant from the Coors Foundation, who were very generous in supporting what is this pragmatic- or “N-of-1”- research. And I’m very excited because it mimics what I’ve done my entire career. And there’ll be three parts to our research project. The first part is we’re going to go to waiting rooms and ask people- what good sleep means to them. So start to create a definition not based on our definition within medicine, but ask people what good sleep really means to them. The second aspect of that- because integrative medicine has many parts, is we’re going to do what’s called a modified Delphi. And that’s where we bring experts together to try to identify what are the best seven things for your sleep.

As I was speaking to the food pyramid- or what are the best five things to help someone get that best night’s sleep? And then we’re going to utilize a backbone whereby there’s an app and there are validated measures and each participant will get a wearable device- whether people like or don’t like wearable devices, that’s something we can debate. But that feedback of data in real time as people start to incorporate these recommendations into their life, and then their data- both subjective and objective says, “Wow, I got a better night’s sleep. I’m going to keep doing this thing that you told me to do. ” And it might not just be one. You can kind of choose your own adventure, as I like to say- as I like those books a lot as a child- to start to stack them in a way that you also rebuild confidence that, yes, I can get a good night’s sleep.

And I’m real excited about these areas that aren’t your traditional randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial- which is a group of people over there run through a certain number of weeks through this single intervention with a control, a placebo control that I don’t know if that pertains to me or not. And I think it’s fascinating research and it’s our gold standard and I don’t want to speak down to it because it is the basis for much of what I do as a physician, but we’re going to get to a period where I get to look at my own data and see if these interventions are one, feasible, affordable, something that I can actually implement in my own life, and do they move the needle for me in my disease and/or symptom state? And I’m real excited about that future opening up. And I think it’s going to be a different way where we can look at some of these more complex interventions like I was speaking to or Chinese medicine, and we can stack outcomes.

I don’t care about a placebo response. For me, that’s really the innate healing potential of the body that’s affording that placebo response. Can we stack the outcomes for the best possible outcome for a patient- with their time, money, energy, and effort? And I think that’s where we’re going to move to in medicine. I’m really excited about it. And I think AI technology and many of the advancements are only going to help us to get there.

Shay Yeah. I also think about when you start to study some of the systems that have been for thousands of years, like Ayurvedic medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, and you look at the roots and you get into the sort of formulation and philosophy of some of those, I think one of the things you see that’s very inherent in a lot of systems of medicine is deep listening, right? And we’ve taken this approach of like, if you were to think of the yin and the young side of medicine, I would say Western medicine has had a more yang approach, right? It’s been very much like the do, which is great when you need surgery and when you have like you’re in the emergency room and you need quick action and you need a fast antibiotic or you need something quickly to save your life. It can be a pretty sharp, aggressive form of medicine, which has its place, right?

100%. But I recall- this is maybe a nice way to frame this- a very simple story of where the Dalai Lama has his Tibetan physician, right? So this is like a Tibetan master and he also goes to the Mayo Clinic. So he’s got his one skillset and another skillset. And I heard a story of how that Tibetan physician would basically listen for like 45 minutes and it was all a listening. And then he said all these things that he had found through that. And then the cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic, through their scans and tests, basically confirmed a lot of what he already knew. Now, if we have that capacity to be able to listen to the body at a level that we can actually predict or intuit- or whatever word you want to give to it- but like similar outcomes to what state-of-the-art fMRIs, et cetera, are going to discover, don’t we want to use both?

To me, it’s like you want to be able to use both. Of course, you don’t need to get rid of the amazing technology that we’re- in fact, you want to push it further, but at the same time, I feel like the step that I see often gets missed in our clinical work is listen first because sometimes you can rule out you don’t actually need that test, you need a different test, or you don’t actually need to go that direction, you need to go another direction. Because if we take the time to really listen and tune into your system and remember that we have that skill that we inherently have that capacity, that our systems are designed for healing and that they haven’t what I call an inner intelligence- or you could call it a healing intelligence, right? An inner capacity that, if you tune in, you can actually gain a ton of information and insight that then can guide you in often a more clear pathway forward for what you actually do need to engage in medicine.

