209-SYNCPodcast_CalvinandElise

[00:00:00] Jenny Swisher: Welcome friends to this episode of the Sync Your Life podcast. Today, I’m sharing with you an interview that I did with Elise Wagner and Dr. Calvin Ng as part of my virtual summit experience in 2023. This is one of my all time favorite interviews because it really covers the basics of the differences between a functional versus modern medicine approach.

[00:01:19] Jenny Swisher: We’re going to be diving deep this year in 2024 on this topic, how functional difference How functional medicine differs from traditional medicine in the realm of hormone health. We’re going to be meeting with top experts in the fields of gut health, infertility, hormone balance, everything in the reproductive system, including sexual health.

[00:01:38] Jenny Swisher: So much good stuff coming your way in 2024. This episode has never actually aired on the podcast. Like I said, it’s been part of our virtual summit video series, which you can find at sync. jennyswisher. com slash virtual summit. But it’s so good that I didn’t want to keep it from the masses here on the podcast.

[00:01:55] Jenny Swisher: So I’m launching it here. It’s a great kickoff to January, 2024. It’s a great way to start the year to really set the tone, teaching you and educating you all about. functional wellness. So without further ado, I introduce you to Elise Wagner. She’s the founder of IFMCHC, which is the Institute for Functional Medicine’s Certified Health Coaching Program.

[00:02:16] Jenny Swisher: I’m also introducing you here to Dr. Calvin Ng. I’ve had Dr. Ng on the podcast before. He is such a guru in the world of natural medicine. You guys are going to learn so, so much from these two. So without further ado, here they are.

[00:02:29] Jenny Swisher: Welcome friends to this virtual summit. I am so grateful to be joined today by Dr. Calvin Ng and Elyse Wagner. Both from the functional medicine world in some capacity. I’ve had the great fortune of interviewing each of them on my Sync Your Life podcast, but I thought it would be really cool to bring them together for a video virtual summit, so that we could really dive deeper into what is functional medicine, why is it valuable, why is it on the rise, and why you should be considering utilizing it yourself.

[00:02:55] Jenny Swisher: So we’re going to dive into all that stuff today. I want to make sure we’re mindful of everyone’s time and that we get as much out of this as we can. So we’re going to dive straight into just learning more about these individuals. This is the first time that they’ve met each other too. So I think it’s so cool because I was just telling them before this.

[00:03:10] Jenny Swisher: I love nerding out with each of them. Like every time I’ve interviewed them on the podcast, I love having conversations. They feel like they could go on for hours. And I think it’s even cooler when you can bring people together that are very like minded and who have similar philosophies and experiences.

[00:03:24] Jenny Swisher: So for me, this is just leveling up the conversation by bringing in more than one guest. It levels up the conversation and really helps you as the listener. So. Without further ado, let’s dive in. I’ll start with Dr. Ng. If you could just give us a little bit of your background and your story and what led you to functional medicine, and then I’ll let you hand it over to Elise when you’re done.

[00:03:44] Calvin Ng: Yeah, thank you so much, Jenny, for having me on this podcast again and doing this virtual summit. I’m super excited. So yeah, my story began when I realized that when I was going through chiropractic school, I realized that there was something missing. I was always really involved in like, like sports and fitness and nutrition.

[00:04:05] Calvin Ng: That’s what I studied back in college. And I was just really interested in improving like human performance, but I realized that there seemed to be something missing between all the different disciplines within health and wellness and fitness. And it didn’t seem cohesive enough for me. So I didn’t know what that was.

[00:04:25] Calvin Ng: But when I went through chiropractic school, my dad had went through his journey of. Liver failure, cirrhosis, ultimately leading to a liver transplant. But anyways, that was like a 10 year journey. So going through that journey, I realized that there was also something missing in medicine, in Western medicine, mainstream medicine.

[00:04:45] Calvin Ng: And I wanted to see if there was a way that we can bridge all these disciplines together. I always said that my ideal health care place would be this place where There’s just no judgment on any healing modalities. It’s going to be a one stop shop where everything is included. And why wouldn’t you?

[00:05:04] Calvin Ng: Because when I remember the feeling of when my dad was at the brink of death, I was like, I’m willing to do anything. You know, I’m, I’m praying, I’m doing anything possible. So at that level of desperation, I go, can I harness this energy? Right. Can I take this perspective, have the same level of passion and apply it to thriving versus surviving?

[00:05:30] Calvin Ng: So that’s where I discovered there are more things in our healthcare space. There’s functional medicine, lifestyle medicine, foundational medicine, and there’s, there’s new way of looking at disease and dysfunction. And so for me, I wanted to help people get out of that pain and also prevent. You know, from me and my dad going through that pain again for, for others, um, if they wish.

[00:05:55] Calvin Ng: So that’s in a nutshell how I, how I got into this type of work.

[00:06:00] Jenny Swisher: Yeah. And you’re now practicing in Southern California, right? So we’ll make sure to link up your information and Elise’s information too here so that people can have access to you guys, um, after this as well. So Elise, I’d love to hear from you.

[00:06:12] Jenny Swisher: Tell us a little bit about your story and what you do.

[00:06:15] Elyse Wagner: Yeah, well, thank you so much for having me. And thank you, Dr. Ng for sharing that. And you talk about desperation. I, when you said that it, to me, it’s actually a beautiful story of love, you know, and so thank you for sharing that. Yeah, so my story started actually when I was a young girl.

[00:06:36] Elyse Wagner: I was 13 years old when intuitively I just realized that certain foods and me did not agree. And I have always been very curious and, um, wondering, you know, why, why this, why that? And, um, I was also Haunted as obese Elise in middle school. I was 200 pounds. I was overweight. I had this nice big tire around my belly, you know, thin arms, thin legs.

[00:07:06] Elyse Wagner: And I was totally inflamed, but I went to my mom, um, and I said, you know, I want to change. I want to look different. I want to feel different. And, um, I know that I’m not supposed to feel like this. We’re not supposed to feel crappy inside. I truly believe that. Um, so she really partnered with me and she helped me to find a holistic nutritionist at the time who would see an adolescent.

[00:07:35] Elyse Wagner: And. That person was really taking about 20 some odd years ago, a functional medicine philosophy or mindset by looking at the whole person and taking a very client centered approach with me, asking me a lot of questions versus this doctor directed or, um, telling someone what to do. And ultimately I ended up taking the, um, the plan, if you will, the lifestyle plan, eating plan and implementing it.

[00:08:05] Elyse Wagner: And within about two months. Something miraculous happened. I lost about 50 pounds. It was like you put a pin in me and I just shrunk. My hair began to grow. My skin cleared up. My nails were growing. And I said, holy guacamole, food is medicine. And I have to share this with the world. Well, I was also 13, so who was going to listen to me really at that time?

[00:08:29] Elyse Wagner: Um, but that’s actually when I started studying and, uh, reading. And, uh, I set it, I set forth on my purpose and my passion. Long story short, went through undergrad degree in nutritional sciences and dietetics, really did not appreciate or value necessarily what I was being taught in school, because like many other practitioners, doctors, nutritionists, etc.

[00:08:59] Elyse Wagner: Most, I won’t say all, but most are taught in an illness, uh, framework or illness paradigm. That’s not necessarily where I had experienced wellness and health, and I wanted to come from that space. So, cut my head down, and I just kept Moving forward, uh, to graduate, but I was always curious about, like, we have so much information, um, now more than ever.

[00:09:25] Elyse Wagner: Why aren’t we actually making the changes in the behaviors necessary to really see a shift in a change and make our lifestyles more sustainable? And so I got into the psychology of things. I moved forward, went on, got a double master’s in holistic nutrition and clinical health psychology from Bastyr.

[00:09:45] Elyse Wagner: University in Seattle, Washington, which also is the home of the Institute for Functional Medicine. And when I was in my second year there, I got really sick. No one could figure out what’s going on with me. My parents wanted to pull me out of grad school. I said, no, no, no. I truly believe that my body and my mind can be healed.

