Welcome back to the Healing Pain Podcast with Dr. William Davis.
I have a really amazing guest I’m so excited to talk to this week. His name is Dr. William Davis. I’m sure you’ve heard of him before. Before anything else, you can join me live at the PT NEXT Conference on June 21st to the 24th where I’ll be talking about the effects of nutrition on musculoskeletal pain. I want to thank the American Physical Therapy Association for inviting me. You can join me in Boston, Massachusetts in just about a month. Of course, please share this podcast with your friends and family. They’re doing a wonderful, wonderful job about sharing their message on how you can heal chronic pain naturally.
Dr. William Davis, you’ll know him as the New York Time’s bestselling author of Wheat Belly where he changed the lives of millions by teaching them how to remove grains from their diet to reverse years of chronic health problems. In his new book called Undoctored, he goes beyond cutting grains to help you take charge of your own health. This groundbreaking book reveals how millions of people are given dietary recommendations crafted by big business, how prescribed medications are often unnecessary. That’s something we talk frequently about here on the Healing Pain podcast as we talk about opioids. Last, how there have been unwarranted procedures that feed the hungry revenue healthcare systems that have become so large and pervasive in our healthcare system, another thing we talk about when it comes to things like injections and MRIs and X-rays for all sorts and types of pain.
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Undoctored with Dr. William Davis, MD
Dr. William Davis, welcome to the podcast.
I’m thrilled to be here.
There are so many things I want to talk to you about because I followed your work for years. Your first book was groundbreaking. Just taking us back probably a few years, ten years or maybe more, what was the precipitous to write the first book?
I was just trying to give people, my patient’s in my Cardiology practice, a better way to control their heart disease risk. Joe, heart disease is scary stuff: heart attack, sudden cardiac death, bypass operations, angioplasty, stents, and all this stuff. I also recognize that the cath lab and the operating room is really not the way that I want to deal with disease. My mom died of sudden cardiac death a few months after her successful two-vessel coronary angioplasty. She was in New Jersey. It drove home the lesson to me that procedures are really not accomplishing it. They might be a temporary Band-Aid. I set out on a course to try to put a stop to the disease altogether, which by the way got not intention at all, because it doesn’t pay. There’s no pot of gold if you put a stop to heart disease, but I did it. I published some of those data.
It took some stumbling around over a few years. It took a means to track the disease, in this case calcium scores by heart scanning devices, vitamin D, a huge effect, magnesium, Omega-3 fatty acids. The thing that led me in this dietary direction was focusing on the number one most common cause for heart attack and heart disease. It’s not high cholesterol. High cholesterol is this fairy tale that serves the drug industry very nicely. The real, most common cause, is the excess of small LDL particles. Two foods cause an excess of small LDL particles. Not bacon, not fat, not greasy hamburgers, not frying your food, but grains and sugar.
I took grains and sugar out of people’s diets. Small LDL would plummet, drop from a value of 2,000 to zero or something like that. They’d come back with these astounding stories. “I don’t have joint pain. I don’t have acid reflux. I’ve lost 47 pounds in three months. I’m no longer diabetic. I don’t have high blood pressure. My pain is now gone in my low back and hip and knee. My eczema and psoriasis are gone. My depression has lifted. I no longer feel like walking to oncoming traffic.” I started to see a transformation in health.
What became clearer overtime and as we took this experience to many hundreds of thousands and millions of people was that even greater benefits were obtained by eliminating all grains, all seeds of grasses. That’s what grains are, they’re seeds of grasses. Grasses are not digestible by humans. Then it became clearer, we get even larger benefits if we expand that little universe to include correcting some of the nutrient deficiencies that persist even after we remove grains, like magnesium, and some of the more common deficiencies not blamable on grains, like iodine and Omega-3 fatty acids and cultivated bowel flora. Put this all together, what I started seeing was astounding turnarounds in health, by packaging it in really just six simple strategies together. It was uncommon for diseases as seemingly unrelated as rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s Disease, migraine headaches, and plantar fasciitis to go away.
