Dr. Jeffrey Rediger is a Harvard trained medical doctor and is the author of Cured: The life-changing science of spontaneous healing. Today, Brodie and Jeff talk about the underlying lifestyle factors that hinder recovery and contribute to pain throughout the body. In relation to running, we discuss why some runners struggle to overcome their running-related injuries and are unable to achieve a pain-free state. Dr. Rediger discusses his 4 pillars to spontaneous healing, including Nutrition, Immune System, Stress & Identify. We unpack all these and how it applies to the running population. This is a fascinating conversation if you are interested on persistant pain and how to overcome it. Link here to Jeff's Instagram @drjeffreyrediger and also his website. Don't forget to check out his book Cured: The life-changing science of spontaneous healing Become a patron! Receive Run Smarter Emails Book a FREE Injury chat with Brodie Run Smarter App IOS or Android Podcast Facebook group Run Smarter Course with code 'PODCAST' for 3-day free trial.
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On today's episode, the new science of healing with Dr. Jeffrey Rettiger. Welcome to the Run Smarter podcast, the podcast helping you overcome your current and future running injuries by educating and transforming you into a healthier, stronger, smarter runner. If you're like me, running is life, but more often than not, injuries disrupt this lifestyle. And once you are injured, you're looking for answers and met with bad advice and conflicting messages circulating the running community. The world shouldn't be like this. You deserve to run injury free and have access to the right information. That's why I've made it my mission to bring clarity and control to every runner. My name is Brodie Sharp. I am a physiotherapist, a former chronic injury sufferer and your podcast host. I am excited that you have found this podcast and by default become the Run Smarter Scholar. So let's work together to overcome your injury, restore your confidence and start spreading the right information back into your running community. So let's begin today's lesson. sheet is back over my head. Fortunately, I interviewed Dr. Jeffrey Rediger a couple of weeks ago, so I hadn't moved into my new house yet. I was actually staying at my brother's house. while we had Wi-Fi issues, we had our NBN disconnected while we were moving house. And so for a period of time to do some interviews, actually drove over to my brother's house to record who had better Wi-Fi connection. So the quality is a bit better and I don't have to do this entire interview with the sheet over my head. I first heard about Dr. Redikar. on another podcast when he was talking about just on a general health and wellness podcast, talking about spontaneous healing. And while it's not the robust kind of science that we usually head towards in this podcast, I think a lot of the lessons that he was teaching a lot of the stuff he was preaching really resonated with stuff I hadn't covered on the podcast yet. And really was such an interesting story. He went out in search of those who had an incurable disease, and managed to spontaneously heal themselves and just all he did was interview them and ask what they did how they what their philosophies are what their beliefs are, what their diets like how they changed and it was really profound that the patterns that were emerging. And so I'm like, let's jump on, let's have a discussion. This sounds really interesting. And so yeah, I was great to have him on. I tried to cover a lot of his computer kept binging, like he was getting notifications, he didn't know how to turn it off. So I tried to get rid of that as much as I can. But if there's a couple in there, forgive us. You'll also if you're paying attention on Facebook, no, on a tremendous, enormous task, I'll call it, of writing a book. I think it's just the next step I want to reach as many runners as I can. I want to help as many runners as I can. And I do know that not every runner listens to podcasts. So I thought a book would be really awesome to do. It's something that I've been thinking about for a long time and just decided to execute. I don't the that's the tremendous task that I'm taking on at the moment. I asked people on Facebook for any feedback, I gave them the chapters and the chapter titles that I had in mind and a lot of them were commenting on things that they wanted to include and so responding to that and I'm just going to be reiterating along the way but I'll keep you guys updated. It's going to be a real, real exciting kind of venture and I have interviewed a lot of authors in the past so emailing them or messaging them asking them like what how they found the whole entire process and I'm just going to go through the the task of being okay, do I self publish? Do I get a publisher? How do I do it? How do I format it? And yeah, like I said, I'll keep you guys updated. Also, just on my point of view from a injury perspective and me trying to update you guys on how I'm trying to train smarter as best I can and just stay totally transparent with a lot of my injuries. I've been backing off a lot of my training in the last. two or three weeks as we've been moving house. One, because of the