Dr Jeffrey Rediger: Our hearts go out to all the people who are so stressed around all of these different things and there's so many people, the stories of people helping each other, reaching out to each other, finding ways to both socially distance but also improve the depth of their connection and love with each other. Those are the things that are going on beneath the surface that hold things together for all of us individually and collectively and we just need to realise these things are going on and there are things that we can do.
Dr Rupy: I'm Dr Rupy and this is the Doctor's Kitchen podcast, the show about medicine, food, lifestyle and how to improve your health today. And my guest is the incredible Dr Jeffrey Rediger. He is an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, a medical director for the McLean Southeast Adult Psychiatric programs. He has a master of divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary and publishes in the fields of medicine, psychiatry and spirituality. He is absolutely incredible and I know you're going to absolutely love this chat that we have regarding his latest book, Cured. Now, I struggled with thinking about whether I wanted to do this podcast because I feel I already skirt on the convention versus unconventional side of medicine where I talk about food as medicine. But Dr Rediger's really done a deep dive and brought a degree of scientific rigour and an academic approach to what we regard in the medical community as outliers or spontaneous remissions as they're known in the literature, which don't really get much attention. And what Dr Jeffrey has done is really try to lift the hood on why these particular people have undergone something that is beyond the realms of what we believe is possible in medicine. And Cured is for its title is actually an incredible journey that Dr Jeffrey takes you on through what the anomalies are, why these deserve greater attention and how studying these what we regard as miracles or quirks of nature that we haven't just quite figured out yet, may actually be key to developing a new model of medicine that can actually try and treat the root cause and try and look after the body in terms of improving its innate ability to look after itself. And I know all of this sounds a bit woo and the use of the term healing and putting the body back into balance sounds a little bit off, but honestly, I think we need to rethink the way we use language and to appreciate this is perhaps the most appropriate way to look at ourselves. What started off as a journey towards finding the four pillars of what makes us healthy, immune health, nutrition, stress, identity, sort of dives into some extra realms that he can't really put together in terms of describing. How do you describe hope or belief or a reliance on divine forces? How do you explain people's cancers reversing? How do you explain idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, which is essentially an incurable condition, going away? And how do you state the correlation that these people actually took a huge amount of undertaking when it when it comes to their nutrition, their belief systems, their stress? How do you take that into account? Do we just disregard that or do we actually take a bit more attention, lift up the hood and actually explore what the scientific basis could be? This episode really does resonate a lot with myself as someone who has undergone what would be regarded as spontaneous remission, something that I initially was quite embarrassed to talk about, frankly, amongst the medical community for fear of being ridiculed. Dr Jeffrey has given a layer of legitimacy to my experiences and the thousands of patients across the world. One thing he likes to do actually whenever he gives lectures is and lectures to to crowds of physicians is is ask if anyone in the room has experienced having a patient that's undergone a spontaneous remission. More often than not from his experience, hands go up across the room. And as soon as he asks the next question, hands go down. Have any of you written up these experiences as anecdotes or case reports? The hands go down. And I think we need to change the way we look at spontaneous remissions and really see if biology is trying to tell us something. I don't want this episode to come across as giving snake oil salesmen a a layer of legitimacy because we are always going to have people who try and exploit people's beliefs, people's hopes, but there are some people out there who have actually done some pretty incredible things. As he likes to describe them, they are the athletes of health and they are the stars of spontaneous remission and we need to give that a lot more attention. So without further ado, that's my rant over. I can't wait to release this episode and really get some feedback from you guys because I think it's it's going to resonate with a lot of you. But this is my conversation with Dr Jeffrey Rediger on his book Cured. You can find out all the notes and some of the links to the studies that we talked about on the podcast show notes, thedoctorskitchen.com. You can also sign up to the newsletter where we give science-based recipes and lifestyle tips every single week. Plus, give this a five star if you found it useful. Honestly, it will really help spread the message and I think this will really be a turning point for the way we look at medicine and do pick up a copy of Cured. It's it's one of my all-time books, I think, and I mean that legitimately. It's it's a fantastic read and I think you will love the stories and the way Dr Jeffrey approaches medicine. Onto our conversation.
Dr Rupy: Great. So, I'm sorry to hear that your trip was cancelled.
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: Oh, I was too. I was so looking forward to it. I was bitterly disappointed. I love London and Great Britain and I wanted to meet everybody. So hopefully we can do this rescheduled later on.
Dr Rupy: I really hope so. Yeah, because so the just to give you a little bit of background, what we tend to do is we'll get you into the studio here. I would have asked what your dietarys are, if you have any requirements, and then I basically cook you a meal whilst we have the conversation.
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: Wow, really?
Dr Rupy: Yeah, so it's kind of like a chop and chat. We use some of that content on social media and then obviously we have a break and then we get to chat a bit more with anyone else of your team and it's a bit of like a family affair. We we we try and create a nice homely environment for everyone when they're on the pod, but.
