71. Healing Bones & Preventing Joint Replacement with Quantum & Circadian Biology | Eric Novack, MD

Eric Novack, MD is an experienced trauma and general Orthopaedic surgeon in Phoenix, Arizona, USA having performed more than 15000 surgeries. He is pioneering decentralised, preventative orthopedics that addresses the root causes of joint degeneration & soft tissue injury.. 

In this episode we discuss circadian/quantum health approaches to healing and preventing joint & bone conditions, the perverse incentive system in centralised medicine, Robert O. Becker, non-native EMFs, fluoroquinolone antibiotics, the carnivore diet and more. 

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#orthopedics #circadian #circadianrhythm #circadianhealth #quantumbiology

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:06

okay, welcome back to the regenerative health podcast. I am interviewing dr eric novak, md, and eric is a general orthopedic and trauma surgeon in arizona in the united states of america. So, eric, thank you for joining me, thanks for having me on. Appreciate it. So you've been delving into the realm of circadian and quantum biology and really adding this kind of decentralized perspective to what is obviously a career in conventional medicine, conventional surgery, conventional hospital system. So very excited to delve into a bunch of these topics, but maybe give us a background on your credentials and your experience, because I think that's going to be instrumental in taking us to the further places with these decentralized concepts.

Speaker 2: 1:02

Sure, well, given that I kind of work in the conventional centralized system, this is maybe a peak and kind of behind the iron curtain from the decentralized world here. As you mentioned, I'm an orthopedic surgeon. I've been in practice since 2001. I do general and trauma practice. So for the last six years I have been doing a fair amount of level one trauma, which in the US is sort of the highest level of trauma, in addition to a general orthopedics with your usual shoulder and knee stuff, and generally treat people from two to 102 and beyond. And so over my 20 some odd years it's always hard to figure out exact numbers, but you know, probably there's probably about 110 to 120,000 patient visits over that timeline and somewhere probably between 12 and 15,000 surgeries that I've been a part of. And so the weird part, of course, is waking up one day and realizing suddenly you're the oldest person in the room. And I've always said for a long time there are sort of the two first laws of the two laws of surgery that I try to focus on, and number one is that the first law is always humility, because we can never guarantee the outcome and it's important to wake up in the morning realizing that we're never perfect and there's always more to learn. And the second thing and this I tell my patients literally every single day which is absolutely positively the best operation is always the one you've never had, because they tend to beget other problems, get other problems. And while I certainly take issue with some of the people on social media who are continuously bashing physicians because there's a lot of good things that we do in traditional medicine, particularly in the realm of trauma we do a really, really good job of taking care of acutely injured people and, as I always say, a lot of that is on the backs of our servicemen and women who have sacrificed so much, not just in the US but in Australia and around the world, because, unfortunately, their injuries have really propelled medicine greatly. I think it was Hippocrates who actually said you know, if you want to learn medicine, follow an army. I think it was Hippocrates who actually said you know, if you want to learn medicine, follow an army. So I always have a great debt of gratitude there as well.

Speaker 2: 3:31

But specifically to this, the reality is and you don't have to be a doctor to know that, in spite of spending in the US about four point five trillion dollars on health care and being pummeled with health information from every direction. People are getting sicker, fatter, less mobile. The more we intervene, the worse people seem to be doing. And we have people who are healthy and we have people. We have a huge population of people who are very unhealthy and that sort of middle is disappearing.

Speaker 2: 4:01

And so I just found myself now, 20 some years, in saying, well, what are we doing wrong? And then, to be honest, being particularly unimpressed with some of my colleagues when you pose the question, just the degree of the lack of intellectual curiosity, and some of that is the nature of the way medicine is today. The incentives are so misaligned that the idea is to operate on everybody. You can just to keep the thing going or do other interventions. So it was maybe a little bit of an existential midlife medical crisis to say we've got to look for something else and we maybe need to look for something more foundational. And I was trying to think back before we did this of where it all began and I can't remember exactly where it started. But once you start going down the you know, down the rabbit hole of circadian biology and understanding that physics has to underlie biology, you really can't go backwards and unsee what you've seen you really can't go backwards and unsee what you've seen.

Speaker 1: 5:14

Yeah, it's so fundamental, isn't it, to what we're doing as doctors and physicians. And we were talking about this off air. But it seems like there's an elephant in the room and that is that this chronic disease epidemic, the fact, as you so eloquently put, that people are getting sicker and sicker despite more and more intervention, yet the predominant narrative or clinical approaches seem to be kind of ignorant or not really realizing that we're not really making any meaningful headway in so many ways. And the point that you made about humility I really love that because it was actually a surgeon in one of my medical school years who drilled that concept into my head.

Speaker 1: 5:53

He would ask questions to the medical students and he hated if we guessed. And the reason was is because if you don't know but you pretend like you know, then that is how you essentially overestimate your knowledge and that leads to patient harm. So he was always. It was a very practical and somewhat trial by fire inculcation into the idea that you really have to know the limits of your knowledge. But as it applies to orthopedics, I mean, you guys are in many ways at the forefront of an obesity and chronic disease epidemic, in the form of hip replacements, knee replacements particularly. So what's your perspective on orthopedics in general and how maybe your colleagues are approaching this problem of chronic disease um?

Speaker 2: 6:45

yeah, maybe maybe your colleagues are approaching this problem of chronic disease. Great question I, we all know, everybody's seen the graph of, you know, time and diabetes and time and obesity and time and autism and neurodegenerative disease. And if you ask anybody inside medicine or out and say, do we think this is a good thing? Essentially universally the answer is no. But the same numbers apply. The same graph is there for, let's say, joint replacements in the last 15 years in the US. And again, like everything, it's hard to get perfect numbers in the US and but the number of drone placements in the United States has essentially doubled in the last 15 years from about 350,000 to almost 700,000. And there is no sense that that line is flattening out. And don't look to medicine for that. Look to industry and how they're planning for the J&Js of the world and Smith and Nephew and Strikers. They're all planning for this increased thing. So if you ask orthopedic surgeons, is that graph a good graph? Amazingly, and to me somewhat disturbingly, people think that's actually a wonderful thing that the total number of Jordan placements is going up.

Speaker 2: 8:08

It's kind of a source of angst for me because that's not a sign that we're doing something well. We're good technically and we continue to improve technically. But that's a problem and we're seeing people with arthritic changes at younger and younger ages. Because the surgery is safer and we get people moving faster, people are more apt to do it. But the reality is that excellent outcomes, even for joint replacements, are still only somewhere, let's say, in the mid to upper 80%. So you know, the back of the napkin is, if you've got 700,000 and even 90% do great, that still leaves 10%. That don't. That's still 70,000 people per year. Those aren't great numbers, if I was the one rolling the dice. So it's a huge issue and the incentives, unfortunately, in the system are all more towards pushing to do more and more and more so and to get more and more specialized.