And to me, that would be like a more optimal design, right? Where you develop this cohort of humans who has great listening capacity like the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan physician, and you train the heck out of that and you have this other component of medicine that has different kinds of tests as well. And especially because, as we know, a lot of those tests are machines that cost millions of dollars and are very expensive to run and there’s quite a bit of cost to that. And so we want to be thinking about cost-benefit, right? And so to me, these are reasonable questions to be asking.

Stephen Yeah. I think that’s a very reasonable question to ask. And I think the other thing that brings to mind for me is being a physician for 20 years now- or nearly 20 years- is our patients often speak in, and myself included, but we speak in terms of story. And as humans, we understand story, we’re motivated by story, and I think it’s a big aspect of medicine that modern medicine has missed out on. I think we depend on science to such an extent that we think that just the right evidence-based answer will cure, and that’s all we need. We get the right drug, right diagnosis, right patient, right dose, and we’re set and that’s all we need. For me, medicine- the majority of it- is much messier than that. It’s not so clean cut. And we welcome those cases that are so simple. And I think being an integrative physician now, I attract even more of those cases that don’t fit that perfect diagnosis, don’t have that single intervention or that surgery that will cure them.

And really, that is the minority of health problems that we as humans face. And story allows us- back to your point before- is our physiology oftentimes follows the thoughts and the stories we tell ourselves. If I get very worked up about a lecture I have to give tomorrow or public speaking, my heart rate will pick up. I might even start sweating if I get into that story enough. And when patients visit us, oftentimes in the clinic room, you can’t just walk away with, “Here, you need a drug for this deficiency or this drug that you have,” or “you need this drug because it will treat the ailment that you brought to me. ” We have to listen intently, establish rapport. And that’s why this is part of the definition of integrative medicine that emphasizes a partnership between patient and clinician- that that listening allows us then to bring back our intervention or our recommendation in a way that a patient can say, “Wow, yeah, this really makes sense for me.”

And in my experience, it’s when you aren’t listening enough and don’t have enough rapport with the patient, you just kind of come in very cold, which may also work at times. But for chronic disease, especially you have to get buy-in to: this is a new story that we’re going to create for you. This is the story that you brought to the door. We need to now change that story in a way- and these are the tools by which I can help you do that. And that might include a pharmaceutical, that might include surgery, but I think it can include so many things beyond that that are empowering. And I keep thinking about the two cases that you shared in terms of five to 35 words. And I imagine somebody was very astutely listening and created- whether a verbal story or not- but a new story that emerged from that that allowed her to go from five to 35 words.
And that’s what gets me real excited about this kind of merging of worlds whereby modern technology, as remarkable and as amazing as it is, is only a part of that bigger story because it is story that drives our lives so much.

Shay Yeah. I was also thinking of, we often at Integrity Touch, we are often sent the cases where either the physicians like, “I don’t know what to do with this, ” or the mental health providers, like, “I don’t know what to do with this. ” We get a lot of those, especially actually for integrative touch therapy, which is the therapeutic approach I designed, which- it’s a collaborative, it’s a team that provides kind of an intensive healing opportunity. And the whole basis and foundation of that, I think is designed around a piece of medicine that I think we can start to pay more and more and more attention to, which is that because we’re animals and have animal bodies and we have nervous systems and those nervous systems can regulate or dysregulate one another through what we now are understanding is this process of, “Oh, we have the capacity to co-regulate.” And so if I’m really dysregulated, but if I’m in a room of five people that are highly regulated, I don’t stay dysregulated for very long at all.