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: That's a great thing to do. I really will hope I get to do that with you sometime. That sounds like a great thing for listeners and everybody who's trying to improve their health and well-being.
Dr Rupy: Definitely, definitely. So if I was to cook you something, what would you, what would you prefer? What would you like me to have cooked you?
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: I think a great salad. I'd love to find out what kind of great salads you make.
Dr Rupy: Nice. Nice, nice. Okay. I'll bear that in mind for next time.
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: Or a great smoothie is great too.
Dr Rupy: I mean it kind of resonates quite nicely with one of your, well a couple of your chapters where you do a bit of a dive into nutrition into how in a lot of cases that you've done a deep dive into in terms of spontaneous remission, diet had a large part to do with it.
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: Yes, it did. A massive part to do with it and it was a very different direction than what I learned in med school, so.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, exactly. I thought we could, we could start with talking about exactly what we mean by spontaneous remission and the miracles quote unquote that you describe as a quirk of nature that we haven't just quite figured out yet in the book.
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: Yeah, well, it's a it's a really big question. You know, in med school we're taught that spontaneous remission is a fluke with no medical or scientific value. And the truth is, I mean, there's nothing spontaneous about spontaneous remission. The word spontaneous in this context means without cause. And we know that everything has a cause and we just hadn't asked those questions. So what I've learned along the way is that words like spontaneous remission, miracle, spiritual healing, the or even placebo, these words are black boxes that we've never really unpacked. We use these words a lot, but we haven't really unpacked them to figure out what are the mechanisms going on with all these these terms that we use. So it's been a fascinating journey for me.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, and so you started studying a bunch of different case reports of spontaneous remission over 15 years now. I'd love to get into a bit about why and how you started and also a bit about you as well and your your background. You you were exceptionally personal in some of the stories that you told, particularly in the latter chapters as well. So I'd love to get into like how and why you got into this.
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: Yeah, so, well, I had a lot of personal questions. I was born into a very rural situation in Amish background. I grew up very conservatively. We didn't have ready access to things like TV or radio, store-bought clothes. There's a lot of great things about growing up on the farm. And we had a lot of actually healthy foods. There weren't a lot of processed foods. My parents grew the wheat that they then used a stone grinder for in order to create the flour for our breads and pancakes and muffins and I ate a lot of those. I love to eat. I love food. But it was also a very confining environment in a lot of ways and that wasn't very accepted to ask questions. And I was in public school during the day and living in a really different world than the world I was living in at home. And so that caused me to ask a lot of questions about science, about the larger ideas of the world we live in. And so the long and short of it is I went to college and then that really began to open my eyes and then I went to seminary at Princeton after that. And seminary, I went very deep into theology and philosophy of science and really tried to understand the deep structure that allows us to think about the relationship between the different parts of who we are, our bodies, our minds, and our spirits. And so once I became convinced that science is a fabulous gift to the world, I decided to go to med school. And I actually a funny little story with that is, I went home to Indiana for a weekend while I was at Princeton and I asked my best friend's mom said, what are you going to do with all that education you're getting? And I said, well, I'm going to become a college professor. And she said, you're going to get all that education and not do something to help people? So, so the world I was living in was really, I was living in two really different worlds. And so when I finally decided to go to med school, I think there was a collective sigh of relief because that was something people understood and valued and all that. And it turned out to be a great fit for me, but the secret part of me also knew that that would someday let me begin exploring the bigger questions again. And so I'm kind of a question asker by nature and so in 2002, an oncology nurse at Mass General Boston, Mass General Hospital in Boston came to me and said that she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and that told that she only had a matter of months to live. She began calling me from a healing center saying that she was seeing some amazing recoveries and asked if I would be willing to look into it. And I said, no. I didn't think anything real was probably going on. I was a new faculty member at Harvard. I was a new medical director at McLean Hospital and so I was skeptical but also that wasn't really something I wanted to look at very closely. But Nikki was persistent. She began having people call me from around the country and elsewhere saying that they had medical evidence for their recoveries and did I want to hear their stories? So I said no. But eventually I did start realising that some of these letters that were being mailed to me and some of the the lab tests and that sort of thing that were being sent to me, something appeared to be going on in at least some of the cases. And so the long story short is I began to look into it. And I had three strict criteria. Number one, the person had to have a genuinely incurable illness according to all that we currently understand. And that was kind of a precondition for me being willing to look at their story. Number two, they had to have medically indisputable evidence for accurate diagnosis and clear evidence for recovery. And then number three, they had to have no other good explanation for how they could have gotten better, such as an experimental medication that they had taken or anything else. So those were the criteria and those were the criteria around which I built the research and that now 17 years later is what resulted in the book Cured.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, I mean it's a it's a fascinating journey because I must admit, I was a little bit scared of talking about the subject because I think I already skirt on the realm of conventional and traditional or complementary medicine when I talk about food as medicine, when I talk about nutritional medicine. I try and take a rigorous evidence-based approach with everything and every piece of content I put out there. And I can imagine as like a relatively young doctor being told that there's a healer in Brazil who's having these incredible, you know, remissions of cancer as well that already alarm bells are like ringing, ringing, ringing. And and as I was reading this book, I was like, if I was in your position back in 2002 or 2003, I I would have just been so skeptical. And even today as well, I'd still read something and be super skeptical.