stress and the lack of sleep that is applied to moving house. And two, we haven't had blinds and curtains in our house. And so we've been waking up at 5.30 as soon as it starts getting light. And so going to bed really early, but the overall quality of sleep has been lacking. I will admit it. And... Decided to try and get into a little bit more mileage and my Pez and Serenis tendon, which is, um, if you guys are familiar, I had it for five or six years. I did a podcast episode on how I managed to overcome it. Two years have gone by. I haven't felt it at all since undertaking that run smarter kind of journey and publishing that podcast episode, but it is slowly emerging. I thought my, my hamstring tendons would be the ones to to emerge themselves or my plantar fasciitis if I decided to train, if I was under recovered, if I was lacking sleep and an injury were to arise, I thought it'd be one of those, but apparently it's the tendon behind my knee. And it's not, I wouldn't say it's an injury just yet. I just noticed that same soreness on the back of my knee when I struck the ground for the first couple of minutes of my run, which was pretty similar to when I first had that injury. there's no tenderness to do like a single leg bridge or load it like it did previously. So it's not injured just yet, but the first couple of minutes of my run. I've just started noticing it, it just goes away within one or two minutes but it's something that I want to pay attention to and so I'm not doing any long runs because even though that would be pain free to do, I know that if I was to run one or two days after that long run that pain might last longer, it might be more severe and yeah take a long a longer time to fade away. So at the moment I'm keeping my mileage to shorter runs but more frequently so I'm almost running every day but paying attention to symptoms. Say yesterday, I felt the back of my knee for about 30 seconds, and then it just completely went away. So that was fantastic. When I was feeling it for that 30 seconds, it was probably like a 0.5 to one out of 10. So I'm pretty happy with the response and I'm running 4Ks every day. So still increasing that mileage. And so I'll probably do a little bit more next week if that's feeling good. And then once I'm symptom free, I'll slowly start building it up. But it's In this particular instance with this particular tendon injury, it's really nice and beneficial to spread your mileage over more days in the week. Like I said, I'm running almost every day rather than doing two or three runs per week and trying to make up that mileage by running further. So that's what I'm doing that they're the decisions I'm making and I'll keep you updated in the process, but I'm pretty sure I'll just overcome that quite quickly. Strength training is still very much. I'm still very involved in that, you know, two or three times a week doing heavy squats, heavy deadlifts. I'm back to doing those as two weeks ago when we're moving house, I was just really conservative, not really doing a lot. Especially when I moved house, I was exhausted and Yeah. Getting back into it very conservatively, but back to, I guess, the full swing of things with the strength training. All right. So, um, thought I'd keep you updated on that and yeah, let's dive into our interview on spontaneous healing. Dr. Jeff Reddicker. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Did you ever think in your career that you'd be appearing on a running podcast? Oh, I've wondered about it. I've done a few sports things. I'm an avid runner myself. Oh, fantastic. It's a huge interest of mine. What sort of running do you get involved in? I just do it for myself. It's helped me rebuild my own mind and body. And so I pretty much make sure I don't miss at least six days a week of running. And it's just a critical part of my life. Wow. Any races or any preferred distance? Not really. I haven't run competitively. It's only because of time I would like to. I'd like to do the Boston Marathon sometime. But I usually make sure that I get in a good 3.5 to 7 mile run, usually more along the lines of 3.5 to 4 miles. But I do that daily. So it's, it's a critical part of my life and wellbeing. Well done. Well, I guess you might, um, understand a lot about the context or the audience that we're, we're appealing to when it comes to today's topic. And once I heard you on other podcasts and listening to you on YouTube and those sorts of things, uh, I know I talked about a little bit before we started recording, but I've had a huge fascination with pain, pain science. It's why I've had like pain psychologists on in the past, just delving into the intricacies of dealing with pain because I know a lot of runners have reached out to me and they're got running injuries, several like months, sometimes several years of pain and it starts to blend into, it's not necessarily talking about the tissues anymore. We're talking about the whole body and why people experience pain, how people can overcome pain. And while talking about spontaneous healing is like a slightly different tangent to, to like say your book and what you're mainly talking about. Um, Can we maybe get the listeners up to speed with your book and your, I guess, your professional journey and where