And so we’re also not, in my view, using in medicine- and we are doing this in integrative touch therapy- we’re using the power of numbers. We’re animal systems. If you can get five systems that are highly regulated, where their nervous system is operating in a very good, clear ventral vagal state, and you bring in someone who’s highly dysregulated and is in deep trauma, it is extraordinary the power of the capacity of that team of individuals to be able to shift somebody into a much more regulated state. And once you do that, there’s a lot of healing potential that opens up. And I remember- I felt it very distinctly just as a practitioner- where we used to work at one point in inpatient through Banner within the mental health lockdown facility. So these were people who had- they were in a lockdown facility for severe mental health challenges.

And I remember in there, what my body always wanted was more numbers. I wanted more numbers because I was like, “If I can get whole teams of us regulating, we can start to shift.” And you would say, “Well, wait, how is that possible?” It’s possible because we’re animals, because my nervous system speaks to your nervous system because we’re talking to each other on levels that we’re not always consciously aware of, but it’s happening anyway. And I do think this is a part of medicine. And as we understand polyvagal theory, as we look at some of the research in Dr. Porges’s work, as we start to understand the relationship between the nervous system and then all these other aspects of our health, I really do think we’re going to be paying more attention to that and we’re also going to pay more attention to how it feels to be in a hospital, how it feels to be in a medical clinic because if it feels scary and hard, your body already has shifted into a state of less capacity to soften into a parasympathetic state where maybe now actually you can rest and digest and maybe now there is room for healing, right?

So I think we’re going to learn more, too, about how we regulate our system to make healing potentiality increase. And so again, these are like- I’m always looking at where are the gaps in maybe not only what we’re doing, but maybe what we’re not doing or what we’re not utilizing. And when we worked in the hospital, a lot of what we would do is go in and work with a system that was deeply dysregulated because it was in fear and trauma and get it into a much more regulated state where the system itself could actually start to heal and do the thing that the body already knows how to do. And in many ways that’s low cost, it’s not that expensive, it’s very effective remarkably in many cases and had great outcomes in terms of pain management. We have the data to show it. I had a doctor say to me, “If my pain meds could do what you guys do, I’d be thrilled. You’re more powerful than the pain medications.”

Stephen Even that statement is falling into that trap of binary again.

Shay Yes.

Stephen It’s either what you do or the pain meds and it doesn’t have to be.

Shay And it’s both. It’s all of the above.

Stephen Yeah. And that’s what we- I think that we’re missing out on a more beautiful and patient-empowering story, which is what I hear from what you’re telling me and what I’ve witnessed in my own career. And I think that we need to continue to fight to look at that more amplified viewpoint that incorporates those things that kind of dance together and in a beautiful way, empower. The patient on the other end, I like to say in my lectures a lot that there are estimates- in some estimates as high as 80%, but usually around 70% what I see as a primary care doctor, its root is in stress.

And less than 3% of primary care visits culminate in affording a patient some tool to help mitigate- or I call metabolize- or do something about that stress. And when you’re saying that to me in terms of the vagus nerve and parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system, for me, what you’re saying to it- and we have many terms for it- of what occurs when it’s really wreaking havoc across the body, but that underlying is: am I in a stress state or am I in a rest-and-digest or parasympathetic state? And the hospital- anyone that spends time in it- is just akin to a stress state. And can we offset that as we know? And again, the evidence is robust- that it will. It will help a patient to not only heal during that doctor or during that hospital visit, but this is the beauty of, in my opinion, the work that we do.

When you can teach a person to fish health, then they can enjoy health for a lifetime. And we can teach even simple techniques. And Dr. Weil is renowned for the 4-7-8, that I’ll take time even during my visits to teach. It seems very small maybe from a certain vantage point or a lens in comparison to intravenous benzodiazepines or some of the things that were afforded in medicine, yet there is no tolerance that develops to it. It doesn’t cost a penny. A patient can utilize at any point that they want. And apart from- even to the contrary that tolerance doesn’t develop- the more that you practice it, the stronger it becomes. These are remarkable things over a trajectory of 50 years. And back to your point about the Nurses’ study and looking longitudinally, most of our interventions we look to between now and they’re discharged from the hospital or between now and maybe 24 weeks, if you’re lucky, we don’t look at a very longitudinal trajectory or even seven generations, which our indigenous elders will teach us as to look that far.