Here’s what caught my ear. People will do this; they read the book, they do this, they say, “I told my doctor I was going to do this. He said it’s stupid. You’re going to die of heart disease. You’re going to end up on cholesterol drugs. You’re going to end up with bypass operation or heart attack. It’s stupid, do not do it.” They say, “I did it anyway. I lost all the weight. I’m healthier than I’ve ever been twenty years. I look different. I’m off five drugs, six drugs. I no longer have Type 2 Diabetes. I no longer have high blood pressure. I’m no longer depressed, etc.” It became clear what we really had was not just a means of controlling heart disease or losing weight, but a way to become astoundingly healthy, despite the doctor, despite the bungling of my colleagues who think that the path to health is through the operating room, an MRI device, or the front door of the hospital. You and I know that’s ridiculous. They have a role but they’ve tried to persuade us that they can monetize our health, expand the world to statin drugs and opioids, all those kinds of things that we really do not need.
In the world of pain right now, this is blowing out big time because last year the NIH and the CDC released statements that opioids should not be used for long-term chronic pain. If you’re in a car accident and you just fractured your leg or you’re terminal and you’re dying of cancer, we want you to be as comfortable and pain-free as possible. I want that for everyone. But when it comes to the more chronic diseases we see, we know these things don’t work. My question is, as a physical therapist, I have many friends and colleagues who are physicians and they’re wonderful and they send me patients. But how have physicians got stuck in this system, so to speak, because they really are stuck in the system at this point?
I don’t have all the answers, but I think part of it was they were raised and trained in a paternalistic, “I’m the doctor, you’re the patient, shut up and do what I tell you,” kind of mentality, which is how it’s been for the last few thousand years. The doctor who wore the white coat was the authoritarian. By the way, the reason for the white coat is not to be sterile because they’re filthy, it’s to intimidate. It’s to use the power of a placebo. Medicine and healthcare traditionally had very lousy tools, even today. There was always belief that the path to healing somebody would be through instilling confidence. Not through knowledge but through the placebo effect; using artifice to persuade people. That still goes on today. That attitude continues today. The doctor says, “You’re going to take these four prescriptions. If you don’t, don’t come back. I’m not going to take care of you. You’re a walking time bomb.” All those tricks they use to persuade us that we need to engage in some revenue-producing model.
In Milwaukee, where I live now, even though I’m from the East Coast, a great majority of doctors are employees of the healthcare system. A lot of these guys are my friends. They told me, the more revenue you generate for our hospital system, the larger your end of quarter bonus. Guess what the impulse is? Your mom goes in the hospital for shoulder ache. She’s got an MRI of her shoulder. She’s got a stress nuclear study for $4800. She gets a heart catheterization because there was an unclear abnormality on the stress test that added another $25,000, $30,000. She sees an electrophysiologist. He does a Tilt Study. She walks out of there after shoulder pain from gardening with a $120,000 bill. I’ve seen that happen countless times because the healthcare system has become, it was a healing system 50 years ago, it’s morphed into a very aggressive predatory revenue-seeking system.
The tragedy is, you and your listeners are part of this movement, we’re collaborating now, online, podcasts, social media, and we’re putting our heads together. We’re saying, “What the heck is going on here? The doctors tell us the only path to health is by taking statin drugs and taking non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs.” Why don’t we just address health and the real cause in the first place and regain health? I say that the enemy of the healthcare industry is not sickness. The enemy of the healthcare industry is healthy people. If you’re healthy, you are completely useless to this predatory profit-seeking system. I want all of us to be the absolute hated enemies of the healthcare system.
The way you do that is obviously get yourself as healthy as possible, so you don’t have to go to the corner drug store to buy what’s over the counter. You don’t have to rely on the prescription medications for your chronic disease. In some ways, you don’t have to rely on your physician. You only rely on them when you really, really need it.
If you tumble down the stairs and bust your hip, you do need the stinking hospital. If you come back from Costa Rica with dengue fever, you do need antibiotic or some great need of medical care. There’s a time and place for them, but they’ve managed to infiltrate into your life and tell nice people, “In order to remain healthy, you need to take these drugs. You need to submit to these procedures.” Because those are chronic issues. Acute illness, like an infection, provides about two weeks of revenue to the drug industry and the hospital. With a longstanding condition, like high cholesterol, this semi-fictitious thing invented by Big Pharma and others, is a chronic need, 30, 40 years of revenue year-over-year. That’s what they’re looking for. They’re infiltrating into our lives and telling us you must take an acid reflux drug. Think of it, we’ve been told this ridiculous diet, “Cut the fat, cut the cholesterol, and eat more healthy whole grains, sugar’s okay. It causes Type 2 Diabetes, obesity, autoimmune disease, etc.” The medical system comes in to your rescue.