[00:10:04] Elyse Wagner: And we just haven’t gotten to the root cause yet. Well, that actually led me to a functional medicine doctor who was able to do the genetic testing. I was able to get a diagnosis of celiac disease. And along with that, if anyone’s been diagnosed with a chronic illness or a autoimmune disease, you know that there’s a lot of lifestyle changes involved for me, it was going completely

[00:10:27] Jenny Swisher: gluten free.

[00:10:28] Elyse Wagner: Uh, and, and that required a lot of behavior modification as well. And I just knew that once I was able to get myself into a space of health and well being. Um, I wanted to make this climb or this struggle last for other people. Again, fast forward. Now we’re in our eighth year at the Functional Medicine Coaching Academy.

[00:10:50] Elyse Wagner: I am the co founder along with Sandra Scheinbaum. Um, and we are a collaboration with the Institute for Functional Medicine and we train health coaches in these paradigms of functional medicine foundations. Functional nutrition, mind, body, tool, tools and techniques, the art and science of coaching and the psychology behind behavior, behavior change, as well as an entire career navigation that helps you to build your career.

[00:11:17] Elyse Wagner: Because, you know, I really wish that I had someone kind of like me who could have. Help me along the way because we don’t have to struggle alone. We really don’t. So that’s kind of my story in a, in

[00:11:28] Jenny Swisher: a nutshell. Yeah, that’s so great. And I know we’ve said this before, but I want to mention it here too, that, you know, the vision really is that eventually everyone will have a health coach, right?

[00:11:38] Jenny Swisher: Like, so not only will functional medicine, I think obviously it’s already on the rise, but this lifestyle implementation is sort of a secondary piece, right? There’s functional medicine to help a doctor help a patient. Figure out root cause, but then there are often so many lifestyle factors like you’ve mentioned having to go gluten free or for some people might include exercise and diet changes and sleep adjustments and all kinds of lifestyle changes that really health coaches can be the ones that can really, um, make that.

[00:12:08] Jenny Swisher: make that shift for people and help them do that. So I love that. I love the idea that, you know, we all have a lawyer. We all have a veterinarian for our pet. We all have, now we’re going to have health coaches in the future. And I love, I love your mission. So I want to dive in. I think the best first place to start is to really just address for people who might not have heard of functional medicine before, or who have heard it.

[00:12:27] Jenny Swisher: And have misconceptions, they think like, Oh, that’s the thing where you have to pay out of pocket. I’m not doing that, right? Like that’s what I hear all the time. Maybe we should start there. And, um, at least you just, uh, you just alluded to this and I wanted to kind of bring it out. You talked about how you’ve always been someone who’s wanted to know why.

[00:12:45] Jenny Swisher: And that’s really a big piece of my story too, right? After struggling with chronic migraine for way too long, I got sick of going in and out of doctor’s offices where all we did was talk about the what. Right. All we did was talk about what hurt and what could be wrong. And we did brain scans and we did all these things that weren’t helping me figure anything out.

[00:13:04] Jenny Swisher: And I remember leaving all those appointments thinking, well, why isn’t anybody asking why, like, why does my head hurt? Right. And so I think it really at the basics, basic level of this, in my mind, functional medicine addresses the why. Right. It’s not just the what’s wrong with you. What are your symptoms?

[00:13:21] Jenny Swisher: It’s why is your body talking to you the way that it is, right? Because a lot of times our symptoms are just our body’s way of crying out for help. So that’s my, you know, elementary school version of it, but I’d love to hear what you guys would say as far as what is functional medicine. And we’ll go, we’ll go ahead and merge into, you know, why people might want to consider a functional approach.

[00:13:41] Jenny Swisher: So Dr. Ng, I’ll start with you.

[00:13:44] Calvin Ng: Yeah. So I love what you said about the symptoms are the body’s way of crying for help. And something that I. that I piggyback on top of that is when we experience symptoms, it’s not necessarily that there’s something wrong with us, but perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned through your symptoms and the pain that we are going through, right?

[00:14:07] Calvin Ng: There is a lesson behind it. And if we, healing is essentially. Learning that message and learning that lesson. And now you’re in a different place, you’re in a different state. And now you can thrive because you are living a different life, right? So, for instance, going back into gluten, if somebody was, had celiacs, somebody had leaky gut, if somebody had a lot of gut issues and they were And they had inflammation because they were eating a bunch of gluten and they didn’t know it.

[00:14:37] Calvin Ng: Well, learning about their symptoms and learning about why they’re having those symptoms and then learning how to break through from them by going gluten free and managing that. Now they have gained, uh, a new lifestyle. And so with that, they have power. And with the power they can make that change and they can live a different life.

[00:14:57] Calvin Ng: So I, I really feel really empowered by, you know, what functional medicine does for a lot of people. At the core of it, I really think that it’s education. And I’ve always said that, that in, in my patient care, I tell people, I, I go, look, you’re. You’re, uh, you’re paying me for the knowledge, right? I’m a chiropractor.

[00:15:17] Calvin Ng: So I’m like, the adjustment is free, but you’re paying me for the knowledge. And I’m here to just teach you because doctor means docer in Latin and doctors is supposed to be your teacher, right? They’re not supposed to be your healer, right? You are the healer yourself. So at the core of it, What functional medicine really does for people is it helps empower them and gives them that ability so that they can learn more about their bodies.

[00:15:43] Calvin Ng: And I think that’s really the key message behind that. And it’s because mainstream medicine is sick care. Mainstream medicine is about you come in, you have pain, and I’m going to give you something. So that you can have less pain. Right? If you have a headache, I’m going to give you a headache medication.

[00:16:02] Calvin Ng: If you have high blood pressure, I’m going to give you a high blood pressure medication, cholesterol, diabetes, all these things. And the management and the treatment for Western medicine is really a band aid. And so when functional medicine comes in is Like you said, asking why this is happening in the first place, and then also how can we heal from it?

[00:16:26] Calvin Ng: Uh, and I think this approach is, is phenomenal for people because it’s such a breakthrough. Now. Is it that a lot of medical, uh, functional medicine practitioners are, you know, cash based? Um, yes, it is. And that’s a tragedy, I think, in our insurance and healthcare system going on right now. Because I believe that if we can invest upfront into our health, Right.

[00:16:53] Calvin Ng: We are going to mitigate. We’re going to reduce a lot of the long term costs that comes with situations where people get older and they have more complications and they need surgery. I mean, when you get into that, we’re talking about millions and millions of dollars per single patient. So I believe if we can make that mindset shift of investing in our health.

[00:17:17] Calvin Ng: Upfront right now doing the work right and insurance companies Allowing, you know reimbursement for this type of medicine, which I think they’re starting to do Right. I think that we’re going to have you know, uh better outcomes in turn and better health and also It’s also going to be more advantageous for the insurance company as well, too So I think that from a bigger vision, right?

[00:17:41] Calvin Ng: I see that.

[00:17:45] Jenny Swisher: Yeah, at least

[00:17:50] Jenny Swisher: Yeah, um,

[00:17:52] Elyse Wagner: so many things I want to add on to and I love. What you said, I’ll go back to kind of the my definition of functional medicine, which, you know, in my world through my lens, you know, we’re pairing two different worlds together. We’re pairing this world of functional medicine together and positive psychology.

[00:18:13] Elyse Wagner: Um, you know, and if you if you go back to what I had said earlier is right. Most doctors and. Nutritionists and etc. You could go on and on. Licensed providers, they’re trained in this illness model, right? And same with psychologists, right? Most traditional psychologists have been trained in this illness model.

[00:18:39] Elyse Wagner: What’s wrong with you? Let’s, let’s diagnose, you know, a mental health disorder, etc. The paradigm that we’re coming from is Well, what’s going well with you? What’s right? And what are your strengths? Um, when I look at functional medicine, you know, and, and when we play off of what that definition, what does functional medicine mean?

[00:19:01] Elyse Wagner: Well, it means a couple things. It’s evidenced based. So I’ll go into that in just a second. It is, um, it’s really about a relationship and a partnership with the provider, with the patient, um, Um, and now with the health coach, it’s about a collaboration and and really building in that, uh, positive therapeutic partnership.