Speaker 2: 9:16

You know, I know that other people talk about it, but the nature of complexity of surgery and the nature of complexity it's hard to know everything. Nature of complexity of surgery and the nature of complexity it's hard to know everything. And so in the world we live in, the idea is to become a master, expert in this little, teeny, tiny thing. Unfortunately, humans aren't little, teeny tiny things. We're this constellation of a whole being, from the physical to the spiritual, to our other relationships. There's all these things that come into play and ultimately, you know, if we all function as a very, very specific kind of hammer, we can find the nail that we're going to hit every time, and I'm not convinced we're actually making people better. That's really the 10,000-foot view of it.

Speaker 2: 10:00

I think the practical issue is we live in a society of instant gratification. People see it on their own social media, People see it on television. It's just the nature of the world that people live in, and so when you see patients and you make suggestions regarding lifestyle changes, it's amazing the amount of blank stares and pushback you get. I know we can talk about more things going on, but I'll tell people just try X for two weeks. You've been hurting for six months. I know it's hard just to make this change for two weeks and see what happens, and I usually get this look of well, can you give me an injection or is there something else we can do? And it's disappointing, but my hope is that maybe conversations like this, and obviously the amazing work that you and other people are doing to spread the word, can get us to a critical mass where we can get more people to consider the changes.

Speaker 1: 10:58

Yeah, and it's almost becoming normal that someone when they hit, when they start maybe, age of 50, 55, they begin the journey of one first knee replacement and then second knee replacement and then a hip and then the other hip. So by the time they've got to 80, they've had bilateral knee replacements and bilateral total hip replacements. And really obviously, the reason why this is happening is because we're getting accelerated degradation of the articular surfaces in these joints. They are essentially wearing out before the rest of the body. I think about the animals in the wild and other animals. Sure, I believe they would have osteoarthritis in their advanced ages. But it seems to me disproportionate destruction or aging of that part of our body, of these articular surfaces, relative to other, maybe other parts. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.

Speaker 2: 11:59

Yeah, I agree 1000%. And so then the question is, why or what are we missing? Which I think probably gets to sort of the heart of some things we wanted to touch on today. And what do we know? Well, your audience obviously is familiar with the fact that we spend 90 plus percent of our time inside noon night, middle of the night and early morning, so we're removing less.

Speaker 2: 12:31

Our diets are terrible, we're being bathed in all these non-native EMFs by wearing our headphones all day long. We're keeping our phones in our pockets, you know. So there are all of these things that are actually on the electromagnetic spectrum, that were violating what nature has developed us to tolerate. And on the other side of it, of course, is diet related. So I'm in my 50s. Trust me, it wasn't like I didn't have candy all the time growing up, but we were outside and moving more.

Speaker 2: 13:04

But when we start combining all these things together and not the least of which probably relates to things that are on our foods, like glyphosate and these other things that are ending up that we know have a direct impact on both mitochondrial and cellular function, and, as Stephanie Seneff talks about, that, glyphosate is a mimic for glycine and glycine is a fundamental component of collagen and it can mimic and get in there and probably disrupts the strength.

Speaker 2: 13:39

So really our joints are being assaulted on every single front and when we do that, joints are actually. You know, I always say we're just the dumb bone doctors, but joints are pretty complex. The complex balance between the cells that line, the joint lining, and the synovium, the actual joint fluid itself, which is turned over continuously to the actual, both the cells of the cartilage and that extracellular matrix, it's a pretty fine balance and it's just as susceptible to all of the stressors that the system has as any other part of our body and for the most part they're remarkably superficial, so they are very susceptible to all of the insults that we're putting on the body.

Speaker 1: 14:29

Yeah, there's a lot of ways to think about this and let's really go through each of them in turn. I like how you made the point that the electromagnetic radiation and the electromagnetic environment has changed dramatically and that, I think, proportionally compared to the changes that we've seen in our diet, it's a larger magnitude of change, both the introduction of a whole bunch of non-visible EMFs in the form of microwaves, radio waves, wi-fi, and all the generations of telecommunications networks, but also in the visible, non-native emfs, which essentially blue light. And you know, I spoke to Kelsey Dexter, who's an endocrinologist, and she made the point that you know the food compared to when she was a child, compared to now, I mean, yes, as you mentioned, there still was candy there, there were still ultra-processed foods, but there wasn't the rates of obesity that we see now. And I mean, I agree with her and I really think that it's because we've added this indoor environment and the iPad, so to speak, and the TV and the devices, on top of what was already a pretty broken ultra-processed food environment.

Speaker 2: 15:51

I agree Again. I tell people, let's, for example, look at a shoulder MRI in anybody over the age of 40. It's always abnormal. There's nobody who's 45 where you do an MRI of his or her shoulder and it comes back with one line that says normal. So symptoms in the body tend to occur, and this is more just general medicine stuff, I think, which is that it's almost like going to the buffet. I tell people, you get a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B, a little bit of C, and once you get that magic combination, that's when you start having symptoms.

Speaker 2: 16:34

I'd make the case that even Jack Cruz would sort of make that case. It's still multiple insults together and then there's that magic combination. There are fundamental pieces, but it's things coming together. So without a doubt, it's the being inside and being covered in sun screen. I mean, I listen, um, I I've taken a lot to heart and kind of embrace this whole solar callus thing because I think that ultimately, uh, we're all our own N of one and we are all different, but we need to experiment kind of with our own bodies, to take, take chances. I've never had a tan in my entire life until the last three or four months because I said, ok, well, everyone says you can do it. So I was out in the morning every day all winter here in Arizona and now I'm really not burning. And I went to a family event in the spring and you know, they all did barely recognize me because I look, look so different.

Speaker 2: 17:23

So when we look at whether and it starts now with kids, right, I mean I cannot. You know, the iPad is the babysitter of 2024. I mean it is. And you come in and not only is it the attention span issue, but I do think we're missing the point a bit. It's the actual EMF spectrum radiation that is then priming the brain to then get the additional stimulation and when we start at such young age, it is having an effect. There are now dozens and dozens, hundreds of studies that are showing the impact of a non-natural spectrum of EMF radiation on the delicate balances of the body.

Speaker 2: 18:11

So you tell people well, you know, when you get up in the morning, just go sit outside and have your cup of coffee outside. That's just where you need to start. Again, I get these blind stares like I'm some crazy person when people have knee arthritis to say just start with that and why? Well, because we know that that near-infrared light which will go right through your clothing I'm not saying you need to be a nudist, you can go sit outside, have your cup of coffee sitting outside it will go through your clothes, it gets into your body and that near-affair spectrum essentially hits things in your cell, in your mitochondria, that really tell your body from an energy perspective to start the day. It kicks off the things that were in the repair processes at night and gets the day going and the flip side, and everybody has their thing. But I do think the nighttime light and the nighttime blue light is as much of a problem as anything. By the other end of the day, being pummeled with blue light has. The flip effect is that it prevents the repair processes from kicking in.