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: That's right. Yeah. And you know, science is about the pursuit of truth and I'm sorry to say that it took me a while to become open to it. So.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, totally, totally. And one of the things I think that I really brought away from one of the quotes in your book was a good scientist also tries to prove as well as disprove. And I think we have this like esteem in medicine that we try, it's very hard to shake off about spontaneous remissions being an anomaly and nothing to take attention to, whereas we don't want to miss, you know, the the accidents of biology as you describe in the book.
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: Right. Yes. And what I've learned is that these stories are out there everywhere. There's a lot of stories in our culture that are buried without a voice around this. I have yet to give a lecture whether it's to doctors or to lay people where somebody doesn't come up to me afterwards and say, you need to talk to this patient or you need to talk to my aunt or my cousin. There's a lot of stories out there and not all of them will have the kind of criteria that we just are talking about, but it doesn't mean that something real didn't happen there and it doesn't mean that we shouldn't be looking into these things much more. It is a very different way of thinking, but I think it is the way of the future. You know, I think as we start to move towards data where people have data on their smartphones that will allow them to really personalize their health care and well-being based upon information they have available to them, it's going to really change the way we think about science. It's going to really allow us to think about individual stories and cases and what works for each individual, which is different because every individual needs something tweaked for them. It's not just a blank prescription that works for everybody.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, and it sounds as if like when you went to see and take case reports from spontaneous remission patients, you took this really methodical, I mean, even the way you described about who you would even entertain seeing is like, okay, they need to have a condition where they weren't using experimental drugs, etc. And it's almost like the book takes you on a journey where you try and formulate a nice clear path by which giving explanations as to why they might have had these remissions. But then you quickly realise that actually there's a lot more that normal scientific research and methodology cannot explain.
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: Yes. That's absolutely true. And so we need these complementary approaches. We can't just let the tail wag the dog. We need to really look at situations and try to capture them in their wholeness and in all of their complexity to really understand the deeper factors.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, totally. And you know, one of the things I I love about the whole book is that, you know, it's a it's a collection of different stories, but they're very different as well as similar in in many ways. You know, you've got the renal cell carcinoma spontaneous remission, you have pancreatic cancer, you have autoimmune conditions, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Um, how and you've probably like had a whole bunch of these stories. How did you focus on those particular episodes and those particular patients versus the hundreds of others that you've probably come across?
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: Yeah, so I've studied so many people now at this point. And so for the book, I tried to tell the stories of people that I felt had stories that would resonate with people and that were also representative of so many other stories that I've read. And I wanted to choose stories that were different on the surface, but underneath there show the commonalities among all these different diseases, among all these different kinds of approaches to nutrition and all the different ways in which people tweak the path for well-being for them. Underneath, there's a lot of common factors even though it doesn't look that way just at a more superficial level.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. And you talk a bit about stress, inflammation and how that's related to a whole host of different lifestyle related diseases and something you describe is the healing mode. What what could you dive a bit deeper into what you mean by the healing mode?
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: Yeah, so it's a really big topic because I think a lot of us live in chronic fight, flight or freeze and that is a very distinct physiology. It's a very important part of our lives when there's an acute threat. If it's a tiger that's on the savannah in front of you or if there's a person who wants to rob you or rape you and that sort of thing, it's really important to have that physiology where your body galvanizes for action or to fight or to freeze in place. But that's meant to be an exception and not the rule for how we live our lives. And too many of us live that way chronically with this physiology of norepinephrine, cortisol, adrenaline, these stress hormones that flood our bodies and flood the cells of our immune system. And we know from the research that when that is a chronic state of being, that that numbs our immune system, that causes the immune system, all these brilliant cells and cell subtypes that want to do their job crisply and efficiently, it numbs them and causes them to behave sluggishly and inefficiently. And so when a person can shift out of that into a parasympathetic state, when we can activate the vagus nerve within us, which is the super highway of the parasympathetic response in our bodies and not only relax, but also really connect with each other, make eye contact and really, you know, it's the vagus nerve that causes us to make contact with a person and and bends our smile, bends our lips into a smile. It does all these things to help us connect. That's a a strategy of cooperation rather than survival. And you know, I was taught that Darwin was all about survival of the fittest, but in his book that he wrote after Origin of Species, he wrote, he mentioned survival of the fittest, I think twice if I remember right, and mentioned love something like 98 times approximately. And so he talked about this more evolved capacity within us for cooperation rather than just survival. And I think that's what the parasympathetic response is all about. And what we know is that when we make genuine connection with others and when we learn how to relax, what that does is it gives us a very different physiology and it activates our immune system. It it fires up all these brilliant cells and cell subtypes and that sets the stage for healing in a way that isn't possible if we are flooding our body with stress hormones.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. And I think a lot of people listening to this will be like, this is quite novel for a Harvard based professor and and psychiatrist talking about the utility of vagus exercises and flexing your vagus nerve essentially to try and activate mechanisms that can improve a whole bunch of a whole host of different disease states, very, very varied. And I'm just thinking of the the listener now, like, how on earth can can we create these micro connections? And are they really as substantial as we think they are?