Why not start with the right diet? Correct a handful of basic nutrient deficiencies and why not just enjoy health so that you’re not a Type 2 Diabetic at age 38, so you don’t have 25 years eczema and migraine headaches, just be healthy. The big downside of this is: it’s free. If I said to you, this will pay each doctor $10,000 a patient, there will be a huge line outside my front door. If it’s free and you can do it on your own, the doctors don’t care. In fact, they’ll discredit it. That’s why it’s so important that you and I convey these ideas. Some of us may differ on some of the details. Maybe you think that other nutrients are more important. I’ll tell you, there is an unusual synergy when you put these things together.
The most powerful components are no wheat, no grains, vitamin D, and cultivation of bowel flora. Those three are biggest. There are three others but those are the biggest. If we just persuaded the country to do those basic three things, we would see a dramatic transformation in health, the need for medication, appearance, weight, children’s diseases, the flagrant effects to ADHD and autism. They wouldn’t go away but the phenomenon will improve. We would see a dramatic transformation of the landscape of health nationwide. It would save us untold hundreds of billions of dollars. You see how tough it is to make change in healthcare because there are too many people who like the fact that in the US, we consume 17.5% of GDP to pay for healthcare. What they don’t tell you in the news is that they want it to be 19%, 21% because it’s a huge wealth transfer. Not to the nice nurse or the radiology tech, but to the people in decision-making positions, the executives in hospitals, the executives in Big Pharma and the medical device industry. The people who really pull the strings of this. They want healthcare to grow even bigger.
Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of the patient for a minute. You’re a patient, you have diabetes, and you’re going to the big hospital with the big sign on it and looks so pretty. It is rated number one by World News Report on the door when you walk in. You walk in to the physician’s office and now you’re conversing with the physician. Oftentimes, patients believe whatever the physician says. How do we start to educate people about being their own best advocate? How do we educate them about having a higher level conversation with their practitioner, whether it’s a physician or a physical therapist or a nurse practitioner, doesn’t matter who it is. How do we educate and how do we really empower them that they are an active role in that therapeutic relationship and they really should have the most prominent role in that relationship?
In this age of information empowerment, you, your next door neighbor, your children, can read the same study that a neurologist, gynecologist, or neurosurgeon reads. You have access to the same information. We’ve had now several years of learning how to collaborate together. Those tools online are starting to get better and better and more powerful. It could be Facebook but there are other websites like PatientsLikeMe.com and other websites where people are collaborating and getting answers. Getting answers to questions that the acute primary care is unable to answer or even a specialist can’t answer. The doctor needs to be a collaborator, an advocate for your health. If he refuses to do that, walk out of the room. If he’s not a collaborator, if he doesn’t understand you have a contribution to make, you have feelings, you have your own ideas, you have your own experiences to contribute, if he doesn’t understand that, get out and find somebody who will. In this age of information empowerment, the doctor is not this person who is exalted and has incredible knowledge no one else has. No, he’s one person and you have the combined collective knowledge of a huge crowd of people because you collaborate online and through other mechanisms.
Insist that every healthcare practitioner you deal with is a collaborative relationship, an advocate for your health, a champion for health. Someone who helps you succeed, not someone who says, “Shut up, I’m the doctor. You’re the patient. Who went to medical school? Did you go to medical school?” All that crap we’ve all heard a million times from our colleagues. “I don’t understand what you did to be slender and healthy but you just keep on doing what you’re doing,” which always astounds me. Not, “What did you do? Teach me so I can learn and see if there’s something of value I can use on other patients.” It should be a collaboration, a learning experience as we all get smarter. I cringe to think where would we be if we didn’t have these online tools. We’d still be 1985 more or less. Fashions would have changed. Music would have changed. But the level of knowledge and sophistication we have, we dialed back 30 years. But we have had these wonderful tools and we’re a lot smarter, even in some of the darkest corners of rural America. Insist that the doctor is a collaborative relationship.