Speaker 2: 19:18

And we know our joints, they're moving all the time. And we know our joints, they're moving all the time. So we have a system that is designed very differently than our cars. We have a system that's designed to essentially be cycled millions and millions of times and nature has done a really good job of giving us the repair mechanisms to try to adapt as quickly as possible. And that's where the fundamental issue seems to be occurring and in this idea of specialization, it's where you see it.

Speaker 2: 19:50

Now we can be the conspiracy theorist which always turned out to be true in 2024 that you know there are some nefarious plot by by Oakley or by L'Oreal, and I don't doubt it.

Speaker 2: 20:04

But when we focus with this tiny lens, it's saying, okay, hey, uva or UVB by itself is always bad, but the reality, as you said, is that animals in the wild they seem to do just fine and we seem to do just fine when we were out there in the past. And these neolithic diseases as we talk about really have cropped up particularly and gotten so much worse in the last 70 years. And again, I'm a bit of an orthopedic snob in that there's an enormous focus on neurodegenerative disease and developmental neurologic disease, but as an impact on the economy and the basic functioning, the impact of musculoskeletal disease just on society's functioning is enormous and we're seeing it really at every level Because, remember, when your kid gets hurt playing sports, that has as much of an impact as if you have knee arthritis and you can no longer go to your job because you can't walk up and down stairs.

Speaker 1: 21:06

Yeah, no great points, and that is relevant to primary care medicine and GP, which is the field that I'm in, and, as you mentioned, after colds and upper respiratory tract infections, musculoskeletal issues and complaints, lower back pain, joint pain is next, and there's a lot going on here that I think is preventable. And once we start teasing apart these causative factors and helping to educate on them, then perhaps we could reduce the number of people that are suffering these problems. Before we finish on the or to round out the discussion on the non-native EMF topic, one of the pioneers in the area was Dr Robert Obecker, who obviously himself was an orthopedic surgeon and did quite pivotal work on understanding bone regeneration and the essential electromagnetic nature of the body. Have you had any particular reflections on Robert O'Becker's work or has that given you a new perspective to think back on your career or orthopedics in general?

Speaker 2: 22:21

Absolutely. First of all, until 18 months ago I didn't know he existed, which I just find stunning. I mean, I trained, so I went to med school from 80s. I went to med school from 91 to 96. I've been doing this for a long time. I literally had never heard his name.

Speaker 2: 22:40

And, trust me, orthopedic surgeons are egomaniacs, like many surgeons, and we use our opportunities to basically build up orthopedic surgeons in every setting, as other people's greatness can then be reflected on our awesomeness just because of who we are. So it's really telling that he's basically absent from orthopedic and medical education. So it's sort of glaring by its absence. Number one, number two his work, the recognition. And I'm not a physicist and while I've spent a lot of time reading in 18 months, that's a fraction of time and so I try not to go into too much detail for things, that which I don't think I can feel like I'm an expert. But the basic recognition the musculoskeletal system relies at its foundation almost entirely on the electrical properties of our tissues to send the signals back to our system, to know where to make bones stronger, to know how to make tendons stronger, to send the signals back to our system, to know where to make bones stronger, to know how to make tendons stronger, to send the signaling, to probably help us identify where repair needs to happen and how we signal our brain to adapt so we're less likely to get injured. Really, all comes from the fact that musculoskeletal system is really just one big fancy semiconductor, which is really just one big fancy semiconductor, which is really just a big fancy way of saying it shuttles charges around to help adjust energy signaling, repair and restoration, and when we neglect that, it's really no surprise that we're having more problems today than we've ever had, that we're having more problems today than we've ever had.

Speaker 2: 24:21

What's fascinating is that he, through his work, he had this idea for again another instance to where our military veterans are a major place for advancement in healthcare. So Robert O'Becker was in the VA system or the Veterans Administration healthcare system in the US, and in the 70s he had an opportunity to be able to treat a couple of patients who were Vietnam veterans, who had had injuries with these chronic non-healing fractures, which is a huge problem. For any open fractures or fractures that open to the skin, things don't heal and, as an aside, we struggle today with fractures that don't want to heal. A lot things don't heal and, as an aside, we struggle today with fractures that don't want to heal a lot. And so, with the work that he had done, he went to a couple of these people and said can we try this of doing electrical, essentially doing electrical stimulation of different times to see about getting bones that wouldn't heal to heal? And honestly, miraculously probably in part to him as well, let alone the patients and the other doctors around he got these just chronic, horrible, almost in any other case would need to be an amputation fractures to heal. That still raised a lot of questions because even in the handful of patients he treated he used different techniques and it created he wasn't really quite sure if this was ready for prime time because, understanding that bone is a semiconductor, well, we can cause, maybe we can cause more trouble or cause other problems as well. So he, in spite of his successes, wanted to put a big, you know, basically a yield sign. Let's understand more.

Speaker 2: 26:10

Industry felt differently and so the bone stimulator industry sort of grew up from that. So here we are now, almost 50 years later, and bone stimulators absolutely can make a difference for healing. So in the US we've got a couple of problems, well, one of which is we know it can make the biggest impact in the early stages for big open injuries where the injury itself disrupts the local environment. But in the US we can't use bone stimulators until we get to at least three months of fractures not healings. We probably have lost a lot of opportunity.

Speaker 2: 26:46

The second thing is and without naming any names doing surgery is more fun for orthopedic surgeons. So I had reached out about this. It's one of these online kind of case discussions about saying I would do A, b and C and we absolutely should use a bone stimulator, and this person who is a highly respected, big, fancy academic center trauma surgeon, said I don't believe in those things. There's no way they ever work. So a long-winded answer to your Robert O Becker question is what's most telling in the musculoskeletal world is the ignorance, and in this case, actually, I do think to a certain degree ignorance is an excuse because we were never introduced to his ideas in any fashion.

Speaker 1: 27:39

Yeah, and the reason there were specific reasons for that and specifically related to his discussion about, or the public publicization about, the harms of non-native electromagnetic fields, and essentially his research funding was removed and basically he was erased, so to speak, from the scientific record. So I mean Dr Jack Cruz has probably been the person that's done the most to bring awareness to the work of Robert O'Becker in today's day and age, because, again, that was no one I'd ever heard of in my training either.

Speaker 2: 28:19

Yeah, I think sort of the final straw that got him in trouble was after his 60 Minutes interview, which people can find on YouTube, where he basically says hey, we know that non-native EMFs and these essentially low wavelength fields that the military wanted to install to help communicate with submarines across the world actually do have an impact on cells and sort of the first work that he had done essentially got the Navy to move there this massive installation, I think from the Upper Peninsula in Michigan, and to move it someplace else. But essentially shortly after that 60 Minutes interview is sort of where the hammer seemed to come down on him. And obviously we still live under that same cloud today because everybody has their cell phones on, people have their Wi-Fi on all the time. I mean, listen, I actually can't get my own wife or children to not wear Bluetooth headphones. I've definitely had some success with blue light glasses, but I cannot get them not to wear Bluetooth headphones, even though we know that there is essentially an endless amount of data, that there is essentially an endless amount of data and again, some of the details I think are less important.