We’re looking 16 weeks and planting the seeds for some of these things that, again, low cost right under our nose, pretty easy if we have an open door to allow them to pass through and impact us on this deep level that’s the root of almost all illness. And it might not cure- to that earlier point- of yours, but it will give a tool to a patient where they’re empowered and will help them towards health, towards improving their outcome alongside that pain medication, alongside that surgery, alongside that pharmaceutical intervention, alongside that fill in the blank.

Shay And I want to give you an opportunity to share what you see as the future of medicine. We’ve talked about some of the things- like what it is, what it could be, what some of the possibilities are- this non-binary approach that you’ve spoken to in this conversation. When you think about what feels the most salient, the most like, this is where I see this future of medicine could go, what could come next? What are some of the things that as you imagine that future with the highest possible outcomes and results, what comes forward for you?

Stephen Yeah, what a great question, Shay. And I want to hear your answer. I’ll take a first step. I think right now what I’m very interested in exploring- and I think a lot of my career has led me to this, right? Being at the forefront of primary care, I’ve worked even with a company that all healthcare was afforded within a patient’s home. And I oftentimes show a slide- it’s an age-old slide from New England Journal of Medicine that for every thousand people in our community that have symptoms, some type of symptom related to their health, less than 1% will make it to the hospital. And so no reason- it’s clear why we’re so zealous and there is so much stress- is it’s that less than 1% with oftentimes an extreme illness, not always, that makes it to the hospital door that we have to react.

And one of my best friends in the world, an ER doctor, and what a tremendous profession- that you have to react for that less than 1%. I really see medicine moving upstream. And I know we’ve been talking about this for millennia, but utilizing technology, utilizing integrative medicine to empower people in their community to make those right choices, to support those right choices through even government subsidies and what happens in a community to make movement much more accessible and the norm, to make healthy food much more accessible in the norm, to make connection with nature much more accessible in the norm, to make daily activities that help us to deal with the stress of our world much more accessible in the norm- that that 1% is going to be 0.01%. And I truly believe that. I truly believe that if we can stack really the odds in our favor to support people with healthy lifestyle- not just a boring healthy lifestyle, not just a dry, “I only eat cardboard and no salt,” it can be fun and engaging.

This is what Dr. Weil has showcased throughout his entire career and written many, many bestsellers about- is that this is an exciting path that fortifies our greatest resource, our greatest resource ever. And we don’t know how amazing it is until it’s gone. And the more that we can be on the proactive side talking about it, empowering people with ways to fortify their own resilience and their own health, I haven’t reached where we want to. And I still have worked in ICUs. I’ve been a hospitalist in the past, and this is remarkable, remarkable work, but I see really the future of healthcare is moving upstream into our homes, into our communities to empower best choices that compress morbidity, that allow us to live that healthiest, amazing life until our last days on earth. And it’s a quick, beautiful death that we embrace- again, not the way that oftentimes we see death in our society.

And that’s my romantic vision that seems very doable. It seems very real and it’s going to require more allocation of resources upstream and not just be that kind of reactive- sometimes unfairly- we call it whack-a-mole medicine. You come in to see the doctor, you got hypertension, you get an anti-hypertensive; you got reflux, you get an anti-reflux medicine, you get depression, you get an antidepressant, but to really move upstream to empower things that- even if and when that occurs, and it will- you’ll have a stronger vitality that allows you to come to bounce back to a homeostatic point that won’t require the severe hospitalizations, those severe cases that really have very few remedies left- but integrative touch.