it's, where it's led you to today? Absolutely. Yeah. I'm happy to talk about it. And, and chronic pain is a massive issue and also very relevant to what I've studied and care about. So I'm happy to talk about anything in there that's useful to your listeners and you. All right. So, um, I guess with qualifications and like what led you to writing this book. Can you maybe start us off with that? Sure. Yeah. So back in 2003, I had just finished residency and I was a new young medical director at McLean and faculty member at Harvard. And an oncology nurse at Mass General came to me and said that she had just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and wanted my help describing this issue to her son, which I did. And then Nicola took off to a healing center and began writing me saying that she was experiencing healing herself and she also was seeing other people obtain improbable healings. And with my background in both medicine and theology, she was hoping I would look into this. Well, I... I was busy. I didn't think anything was likely going on that wasn't understandable. And so I declined. But Nicola was stubborn and she began having people call and write from around the country and elsewhere saying they had medical evidence for the recoveries. Did I want to hear their stories? And I initially declined. But as people started to send in their files and their stories. I began to realize there is something going on here. Now most of the files I went through could be understood from a traditional medical standpoint, but some of the stories and medical data couldn't be. And it's those that I began to pay more attention to. And over time, I realized there is something going on here that we needed to understand. And so that's how this whole research project started. And now I've been doing this now for 18 years and it's changed the way. I view everything and it's changed who I am professionally and personally. And just as more stories were coming forth and you start to, I guess, maybe recognize patterns, did you have the idea to maybe start putting together a book or some sort of content? Yeah, originally I wasn't planning to write a book about this. I Just simply focused on three things. This was a very personal journey for me in a lot of ways I had real questions about what was true. I had been to seminary at Princeton and had a master divinity from there in theology and philosophy of science and then I went to medical school and Both trying to reconcile those two worlds was an issue for me But also is a long personal journey to understand what was true By the time I was a new medical director and faculty member, I'd been on a long journey searching for truth for years at that point and had come from a very conservative rural background and had lived in several different cultures with very different assumptions about what's true in the world. And trying to reconcile the worldviews was very challenging for me. And I had a pressing need to know what was true just in terms of constructing my own life and answering my own questions and healing my own suffering. And so this became a kind of an empirical theology for me after reading hundreds and even thousands of articles and books over a period of decades in theology, psychology, You know, I knew there was lots of opinions out there, but what's true? And so I basically figured if there's medical evidence that this person got better against all odds, then that's a level of empirical truth that I can trust and pay attention to. And I wanted to understand what the factors are. And so I went into those factors very deeply. And as I began to see patterns across so many different illnesses, the same kinds of factors playing a role in people's lives. I knew there was something really important here. And, and then, you know, in the last several years, I wrote a book about it. And that's, um, how this all came out more publicly. You've come, you've found cases of what we call like spontaneous healing. Like the science is showing that these people are overcoming certain, um, obstacles and can't necessarily be explained through just a purely. physiological science perspective, is that what you're saying? Yes. Yeah, I had three strict criteria. Number one, the person had to have a genuinely incurable illness according to all that we currently understand. Number two, there had to be indisputable evidence of accurate diagnosis and clear evidence for recovery. And then number three, there had to be no good explanation for how they got better. such as an experimental medication or something else that could potentially have played a role in this. So the criteria were very strict, but. let me just say that this is not just about incurable illnesses. What I've come to understand is that as a doctor, I was taught to make a diagnosis and start a medication, but by and large, we don't even study how people heal. That is starting to change, but that's a massive issue. And so to just begin to study how people heal has been life-changing for me. And what I've come to understand is this is not just about incurable illnesses. That's what I studied, but I began to realize this has massive relevance for all the illnesses that we treat as if they're incurable, but they're not. They're lifestyle