Speaker 2: 29:47

But those non-native EMFs at those frequencies that are non-ionizing, everybody knows, don't get irradiated with x-rays too much, I will laugh because I get patients who come in the office with new shoulder pain and they give us a hard time about taking a plain shoulder x-ray, which in this day and age with digital x-ray, is a shockingly small amount of radiation I mean, it's less than a quarter of a shoulder x-ray from when I started training because the magic of the digital work. But they come in and they never take one of their Bluetooth earpiece things out the entire time for the visit. They have their kids you know the iPad isn't here. The kids are on their iPad with it to hear with Bluetooth headphones as their babysitter during the visit. So we're still living under that cloud today where there's essentially been a complete suppression of the potential downside effects of whether it's on voltage-gated calcium channels or things that you know. Essentially it screws up energy flows in the cell. It can have a direct impact on hydration and what goes on with cellular water. It can have an impact on sort of protein folding, which is how things get managed, and so we think about this again.

Speaker 2: 31:07

I know that Jack is a neurosurgeon but as an orthopedist, we have to always give the neurosurgeons a hard time that all these joints are right there and they're getting equally pummeled by all this radiation, and it is absolutely a huge impact. Now, maybe if people lived outside from morning till night, they would have an. That's where I feel like it's that sort of buffet concept. Honest reality is is that the vast majority of people cannot pick up, uproot their lives, their family's lives, their connections to their friends, families and you know, move to some place on the earth where the environment's entirely different. I think it's highly knowable and I'm not saying anything negative, but the honest reality is that most people can't do it, um, and so we need to say, okay, well, if you're going to do x, you should probably, you know you really need to make sure you're working hard on y, or consider giving up x, uh, and changing it to z, because maybe because that can be less harmful.

Speaker 1: 32:19

Yeah, the point about non-native emfs, especially especially these radio frequency emissions, is that they've really been layered on top of each other, and that is a point that Tristan Scott really made to me was that it's not like we've subtracted somehow. We've subtracted the earlier emissions. Every new generation of telecommunications, especially in cities, is just being layered. The 5G is being layered on top of the 4G, and if there's an abundance of data showing harm in some of these earlier iterations of the technology, then we don't necessarily need a 2024 version of a 2017 study that unequivocally showed harm in mammals. So I think that's somehow.

Speaker 1: 33:05

That ambiguity is somehow is often played, and this is, I feel, like an industry playbook technique, which is create obfuscation. There was a book called the Merchants of Doubt that really illustrated the tobacco industry's techniques in creating obfuscation, or scientific doubt, lack of scientific consensus about damage and harms of certain environmental exposures. But the reality is that if you now walk through any major city in the world with the 5G installations everyone's got Wi-Fi everywhere then you're really being bombarded with this amount of radiation in the non-ionizing range that we simply weren't even 10, 15 years ago. So I'm really glad you brought that up, because just because it isn't ionizing doesn't mean it's not having meaningful health impacts.

Speaker 2: 33:57

And practically speaking, I mean in your medical stuff and in my medical stuff people come in because they're having problems. Some of it's acute, but the vast majority of things are chronic and the patients don't like X, right, they don't like how they look, they don't like how they feel, they don't like that they hurt, that they hurt. But it's remarkable to me how unwilling so many people are to even consider changes, which probably speaks to how incredibly successful industry has been at doing the obfuscating. I'm sure you're familiar with the story of the radium in watches in England.

Speaker 1: 34:40

No, go on.

Speaker 2: 34:41

And I'll do a bad job of retelling this, but the brief version is when they discovered in watches in England no, go on, I'll do a bad job of retelling this, but the brief version is when they discovered radium, it turned out that people loved it on their watches because it made the arms of the watch for those of you old enough to remember actual watches with actual things on it, you could see it at night. But of course it forced the women because these are all these women working in these factories to be working with radium and inhaling it, in large part because that was the issue for the radium and they were dying of cancer. And in England the companies knew full well that people were dying at higher rates and they denied it for decades and I believe for 20 years after it was sort of unequivocally true, industry continued to use it. So you know, I don't think you have to be a massive conspiracy theorist to recognize that some things are being pushed as fully safe. When there are enough voices saying maybe this isn't what we think it is, that there's really something to it. And particularly when you look around and you say, oh, my husband's had two hip replacements, I can't understand why my 25-year-old child now has arthritis on his or her knee x-rays and, amazingly, the number of injuries we're seeing in the kids who are still active which admittedly is not a huge percentage like we want them to be but we are seeing so many more injuries in recent years in child athletes and the tendency is to blame it on the fact and I don't know what it's like in Australia but for kids who are even decent athletes, the push to become single sport athletes at a very young age is almost overwhelming.

Speaker 2: 36:47

Because if you want to be on the club team or the traveling teams, well, you know you now have to do volleyball from the age of nine. You know 11 months a year you have to do baseball. It was always the case in things like gymnastics, but that was really the exception. And maybe in things like ballet. You know those were things that and honestly, there a lot of times it was body habitus and stuff, things that truly were genetic, that sort of you know, aged people out of continuing it for endlessly. But in all these other sports we're seeing it at an incredibly young age. So you know, when I was a kid, I was, admittedly, a mediocre baseball player, in spite of my lifelong dream to play second base for the Yankees as a kid, even though I was too short, too slow, didn't have a good arm and, you know, couldn't hit very well. It was still the dream.

Speaker 2: 37:40

But we didn't see these elbow ligament injuries, which are super common in throwing athletes, for the so-called Tommy John surgery, since he was the major league baseball pitcher who had the first really successful operation in terms of return to sport. And the surgeries are happening all the time in teenagers and ACL tears or ligament injuries in the knee. And we're seeing enormous number of ACL injuries in younger people, particularly in young women, and you know there's this hand wringing particularly for this ACL in young women. Well, why are you know? Why is it happening? And I have never once heard anybody say huh.

Speaker 2: 38:24

Is it because these kids are on devices all day long? And, by the way, when we don't, you know, we don't activate their healthy systems during the day by getting the morning sun and, oh, by the way, they're on their devices all night. So their melatonin sort of focused repair system doesn't have a chance to help them build things up, because that is really incontrovertible. Albeit a very complex and complicated multifactorial system, melatonin absolutely helps dictate repair systems, both overnight from the central systems and during the day, do our intracellular melatonin production, which is primarily stimulated by the near-infrared system. So we're not giving these growing bodies the opportunity to do the necessary repair. So, yeah, probably playing volleyball 11 months a year and doing this isn't the greatest thing for you, but imagine how much better off we'd be if we were actually giving these kids' bodies a chance to actually recover. And that doesn't even account, in the young women and men, for the hormonal disruptions that happen when we have them sitting under LED blue, only lights, for nine hours during the day. And you know, because, as parents, we, you know, we are whatever, whatever is beyond helicoptering parent that we have now.