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: Yeah, I think Barbara Fredrickson, for those who want to go into this more deeply, Barbara Fredrickson is doing some brilliant research at UNC Chapel Hill and in North Carolina. And she writes a lot about what it takes to activate the vagus nerve and the power of that physiologically and how it does give us a different physiology. It it it secretes a whole different set of neurohormones, the oxytocin, which is the bonding molecule for all of us that helps us bond with each other. The classic example of that is oxytocin was discovered in the context of mothers bonding with their babies and and that is a hormone that's for all of us. It's kind of the love molecule. Also dopamine, which is the pleasure pathway and serotonin, which has to do with decreasing our anxiety and our depression and activating feelings of well-being. That's that's a very different physiology and the body and the immune system just like that physiology better and we heal better with that.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. I mean, I I did a gratitude exercise for 700 days straight where I would share on social media and I I still do it now and I've done it for a number of years, but where I share three things that I'm grateful for every single day. And it can be something as simple as, you know, when I went to the shops, the the cashier smiled at me, or when I was on the bus, you know, someone said bye to the bus driver and I thought that was a really kind thing to do. Very simple things that we would otherwise glance over and just never really pay attention to. And the perspective I gave people who who watched it and and started their own gratitude journals is that, you know, it just puts a positive aspect on the end of your day. But for me, it fundamentally changes the interactions that I have every single moment. And I and I love the analogy you put in the book about how all these small little stars of of hope and positivity actually coales into a galaxy essentially of of of positive energy that can have, you know, healing effects, for want of a better word.
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: Yes. Yeah, I think it is a big deal. It's it's great for all of us as human beings. And you know, it doesn't have to be just with those in our closest family or closest group of friends. It can be someone we pass on the street or a bank teller, like you mentioned, somebody that you just see for a matter of seconds, but if we let that be a genuine connection, something that's authentic and real, it lights up our physiology in ways that are great for our experience, but great for our bodies as well.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, totally. And what one of the things I think I struggle with and and you talk a bit about this in the latter chapters of the book is how do we study these incredible experiences and these incredible stories of people who have, you know, created miracles themselves. In the same way, you know, you talk about Sir Alexander Fleming and the discovery of the fungi that led to the development of penicillin being an accident of biology, a petri dish that he was going to throw away. These are essentially accidents, quote unquote, of biology that we need to study in a lot more detail. But how do we do that in a scientific, rigorous way that actually leads us to make sensible suggestions to to other people?
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: Yes. Yeah, you know, it's it's I like the way you've connected it with the accident of biology that discovered penicillin because this is the same thing. These appear to be accidents to us, but it's not because there are common factors across all of these different diseases and stories that really do show that there are underlying factors and patterns and we do need to study this. And that's what science is brilliant at. Science takes something that is inexplicable and figures out the mechanism, whether it's a bird that flies and so now we understand the Bernoulli principle and now we know how to make airplanes fly. You know, and so the same the same thing is true with spontaneous remission to begin recognizing that there's nothing spontaneous about spontaneous remission. There are factors associated with how these people got better and we need more research to go into this unmapped wilderness and really unpack this and show that we all have capacities to take charge of our health, to take charge of our well-being and begin listening to the message of the illness rather than just taking a medication for it. Medications can be life-saving and helpful at times, but they just aren't always the whole story.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. And one of the things I think I'm always cautious of whenever I, because I I still work in accident and emergency and general practice. I'm trying to balance false hope versus the constrainment of possibility that patients have. How do you, do you have any suggestions for, because a lot of doctors probably listen to this and very interested in this subject. How do you frame this in an approachable way and one that isn't going to be, you know, too sensationalist to the public?