As you’re releasing this book, it’s a great book. I love the title, Undoctored because ultimately, it puts the power back into the patient’s hands. As you do that, you’ll be successful at it, because we’re all backing you up and you’ve been successful in your other endeavors. Success is going to follow you. What has been your thought process around what the special interest groups are going to say about this? A lot of those special interest groups, they have PR people that try to block campaigns and block books like this. What is your thought around that?
I believe it’s happening already. We all know this. If you watch morning news, every other commercial is a drug commercial. These aren’t cheap drugs. Some of these drugs are several thousand dollars a month, a hundred thousand dollars a year or more. These are not inexpensive drugs that are being advertised. The drug industry, in my opinion, has in fact bought big media. If you’re obtaining say, $800 million a year on TV ad revenues from the drug companies, will you entertain conversations in your talk shows and morning news that antagonize your advertisers paying you? No. If you Google back over the last years and see how much negative press there has been on healthcare. Healthcare politics, that’s something different. Actual healthcare itself, the cost of, the GDP burden of, what goes on in doctors’ offices and hospitals, the excess of cost of medical procedures, etc. You’ll see there’s been almost no mainstream media, which is astounding. It would be like there’s been no reporting of the war on terror, but it’s going on.
We have this war on us from healthcare, the practice of healthcare, yet there’s virtually no coverage of this. The only reason I could think that the media would be so silent on it is because they’re fearful of losing ad revenue. Think of it, Big Pharma now controls big media. The argument in favor of directing consumers at drug advertising is that it’s freedom of speech. It’s a form of freedom of speech. What they have done quietly is control big media now. To me, this is a crime on a par with burning people. This is incredibly huge crime. That’s what I believe is going on. That’s why what you and I do is so important.
They can’t stop us from talking because that’s our freedom of speech. But they can go about it through the backdoor and do it in a way that they can influence those who have money, who have influence over the airwaves, so to speak.
We’ve got to find ways to counter that. The way to counter that is what you and I are doing right now; educating, pointing these things out to people, and saying, “That drug commercial for a drug that costs you $2400 a month is really not necessary.” It might be in some selected instances. Why is it on mainstream TV when it really serves a teensy-weensy population, if anyone at all? We need to talk about these kinds of things and expose this predatory system for what it is.
The other thing I think about as I talk to you, I have a tremendous amount of respect for physicians. They’ve obviously gone to school for a very long time, longer than I did. I went to school for eight years for my doctorate but you guys went to school probably for twelve to eighteen, depending on what the specialty is. My other question for you, and I wonder about this from a physician perspective is, are physicians ready to disrupt the system a little bit? As they’ve now gone from private practice to employees and they’ve gone from employees to now really in some level, drones of very, very large medical systems, would you say the average physician is ready to disrupt this a little bit?
I don’t think most would embrace this idea though that the point of control should be put in the consumer’s lap because they think that’s dangerous, which I disagree with. They see trying to gain more clinical power, they have a different idea of what that solution might look like. I’m not generalizing of course. There are functional medicine physicians. There are integrative health docs. There are naturopaths, chiropractors, who are on-board with these kinds of ideas. They see it as their job to heal, to help people get better, to be free from drugs and procedures. There are some practitioners who are like that, but 90 plus percent of conventional mainstream doctors still think that their word is the last word. They should lord over you, and that they just have to ride this political wave of big medicine, hospital systems, etc.
They’re going to look for different kinds of solutions, cost containment, bundling of services, those kinds of things. What you and I are saying is that’s all well and fine. But everyday people actually have astounding, breathtaking control of their own health, but your doctor probably won’t tell you about that. You won’t get it on the morning news nor the ads. You’re going to get it from you, me, and similar kinds of sources. We talk openly because someone isn’t paying us to say these things. We’re saying it because there’s a great wrong being done to the public. Let’s try to set it right.
Let’s shift to prescription medications just for a moment. On my podcast, I talk a lot about opioids and to a lesser extent NSAIDs, when it comes to treating chronic pain. If we’re talking to people with chronic pain, which we are on this podcast, as a physician, is it possible for someone with chronic pain to change their life and their lifestyles so that they could eliminate their medications?