Speaker 2: 39:52

You know, I saw a great cartoon that had, you know, old parenting, you know, which is get out of the house, don't come back until it gets dark, house, don't come back until it gets dark. And now and then it was today where there's a kid sitting on the ground with an iPad. Basically there's those, you know, like those, you know, those big orange cones in a circle around them and a parent staring at them while these kids are fully clothed. So you know, the kids aren't getting up in the morning, walking to school and playing ball or running around. So they're not getting any of that. So it's throwing out a lot fast for this.

Speaker 2: 40:28

But when we think about musculoskeletal problems, I really believe that's where it begins, and because this is just not something that people have been taught about. You know, for that population we have to get to these leagues and coaches, because the coaches do. I think you know most of these coaches there are also. Many of them are also parents of the kids in the leagues and I do think they're looking for things to help make the even if it's only about their own kids more durable and be able to play better. So we have to. I think it's going to be incumbent upon us to really increase the education to make things better.

Speaker 1: 41:11

Well, I think you're the first orthopedic surgeon to be discussing the non-native electromagnetic spectrum, and you're also probably the first orthopedic surgeon to describe and discuss the effect of near-infrared light on mitochondrial melatonin production. So congratulations for that. Thinking about this problem and the upsweep or the rapid pace of these injuries that you've just described, it really is making me think about what are the component causes here, and when we describe the function of bone as a semiconductor, when we understand the fascia and the body's fascial layers as essentially a highway of electron transfer and we understand the evolutionary role of, or the reality that we were barefoot for the most of our existence, then you really think that deprivation of grounding and insulation from the grounding, relatively on a population basis, isn't as important as, potentially, this blue light and non-native EMF story.

Speaker 2: 42:33

My own personal journey with this and, as you know, there's always a danger in medicine of, as you know, there's always a danger in medicine of. You know, we always say what anecdote. You know you can't live by anecdote, but for this, the idea of sunlight and circadian, which we sort of touched on, but you know it's all related. We can talk more as well, it's a, they're all end up being connected. So once you start saying, huh, well, maybe I should get outside and have my coffee outside in the morning, or maybe I need to get my kids up a little bit earlier and we can go for a walk after breakfast, even if it's only for five or 10 minutes, or you know, then you're saying huh, because, trust me, I grew up in a household where we wear shoes all the time. My parents still are big shoe wearers, um. But then you're saying huh, because, trust me, I grew up in a household where we wore shoes all the time. My parents still are big shoe wearers. But then you're like huh, it turns out, if I'm sitting outside, it's a whole lot nicer just to sit outside with my feet in the grass. So you know, it becomes part of the picture, for sure. I think it's a natural extension, and again it gets back to this idea that it's a buffet. There are more or less important parts of the buffet, but the total picture is going to be a bit from different categories. And, as you say and this is, in some of the ways, the most mind blowing things, part of my journey as well over the last 18 months is the simplest question of all for someone who's been in medicine for in some ways for 36 years, which is what is health? That simple question which I've also kind of started posing to colleagues. I said define what being healthy is without using the negative, as if to say, which is the same thing as saying tell me what being healthy is or what health means, without saying the absence of disease or the absence of pain. And it turns out it's exceedingly hard to do and that, I think, has been also part of my own personal journey, for this, which is being alive, means managing energy and essentially having energy flows that keep you with a degree of internal homeostasis or we're internally stable, but we're constantly at odds with the environment, which would love to be the fact that my pool here is heading towards 90 plus degrees, because it's 110 degrees outside right. So, as opposed to being just equal with the environment, being alive means being internally stable, but in opposition to what the base of the basic things around you are.

Speaker 2: 45:16

And we produce energy, as you mentioned, with electrons. That is what it is. I mean, everybody who's survived at least high school biology had to memorize some of those circle things that you memorize for the test, if at all, and then you forget immediately. But it's called the electron transport chain, so it's electron. So we've known for going on close to a century now that energy is about electrons, and obviously we think it's far more complicated than simply the producing of ATP. So health is about managing electrons. So you talk about grounding. Well, you know if there are 50 lightning strikes at any given second. We know that there's electrons in the earth and we know that we can adapt them. I think, as Jack has pointed out, you know why do we have so many extra sweat glands in our feet and hands compared to other animals? Well, we're designed to have that moisture help transmit that. So I think it becomes part of the puzzle for sure.

Speaker 1: 46:16

Yeah, it's like trying to convey that, as you mentioned, to people in a consult who are experiencing severe joint pain and maybe they've maxed out their non-steroidal anti-inflammatory dosage and you're there to tell them to, hey, take your shoes off and stand on the grass. They might laugh at you and you can see why they might do that. But if we pare back all the layers of social norms and maybe programming, it will just intuitively make sense that being grounded through wet grass, standing on wet grass, standing on the beach or even touching a tree was our natural state and therefore changing that is going to be potentially for that person, a significant contributory cause to their symptoms. I wanted to make a mention of the fluoroquinolone class of antibiotics because if we're talking about joint injuries and perhaps Achilles tendon tears, they play an interesting role. So what's your perspective on fluoroquinolones and maybe explain to everyone about their role in joint injuries?

Speaker 2: 47:31

Sure so, and I will plead, not being an infectious disease expert, but here's the basic idea is that there has been a hunt, and it continues to be a hunt for effective antibiotics that can work well in different settings. And so this idea of broad spectrum meaning we don't know exactly what we're treating, but we want to basically take our shotgun and let that spread out to give the greatest chance of treating a patient's problem Number one. Number two is we don't like people in hospitals. So this class of antibiotics, which are known as fluoroquinolones hard to say, harder to spell were a great addition to doctors' armamentarium. Because number one is they're only once or twice a day, and any medication that's only once or twice a day, you increase your likelihood that people are actually going to take it substantially. So that's number one. Number two is, and equally importantly, is that fluoroquinolones are fairly remarkable and that they work equally effectively whether you take the pill version or whether you give it through an IV. And so that's concept of bioavailability, which you know the health people all think about in terms of hey, you know these 50 supplements that I'm taking, you know what am I actually absorbing. But the idea for medications, a medication that works just as well by mouth as by IV is an incredibly important thing for medicine. So there are these great drugs, particularly for treatment of certain urinary tract infections that were hard to treat for people. But this idea of community acquired pneumonia. It was this great shotgun approach. So they got enormous usage. And they were under enormous usage when I was in training.

Speaker 2: 49:15

So again, I don't know exact dates for things, but I'd say you go back 25, 30 years ago, you ago, when they first came out they were everywhere.

Speaker 2: 49:23

Well, we learned something pretty quickly about them is that, while on an absolute percentage basis we didn't see it very often, but the incidence of fluoroquinolone-related tendon ruptures was incontrovertible and that's really in almost any tissue. So you know, the Achilles tendon is a tendon that most people can relate to because you can feel it. It's the one that connects your calf muscles down to your heel and it's big. It's almost the thickness of your thumb. So Achilles are easy, but you've got them all over your body, ranging from the big ones to things that are, you know, in the real world much more common, things like rotator cuff tears, which are some of the small, four small muscles that live around the shoulder to help stabilize and initiate motion. So the reality is there's been a big recognition of some of the downsides of fluoroquinolones and so, at least in the US and at least amongst the people I see coming in and talking to, the incidence of things like Levaquin or these other fluoroquinolones that were so prevalent are very, very, very, very much less common in this day and age.