Shay Yeah. And I know you’re very familiar with the work that’s been inspired from what we’ve learned from the Blue Zones and then now is being applied in public policy in certain cities and communities. And I think that at that level too- like public planning, city planning- how much green spaces do we have in the restaurants? How much plant-based food do we have? Because we can see how many community centers do we have where you actually start to look at how walkable is this space? How easy is it to get on a bike? It’s at every level. I think that’s what’s so fascinating about it. It’s at the city planning level, it’s at the simple things like the vending machines in the schools, where our kids go. It’s like all the layers, right? Because it’s embedded throughout society- how hard it is in some places to get healthy food and you see all the deficits, and particularly in lower income communities- like how far you have to go to even get a fresh fruit or vegetable, right?

We see that level of inequity. And so some of it is in systems and design, but I still- I’m such an advocate for most of the things that have had the greatest benefit in my health were free. So I’m always like, don’t forget breathing, meditation, monitoring your thoughts, your ability to learn how to regulate your own nervous system. There’s a lot of really, really basic things that are so powerful, that don’t cost money. Remembering how important relationships are- who you surround yourself with- that your happiness is very contingent upon the happiness of the people around you, the power of awe, the power of like in your day, being able to basically kind of work against negativity bias in the brain and focus on things that- oh- that inspires awe. We have so much power, even just the simplest things of gratitude, right? Finding things that you’re grateful for.

And we have research on so much of this, but it’s like- so simple, so free- and yet you just have to learn it and then to actually implement it. And I’m not saying that’s easy. There are a lot of circumstances in which that isn’t always easy to do, but it can be life-changing. And even- we’ve talked about stress- and I really like Kelly McGonigal’s work around The Upside of Stress, that she saw that and the research surprised her. She was like, “I’ve been teaching everybody stress is bad.” And then she said, “Actually, stress is bad if you believe it’s bad.” Because that’s what she saw- it increases your mortality. If you think stress is bad, stress kills you. Essentially, your belief system around your stress is critically important. If you perceive stress as challenge and the body rising to meet an occasion of challenge and you perceive it not as a negative, but actually as a response to something that’s requiring of your attention, your body processes that stress completely differently is what she started to see from that research.

And it changed her whole thinking because she was like, “We got to get rid of stress.” And then she was like, “Wait a minute.” And it doesn’t mean we don’t put ourselves in horribly stressful situations all the time- that’s not what she’s saying- but she’s saying, “You also need to understand that the belief system around stress is also very important.” So again, it’s not an either or, but it is an understanding that no, you don’t want to put yourself in crazy stress all the time. And it is also important how you understand the challenges that you’re facing and how you can meet those challenges.That matters too.

Stephen And I think having tools to be able to address what is… It’s an epidemic of stress. And again, it’s necessary that you can’t have life without stress. Having the tools to be able to address that and at least to be a step ahead of the game, it’s kind of like having the muscles to be able to lift a weight. You become- bring it on. Yeah, great. I have that flexibility or that strength to be able to handle it. And that’s what, for me, really being human is about- is about having a strong vitality that what life gives us, and there will be suffering and there will be stress. And these are core tenets of being human- we can handle those and bounce back. And what a gift for us to be in a meeting together earlier today where a local high school is really bringing this in to their curriculum, to their shared spaces and making it a part.

That really gives me hope to see that that’s happening because again, I think we’re coming back to the binary quite a bit, but I think there is a real fear- oh, if we invest in what we’re discussing, this kind of upfront, upstream approach of empowering people- and you and I say it doesn’t cost a lot of money- but the concern is, well, then we’re not going to have the life-saving surgeries that modern medicine is based on. And it’s this fear that it’s either or no. I mean, again, one of the most affluent countries in the world- shame on us- that all of us don’t have access to healthy, remarkable food, that all of us don’t have access to techniques or tools that allow us to better deal with the tremendous stress of being alive, shame on us that this isn’t accessible to all Americans, that we can live our healthiest life.

And that’s what gets me up in the morning- and I know it does for you too- is that how do we find ways to thread that needle despite so many things pushing against us?

Shay Yeah. And I have to ask you, Stephen, because I always like to get- everyone has such a different take and answer to this question- but because this podcast is a conversation on healing, how do we heal? And so I would love to know how you define or describe what healing is, because it’s always a different answer for every single guest.