Absolutely. You’re going to be a lot better informed than I am about a lot of chronic pain issues. But I can tell you what I see. I see it every day, not just once a in a while. I see it every day, many times a day. That is in the menu of things that I advise people to do. The Undoctored program is not some complicated massive thing you do. It’s really silly simple. I call it the wild, naked, and unwashed program. The things that seem to lead to alleviation of pain, wheat and grain elimination because they’re so incredibly inflammatory, Vitamin D restoration, and least important, Omega-3 fatty acid supplementation because it’s an anti-inflammatory for some inflammatory pathways, and then also cultivation of bowel flora because dysbiosis is inflammatory, disrupted bowel flora. Once again, you put those things together, you get this larger effect. They call it two plus two equals eleven. You get this larger effect than you ever thought was going to happen.
I’ve seen a lot of people say things like this, “I used to have wrist and arm pain, and it’s now gone. My rheumatoid arthritis that was disfiguring and caused pain and swelling in my hands and wrists is 80% better over a year and it’s getting better every day. I’m off two drugs.” I see lots of chronic pain, articular pain, joint pain, etc. get better. Not to say 100% of the pain goes away, but even though it’s only 50%, it’s free. You get healthy and slender and your rashes go away. There’s no reason to not try these things. I’d do that before I took OxyContin and Naproxen.
I want to thank Dr. William Davis for being on the Healing Pain Podcast. Can you tell us where we can find your book and find out more information about you?
The Undoctored book hits the bookstores on May 9th 2017. There will be a lot of social media and websites attached to it but they’re not up yet. They’ll be up around the same time. One of the things we’re going to do is collect data. We want the experience of thousands of people, how much weight did they lose, how many drugs they got rid of, did their pain go away, did their acid reflux go away. Because we want to show this to the US government, health insurers, hospitals, to my colleagues. We’ve got to prove not just anecdotally and not just by the study that looks at one little sliver of this, but we want to look at the population experience because we really want to effect change.
Your book is a wonderful idea. I wish it all the success. We’ll be supporting it here on the Healing Pain Podcast. I’m going to thank Dr. William Davis for being with us on the podcast. Make sure to share this podcast out with your friends and family on my blog at DrJoeTatta.com/podcast. Make sure to go on to iTunes and give it a five-star review.
About Dr. William Davis, MD
In his New York Times bestseller Wheat Belly, Dr. William Davis changed the lives of millions of people by teaching them to remove grains from their diets to reverse years of chronic health damage. In Undoctored, he goes beyond cutting grains to help you take charge of your own health. This groundbreaking exposé reveals how millions of people are given dietary recommendations crafted by big business, are prescribed unnecessary medications, and undergo unwarranted procedures to feed revenue-hungry healthcare systems.
With Undoctored, the code to health care has been cracked―Dr. Davis will help you create a comprehensive program to reduce, reverse, and cure hundreds of common health conditions and break your dependence on prescription drugs. By applying simple strategies while harnessing the collective wisdom of new online technologies, you can break free of a healthcare industry that puts profits over health.
Undoctored is the spark of a new movement in health that places the individual, not the doctor, at the center. His plan contains features like:
• A step-by-step guide to eliminating prescription medications • Tips on how to distinguish good medical advice from bad • 42 recipes to guide you through the revolutionary 6-week program
Undoctored gives you all the tools you need to manage your own health and sidestep the misguided motives of a profit-driven medical system.
Website: Wheat Belly Blog
The Healing Pain Podcast features expert interviews and serves as:
A community for both practitioners and seekers of health.
A free resource describing the least invasive, non-pharmacologic methods to heal pain.
A resource for safe alternatives to long-term opioid use and addiction.
A catalyst to broaden the conversation around pain emphasizing biopsychosocial treatments.
A platform to discuss pain treatment, research and advocacy.
If you would like to appear in an episode of The Healing Pain Podcast or know someone with an incredible story of overcoming pain contact Dr. Joe Tatta at [email protected]. Experts from the fields of medicine, physical therapy, chiropractic, nutrition, psychology, spirituality, personal development and more are welcome.
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