illnesses. And so the 85 to 90% of illnesses that people suffer from, that we just start a medication and treat them as if this is the way it is, and people go on and just tread water instead of healing, I'm realizing that... much of the time these are more fixable or healable than we realize and the body wants to get better and once you set the conditions for the body to heal, the body does heal and that's true with chronic pain as well. So these factors have massive relevance for 85 to 90% of what people suffer from and for creating authentic wellbeing in our lives and healing even things like chronic pain. Wow. It's, it's interesting to say, like you started off with the criteria of like. I guess, defining an incurable or finding an incurable subject having that criteria. But the lessons that you learn from those subjects can be applied to anyone who may be in some sort of suffering or some sort of pain that may not necessarily be labelled as incurable. Those lessons can still carry over to the vast population. Massively. Yeah. It's, it's, it's changed my entire understanding of how we should be working with patients and what is possible. One thing that I read, um, on one of your, I think it was like a YouTube presentation was that you mentioned that there's nothing spontaneous about spontaneous healing. Uh, can you explain what you exactly meant by that? Yeah. I mean, it's a startling finding. in med school you're taught that there's nothing spontaneous, that spontaneous permission is a fluke with no medical or scientific value. That's what you're taught. Well that's a really unscientific perspective. when you begin to understand that the word spontaneous in this context means without cause. So we're saying that these, um, healings, they have no cause. Well, that's ridiculous. Everything has a cause. We're just not, we're not, we're just not asking the questions. And so to start off with that level of unscientific thinking, it's been a little bit of a shocking realization for me. Nice. And I guess you've kind of filtered it down to four pillars of, um, what I guess what your search for what you're not, what you want to be true, what you're searching for the answers and truth. And you've come and put together these four pillars. And I want to start with pillar one, which was around nutrition. What mistakes are people making around nutrition? And what's like the, the big message that everyone should know when it comes to nutrition, healing, pain, and just overcoming a lot of suffering. Yeah, one of the first things that comes to mind for me is that there's a lot of misinformation out there. The trifecta, at least in the United States, the trifecta between industry, who pays the academics to do the studies or sign off on the studies, and the way in which that interacts with government lobbyists and the food pyramids and recommendations that are created is fine and good up to a point, but there's a lot of misinformation there and it's not pure science. business aspect to that and that hole goes really deep unfortunately and so that has contributed to a lot of misinformation and we can go as deep into that as you want. So what's tragic is that when I look back and remember the nutrition education that I received in medical school, which was very little, but the little bit I did receive was actually completely upside down and completely wrong. We were taught, I remember where I was sitting when the instructor said that the problem with nutrition in Western countries is not that there's malnutrition, the problem is that there's over nutrition. People out that's completely upside down and wrong but it took me decades to understand that. It was these remarkable recoveries, these individuals who really figured something out that taught me this. So it's unfortunately the doctors and nutritionists and nurses that I work with, they're suffering from the same illnesses as the patients they're serving and they don't know how to heal themselves the same misinformation unfortunately and so getting true information about nutrition is a really big deal and took me a lot of re-educating myself and fortunately there is better information that's coming out over time slowly that's not as biased but I was a slow learner I had a lot to learn and it's absolutely not a problem of over nutrition the problem is malnutrition eat in the West, they don't have the phytochemicals, they don't have the minerals and the vitamins at the level that we need. And so the body constantly is craving those nutrients, triggering the hunger mechanism, and all those empty calories do create obesity and they create disease and they create chronic inflammation in the body which gives rise to pain and all kinds of issues and disease. to truly understand what it is to create a non-inflammatory diet for one is a massive deal and does take some hard work to begin to understand initially. Yeah. I recently talked to Dr. Patrick McGilvray around dyslexic sports nutrition and we were talking about the discussion of how it's really unfortunate that the same word for fats, like food fats, is also the same word for fat on our body because people make that instant you eat fat, you get fat, but you don't really get fat from eating fat, you get fat from eating sugar. And