[00:19:27] Elyse Wagner: Um, I was talking to a doctor in London yesterday who said, you know, my 20 years of doing that, that is probably the most significant thing about functional medicine is creating that relationship of if I don’t have that. I don’t really have anything. Um, I can’t, you know, quote unquote, get my clients or my patients to do anything right without that connection.

[00:19:49] Elyse Wagner: So, um, and it’s just it’s it’s really looking at a systems model. So it’s looking at the full. Um, whole real person from a bio psycho social level and beyond, even into the spiritual component as well. Um, and so that when I look, when I talk about functional medicine, those are kind of the elements that I bring in to, to discuss what this is functional medicine.

[00:20:16] Elyse Wagner: It’s really about asking why getting to the root cause. Um, some people, you know, talk about it as like peeling back the onion. Or going upstream, if you were to look at it as a, um, a nice tree, whereas conventional medicine is mostly focused, like Dr. Ng said, in the branches. You know, you’ve got your cardiology, nephrology, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:20:39] Elyse Wagner: Then you come back down to the roots. And you go upstream to figure out what is really going going on because everything is so interconnected, you know, so liver enzymes, right? Well, is it really just your liver? Should we just be giving you and treating the liver? Are there something going on much deeper with your hormones or with the way that you’re actually processing or, you know, what’s going on with your microbiome?

[00:21:03] Elyse Wagner: Are you even able to digest, you know, amino acids? Except anyways, you could go on and on, right? So, but, um, then when you bring in the world of positive psychology and health coaching, it’s again, that partnership, it’s. Um, bringing in this safe nonjudgmental space where people can actually hopefully make the shifts and the changes and, and try out, um, you know, what is going to work for them in their personal life because everyone’s so different and unique.

[00:21:35] Jenny Swisher: So, yeah, and just, just to tie into just to make this so real for people like, I mean, the first thing I say, I find myself saying this all the time, which is. There’s a quote out there and I don’t, I’m going to, you know, I don’t know who said it exactly, but it’s most people don’t know that they don’t realize how good their bodies are designed to feel.

[00:21:54] Jenny Swisher: So I think for me, like as a health coach of sorts, helping people for the last dozen years. I see this every single day where people reach out and they feel like they’re off, right? They just don’t have the energy. They don’t have the energy to keep up with their kids. Most are overweight, right? They’re struggling to lose the weight A lot of women come to me because they’re dealing with hormone imbalance issues and they’ve listened to my podcast or whatever and it’s just interesting because By just incorporating some simple things like not even looking at like food allergies necessarily or, or lab work or anything like that, that a functional medicine can really help with can really dive even deeper, just surface level things like helping them get better sleep, helping them hydrate better, helping them eat healthier food and change over to a more whole food diet, helping them move more.

[00:22:41] Jenny Swisher: Within weeks, they’re, they’re so changed and it’s not just their body’s changing, but like you’ve mentioned, their psychology is changing the way that they think about themselves, the way that they interact in the world, the relationships with other people. And so sometimes I think people listen to, um, you know, they, they hear this idea of functional medicine and they, they think it’s sort of like woo woo medicine.

[00:23:02] Jenny Swisher: Right. But from my own personal experience. I spent years in and out of neurologist offices. I saw between spinal specialists and neurologists, 14 different specialists in two and a half years, and nobody could figure me out. Everybody wanted to send me on to Mayo Clinic and Diamond Clinic and Cleveland Clinic and.

[00:23:20] Jenny Swisher: Um, I had every possible test done on my head. My head was what was hurting, right? So I had brain scan. I had brain MRIs. I had CTs. I had, um, Botox for migraine. I had a surgeon operate on my neck. I had four ablations of my neck for nerve. They thought it was nerve pain. Everything possible for my head, right?

[00:23:39] Jenny Swisher: And one meeting with a functional medicine doctor and they’re like, has anyone ever looked at your hormones? Has anyone ever looked at anything like in your endocrine system or sent you to an endocrinologist or anything? And I was like, no, I mean, I’ve told my OBGYN that my cycles are off. I have painful periods.

[00:23:55] Jenny Swisher: I have, you know, all these other things that were also happening, but no one had ever asked. Like, it was like, people were only looking at me from the neck up because that was what was hurting. And so to put a story behind what you guys are saying. This has been my experience, right, is this experience of this illness framework or the sick care as Dr.

[00:24:13] Jenny Swisher: Ng said, like walking into appointments at offices with doctors who they know a lot, they do know a lot about their specialty, right? But sometimes it’s like, we don’t need the specialty as much as we need to look at the whole person. And another thing that I wanted to mention too is, um, even just thinking about my own personal doctor.

[00:24:33] Jenny Swisher: She is an MD, but is also licensed in functional medicine. And we have become friends, um, sort of outside of just being her patient, but she knows me on a little bit more personal level. So she knows my life. She knows that I come from a personal training background. She knows I love exercise. She knows I’m type A, right?

[00:24:53] Jenny Swisher: She knows these things about me. And so last week when my daughter and I were sharing a virus, which seems to be the trend with kindergarten these days, um, I reached out to her and I was just like, I don’t know what’s going on. This is how I feel or whatever. And she was able to say to me, like, Have you, have you created margin for yourself?

[00:25:09] Jenny Swisher: Like, do you need to go have an overnight at a hotel and get away from your family for a night? Like you are too in control and you’re probably just so stressed over your daughter being sick that you’re not resting yourself. And so it was like to have, and it sounds so silly, but it’s like another type of example of this is when I was seeing a regular GP, right.

[00:25:29] Jenny Swisher: Going in and out, complaining of headaches, complaining of these issues. She knew nothing about me aside from that 20 minute appointment. And I’m not saying that you have to like become best friends with your practitioner, but I’m just saying that functional medicine does take a deeper look at not just your body and what’s going on underneath the surface, but they get to know you better.

[00:25:47] Jenny Swisher: Right. And so I’ve, I’ve shared this analogy before, and some people may not, um, this might even age myself a little bit, but I used to be obsessed with the show house, um, with Dr. House. And that’s in that time in my twenties, that’s what I was craving. I was craving a Dr. House. who would really like, he would go to my house and like, look for mold in the gutters, right?

[00:26:07] Jenny Swisher: Or he would like, try to figure out what was causing my, my disease. Cause I knew that if somebody would just look at my life differently, if they could just, if I could just remove myself and someone else look at it, they could figure out what my issues were. And so to me, that’s. That’s just, uh, you know, that’s what functional medicine does is it creates that relationship, um, you know, the appointments themselves are not 15 minutes long.

[00:26:29] Jenny Swisher: Usually a lot of time. There’s an in depth consultation there, but this idea of like, body awareness and knowing yourself, you know, Dr alluded to that, um. As a personal trainer, I can tell you that this is something that when people would walk into my doors in my gym, um, you know, you would tell them to do a squat and you would demonstrate a squat for them.

[00:26:49] Jenny Swisher: And I’d put my feet underneath my hips and I would do a proper squat. And then they would look at me, never looking at their own feet, and they would do what they thought was the same thing. And you look at them and you’re like, that is nothing like what I just did. Right? And so that’s what we call in the training world proprioception, like being aware of your body in space.

[00:27:07] Jenny Swisher: To me, um, this idea of what functional medicine teaches, this deeper level of body awareness is taking that to a deeper level. Like what’s going on inside your body? Are you dealing with food allergies that you might be unaware of that are causing your symptoms? Are you dealing with a hormone imbalance that’s perhaps causing you to have that extra weight gain that you can’t budge?

[00:27:26] Jenny Swisher: Right? Like there’s so many different things. So I’d love to hear from you, you know, just to give our listeners an example, what are some things that functional medicine looks at. Um, that is different from what these specialties or traditional medicine looks at. So what are some things that can be done to really help someone get to the root cause?

[00:27:49] Calvin Ng: So good. Um, so functional medicine, the difference in how the analysis of somebody’s health is really different. So in conventional medicine, you are, you go back, um, let’s just say every year, right? You go for your annual checkup. Everybody knows about that. And you get your blood pressure measured. You might get some lab work done, right?