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: Yeah, that's great question. So what I typically do is, because I think as doctors, we're trained to not give false hope and that's really important. I think it's also important though to understand that people need grounded, ethical hope that's rooted in real medical evidence. If I was ill, I would want to know what the average person does and our current scientific studies all group everything around the mean, around what the average person does. But the truth is, there's a lot of us that are not average and we fall all over the distribution. And so it's just important to realise that there are things that we can do to shift where we are in that distribution. I think it's important to not give false hope. I think it's also important to, I think it's important to also give grounded, ethical hope that's rooted in real medical evidence. If I was ill, I'd want to know what the average person does, but the truth is, I'd also want to know what the ultimate achievers in health do. I think whatever we do and whatever the person decides to do, we need to support what works for them. We need to help them understand that whatever path they choose needs to feel like an opportunity to them and not a burden because the last thing that a ill person needs is to feel like there's something they should do or something that they have to do for someone else because I know that doesn't work. It has to be something that is real and authentic. I can't tell you how many people I've talked to who when they get a life-threatening diagnosis, they will actually, they'll be devastated at one level, but at another level, they'll feel relieved because they'll say, oh, I don't have to go to med school because my parents want me to, or I don't have to keep taking care of everyone else and not have any time to focus on what matters to me and my well-being. And so it's and that shift when people finally realise, oh, okay, if I've only got a year left, I now have this diagnosis, I have an excuse for focusing on what gives life and well-being for me, that becomes the doorway into the possibility of a different life. And I think it's so whatever a person decides to do, it needs to feel like an opportunity to them and not a burden. And they have to do it for themselves, not to please someone else.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, and I think framing it in a way that doesn't assign blame to a patient that is undergoing something like cancer or even diabetes. You know, we we are the product of our experiences as well as our actions as well. And sometimes they are completely out of our control, our locus of control, particularly during childhood. I'm sure this is something that comes up quite a bit in your psychiatry.
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: Absolutely true. Yeah. Yep, it's absolutely true. People need to feel like they need to feel cared for, they need to feel seen, they need to feel not judged and whatever choices they need to make need to be their choices and decisions for themselves and it needs to feel like an opportunity and not a burden. Whatever path they take needs to be a liberation, not another not another set of chains.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. One of the, I mean, all of the cases that you describe are like, you know, spontaneous remission, you can't explain. The one case that really sticks out to me is the one of Stephen Dumfey, I think it was, who has the multiple myeloma and then has an MRI and within a week it's gone. Could you talk a little bit about that and and I mean that was quite frankly remarkable and I can't really get my head around it.
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: Yeah, I don't have my head around it either and I've really tried. I I really have tried. And so I think that case, I only had a limited amount of time in the book to go into it and I only had a limited amount of understanding for it. Right, right. Yeah. So, but you know, I think his multiple myeloma didn't go away, but the tumor went away and they cancelled the surgery. And so, but still years later, you know, his doctors, he tells me that he's doing well, his doctors don't understand how he's doing so well. He's far outlived what is normally his prognosis. And so even though he still has it in his bloodstream, he's living a high quality of life and doing well. So I think it just shows the mystery of all of this. That chapter actually, I believe is going to be kind of the intro for my next book as I try to go into this stuff more deeply and hopefully my understanding will be improved at the time because that case just captured a lot for me around the interface between technology and imagination and an altered state of consciousness and then a remarkable healing.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, I mean it brings me back to the the quote from Richard Feynman that you use, like if you if you think you understand quantum physics, then you don't.
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: Yeah, right. Exactly. I've spoken to some physicists. Yeah, yeah. I've got a few physicist friends who try and explain to me what the observer effect is and how that impacts physics. And I I still find it very, very hard to to contemplate, but that chapter regarding the MRI and how there is like a a hallucination or a dreamlike state or whatever you want to call it, and then the the MM miraculously goes away. It was very inspiring, absolutely inspiring because there is the evidence base behind that actually occurring as well.
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: Right, exactly. I think the whole quantum physics is a really massive topic. And my friends who are physicists, one of them said to me that, yeah, we don't understand quantum physics either. The implications are just so massive around the observer effect and that our minds play a role in the reality we experience. And it's so massive that they're just told in graduate school, well just apply the math. And so we don't understand this and neither do the many of the physicists, but applying the math is slowly changing our world and it's introducing a digital world to us and preparing us for a different level of understanding, I think. It might take us a while to get there.
Dr Rupy: I'm sure, yeah. And this this is a great segue into the line and the distinction between the physiological mechanisms behind hope and belief and how that differs if any with that of placebo. And you talk about both those in the book and I was just wondering, I'm trying to get my head around, is it both? Are they intertwined? Are they similar or are they distinct entities in terms of how they might relate to remission?