Speaker 1: 50:34

And it's a very interesting topic to go down and I've explored it in previous podcasts, but I really recommend reading Dr Jack Cruz's LinkedIn article called Phloxed and it really goes into the mechanisms by which ciprofloxacin and these other fluoroquinolones are having a negative effect. So, in terms of the other components to maybe this increase in injuries and musculoskeletal injuries, what do you think about cold and specifically in terms of treating it, Because I have read some evidence that there's this benefit for cold immersion or actually lowering the temperature of the limb to aid bone fracture healing. Is that something that you're aware of? Do you think that's also relevant to soft tissue?

Speaker 2: 51:27

so, um, I can't tell you. I'm aware of a whole lot in terms of, directly, in terms of of bone healing, although one can make the case that, if, if, if we accept as true which I think we can today that, uh, intracellular or within organ light production is stimulated by cold, which again is a bizarre thing, I think, for most people to try to understand. But the recognition is when we have, just like we create light by taking things from one energy state to another and letting them drop back down, that happens inside the cell and we produce light, albeit at volumes that we can't really perceive, albeit at volumes that we can't really perceive. But when we're talking about things that are much tinier than this, you know, you can, actually, it actually has an effect. So I can't tell you. I've used that particularly, but obviously forever. You know we've been using cold's been part of athletics and doing things right. So you know, I had one of the PAs I worked with for a bit. She was a big runner in high school in Minnesota, so I think it should be cold enough there already, but she was a big cross country runner and she would run cross country and then the coaches would basically throw her into an ice bath, you know, with the cubes floating around, um, I think we recognize today that from a um a stress, because obviously our body respond, we want enough stress or our body responds which I think is one of the other reasons why people get sick today is there in. You know, we don't provide enough normal stressors to the body, whether it's regard to hunger or temperature or uh, or movement, right and so cold as a, if we're lifting weights, it's pretty well accepted that that inflammatory response after lifting weights or after training, we want a certain degree of inflammatory response because that helps provide the signals to the body to say, hey, make this muscle stronger, hey, make these tendons better able to withstand certain stressors. There's no question that it has its role in terms of reducing inflammation and pain, because we use a little cold spray whenever we do injections, because it reduces some of the pain. So there is that role.

Speaker 2: 53:45

I mean I will admittedly say that my children would readily admit that I hate cold water more than anything. Even here in Arizona I'd be walking in the pool and the pool is 92 and it's taking me a few minutes to get in. So I decided to embrace this idea of doing some cold immersion, mostly as a mental challenge, and so there is a cold plunge tub sort of off to my back on my right here that I do three or four days a week and I'd say doing it very regularly for the last nine months. It has never gotten easier to get in any time. But we know again, as Jack and others have pointed out, that there are multiple levels on which cold therapy can have an impact and he tends to focus on it very much from the biophysics perspective, but that's very hard to explain to people at any level. And the reality is, as I mentioned, it's the nature of. There are a lot of reasons why, but we all seek to minimize discomfort in 2024 on every level and there is significant value to voluntarily choosing to do something that is uncomfortable for a short period of time and knowing that it actually for a short period of time and knowing that it actually we never really adapt to getting into 39 degree water and that mental component is such an incredible piece. And, as an aside, I know this isn't circadian or, you know, or sun related, but if we think about so many of the issues today and again, I have two children who were in their first half of their 20s, and so I think they're remarkably well adjusted. But the people in that age group are struggling.

Speaker 2: 55:42

And there is Viktor Frankl, who I don't know if you're familiar with him. So, viktor Frankl, who is a psychiatrist survivor of the concentration camps and kind of inventor of this concept of logotherapy, which is Greek for meaning therapy. But he created this term, which I'm sure is not unique to him, of this idea, of this existential vacuum If we don't have something bigger than ourselves that we are for or believe in. I don't know how that fits into some quantum view of consciousness or life. I don't pretend to know, but we know that Eastern medicine and Eastern philosophy, I think, has embraced this much better than our really horribly maladaptive, mechanistic Western view. We need to have something greater than ourselves that we are living for, because otherwise everything else we've talked about doesn't seem to matter. So I am not here saying everyone needs to go to a synagogue or a church or a mosque or something every single week, but as parents, probably starting with ourselves, we need to be going back to understand well, what's the meaning behind what we do, because if we don't have a purpose and I'm sure you see this as well.

Speaker 2: 57:03

People who don't want to get better after an injury will never get better. At that mindset component, uh, and that'd be a fun conversation for a different day, you know, for how we break it down and ways to think about that. But that idea of the why is that's where we have to start and I can tell you, in US healthcare in 2024, there is no time to discuss that and I would love to be able to take the people, whether it's they wrecked their motorcycle and they broke seven bones, or they tripped over the curb and sprained their ankle. That's part of the humility piece because, to be completely raw and honest, there are times we're in the operating room where I do a surgery for something and, honestly, you feel pretty good about yourself. You're dislocating your own shoulder, patting yourself on the back because you felt you did such an amazing job, but my surgery doesn't matter. What matters to the patient is the outcome. So I've had times where I'm like God, I'm great, and the outcomes, frankly, clinically, are pretty crappy.

Speaker 2: 58:14

The flip side, in all honesty, is also true. I mean, the reality is there have been cases where I'm like I think you know, I wouldn't have left the operating room, unless I think it's fine. But you know I'm not sure I'd want you know this up on the New York Times. You know the Times, the Times Square billboard, and then people come out and they do literally amazing and so I tell this to the students and the PAs and stuff. I said you can use those two extremes in two different ways and unfortunately I think a lot of us use it for not the best reason. So you can use that as a justification to operate on.

Speaker 2: 59:00

Everybody, or my unfortunately excessive introspective side, says what are we doing? Where are we missing? Because we really only want people to do well and maybe we're overstating some of our awesomeness because the outcome is a little bit less related to some of the things that we're doing in the operating room. So, again, a little bit tangential, but sort of understanding some of that why, or I guess I'd encourage the listeners to think about it for themselves and there are about 20 billion and a half places to sort of think about. You know how people think about their whys and um or what motivates them. That's bigger than themselves, and to think about that and that really needs to be the North star during injury recovery. Well, I'm not saying that every 13 year old, you know, a kid who hurts himself playing soccer needs to have some kind of epiphany, but I'm I'm saying that for that. For adults, we need to make sure that we have something that we're for.