actually fats can be quite good for you. Whereas it's sugar that's kind of, they're really, well, one of the big issues is highly addictive and can be a big cause for a lot of this, like you say, pain signals or just like a lot of dysfunction in the body. And there was a huge switch. Like I remember in the nineties, like everything was 90% fat free, 99% fat free, 99.9% fat free because we all just thought we need to reduce our fat intake. And there was just a mountain amount of sugar. I couldn't believe them. Like looking back now, the amount of sugar I had in the nineties was ridiculous. Um, so is that like the. Would you agree with those statements around fat and sugar and, um, or is it? something else, something you might disagree with? No, no, no. That's really well said. What I'm sorry to have to say is that there's a lot behind what you're saying. The sugar industry, there was real evidence that sugar was creating disease back several decades ago. And they consciously created a program to divert the discussion and to create research that said that fat is the problem. And that was a conscious effort to divert away from the sugar industry and they won for a number of decades and I'm sorry to say some leading intellectuals at really prestigious universities and in the government and FDA here in the United States played a central role in that and It was all a scam, unfortunately. And low fat was, fat was never the problem. It was sugar. You know, a century ago, the average American ate four pounds of sugar a year. No big deal. Now the average American consumes 154 pounds of sugar a year. It's in everything from tomato sauce to... pasta to breads, bread to salmon at Whole Foods. I mean, it's in it's in so many things. Yeah, I mean, I read recently that Subway can no longer tax their bread as bread, Subway, the fast food corporation, they can never tax, they cannot tax their food as bread in Ireland any longer, because it's got so much sugar in it on top of the refined flour, that it's not a bread product. that tax category anymore. I mean, it's just appalling. Yeah, it's ridiculous. And I guess like, like I say, it's, it's really unfortunate that we have to tell this story. And unfortunately, it's just big money that's behind it. I know from this, my My mission is dispelling a lot of running myths. And there's a lot of shoe companies and big, big money in those sort of industries that just put out a whole bunch of science in quotes. And they just play it off as science, but they don't hold themselves to the same accountability that, say, researchers have to do. They have to have these strict, non-biased kind of studies and publish them, have them peer reviewed. Whereas things like the supplement industry that make big money, they can just put together some really flimsy studies, really questionable and just put it out there and people like Canada Science, like they realize these big companies realize that science is a big selling point for a lot of people. And so if you say, you know, take these supplements, then you'll get 20% increased muscle mass, like around those sort of things. It's really unfortunate. That's why, that's why there's so much confusion out there. It's why a lot of people are just getting so many different messages and believing half the people, because a lot of the messages that are being told by really credible people and they've been told by multiple different sources. And so they can almost have that, that bias to the confirmation bias to start believing all this stuff when other evidence comes out, shows the exact opposite. Not only just like disagreeing, but showing that they're actual opposite is to be true. Yeah, it's, it's a big issue and I value science, but we need better science. That's not biased in this way. It's, it's a massive issue. Yeah. So if, can you maybe delve into why sugar and pain is so correlated? Like what's happening in the body that's producing that? Yeah, so sugar is one of the main causes of chronic inflammation in the body and pain is... very much an issue of chronic inflammation a lot of times. And so when the sugar molecule, when you have lots of sugar molecules that day after day are ricocheting off of those beautiful arteries inside your body, those sharp granules create little cuts on the inner, interstitium there of your arteries. Those little cuts, of course, activate all those brilliant immune cells that come in and do their highly specialized jobs of repairing those little cuts and they create scar tissue. And as that high sugar load creates more cuts, you just get scar tissue on top of scar tissue on top of scar tissue and that's called atherosclerosis. And that's also called chronic inflammation. And the reason why, and one reason why in science we've been so slow to understand that issue of chronic inflammation is that doctors, we all specialize in body parts. So if you're interested in the brain, you become a psychiatrist or a neurologist. If you are interested in the heart, you become a cardiologist. If you're interested in the GI system, you become a gastroenterologist. And we all study that part of the body. But to understand chronic inflammation, you have to stand back and look at the whole picture and look at what it is, what it is, because it's chronic