[00:28:12] Calvin Ng: Your blood work. And then your blood work, it may be very minimal. And the reason why it’s very minimal is because number one, the insurance may not cover all of it. Um, your doctor may not know how to run a complete lab work, or they may not feel like it’s pertinent to your health. For instance, if you don’t have that many symptoms, And you tell your doctor, Hey, I want to run a thyroid panel, a full thyroid panel, right?

[00:28:39] Calvin Ng: So, and your thyroid is essentially the master hormone gland in the body. I tell people it’s the mother of all hormones and in your, for your thyroid, it’s very important because every single cell in your body responds to thyroid hormone and it is responsible for metabolism. So from, even if you have no symptoms, you should probably get a.

[00:29:02] Calvin Ng: baseline check of what your thyroid is doing. It’s a simple test. However, most doctors are not trained to understand what a thyroid panel is or how to interpret it. Um, and they may look at just one value and classically that’s something called thyroid stimulating hormone or TSH, which is not even a thyroid hormone.

[00:29:24] Calvin Ng: It is a pituitary hormone, which is a gland in your brain that tells your thyroid what to do. And so Basically, you know, in conventional medicine, we’re really not taught how to look at the body as a whole and to dive deep. What you’re really taught is how do I get to a diagnosis and how do I get to a treatment?

[00:29:46] Calvin Ng: And then how do I make sure that I’m getting reimbursed for it? And all my codes are aligned. Um, and unfortunately that is the care in functional medicine. The analysis is when you come in, we have to assess. And analyze your entire story like I really want to know what happened to you right where things have gone wrong if you’re feeling pain or if you have any dysfunction if you’re not I still want to know all the things about you and what you want to improve.

[00:30:15] Calvin Ng: I often ask people about their entire health history from birth, all the way to where they are at now, because even their childhood. um, is pertinent to what’s happening today. So I like to tell people that, you know, we will stop at nothing to, to figure out what’s going on. And there’s so many different types of testing from blood work, right?

[00:30:38] Calvin Ng: That’s analyzing your blood to stool analysis. That’s looking into your poop, uh, to a urinalysis, looking into your urine to. You know, imaging, x ray, M. R. I. S. And whatnot to, uh, genetic testing, looking at what your D. N. A. And how your genetic expression is to even doing things. What? What I do mostly in the clinic is kinesiology testing, which is something called muscle testing or what I call frequency testing.

[00:31:09] Calvin Ng: And that’s testing the bioenergetics of the body. To test the function in real time. So, um, which is a rabbit hole to go down into. So we have many different types of testing. And the reason why we have so many different types of testing is because you are trying to get to that root cause in what you don’t know, right?

[00:31:30] Calvin Ng: You, you just don’t know. So what you can’t find, you can’t fix. So the goal is really to find the thing. In your body or in your lifestyle that’s not functioning at 100 percent and get that thing functioning back at 100 percent and allow the body to heal itself because the body is a self healing machine.

[00:31:51] Calvin Ng: However, there may be roadblocks along in its way, right? There’s no incurable diseases, there’s incurable people. And if people are willing to go down that route, whether they like it or not, they’re going to still get better.

[00:32:06] Elyse Wagner: Love that and I’ll just add on to that a couple of things. Um, I think really what you’re saying to when you said when you just made that comment it I think it also comes back to a mindset, a belief system, you know, if you truly believe that your body can in your mind right can heal itself.

[00:32:26] Elyse Wagner: It will, and it can’t. And if you can’t, it probably will, right? So, um, a couple of the things I want to add on to that is, you know, functional medicine versus conventional medicine. We’re in a world where, I mean, there’s room for both, absolutely. And I don’t know if there’s a right or a wrong or a good or a bad.

[00:32:47] Elyse Wagner: I don’t think it’s even about that. It’s just, here’s what we have. Here are all the tools. What can we use to support This human being in front of us. Um, and also functional medicine, I think, is really about that. Like you said, Jenny, it’s about that human connection. You have a conversation. Your doctor actually knows you and can, you know, provide a little bit of that insight for you or see some of those blind spots and even just being able to listen, right?

[00:33:17] Elyse Wagner: I think so, so much of functional medicine is listening and, and actually really hearing and creating the space for that other person to speak and talk because how many minutes do you truly have in a conventional and traditional doctor’s office? seven, eight, nine, I don’t know, 10 if you’re lucky, I suppose.

[00:33:34] Elyse Wagner: Um, and then I’m curious, you know, how many times has your doctor actually a conventional practitioner actually sat down and sat with you shoulder to shoulder, eye to eye, or are they standing above you, you know, talking down to you? It’s so interesting, even just the, the dynamics and the energy in the room.

[00:33:56] Elyse Wagner: When you look at these two different models, um, a couple of the things I want to share is functional medicine in my mind is much more of a response, a very prudent response. Let’s think about this. Let’s look at this to Dr. Ng’s point. You know, we do a timeline, a functional medicine timeline, a functional medicine matrix.

[00:34:20] Elyse Wagner: How were you birthed? You know, was it vaginal? Was it natural? Or were you C section? Were you breastfed? Were you not, you know, tell me about some of the traumas that happen. All of this is information and information is knowledge. It just, it helps us to, uh, connect the dots if you will. So I think functional medicine takes a much more preventative As well as long term sustainable approach, whereas in my personal experience with conventional medicine, it’s very much reactionary.

[00:34:51] Elyse Wagner: Here you go. Let’s do this. And transactional. Like don’t care to really make a relationship idea. I just want to get on with my day. I got 50 other patients. I have to see. Um, and the last thing I’ll say, because I could talk about this forever. Um, I think this is a really important concept, and it’s one that I don’t think it’s really talked about very much.

[00:35:13] Elyse Wagner: Conventional and traditional medicine in my mind is very outer directed. It is teaching us to look outside ourselves that we don’t have the answers. We’re not enough. We have to consult with someone else. And certainly, you know, there are plenty of people who do have that knowledge and can support them around the way, uh, along the way, but functional medicine and specifically with functional medicine, health coaching, and positive psychology, it takes the lens of.

[00:35:41] Elyse Wagner: The person sitting across from us is the expert in their own life. How could I be the expert in your life, Jenny? I don’t know. I don’t, I don’t live in your body or in your mind, you know? And so that’s the modality. That’s the framework. That’s the mindset and philosophy we take. And so it’s a much more outer, excuse me, inner directed approach and.

[00:36:04] Elyse Wagner: I think that’s where you get the sustainable long term results because what’s happening at a deeper level is that people are actually one. When will it take a functional medicine health coaching approach? We’re holding that space. And essentially what we’re sharing with other person is you’re worthy and you’re deserving.

[00:36:25] Elyse Wagner: Of God of love of whatever you want to call it, you know, you’re worthy and of health and because you say you are and the other piece of that is, um, we see people make the changes because they want to not because they’re told to and often these changes last longer because they’re internally motivated.

[00:36:46] Elyse Wagner: You know, health coaches don’t motivate, they’re not there. Like, I think that’s a different conception of health coaches. Like, yeah, we’re just cheerleaders or we’re out there. Rah, rah, like, yes. And I mean, there’s so much more, um, Encouraging, but it’s really much more on a deeper level of holding that space as someone can make those shifts and changes in their life.

[00:37:09] Elyse Wagner: So,

[00:37:10] Jenny Swisher: yeah. Yeah. And it makes me think too, of just, you know, I mean, I wrote down while you were talking, you know, you are your own best doctor. Like I say that so often, like you are your own best doctor and even regardless of what type of doctor you’re meeting with, whether it’s functional medicine or traditional medicine.

[00:37:27] Jenny Swisher: That doctor is basing everything off of what you tell them, right? And so there have been so many times where I’ve said to my husband, um, here’s a great example because I do still suffer from migraines occasionally. They’re very cyclical. Um, I have a neurologist and the neurologist is because I have one abortive medication that I need for myself to take once every three months or whatever.