Speaker 1: 59:54

Yeah, and the mindset that's so important, and for any type of behavioral change as well, and lifestyle, you definitely need the why. So thanks for laying that out, eric. Let's do a. Maybe we can finish with a real practical takeaway for patients. So say that you had a lady. Maybe she's in her 60s, she's got a metatarsal fracture that just simply isn't healing. Let's use her as maybe a case example of how we can apply decentralized medical thought processes, circadian quantum biology, to help that fracture heal as quickly as possible. What would you do as a decentralized orthopedic surgeon to assist healing? And the patient was like Dr Eric, I'll do whatever you say. So what kind of lifestyle advice would you guide her with?

Speaker 2: 1:00:47

Absolutely. So, just to lay it out practically speaking. So we have a person who is reasonably healthy appearing, who has an injury that isn't getting better right within reason. So, when it comes to the fracture side, if fractures just aren't healing, the truth is that we still do I still do a set of regular labs looking for any major deficiency, to sort of put my hand on if that makes sense. One of the reasons sometimes fractures don't heal can be infection, even if there's not a big open wound. So I think you always need to check for that. So let's just say we go through and there's no big, huge red flag and it isn't a fracture that absolutely, really 98% of people would recommend treating surgically to start with. So if we get in that which, again, if you take all comers, is the significant majority so here's what I would tell people from the decentralized perspective.

Speaker 2: 1:01:51

Here's what I would tell people from the decentralized perspective, which is we know that the environment that we live in has an enormous impact on our ability for our body to respond. We also know that the modern environment just look around you appears to be having a globally not so great effect on people's health. So here's what I would recommend that you do. And I'm not saying you know, as just like the folks you have on who talk about deuterium and other things. We're not talking about totally supplanting standard medicine in many cases, but the general advice would be okay.

Speaker 2: 1:02:21

Let's look at your light environment from morning till night. So number one we'll just start. We'll start in the morning. So number one when you get up, just first of all put your phone in the other room. So isn't the first thing you reach for when it's still dark out? And you get up Because we want to make sure that your body knows to devote all the resources it can to the right places. So get up and if you're a coffee or tea drinker, or even not, just go sit outside and don't wear sunglasses, don't put your contacts in, don't wear your glasses at all. The rays can get through your hat, so you can wear a hat and, again, don't have to go out naked. But start with that. If you got access to grass in the backyard or in the front, you know you can go out barefoot as well, because that's probably going to help as well. So that's, that's number one.

Speaker 2: 1:03:13

Number two is you know, movement matters. Depending upon your injury, you may be limited, we want you moving as much as you can because it turns out that, again, our body responds to. You know, motion is life right. So to the extent that you can, you do want to be stimulating the body, the areas around the body part that are hurt, because that helps send signals for healing the micromotion. You know, again, in orthopedics we refer to it, we refer to it as micromotion.

Speaker 2: 1:03:40

I think Becker et al would be saying you're trying to create the proper local electrical environment to try to inspire your body to get its act together to do it. Well, you know, chances are that same person you're talking about is working in their 60s in 2024. And chances are that he or she has a sedentary job that's inside. So if you're sitting inside in a computer all day, you probably should get a pair of good blue light glasses so that at least we're trying to cut down on some degree of the excessive stimulation. But, by the way, I know your computer screen looks really bright to you and I know that the overhead fluorescent lights look really bright to you. But the honest reality is that that indoor lighting is a tiny, tiny fraction of the total light exposure you get when you step outside, even on a cloudy day. So when you get your morning and afternoon break for a few minutes, and when you have your lunch break, get outside. Same thing Don't put your sunglasses on and try to look super cool, just get outside as best you can. And there you'd like to be a little bit less uncovered because you'd like to try to get some UV exposure, because, again, that UV exposure is going to help with your vitamin D and all the other factors and that absolutely is involved both in an anti-inflammatory effect and for healing.

Speaker 2: 1:05:04

At the end of the day and I've come to believe, I think this is actually the big issue for most people who are, you know, who are not retired is that you get home, the TV goes on and most people these days, not only are they in front of their TV, but they're in front of their TV and they have their phone on at the same time, and they stay there until they go to bed, which is almost always well after they're tired. So when you do that, you're actually shutting down your body's repair mechanism. So it's as if your body says, huh, maybe it should be time to help this thing heal. And they never get started, and then the cycle begins again and then they're in bed and they're still on their phone and the light's on and it circles from there. So that's, I think, the light environment thing, the question of adjuncts like I take care of a very blue collar population. So to tell people this is just the honest reality, to tell people to go buy a red light device, even if it's something that's only a few, several hundred dollars, and I don't even like to say only, that's a big sell for people, unless I can look them in the eye and tell them there's a hundred percent guarantee it's going to make a difference. So I think you can use adjuncts that way.

Speaker 2: 1:06:23

I know that Jack's not so keen on PMF, but you know there's some commercial PMF devices for which there are hundreds of studies that it can help with bone healing early, just like we use bone stem later. There is so on the what you're taking and putting in your body perspective, you know there is just to touch briefly as a final thing short-term taking anti-inflammatories, which is your Advil, aleve, naproxen, meloxicam, ibuprofen. Short-term taking anti-inflammatories which is your Advil, aleve, naproxen, meloxicam, ibuprofen Short-term there is literally no evidence that they're bad for bone healing. But the reality is for fractures that are misbehaving, that non-steroidals can have an adverse effect on healing, which is why, for example, the spine surgeons are so crazy about not taking it, because for some of their healing. So I try to minimize the medications and that I think that's sort of the basic circadian light recommendations for that. Can I throw one other?

Speaker 2: 1:07:23

totally different scenario with you as well. So let me give you so that if you go see the orthopedic surgeon you know you're going to get that population, particularly for someone like me who treats a very high number of fractures of different types and different ages, but more apt to be in your universe and the universe that most people will see and experience, which is I'm that same person. So let's just say 55, 65. And they're not marathon runners, they're not totally invertebrates. So you know, they kind of do their stuff and they're having knee pain and they come into the office and, by the way, this is a at least a handful of times every single clinic day for me. So they come into the office and they have knee pain and you get the x-ray and there are some mild arthritic changes in the knee. Boom, that is the population. Some of them have already tried Advil, some haven't.

Speaker 2: 1:08:21

You know what is the decentralized? What I would say is a decentralized thing as well, and I know that to some degree in this environment thing as well, and I know that to some degree in this environment, making diet a part of it can cause anxiety and stress amongst some people in the decentralized world. But let me go for it anyway, which is anecdotally and I can say personally going to effectively a no-carb diet, so what we would call what people call a carnivore diet short-term, even doing it for two weeks. I have never seen anything be more effective ever in my 28 years of orthopedics of being able to almost eliminate basic musculoskeletal pain than going to a carnivore diet. And I am not telling people that they need to only have dairy eggs, fish and meat for the rest of their lives. I am just saying, if you're hurting that badly, the anti-inflammatory effects of going to that are I have just never seen anything like it and it's much better than taking drugs. I have just never seen anything like it and it's much better than taking drugs. It is totally life-changing. I'm not pitching hey, this is how you should lose weight, like you see all over the internet. I am saying, if you are hurting, and if you're hurting bad enough to go, spend your $50 copay to come see me, what do you have to lose? I know it's hard, I know it takes incredible discipline, I know we have all these things, but I just cannot recommend more without giving specific medical advice for people to try it. And then the question is why does it work? So we can go to the decentralized reason for why it may work.