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: I I think I don't know the best, truest answer to that, but I think that they are probably like a Venn diagram with a lot of overlap because I think that placebo certainly has a lot to do with belief, but it's more than that because even people who know they're getting a placebo still can get better even though it's just a sugar pill. I mean. So, and you can tell them it's a placebo. So, so there's something about the, maybe it's the subconscious thing of having someone in a white lab coat give you a medicine and you've been accumulating for your whole lifetime a set of beliefs around that being helpful and healing. Maybe it's those subconscious beliefs that do it. I don't really know, but I think that belief is part of what the placebo is, but I'm not sure that it's everything because it's certainly not just our conscious beliefs.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. And it's it seems like there are like, um, some of the most pivotal things that we need to know about are unmeasurable, like belief or prayer or hope. Um, how do we navigate that or do you have any ideas about how we navigate that in a scientific research perspective?
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: Yeah, I think what's exciting is that science is improving in the last 20 years in its capacity to walk into these highly qualitative domains that are so important for our life. I mean, our how we feel about ourselves at a deep level and how we feel about whether the universe is friendly towards us. Those are highly qualitative, immeasurable states in a lot of ways. Science is getting better about knowing how to look at that, but it's it's taking a long time to do that because science is designed to only look at the things that we can see and touch. And so to do this in a way that's valid is very tricky. And I think many of the studies have been done in past decades have been much less valid and reliable because they tried to do that, but they weren't able to walk into it as well as the scientists now are who are getting a better understanding of how to do it. But we have to do it cautiously because these things are really important, these immeasurable qualitative states of love and hope and faith. But to unpack them in a way that is grounded and real, we just have to walk slowly into this.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, because it seems to me, and this is from my anecdotal experience as a general practitioner, as someone on the front line, um, kindness, compassion, stress, all of these things certainly have physiological manifestations. I can't tell you the number of young patients who come to A&E crippled with chest pain, believing that they have a heart attack. And we do all the, you know, necessary tests, ECGs, bloods and everything. But they are so sure that they are having something incorrect with their heart. And you know, I'm sure there are listeners here that who've experienced something that like that as well. And you know, I I I shudder at the thought of like, you know, just brushing it off as as anxiety or like you're stressed, but not really getting to the root cause of why people are so ill in the first place.
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: That's right. Yep, it's absolutely true. Yep, I think the connection between our minds and our bodies is very profound. And we have lived in a culture that separated those across a wide chasm for a long time. It's great that that chasm is now being filled in.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, and you talk about the history of that actually with Descartes and how it was almost rebelling against the current times that he almost had to create dualism so you could get access to the bodies so you could actually study what was physically wrong, right?
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: Yeah, I mean the church said that the mind and the body are one unit and so, but the belief that went along with that was that you couldn't do autopsies and you couldn't explore the body because for example, if you did an autopsy on a body after a person died, you were cutting up the soul and that meant the person couldn't go to heaven. And so that was brilliant what Descartes did to separate the mind and the body and say that they are separate domains and that allowed doctors to be free to treat the body and experiment with the body and to do autopsies and really begin to get to know the body on its own terms. But I think the way history goes is we go through these things and then we bring things back together in a new kind of unity and a truer unity and then, but we we are at a time now where we need to realize their connection and maybe down the road again we'll need to separate them in another way to then understand a new, truer level. So we'll just have to keep doing this over time, I think.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, absolutely. And do you think, on a broader sense with the placebo, which is seen as a bit of a distraction and a nuisance in, in, in scientific studies and and nutrition studies as well. Um, do you think it's getting stronger in terms of our our willingness to believe in a product that doesn't have any inert or it's completely inert, it doesn't have any substances to it?
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: Yeah, I mean, boy, it's a fascinating topic to read the research around the growing placebo response in some parts of the world and to try to understand what that means. I don't really know what that means. I think what we do know though is that we all, I think the belief is important and a big deal. We all grow up collecting these beliefs from our parents, from kids on the playground, from the interpretations we make of our experiences and the traumas we go through and from colleagues at work. Some of these beliefs that we take in and some of these perceptions and interpretations that we take in, some of them are true and some of them are false. Some are empowering and some are disempowering, but for the most part, they're unexamined. And so for us to begin unpacking what our real beliefs are, both consciously and subconsciously and begin, begin strengthening beliefs that are true about our our worth and our value and to treat ourselves with compassion rather than judgment and condemnation. All of these things are part of the black box black box that I think is associated with the placebo.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. And there's and there's a whole load of cultural elements to that as well. I know, you know, asking any, I I come from an Indian background and asking any Asian parent what they should be doing if they feel ill, you go straight to the doctor, they'll give you a medication and even if the medication has nothing to do with the resolution of their symptoms, they will believe so strongly in this little pill that everything will vanish within 24 hours. So.