Stephen Yeah. I mean, I think it’s an individual definition of really feeling whole. That means living our lives with purpose, feeling that our lives have meaning, that we feel fulfilled in the direction that we take, and that supports physical, mental, and spiritual- the right balance for us to feel that we not always are thriving, but we’re in a good space, that we’re supporting what is our healthiest self or our whole self to be able to function in everyday life. And I think each and every one of us have felt where illness creeps in or where symptoms creep in. And a lot of times we define health as that lack of wholeness- the illness- that we define it by oftentimes in modern medicine, but it is that ability to maintain balance in the midst of the stressors of everyday life and to live life with purpose.

Shay That’s a great answer.

Stephen What’s yours, Shay?

Shay My definition of healing?

Stephen Yeah.

Shay Yeah. I mean, the thing is, if you ask me on any different day, I’ll give you a different answer. But my answer today- I was thinking about, for me personally- so this is just a very personal answer. My greatest form of healing- so if my system is not in the spot that I want it to be- it’s a meditation I drop into, and I reset. And the only way I can describe it, it’s kind of like I download. And this is, to me, an area where I think the future of medicine could be quite interesting because the more we understand about consciousness and about our capacity to kind of tap in- because I feel like I resource a lot from a blueprint that’s greater than myself by far. And so when I feel like sort of distortions or disturbances in my own system, I’m basically going into deep meditation and kind of resourcing from something much greater than myself.

And people have given that all sorts of different names and different cultures. And I sort of go into a state of- it feels like bliss- but it’s like I can feel my whole inner being is alive and well and happy and connected. And that’s been my sort of personal form of deepest medicine when things feel very out of balance or when something extremely challenging happens. I kind of like drop into this deeply restorative state and that has been my place of healing- just for myself.

But I know through so many of the people that I’ve worked with this, there’s so many ways to do it, right? Some people, they access it through nature. And I was very interested. There was some research that was done on spontaneous remissions, right? People who had stage IV very advanced cancers, and they studied aboutpeople 1,000 who had those spontaneous remissions to try to understand common themes. And I think it was like 10 or 12 of those common themes. I actually keep them in my phone because I like to look at it periodically. And what struck me about it is the common themes of what people did who had these spontaneous remissions that we can’t really explain medically- we’re like, “We don’t know exactly what happened, but something happened,” is that essentially most of the things they changed were not material. Like only one of them was what I would consider more material, like diet, right?
So there- were many of them changed their diet. That was a big part of it. But a lot of what they changed when you read the list across a thousand plus people, it was emotional. It was the way they thought about things. It was psychological. It was spiritual. And so then I’m like, okay, wait- if like nine out of the 10, or if they’re mostly not material- wait, what does this mean?

Because you’re having a very physiological change in your body. If you’re going from a stage IV cancer to remission- like your cells are changing.That’s a massive physiological shift that’s occurring that we still can’t totally explain. And if most of that in most of the stories that are documented is emotional and psychological and in the way you think- like, wow- to me, that causes me to think more deeply about what healing is, right? Because to me, I’m very much a thinker of like- stay open- because my groundedness is from a place of, I probably don’t know 99.99% of what’s true in the world. And so I know that my knowledge is so limited that I want to stay as open as possible to where else is there the potentiality that I might’ve missed because of my limited thinking. And so when I hear things like that, I go, “Hmm, that’s intriguing.” When it comes to healing, probably we should be paying a lot of attention to the way we think and how we feel and our emotions and psychology- is like, it’s more important than we give it credit for, I feel like. So yeah.