[00:37:49] Jenny Swisher: And, um, when I. So I have this neurologist and this is sort of a side story. The first time I ever met with him, I had to go to him because in order for insurance to approve the medication I had, it had to be prescribed by a neurologist. So that’s interesting in itself. But when I went to see him, I actually took in, um, all of my hormone work, like blood work.

[00:38:10] Jenny Swisher: And I was just like, I just wanted to show this to you because I’m sure you see a lot of women who suffer from migraines. And I just wanted to share and see if you had any additional perspective. And also just to tell you that if you don’t, this is what’s going on with me. So maybe it’s something to look into with other people.

[00:38:25] Jenny Swisher: And he, he like flipped through the papers and he goes, I have no idea how to read this. I don’t know what this is. He said, I’m going to refer you back to your GP for this. And like, he literally was very open and honest about the fact that like, he’s trained in neurology, he’s not trained in endocrinology.

[00:38:40] Jenny Swisher: Um, so that’s just sort of a side note, but I, he, he, that day that I was in the office, I left so frustrated because I was told. He was like, have you tried and he literally listed about 11 different medications. Have you tried this? Have you tried this? Have you tried this? Have you tried this? Have you tried this injection?

[00:38:56] Jenny Swisher: Have you tried that? And I was after he asked me so many of them. I said, look, I’m not here because I want to try anything. I don’t want to do any of these things. Like I’m here because this one medication that I know works for me in an emergency situation is what I need. And he was like, okay, well, there’s no reason for you to come back.

[00:39:13] Jenny Swisher: There’s no reason for a follow up. Um, just let us know when you need the medication and we’ll, we’ll put the order through. So that’s literally the purposes of this doctor for me. And I share that because I remember having a conversation with him that day about like, about, you know, what I was struggling with and telling him, you know, like, well, because I started.

[00:39:32] Jenny Swisher: Progesterone supplementation and I’m starting to detoxify my liver and I was explaining to him the different types of things that I was doing for my estrogen dominance and my triggers behind my migraine. He just kind of looked at me and I remember telling my husband, like, it was like a foreign language, but it was also interesting because I came away from that experience.

[00:39:52] Jenny Swisher: Thinking like whatever I would have told him, like I could have led him to whatever conclusion I wanted to lead him to. Does that make sense? Like, I hope I’m taking this in the right direction. Like you are so influential and what your doctor decides for you. Right. I see this with my parents. Like now that my parents are aging and I’m attending doctor’s appointments with them, right.

[00:40:09] Jenny Swisher: If my mom goes in, like she’s gone and she went in the other day to her cardiologist, she’s been really worried about her low heart rate. That was what the whole conversation was about. So of course he wants to put her on different medication. He wants to change her medication. So everything about what the outcome of that appointment is, is based on what she’s telling them.

[00:40:25] Jenny Swisher: So to me, like coming back to this idea of root cause and peeling back the onion, what are you aware of that you’re telling the doctor that’s leading you down the path that you’re going down? So how can we broaden that awareness? How can we make you more aware of what’s going on in your body? You know, a great example of this is women understanding their menstrual cycles, right?

[00:40:44] Jenny Swisher: That’s what I teach with my course. 90 percent of the women that come into my course, when I say, what day of your cycle are you on? They’re like, what, like, what does that mean? Um, I had my period on October 1st, you know, and I’m like, okay, so then you’re on day 17 or what, you know, I tell them, but they don’t understand their menstrual cycle.

[00:41:00] Jenny Swisher: And so if you don’t understand your menstrual cycle, and then you’re going into your OBGYN appointment, and you’re only, you’re only giving that OBGYN like this much information about what’s going on with you, because you don’t understand yourself. Does that make sense? And so again, coming back to this idea of like, you are your own best doctor.

[00:41:15] Jenny Swisher: And so educating yourself on your unique body and the different things, not just symptoms, but they’re just the different nuances of your body is so powerful. Um, one thing, one thing that Dr. Ng and I had spoken about on the podcast interview. And this is something that’s come up in my other interviews for the virtual summit as well, is this idea of sort of starting with inflammation, like starting with helping people become less inflamed, which I think ties perfectly into what we’ve already mentioned in food as medicine.

[00:41:44] Jenny Swisher: So I’d really like to touch on like, again, this idea of how simple can we be, right? Like, let’s bring it back to what if it really is something simple? Um, let’s, let’s dive into this topic of sort of reducing inflammation and food as medicine.

[00:41:59] Calvin Ng: Absolutely. So in the past 100 years, right? We have probably 1910.

[00:42:07] Calvin Ng: We have industrialization and, uh, modern day farming practices and modern food industries. And what, what now what we have is a processed lifestyle. In fact, everything really about our lifestyle today is highly manufactured, highly processed, um, yeah. You know, we, we, I like to say that we are, we have ancient bodies living in a modern day world.

[00:42:33] Calvin Ng: And if we go all the way back to the beginning of us and where we came from, that looks a whole lot different from today. And so to understand that is really important because a lot of people get confused as to go, what’s wrong with me and what meditation, what medication do I need to take? Do I need surgery and all these things?

[00:42:54] Calvin Ng: And I go, look. The first simple thing, the first thing that we should do is go back to our nature is to go back to our fundamental truth. Um, and health is really like a birthright, but we don’t live in that, you know, same environment anymore. So you go to the grocery store and so many things in there, right?

[00:43:15] Calvin Ng: Majority of the things in there are processed. And you have to seek out the whole food and you gotta, you know, it’s the cliche saying of what would my grandparents or my great grandparents, what would they eat and how would they eat, right? Most likely they’re going to be, you know, uh, shopping from, you know, like a local farmer or they get their groceries or their food locally, um, from a farm or from a, from a place where.

[00:43:43] Calvin Ng: There’s not a lot of processing involved. We have had, you know, just an, a ridiculous amount of. seed oils, processed seed oils put into our food, processed sugar put into our food. And now we have like lab grown food, which is, uh, I think ridiculous. So this idea of, you know, it’s, it’s not that complicated and the process lifestyle really causes us to have.

[00:44:08] Calvin Ng: Increased levels of inflammation and inflammation is at the core of pretty much every single disease or dysfunction. When your body is not working right, it’s going to become inflamed. It is a normal human response, normal, uh, immune response when the body is sick. And we live in this, uh, society currently our lifestyle that breeds the sickness.

[00:44:32] Calvin Ng: So the most simple thing that we can do is, is eat whole foods. Now there are nuances. within that because people have food sensitivities and if their, if their gut system is not working correctly, if they have leaky gut, if they have all these types of issues, there are certain foods that they may not want to be eating.

[00:44:50] Calvin Ng: But however, if you’re eating vegetables, right, if you, you know, shopping for organic. is a place to start. If you’re eating meat, right? Pasture raised, grass fed, right? Shopping from a local, local place, uh, butchery would be great. Um, if you are doing anything that comes in a box, that’s probably not the best idea, even if it says organic or gluten free or, you know, sugar free in there.

[00:45:18] Calvin Ng: And it’s because a machine has created it. And through this processing, You know, our bodies were not designed. These are not native to how our physiology functions. So, you know, when we do the things that are not normal for a human body, for instance, if you were to give a dog, nobody, people treat their dogs better than they treat themselves sometimes.

[00:45:40] Calvin Ng: But if, but if you have a dog, You wouldn’t give them necessarily cat food. You wouldn’t give them fish food. You wouldn’t give them, um, sometimes we don’t even give them like human food. Right. And you understand you go, I’m going to give them dog food. I’m going to give them, okay, well, what are they eating?

[00:45:58] Calvin Ng: They might eat a raw diet. I’m going to give them meat because we understand that if I give the dog the wrong type of food, that’s not for a dog. That they’re going to get sick, but humans don’t do that. You know, we just think, okay, if it’s in the grocery store, this is considered human food, but no, the thing that comes in the box is not human food.

[00:46:16] Calvin Ng: So I think as a, just at a high level of global picture, right, going back to whole foods is so important in decreasing our inflammation.

[00:46:26] Elyse Wagner: Yeah. Yeah. So many things I want to add on to that as well. And I, I think food is a wonderful place to start when we talk about inflammation. I look at this from a, um, gosh, you could look at it from a 30, 000 foot view down to this tiny, you know, tiny little view.