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: The placebo is a very real part of it. And right, you're right. We right now we it's a part of every scientific study pretty much and we ignore it.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, exactly. Um, you talk, I I want to talk particularly in times right now where I mean, we are, um, we are built and evolutionarily adapted to have a negativity bias. And I think right now when we're being bombarded with negative news press with with, you know, good reason right now with what's going on. Um, how do we cultivate a default mode network, a default of where we're actually positive about things and daily life where there is so much negativity on in normal days, let alone with what's going on right now with the virus.
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: Yeah, I think that we have to realize that this negativity bias is built into our biology as a way of protecting us. It's important to see a threat looming on the horizon, hopefully before the threat sees you. You know, and that's important and that's adaptive. Um, but that's not only a part of our individual physiology, it's also part of our culture. It's well known that the way a media corporation will work is if it bleeds, it leads because that's where the eyeballs go. I mean, if we're driving down the road, we are not going to be paying attention to the sunset if there's an accident beside of the road and we'll pay much more attention to the accident than the sunset because that's where we're wired to do and that's an important adaptive mechanism. But to live that way is a problem. And so we just need to realize that 10 times more bad news than good news is reported in the media because of the way we're wired collectively and individually, but that doesn't mean that's what's really going on in the world. There's wonderful things going on in the world. The way that communities are knitting together around the coronavirus thing, the way people are reaching out to help those waiters and waitresses and all those others who are really anxious and wondering what's going to happen with their paycheck, the way single mothers are now at home and having to work from home and have their children home from school. I my heart, our hearts go out to all the people who are so stressed around all of these different things and there's so many people, the stories of people helping each other, reaching out to each other, finding ways to both socially distance but also improve the depth of their connection and love with each other. Those are the things that are going on beneath the surface that hold things together for all of us individually and collectively and we just need to realize these things are going on and there are things that we can do.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I I'm really lucky to have been able to cultivate a perspective where I can actually see a lot of the good rather than the negativity right now. Like, you know, what I'm looking at on social media are like different supermarkets allowing elderly, vulnerable people to come for an hour before everyone else so they can actually get their stores, a whole bunch of other volunteer campaigns as well to help out the the industry, the hospitality industry. Um, I'm intrigued, how do you cultivate that sense of kindness and and gratitude and positive energy yourself after having studied this for over 15 years?
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: I think what's important is that we can make choices about what we focus on. And so I think when I have listened to these stories for so many years and realized how important it was for them to to to live and make changes not from a place of fear, but from a place of compassion and well-being and a desire to understand their own value and well-being and be committed to that. That's a a specific focus. You know, I think that we can all decide what to focus on here. We can focus on the things that are fearful, but we can also make sure that we spend time every day focusing on the things that are life-giving, that give us a connection with each other, that allow us to feel love with each other. Those because this is not just an immunologic crisis. This is not just an infectious disease crisis. This is also a anxiety crisis. And the only thing we have to fear in some ways is fear itself. And I think that fear is such a big part of what's causing the stock market to crash and all these other things. And that's where a lot of the real risk and devastation is coming from. And so the more we can mitigate that fear by focusing on the things that are positive and the things that we can do and the things that are genuinely life-giving for us and others is in a really important way out of this.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. I I I really do thank you for writing the book because, um, it resonated with me particularly, um, as I've had my own experience of what you would call spontaneous remission or, um, you know, a miracle or whatever reversing. And it's almost like, uh, having you talk about it and actually compile the cases has given a layer of legitimacy to be able to talk about it openly. I've since talked about it openly. I mean, I I used to suffer from paroxysms of atrial fibrillation. Really? Yeah, as a as a newly qualified doctor, 24 year old, I would have episodes two to three times a week, up to 200 beats per minute, going on for 12 to 36 hours. I was on flecainide, bisoprolol, a whole bunch of other drugs. I never had to have electrocardioversion, but I saw multiple different cardiologists, electrophysiologists. I had all the the studies and I was going to have an ablation. And you know, as a conventionally trained doctor, and my listeners have probably heard this already a number of times, but as a conventionally trained doctor, I was 100% going to have the ablation. It's back to load myself up on warfarin, we were using warfarin at the time, it's about 10 years ago now. And um, I I I've spoken to a whole bunch of my colleagues, like 100%, you're a good candidate, no pre-existing medical issues, no weight problems, bloods are completely normal. And my mom, who is not medical at all, was like, you really need to look at your lifestyle and what you're eating before you have this. And I was three months into being a junior doctor, so sleep was all over the place, diet was everywhere, you know, just a normal sort of medical residency as you guys would call it. Um, and really to appease my mom and to actually show her, like, you know, I will do all these things and I will still have my ablation in six months. And I told my cardiologist, look, I'm going to do this for six months, I'll stay take on the the the medications, but I'm going to try and prove my mom wrong. Um, and after about 12 months, they they went and I'm thankful to say they haven't come back. Um, and there was a lot, I mean,
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: So what do you think helped? How did you change your lifestyle?