Speaker 2: 1:10:07

So number one is insulin absolutely can have a pro-inflammatory effect. So that's number one, and particularly since what we believe, that almost 90% of us are a little bit metabolically not working great. So we probably have higher levels of insulin circulating anyway, so we can reduce the inflammation significantly. That's number one. Number two is leptin appears to potentially be anti-inflammatory. So if we can make leptin work a little bit better, that can work as well. So that's coming up from our fat cells when we go into ketosis. So beta-hydroxybutyrate is one of the ketones that our body starts creating to use for energy. There is an enormous amount of evidence that beta-hydroxybutyrate is directly antagonistic to what they call the inflammasome.

Speaker 2: 1:10:54

Apparently, the healthcare thing of this decade is collecting ohm to basically everything. Essentially it's saying that in a systemic fashion it changes the way proteins in a cascade are being produced to reduce inflammation. That's part of it as well. We turn over our joint fluid water probably every day. So all the different things that go between the synovium joint lining and the actual cartilage they're turning over at different paces. So even within a few days. It's hard for people to believe, but the actual micro environment or maybe below of our joints literally can change within a few days. And then there's the other side of it, which is is it possible that if we are reducing our glyphosate intake and other of these additive intakes which can impact collagen because our collagen actually turns over pretty darn quickly in these systems are we actually making a more effective barrier and is our extracellular water actually better able to handle it, because it's not getting the same kinds of insults?

Speaker 2: 1:12:13

So no one's seen a perfect answer and I've been asking around to see if somebody can give me the holy grail for why it seems to work so well. But if you have bone or joint pain and it's bothering you enough to care to listen to something like this and to go to the doctor, really what do you have to lose? If you do it? It works great. Well, maybe after 30 days, because here's what I found If people do it and they start feeling better, that is the best way to get them to continue it. And you're not a bad person if you have a piece of birthday cake, it's just that, huh, I didn't feel so good, so you go back to changing it.

Speaker 2: 1:12:48

So I know it sounds a bit preaching and I hate to hate to be preachy about it, um, but, as as I say, I tell this to people multiple times every single day and I get the blankest stares you could possibly imagine. There is usually like a three or four second pause of silence and then we do a shot, or what else can we do? Anyway? I I'd make that pitch as well and then, if you don't move, you need to move, and the reality is most people in this day and age, many have never learned how to move to start with.

Speaker 2: 1:13:21

So I do think there's really a role for physical, physical therapy or some kinds of organized training. I love all this online stuff, but here's what I find most people. And then again, I think the people who sign up for some of the online training stuff are self-selecting, but most people don't even really fully understand what their body is, and so I do think therapy is really useful, because somebody who can be hands-on, who can actually see all of you and say, okay, when you do X, this is what it should feel like. This is where the slight movement is different. So I think there's a real value for people who are trained to help train other people to learn what to do on their own.

Speaker 1: 1:13:58

I'm glad you brought up diet and it's been my clinical experience too that the carnivore diet is so effective in eliminating musculoskeletal joint pains and, as you've mentioned, there's an acute effect that's happening. That's going to precede the resolution of insulin and insulin resistance. It's going to precede the resolution of visceral fat and it's definitely going to precede the weight loss that physically unloads those joints and what you just described, which is the turnover of synovial fluid and perhaps removal of maybe glyphosate or some kind of seed oil-rich lipid peroxidation product from that fluid, that makes sense to me as well as perhaps yes circulating insulin on the day-to-day. So it's a really important point and it's a function, it's a pillar, it's a pillar, it's one of these inputs that we definitely need to discuss and it is that highly effective. So, yeah, great point there, eric.

Speaker 1: 1:15:05

I think something like a bone broth made with organic bones, beef bones that doesn't have glyphosate in it is perhaps one of the most powerful ways of supplying collagen precursors like glycine, valine and hydroxyproline all these other precursors of collagen synthesis really, really well. So that's something that I chuck in there in terms of a bone healing protocol. But I think the more, as you mentioned, like this morguesmort analogy the more that someone can do, the quicker that they could potentially heal and, as you say, perhaps the worse their fracture is, the more inclined they are to make different choices to help promote this process.

Speaker 2: 1:15:57

Agree completely. There's lots of. I always say that there's multiple right ways to be happy. There's multiple right ways to be successful, and what's right for you may not be exactly right for me or anybody who's listening or watching, but what we can generally can agree on is that there are things that are wrong, and what we know today is we're doing some massive things wrong.

Speaker 2: 1:16:26

We have such an opportunity, starting at the small level, and you try to start with your own small circles, some people you know you have a bigger platform to try to get people to then go out, and I think for a field that is still fairly small, again, I can sort of only imagine, you know when, when Jack Cruz started talking, you know he was like one person alone in the wilderness there, and so now there's a small number of people. But this idea that if we can come up with a language that there's a certain degree of commonality to that we know is understandable. That's always my struggle. I've been. You know I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but a lot of this stuff. Once you get into the even not even the bottom of the weeds, but the top of the weeds it can become overwhelming, because who can remember all this incredible salad of cofactors and all these three-letter things with numbers at the end that relate to this, and you know it's. And then they throw in Greek letters to make life even harder.

Speaker 2: 1:17:29

You know to try to remember stuff, and so I hope, as everybody continues to talk about it, as the universe continues to grow, whether we're talking to parents at a PTA meeting, whether we're talking to a new crop of people getting their CDL for driving trucks and getting the right kind of sun exposure, honestly, too, we get to the people who are thinking about retirement, you, how do the people want, so we, if we can come up with that commonality of language, to really push back against, like you said, that sort of the act of disinformation and obfuscation that has that that we seem to be, you know, maybe more than non-native EMFs where we're, we're bathing in obfuscation by people who are, who are, sort of profiting off our lack of knowledge when it comes to health, and, and so it's hard, when you get into this too, not to be either cynical or not optimistic, uh, about it.

Speaker 2: 1:18:39

But you know, uh, humanity survived a lot of things and um, so hopefully we'll come out of what seems to be, in my view, almost like a healthcare dark ages of the last 50 or 60 years, and we can emerge, like previous eras, stronger and better than we were before.

Speaker 1: 1:18:57

Thank you, eric, for doing your bit, and I know how difficult it is to be a practitioner who is advocating for essentially fundamental changes that would remove you from a job, and that is essentially what you're advocating for, which is root cause healing, such that people don't need to come and see you and your surgical services. So, yeah, it's a very noble kind of path to be walking. So thank you for advocating for it and thank you for being, I think, the first decentralized, or maybe the second decentralized orthopedic surgeon after Robert O'Becker. So, yeah, thanks for your time. Really appreciate it. Enjoyed the conversation.