[00:46:43] Elyse Wagner: But I, I look at food. Um, I look at thoughts as well. Can, are your thoughts inflaming? Are you, you know, we have these things. I mean, there’s different numbers flying out there. 70, 80, 90, 000 thoughts a day. Most of those thoughts are the same thoughts we thought yesterday. Most of those thoughts, about 70 percent of those thoughts, if not more, probably more are negative.

[00:47:06] Elyse Wagner: Um, if we really were to kind of take out a thought and observe it, look at it. Um, and there’s this wonderful, uh, book and an amazing field of research by Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, and she’s in the positive psychology field. She talks about to every one negative event that we have in order to kind of balance that out.

[00:47:30] Elyse Wagner: We need three heartfelt, like really authentic positive experiences. And so the functional medicine health coach perspective within me. Would love to just ask questions, you know, for example, like, well, what is just one thing that you could take away from this conversation if you wanted to start with your food?

[00:47:53] Elyse Wagner: What’s one whole real food you could eat today? What’s one, um, positive? You know, nourishing or serving thought for you today is that thought of God, I’m just so tired or, oh my gosh, this is like, my work is just so draining, right? Whatever it is, is that thought actually really serving you? Is it nourishing you or is it creating more of what you don’t want?

[00:48:17] Elyse Wagner: And so inflammation can truly come in many different forms from the physiological, whether it’s. Food, water, air, you know, honestly, even the supplements some people take, it’s not, those can be very inflaming to people if they don’t quite know, and you don’t know what you don’t know, right? Your thoughts can be inflaming, um, did I say air?

[00:48:39] Elyse Wagner: You know, I mean, what you have in your household. I mean, so many things that can almost make you be like, what is going on? Why am I even living, right? Like, I can’t even get away from it. But the one thing that I just want to encourage. Um, is to say that the one thing you absolutely have control over is yourself and your choices and your mindset, you know?

[00:49:00] Elyse Wagner: And also to think about if you can’t get the pasture raised, the grass fed, the organic, because I get it. Those things come with a price tag instead of dwelling on that and making it this absolute or this perfect. Right? Like, Oh, I can’t do that. I might as well just throw it in, just grab the Cheetos. You know, ask yourself, well, what, what can I do?

[00:49:24] Elyse Wagner: What, what, uh, could I do? What can make this possible? What’s a step in that direction? Um, you know, and, and take that step, right? So those are my two

[00:49:34] Jenny Swisher: cents about that. Yeah. I love that. Cause it simplifies it down into like, you know, what is one thing that I can do today that can move me forward, right?

[00:49:42] Jenny Swisher: Whether that’s incorporating an affirmation that you repeat throughout the day, or like you said, or, or saying, okay. I have, it’s amazing to me how many people, uh, grown adults come to me for accountability and support with their health. And most of them say, you know, honestly, if I’m being completely transparent, they’ll say I have the diet of like a third grader, like I’m so picky, you know, a lot of them will admit, like.

[00:50:04] Jenny Swisher: I don’t like vegetables, you know, I go to the Mexican restaurant and I order the fajitas without the peppers and onions, you know, I just want the chicken cheese and tortillas. Like, I have so many people who, and I came into it the same way. I mean, at least we talked on my podcast about, like, I was a hamburger helper box taco girl in my early twenties.

[00:50:22] Jenny Swisher: Right. And so, but again, if you, if you, when people start to learn about environmental toxins and household cleaners that are in their house and foods that are perhaps causing inflammation in the body and. It can be overwhelming to the point where they’re just like, there’s so much that I don’t even know where to begin.

[00:50:39] Jenny Swisher: And so it’s like, okay, well, what is. A fruit or vegetable that you like, and let’s next time you go to the grocery, let’s get it and let’s start to incorporate that into your day. Right. Let’s see if we can add in something else to like, after you get that under your belt and you’re starting to eat that fruit or vegetable, like, it’s almost like the same thing I do with my children.

[00:50:56] Jenny Swisher: Right. I take them with me to the grocery store and I say. Let’s pick one thing to try. Right. And all you have to, we can try, we’ll try it three different ways. Right. But the other day we cut up, um, I like parsnip fries. They like to eat them as fries. I was like, let’s try them different ways. Like, let’s try them in the oven roasted and let’s, you know, try them these other ways.

[00:51:12] Jenny Swisher: And a lot of times they’ll say, no, they don’t like it, but at least we’ve tried it. Right. And we’re experiencing what it feels like to really just. Eat real food. And so I have a blog post that I did years ago, and it’s one of the most trafficked blog posts that I have. And it’s called why adults need to grow up.

[00:51:28] Jenny Swisher: And it’s all about this idea of like, we’re too smart now, like as adults to know, we know what’s good for us, but somehow we still avoid it. We still grab the Oreos or the Cheez Its or, or the Cheetos, right? Because that’s what sounds good to us. We, it’s almost like we’ve been cultured in to this like boxed food thing.

[00:51:43] Jenny Swisher: And it’s kind of coming back to what Dr. Ng said about oils. I just want to touch on that for a moment. It, as someone who is an ingredient label reader, like I’m the girl who walks through Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods and every, I turn everything around, like, I’m sure anybody who followed me through the grocery would be like, what is she doing?

[00:51:58] Jenny Swisher: I turned everything around to look at what’s on it. And I’m telling you, it is hard to find some anything in the package section of the grocery that does not have these refined, highly inflammatory oils. And, you know, I have, I have two children, two, two years old and six years old and they go, you know, my kindergarteners in school, she sees other kids bringing like chips and things in their lunches and she’s asking for that kind of thing.

[00:52:22] Jenny Swisher: We’ve been able to find two brands, two brands of something that’s. Like a cracker or something that is real ingredients that doesn’t have the refined oils. It is hard to find. We also have dairy allergy in our house. Two of the four of us have a high dairy sensitivity, myself included. It’s amazing to me how many people, like, she had her school teacher gave her a package of Plain, original goldfish crackers.

[00:52:45] Jenny Swisher: She’s never had goldfish crackers. Um, and, I, like, She had a bellyache that day, and I ended up talking to the teacher, and I said, She can’t have them, because they’re made with milk. And she said, Oh, well, we made sure to give her the original that don’t, that don’t, they’re not cheddar. And I said, Yeah, but if you turn around the package, it says that they’re baked with milk.

[00:53:02] Jenny Swisher: It says contains milk. So, you know, society in general just has this lack of awareness of understanding what’s in our food. We fall victim to marketing, right? Well, it says paleo, or it says, uh, my mom says this all the time. Well, it says natural, I bought the natural ketchup. I’m like, yeah, but you know, so let’s talk about that.

[00:53:22] Jenny Swisher: Like, let’s talk about what it means to really understand your food better. Cause I think if people can become more aware and they turn around that ingredient label, they’re going to be like, Oh, this is causing a lot of problem for me, right? So maybe staying more toward the produce section of the grocery store is the better place to be.

[00:53:39] Jenny Swisher: Yeah,

[00:53:40] Calvin Ng: absolutely. I really like what you said there is that, you know, you’re the person you, you think you’re the crazy person when you’re in the grocery store and turning everything over and putting it back and then, um, you know, or you go to the restaurant and you’re asking like, Hey, what, what oils are you cooking with?

[00:53:58] Calvin Ng: What’s in this? What’s it contaminated with? I have an allergy. Um, can you make sure it’s not, you know, you, you almost feel bad and we feel bad because It’s it’s it’s not normal, right? It’s or it’s out of the norm, but that is the normal. That should be the normal. You are actually being normal. You are looking out for your own body.

[00:54:21] Calvin Ng: You’re looking out for your health, right? The same way how people go in to a place and they ask, well, how much is it? Well, can I get a discount? Well, is there. Is there a coupon on it? Is there a deal? Um, can I save on this? Do I really need the extra large? Can I get like a smaller one and save money? I mean, you are looking out for your finances, but we don’t do that when we, when we think about our health.