inflammation that creates heart disease. diseases of the colon or the GI system. It's chronic inflammation that creates problems in the brain. It's chronic inflammation that creates diabetes and heart disease and autoimmune illness and it plays a role in anxiety and depression and chronic pain. And so understanding chronic inflammation is and what it means to reverse that is key to understanding what it takes to reverse chronic pain and most illnesses. Like say on that, the whole picture, you've got pillar two being the nervous system. Is that, is it very closely linked to, to diet, to nutrition, um, to pain signals? Do you maybe want to delve into the relationship that the nervous system has? Yes, so chronic inflammation is a problem of the immune system. It means the immune system has gone awry. It means that the immune system is attacking itself. And so what happens? We've talked a little bit about the issue of sugar. To understand the immune system, you have to understand that there are neural receptors on the cells of the immune system, and the immune system, and the neuro... feedback system are directly linked and very deeply linked. So one way to talk about this is if a person is in chronic fight, flight, or freeze, if they are under chronic stress and they don't know how to release that stress, that means you are bathing the beautiful cells of the immune system with the stress hormones of cortisol, norepinephrine, and adrenaline day in and day out, far too much of the time. And we know both clinically and on the basis of really clear lab research that if you are bathing those beautiful immune cells too much of the time day in and day out with these stress hormones, we know that those immune cells are going to begin to misfire. They're going to become sluggish and they're going to begin mistaking the body that they are sworn to protect. They're going to start attacking the body instead of the pathogen that they're supposed to be attacking. that kind of problem, that kind of chronic stress, weakens the immune system massively. And that's important for understanding how chronic inflammation begins to take root in the body, but it's also important to understand what makes you susceptible to things like COVID. And so there's all kinds of issues connected with this. It makes me think of like the stuff that you're describing, your initial work was around incurable populations, but you're talking about these Say nutrition, you're talking about the immune system. We're talking about stress. How common is this in the world today? Like how many people are highly stressed, poor diets, like poor attitude with exercise? It's, it seems like the lessons and the general guidelines that you're following, like it's the... the majority that requires this advice is so vast. And how many people have chronic low back pain? It's so prominent. And I guess the runners that I see that come to me who have injuries for several months, several years, and it's like, well, it's a soft tissue injury. Why isn't it getting better? And you go through these sort of lessons and you can understand at least the factors, like you say, that whole picture, lifestyle choices that have a big influence. Yeah, it's very true. There's so many of the people I studied had such a dramatic experience with realizing that they needed to change their relationship with the chronic stressors in their lives or they needed to just eliminate those stressors. Now it's certainly true that some stress is good. Running a marathon can be a great stress. That's certainly a stress but it can be a good stress if it helps you expand your understanding of who you are and toxic relationship or if you finish work every day, depleted and run down, crushing your value north, then something needs to change because you're going to be in chronic fight, flight or freeze and that is going to be the situation where you're creating chronic inflammation in your body and you're going to need to either change that environment or change how you relate to that environment. And that can get messy sometimes. I mean some of the people that I studied, they learned to change their in a way that they were able to stay in that environment and they had a different response to the stress. They learned how to manage it through, whether it's through journaling or going to psychotherapy and learning how to deal with feelings that they had not been dealing with directly or whatever it takes. Some people learned to meditate, some people went to yoga. There's different things work for different people. Some people began to exercise to get rid of the stress that way, but some people had to make the messy difficult courageous decision to leave work environments or personal relationships that were too toxic for them to figure out how to come to terms with. Yeah. Uh, I've mentioned on the podcast several times before the importance of stress when it comes to recovery. And this can be recovery from pain, recovery from injury or recovery from a marathon that the body doesn't know the difference, whether you're exercising the exercise stress or the emotional, um, psychological stress. And if you're, if you go from, uh, doing a workout or going for a run and then you go into a work setting or then you go to spend