Stephen Yeah. No, I agree with you completely. And I think a question we ask a lot of our patients when they come to our clinic as well- and I’ve asked for a long time- is, “When’s the last time that you felt well?”
And I think that what that reminds me of and what you’re saying is well too, I think a key aspect of that- one- is health is a feeling, right? It really is a way that I feel. And I’m a big practitioner of Qigong. And even just this morning, I usually get up very early in the morning and I practice. And there’s just this feeling, as you’re going through your practice of an energy almost surging through your body that- I think you asked before a little bit about the fellowship and I’d like to talk about that- because a big part of what we share with physicians is we have what are called experiential weeks that you can look at literature, I can read all the data in the world and all the studies, but that lived experience of feeling this kind of energy surge through your body after these super simple exercises of slow, fluid movement and breathing- you can’t argue with that.

It just is such a remarkable feeling that there’s almost a light bulb of like- that’s health. I feel that vitality or health or wholeness or whatever term we might use. I feel it. I can’t quite put it into terms, but it’s a remarkable, remarkable feeling. And I think it’s so important that we also give credence to that- that a lot of times what we’re trying to teach is a way of feeling, and that is utilizing some of these kind of physical or energetic or spiritual ways by which that feeling is more present in this short life that we have on earth.

And that’s where I think it is so important to call attention that we can create parameters- which we’re constantly trying to do in research- for what health means. But when all is said and done, it’s kind of a feeling that’s individual to each and every one of us that I think is so important that we are in- I wouldn’t say in pursuit of that- but we’re open to that feeling coming through.And I think the second aspect for me that is so important to healing is if you ask me, “When’s the last time you felt healthy?” The first thing that my mind does is it comes back to present moment.

And I’m not going to find health there or there- it’s almost like, well, how do I feel right now? And I check in. And I think that, again, there’s been a remarkable amount of literature on Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. And I had the privilege of meeting Dr. John Kabat-Zinn. And I think there is just a wealth of remedy in being in awareness. And I think it’s really gained in traction, but really still hasn’t reached most people of present moment awareness is yet another tool we can bring to that healing toolbox, which is so powerful.

Shay Definitely. Well, I know that there’s so much more we could talk about, Stephen, but I also want to be very respectful of your time. And so as we’re kind of wrapping up the conversation, I know that you’re working on a book, so if you want to share a little bit about that- or if there’s any other parting wisdom that you’re like, “Ooh, I want to just mention that”- feel free to share.

Stephen Thank you, Shay. And just- what a wonderful time. Fun. Talking about health really got me thinking too, which is exciting. I like that about podcasts. And I’ll maybe just- as the director of the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine, want to share that really for 30 years, we have trained physicians- have been really the kind of main group that we have trained for 30 years- over 2,500 physicians in our world-renowned fellowship. And that is much of what we’ve discussed and so much beyond that- training physicians to look beyond a single pharmaceutical intervention and take an integrative approach to the health of our patients and to try to transform medicine one physician at a time going through our fellowship. And we have expanded beyond physicians while the fellowship is kind of the main work that we still do. And we still offer the fellowship to this day- two cohorts each year.

We also have integrative medicine in residency where we teach resident- who are kind of physicians in training- IMR. We teach medical students. We have an iHeLP program that many allied health professionals, nurses included, and many things that are even direct to people- we hav,e centered at the center, free integrative medicine offerings. We have a fantastic one- if you go to our website- that you can look at that’s upcoming on dance, which is very exciting, and really try to reach everybody at home and where they’re at to empower them to live the healthiest life that they can.

Shay That’s great. Well, it’s an important body of work over those past 30 years. So thank you- and Dr. Weil- and all of- I know some of the people that were in that first class all those years ago, and they’re amazing doctors.

Stephen They are.

Shay So thank you again for the work that you’re doing and everything that you’re bringing to the center through your leadership. So it’s a privilege to know you, Stephen. Thank you.

Stephen What a pleasure to be on. Our website is awcim.arizona.edu. We’ll probably put it in notes elsewhere and keep up the amazing work that you do at Integrative Touch. You know I love to refer patients to your work and we didn’t even get to talk about Pay It Forward or all the other amazing things that you get to do there, but keep up the incredible work- and it’s been a pleasure speaking with you today.

Shay Thank you.

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