[00:54:43] Calvin Ng: Uh, and many times we often, you know, put our finances above our health and, you know, I’m not blaming anyone. for that. But you know, it’s just is the way it is in society. And we have to be hyper aware of these things. And sometimes it can be overwhelming for a lot of people going like, well, I don’t even know where to start.

[00:55:00] Calvin Ng: So let me just get a little bit more myopic here and just go. I think the number one thing that people really need to do when it comes to their diet and their nutrition is avoiding these processed seed oils, like you talked about, right? Like your soybean oils, your sunflower, safflower, canola, vegetable oil, margarine.

[00:55:20] Calvin Ng: All these types of processed, uh, seed and vegetable oils are highly inflammatory for the body. It causes an imbalance in your omegas. And some people have heard that before, some people have not, but basically we have gone through, um, this society in the past a hundred years and really just jacked up our omega sixes versus our omega threes.

[00:55:44] Calvin Ng: And when you cause this imbalance, Now you cause more inflammation, you cause the cells to break down, you cause a situation called insulin resistance, which is basically think of it like type 2 diabetes, and that is at the core of so many people’s problems coming out of COVID 19. 2 percent of people are metabolically unhealthy, meaning that they potentially might have some level of insulin resistant or metabolic syndrome.

[00:56:12] Calvin Ng: Basically, their cells are not processing correctly. They’re not metabolizing correctly. This is an inflammatory state. And so many diseases come at this level. And so I think from a nutrition standpoint, if people can avoid those oils, if that’s like the one thing that they do, right. If they learn about these oils and they flip over that box, that can, that jar, and they look for those oils and they go, Oh, this is, this is in there.

[00:56:40] Calvin Ng: I’m not going to do this. Right. And they go and look for those two brands that don’t have that. Right. I think that people can do much better on that and then everything else. You know, falls into place. Most people know I’m supposed to eat, you know, clean. I’m, I’m supposed to eat whole foods, but I think a lot of people don’t understand much about, you know, the seed oils.

[00:56:59] Calvin Ng: And so that that’s the one thing I think people need to really understand.

[00:57:04] Jenny Swisher: Yeah. And I also, I just want to say really quickly, I also think that Um, I see this frequently to where most people aren’t they don’t they don’t know how to prepare vegetables in different ways. I grew up on a farm. We had a cattle farm and so it was steak or hamburger almost every single night.

[00:57:22] Jenny Swisher: And I remember actually the funny side story, when I was about 16 years old I stood up at the dinner table and I was like I think I just want to be a vegetarian I can’t handle this steak and potato thing again. And my dad sent me to my room. So that’ll tell you about my childhood. Um, he was like, never, you will never be a vegetarian.

[00:57:38] Jenny Swisher: He sent me to my room. Now my dad, uh, uses only coconut milk. They’re completely dairy free. They don’t eat gluten. Like we’ve made some phenomenal progress since I was 16. Um, but all that to say that, you know, I think that a lot of people, like for me, the vegetables that were in our house growing up. Were things like, I mean, I can remember eating, um, broccoli that was microwaved in the, in the microwave, like steamed broccoli, and then Velveeta cheese, like covered all over the top of it.

[00:58:05] Jenny Swisher: Right. Um, that was about the only way I would eat it. And. Otherwise, the vegetables that we had were, I mean, French fries were like a classic vegetable, potatoes were a classic vegetable. So when you introduce this idea, like when you, even just for 30 something or 40 something, uh, year old adults, when you say, well, have you tried roasting Brussels sprouts with like sea salt and olive oil?

[00:58:24] Jenny Swisher: They’re like, Oh, Brussels sprouts, or, you know, they have this bad connotation. And then you, you tell them how to do it and you explain how simple it is. And nine times out of 10, they’re like, it was actually pretty good. Right. Or they start to notice like. Wow, I was so much more satiated. I didn’t have those cravings.

[00:58:39] Jenny Swisher: Well, you’re giving your body what it needs, right? When your body can eat 4, 000 french fries before it’s ever going to feel full because your body, your brain is telling it, keep eating, keep eating, keep eating, as opposed to you’ve gotten that nutrient. Fulfilled as opposed to a banana. If I hand you a banana, you’re going to probably eat the banana.

[00:58:56] Jenny Swisher: If I hand you a second banana, you’re going to be like, no thanks. Right. The banana is filling a nutrient void and it’s, it’s enough. Right. And so, um, I always tell my daughter, I’m like, you know, we want to eat the foods in the grocery store that have no label, a pair is a pair, a banana as a banana, you know, a sweet potato was a sweet potato.

[00:59:13] Jenny Swisher: There’s no ingredient label and we call them the foods that God made. Um, and I know that everybody has different spiritualities, but for us, it’s just easy to say. We eat the food that God made and, um, are even doing a lot in, in the realm of like growing our own food in the summer. That was a new initiative that we took here.

[00:59:30] Jenny Swisher: It was so simple. Right. And that’s something that, um, I’ll make sure to link up in the show notes, but my interview with Dr. Michelle Jorgenson, where she talks about self-sustainable living and how you can really do that sort of thing much more easier than you think. So before we run out of time, I mean, I just want to just, you know, re encourage this idea of proactive versus reactive wellness.

[00:59:49] Jenny Swisher: And as someone who my father was diagnosed with cancer when I was 12 years old, um, and he was given 2 weeks to live. He’s still with us to this day. And so I, none of this has ever meant to like shame traditional medicine. I believe traditional medicine saved my dad’s life. I mean, he had a bone marrow transplant, um, emergency medicine is incredible.

[01:00:09] Jenny Swisher: Like there’s, I think we need a world where like Dr. Egan said at the very beginning, where everybody can just. Beautifully work together to, to figure out not only root cause, but treatments for things like illnesses and cancers and that, and that kind of stuff too. Um, but I, I want to end with this. And I think it’s important that we address it because I have a feeling that people listening, if I had to think like, what’s the most common objection, like what is in the back of someone’s mind right now as to why they wouldn’t pursue this, um, it would probably come back to this idea of cost and insurance coverage and.

[01:00:43] Jenny Swisher: You know, but not being the norm, right? To see like a functional specialist, um, that’s not covered on insurance. And so I want to touch on that briefly because I, I do think it’s important just from a personal perspective in my twenties, when I had that two and a half journey, I always call it the journey of hell, like two and a half year saga of chronic migraine going in and out of doctor’s offices.

[01:01:04] Jenny Swisher: I did, like I said before, the, the Botox and the different pharmaceuticals and the surgeries. Um, my husband and I spent in two years, just under 20, 000. It was around 10, 000 each year. Now, every doctor I saw was covered on my insurance. Unfortunately, I had to see a lot of them and I had to do a lot of different procedures and I had to use a lot of different medications that were really only touching my symptoms, right?

[01:01:28] Jenny Swisher: They weren’t addressing my root cause. When I started seeing a functional medicine practitioner, yes, I did spend a few hundred dollars out of pocket. I did spend a few hundred dollars to have testing done that I hadn’t had done before that wasn’t covered on my insurance. But I’m at a place now, as I enter the age of 39, Where I see her once a year, like to check in sometimes twice a year.

[01:01:48] Jenny Swisher: I do a twice a year Dutch analysis on my hormones. I know what my weak links are or tend to be. I also now know how good my body’s meant to feel. And so when something is off, I know, I know what, you know, Hey, I got a red flag here, something’s going on. So I know dr. Ian, you had said on, on our podcast interview, like your goal is not necessarily to re.

[01:02:08] Jenny Swisher: You’d like to see somebody on a recurring basis, right? Like your goal is to help them get to a place where yes, you have that relationship and they can, they can come back and you continue to serve them and check in. But the idea isn’t to keep bringing them back and trying different drugs and different, different, different things like that.

[01:02:23] Jenny Swisher: So I want to touch on this idea of. You know, proactive versus reactive wellness and how that how the financial piece fits in, like why people should be thinking about the proactive approach

[01:02:34] Calvin Ng: instead. Yeah. So for a lot of people, I think it’s easy for them to understand when it comes to, like I said, their finances.