time with your family It's constantly a stressful situation for you Your body will not know the difference on how to switch into recovery mode it will just constantly be in that like you say that fight mode and That you'll never be able to switch off and you'll just be accumulating all this stress and so we're kind of recognize that importance in that relationship and what I loved about your take on the environmental side of things is you need to change your environment, or you need to change your relationship with that environment because there may be some circumstances which are unavoidable, like maybe someone has to hold steady with their job for the next couple of months, or maybe it's just a period of a job that they love, which is particularly stressful. So they might have projects coming up or... their team is in a bit of turmoil or something. So you have to change your relationship rather than actually change your job. But I really like how you've taken that as a step of being like, stress is a, it's an internal kind of response. It's like how you are interpreting the situation. And I know safer things like my sister just had a presentation at work that didn't go well and she's been stressed for the last two days. When you actually look at the factors and all that happened was some breakout rooms, didn't really go according to plan and it went like 10, 15 minutes over where if that was me, I'd just easily play it off. But for her, she's quite stressed for the next couple of days. So it's a very internally interpreted sort of presentation. And so changing your relationship with that environment can be extremely helpful and be extremely useful. So I really like how you've got that take on things. Yeah, it's important. I also had, when it comes to stress, um, recognizing the importance of sleep and recognizing that, um, even the science will show that those who have like populations with chronic pain, they also have a very poor relationship with their sleep, um, and how sleep is one of those ways that we can recover. And there's, um, If you were to change your relationship with sleep, it actually helps settle down. The nervous system helps settle down stress and helps lower pain levels. Have you seen that much in your research? Yes, absolutely. It's completely true that things like sleep rest. getting into nature, people need to look at what are the things that help restore them and sleep is certainly usually a big one. It just does reset your physiology in ways that are critical. And I certainly see that clinically all the time. And the research is very clear about that. I should mention as well like so stress is pillar three, I don't not sure if I did mention that with the four pillars we're talking about. The other thing that I had with stress, and particularly when it comes to the clinical side of things, is the response that people have when they are injured or they do get a diagnosis is catastrophisation around their certain condition or like they'll get a scan and it will show mild degenerative changes and all of a sudden they've catastrophised the situation, they've made it highly stressful, they've said they're elevating and prioritizing the importance of their pain, their symptoms, because they're attributing to either a scan or something that a medical team has like told them, like the words that the medical staff use are extremely powerful and can spark a lot of worry, can spark a lot of frustration, a lot of anger and a lot of those emotions. Is that something that you've seen as a relationship with pain and recovery? Yeah, there's a lot of issues connected with what you're saying. If I remember right, 53% of adults over age, I might have the age wrong here, but is it over age 45 have evidence on MRI or CT of the back of degenerative changes and of even hernia, herniation. Now there is absolutely no correlation between what you find on a CT or MRI of the back with what a person reports in terms of pain, which is a shocking statement, but it's just true. And so our assumption is that, oh, if there's evidence for a person having herniation of a disc in their lower back. or some degenerative changes related to arthritis, that that's the cause of the pain. And unfortunately, there is absolutely no correlation with that because so many people in the population have those kinds of changes and worse and no pain at all. And so I think that we're getting into a topic that's big and poorly defined in terms of the research, but so what we assume and what the medical profession well, if these changes are there, that must be the cause of the pain and the person must need surgery or some kind of intervention perhaps. And unfortunately, the results of those interventions and surgeries is much worse than we would prefer. They tend to not be very successful and that's unfortunate. I have learned over time to ask more about what's going on in a person's life, what is it that's creating stress for them, let's see if we can find a way to manage the stressors, and let's ask if there's a message that perhaps the pain has for their lives in terms of what is out of balance that needs to change. that often is a much more productive way to go. And if we can apply the factors, the four pillars of healing that I talked about