Dr Rupy: Me trying to retrospectively figure out what on earth was going on led me to start the Doctor's Kitchen and start having more open and honest conversations with patients. So in reality, I I took like a method methodical approach to you, like what was my diet doing? I was increasing nutrient density, lots more dark green leafy vegetables, less meat, less starchy and refined carbohydrates, much less sugar. I wasn't a caffeine drinker, but I reduced alcohol. I wasn't a big drinker. Um, I definitely started reducing stress, so I started meditating again, which is something that I used to do as a teenager before my GCSEs and and for during medical school, my parents told me to meditate. When I wasn't doing night shifts, I was in bed on time, so I was looking after sleep hygiene. But you know, one of the biggest things I think, aside from stress, aside from, you know, trying to optimize every aspect of my my my well-being, was I never gave up being a doctor. And I I never lost that sense of purpose and identity of being a doctor. There was no way a condition was going to stop me from fulfilling my dreams of of being a practicing doctor.
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: Yeah, that gave me chills because that's such a big deal, isn't it? Because that decision, when a person says what you've said there, or a mother says, I'm not going to die until I watch my daughter walk down the aisle, or a father says, I'm not going to die until I see my son graduate from high school. Those kinds of things are massive and they spring from a deep, invisible place within us and we can't make that happen for someone else. It has to be something that comes from within the deepest self of a person, but it's a massive role that it plays. That's a beautiful story you have.
Dr Rupy: Oh, thanks. I mean, it's it's it's a story that gives me a lot more, um, hope and pushes me to do a lot more research in terms of the nutrition side. It's also given me a lot more perspective on the lifestyle. Um, but you know more than not, you know, and and and you having been a patient yourself, you know, the experience of being a vulnerable individual, being wheeled down corridors, being put in gowns and then having to have all the tests and everything, gave me the perspective of what it's like to be a patient. And that has never left me at all. And I I love the bit at the end of your your book where you talk about the new age doctor, how they're using AI to help with diagnostics and and monitoring and you know, wearable apps and stuff. But the doctor is there to maintain the the human connection. Um, and I feel like my experience has given me a lot of that.
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: Yeah, I think the best doctors and healthcare providers are those who know both sides of that, who have been patients themselves. I think it gives us an understanding of our because these white coats that we wear, being a doctor, these are just masks. Being a patient is just a mask. Underneath these different masks, we're just people. And we all have stories, we all have a need and a dignity that needs to be seen. And so that's where healing begins, I think.
Dr Rupy: And it's it's great to be able to talk about this a lot more openly because I think I would have shied away from using the vernacular that we're using today about healing, about connection, about love, about, you know, the innate, uh, you know, want the instinctive nature that we have to to to thrive in communities. Um, but now like, you know, I'm a lot more open to to talking about it. And I think it's in part from reading your book and and looking at the studies that you've quoted in it as well. Um, I yeah, I just I can't thank you enough, honestly, Jeffrey, it's it's brilliant.
Dr Jeffrey Rediger: I love talking to you. You have a great perspective. Your work is so important. I appreciate your story and your journey and how that is resulting in this great work you're doing. I know it's got to be so helpful for people.
Dr Rupy: Wow, what a fantastic conversation with Dr Jeffrey. Just to summarize, I would say we talked a bit about the placebo effect and our negativity bias, how to change our perspective. In the book, he talks about the default mode network, which is our default strategy to think about things in the wider world. We immediately think of what what the bad things can happen. And that's an evolutionary strategy that's allowed us to survive in times where there are genuine threats. But in modern times, a genuine threat is the constant text that you get to your phone or the news that you hear on the radio on your way to work or the signs, you know, reminding you of the dangers of pickpockets, for example, on your commute. You know, there are a whole bunch of different things and cues that we don't consciously pick up on, but subconsciously they definitely have an effect. Um, we talked about the the line between the physiological mechanisms between hope and placebo. Um, and we also talked a bit about the immune system and inflammation that he talks a bit more in the book as well. The four pillars of of healing or the patterns of healing to get you in healing mode, um, are yes, nutrition, yes, stress reduction, um, and yes, exercise and movement and sleep hygiene are very, very important. But also the notion of identity and self sense of purpose. Um, what the Japanese would describe as ikigai. These are very important concepts that are hard to test in a scientific environment, one that is predicated on using one pill versus another. We have to actually create another paradigm to test these things or actually garner more of an appreciation amongst the scientific community that there are things outside the realm of what we're able to test and actually garnering an appreciation for that is something I hope to do with this podcast and everything else that I put out for as well. I really hope you enjoyed this episode. Please give it a five-star review if you enjoyed it. Share it with your friends and do sign up to the Doctor's Kitchen newsletter where we give science-based recipes every single week. And make sure you pick up a copy of Cured. Again, the link will be on the show notes too. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode and I will catch you next week.