[01:02:43] Calvin Ng: So just like retirement, right? And it’s estimated that like, if you start, um, putting some money away, just, you know, not even a lot. I forgot what the numbers are, but it’s not even a lot at all. Um, the average person can do it. Even people living in poverty can do it is that if they start at age 25 and they just put a little bit away into their retirement account, And they grow that and then, you know, you add in some compound interest in there and whatnot.

[01:03:09] Calvin Ng: Right. But through the multiplication from time and interest, uh, by the time you’re going to retire, you’ll be a millionaire. So, which is really encouraging for a lot of young folks, right? And it’s just the idea of going like, Hey, if you set a little bit here, right? If you take away that upfront, if you, if you invest a little bit upfront, right?

[01:03:31] Calvin Ng: You ultimately, right. Later on, if you have some delayed gratification, right. You will actually go to a place where you’re a lot better and a lot more well off. So. When we understand that about, you know, finances, we can, we can translate that into our health going, okay, well, if I invest, right, some, some dollars into, you know, seeking out for this type of care, if I invest money into, you know, making sure that my family is eating things that are not ridden with seed oils or pesticides or, you know, cooking, uh, or bringing in, you know, high quality food or better quality food, right?

[01:04:09] Calvin Ng: If I invest a little bit upfront, then that saves me a whole lot from potentially a debilitating disease, a terminal illness, right? Uh, that can cost not just money, but can cost time, can cost energy, uh, emotions, right? So, I mean, just to give you some numbers, we, we got, we looked at our, my, when my dad got a liver transplant.

[01:04:36] Calvin Ng: And, uh, the bill was like in the millions when it comes to insurance, it is crazy. And that was, that was, that was one day of decline and, uh, one week of in, in, in like the ICU or one or two in the ICU. And then you, and in another month in like, um, a skilled nursing facility and the bill was in the millions.

[01:04:59] Calvin Ng: So just like that, right. Things can change. You know, all of a sudden, and let’s just say if you didn’t have insurance, who’s going to pay for that, right? It would bankrupt the family. Uh, so it’s really tragic, you know, and not only that, like I said, it’s not always about the money, but the time that you spend, the emotional headspace and all of those things are very important.

[01:05:20] Calvin Ng: So if we can understand that, we just Like you said, if we do the little things to move the needle forward, you know, today, right. And we put up that upfront costs, right. Our life would be so much better later on. And people really have to understand that long term vision. Um, can’t emphasize that enough.

[01:05:40] Elyse Wagner: Yeah. I think, you know, we, you have to be your biggest advocate. Absolutely. No one besides you typically. Going to be encouraging wanting to move you forward. I mean, so it’s really got to come from within and you know, I think about it like a pendulum. We’re kind of really come quite a far away from where we started or maybe where we quote unquote should be, which I don’t even know where that should be.

[01:06:07] Elyse Wagner: Um, but as we start to kind of move back and everyone’s going to be Okay. you know, doing this at their own time, at their own level, at their own pace. Um, you know, one of the ways I think we stay where we’re, where we’re at is because it’s easy. It’s easy for people and shifting away is going to be different.

[01:06:27] Elyse Wagner: It’s going to be a little bit, um, dare I say, you know, difficult, hardest change. I don’t necessarily believe that, but. Some people do and so it’s going to take some, some time, some grace, some support, you know, wellness has the word we in it, I really believe that you’re, you’re supposed to do this with community, you don’t have to do it alone, illness has the word I in it, you know, we make ourselves, I do believe this, ill, there’s nothing, you know, that happens to us, it’s, it’s, illness is outside of us, wellness is within, and so, um, I, I guess I would leave with this because I think Dr.

[01:07:06] Elyse Wagner: Ng, you said that really beautifully. I love that analogy of kind of like the health savings account, if you will, um, you know, whatever it is that you just absolutely love to do and enjoy, you know, ask yourself, why is that so important for you? What’s important about that in your life? Is it the kids? Is it, you know, seeing your grandkids, seeing your children grow up?

[01:07:29] Elyse Wagner: Is it because you just love going on walks every day and being in beautiful nature? But what is that? And if you have your health? You know, what would that mean to you? And oftentimes, you know, really think about it. You can kind of put yourself for a moment in a space of illness, can see yourself kind of on your, you know, in a death bed.

[01:07:47] Elyse Wagner: I know that sounds like really extreme, but what is it going to take for you to create that internal motivation? To say, uh, yeah, I’m gonna I’m gonna invest in myself right now. Um, because really being sick does cost a lot of money. I was talking to a girlfriend of mine. It just made my heart break for her.

[01:08:07] Elyse Wagner: Her grandfather’s in an assisted living home. He’s declining. It costs. 17, 000 a month, a month to live in a place like this. That’s they’re getting very crappy food, processed food. They’re not getting a lot of care. I mean, if I were to look at some of the real estate in downtown Chicago, I could get a pretty nice place for 17 K a month.

[01:08:29] Elyse Wagner: I think, you know, it just breaks my heart. Like, wow, 17, 000 a month. You think about if we could, you know, invest in other areas of wellness.

[01:08:40] Jenny Swisher: Yeah, absolutely. And, yeah, well, and I just, I have to share this analogy as we wrap up and I know Dr. Ng, you have a hard stop. So we’ll wrap this up quickly. I, we have neighbors on either side of us.

[01:08:50] Jenny Swisher: We live in a subdivision and my husband and I were just talking about this the other day and I think this is a perfect way to wrap up. Both sets of our neighbors are retired, um, over the age of 60. And in my, in my mind, like I love these people, right? They’ve, they’ve become almost like family to us. As far as health is concerned, two polar opposites.

[01:09:10] Jenny Swisher: On one side of our house we have, um, their grandparents, their, their granddaughter lives in, in another state, uh, the grandmother travels and goes back and forth to help with the child, um, very independent. They walk, we live on a lake so they walk the lake every day around two and a half miles, three miles a day, they walk together, they plant their own garden in the summers.

[01:09:31] Jenny Swisher: We’ve had conversations about gluten free, dairy free, how they eat, right, anti inflammatory foods. The other side of us, um, again, love them like family. Just totally different, um, highly inactive, um, always inviting us over for alcohol parties and, and very much into sort of like the party scene and all that kind of stuff.

[01:09:50] Jenny Swisher: And it’s just, it’s just different. It’s just different. And it’s when you, when you live right in the middle of those 2 worlds, you can see the differences versus of proactive wellness versus reactive wellness, right? Of, of making that extra time in your day to. You know, sit down and eat your meal and eat it slowly and eat the right whole foods and to exercise your body and to set your mindset like those small things.

[01:10:12] Jenny Swisher: Sometimes they don’t take a lot of time or effort, but they compound so that you have a better quality of life. If we don’t have our health, we have nothing. So I have a feeling that people tuned in today because they wanted to learn more about what functional medicine is, why it matters, why it’s on the rise, why people are.

[01:10:26] Jenny Swisher: Finally, seeing that why matters more than what, and, um, I’m so grateful that both of you have taken time out of your day to do this, I will make sure, of course, to link up all of your information for both of you, um, so that people can access that easily here within the virtual summit, but I just want to say thank you so much for doing this.

[01:10:43] Jenny Swisher: Um, grateful for both of you and thank you for putting your minds together and bringing this awesome content to everybody today.

[01:10:49] Jenny Swisher: So there you have it, my friends. Such a good deep dive into the topic of How functional medicine really differs from most traditional medicine. I have loved getting to know both Elise and Calvin. I have other interviews with them here on the podcast from 2023. I’ll make sure to link those up for you guys in the show notes, but I hope you learned something today.

[01:11:06] Jenny Swisher: I hope you’ll share this out with your friends and family. Ultimately, I hope you also go sign up for the free virtual summit. You can find that at Sync dot Jenny Swisher. com slash virtual summit. You’ll get even more content just like this. So let’s kick off the new year with a bang, understanding functional wellness as we dive deeper into some amazing upcoming interviews until next time, my friends.

[01:11:26] Jenny Swisher: We’ll talk soon. Bye bye.

[01:11:28]