in Cured, if those can be applied and relevant in their lives, that often is massively helpful. My friend, Gabriel Mate, wrote a book called, When Your Body Says No, and he says that if you don't know how to say no, your body will eventually say no for you. And that has been my understanding over and over again. When I see people is they often do have stress that's often not understood or talked about in the doctor's office very commonly, but it is playing a massive role in what they're experiencing in their lives. And the more we can help them deal with saying no, knowing where they need to say no, knowing where they need to say yes in their lives. that helps set the conditions so that the body can heal. The truth is the body wants to heal and if you can set the conditions so the body can heal, it will. That's really good. Um, I do think the general population do need to have a bit more education around incidental findings or what is normative findings when it comes to say scans, because I have had runners who are injured and maybe they don't trust the health professions as much, but they just go straight to a GP who's straight away sends it for the scan and then that's what they're left with. But, um, I was, I've also research, uh, interviewed some researchers around, um, meniscus injuries in the knee. And how, you know, people 40 or 50 years old, like just whether they're like small tears of the meniscus can be very a normal finding. But if someone has knee pain or if someone has low back pain, which are knee pain is very prevalent in runners, low back pain is very prevalent in the general population. If they go straight to a scan and they show scan, if they show tears, if they show degenerative findings, if they show disc herniations, which can be a very, very normal finding, they'll instantly. connect. Okay, your pain is due to this scan finding and they're in a world of trouble after that. And so I do think that there is some education to be said or just for paint the whole picture. Paint, okay, like you say, ask other questions, ask lifestyle questions, ask... eggs eases like they sort of behavioral characteristics of the pain and see if it does match to the scans or what happened at the time of the pain. Does that match the scans and we're only just using scans as one piece of the puzzle. Yeah, completely agree. I used to have chronic pain. I don't have it any longer. I think it's important to to believe that there is a solution to this chronic pain so you don't become hopeless. And then to also, again, to set the conditions so that the body can heal. And that often, using something like the four pillars or whatever works for you, it's usually not gonna be the medication and it's not gonna be a procedure as much as people would like to believe in that. I purposely tell the story in Cured about the study that was done in the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the most prestigious medical journals It compared studies of arthroscopy, which is often done on the knee as a surgery for knee pain, studies of arthroscopy with a placebo where people were put under anesthesia and just a little incision was made on the knee, but no surgery was performed. The results were identical for both reduction in pain just as frequently and just as completely as those who underwent the arthroscopy surgery. Now that did not stop surgeons from doing the arthroscopy. It's a multi-billion dollar industry, but it's just as effective as placebo. Damn. I'd hate to be in the room if a surgeon reads that paper and see the amount of... Yeah. It's good to know though. It's very good to know. Um, and I think the same can be said for. say operations for the lower back. I know there's a lot of studies on the effectiveness of surgery for the lower back. It's very poor. But we need to paint the picture. But we do know for some people, like they have, say an arthroscopy and their pain and function improves incredibly, but maybe that's just fitting the right person to the right intervention. But I think where we're getting at is like when it comes to surgeries, maybe it's overprescribed for a lot of people. Well, I think chronic pain is often a message. It's the body saying to the individual, there's something that needs to change in your life. And to just ask what the message is and to be willing to make the deep changes in our lifestyle and to know where to say no, what needs to change in terms of the stress we're managing, that's often critical for healing this. 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Yeah, I've talked about. say when it comes to your four pillars, I've talked about nutrition a little bit, I've talked about stress a lot, but there's one really important one, which is the fourth one around identity and beliefs, which I haven't really delved into a lot on the podcast, maybe a little bit, but I really want to have a deep dive into this one. Cause I think it's really important. Um, maybe you can start off by just, uh, I guess highlighting why identity and beliefs are so important when it comes to pain, suffering and, um, healing. Yeah, it's a really big deal and it's such a big important pillar that there are certainly people that I studied who made none of the nutritional changes, made no real change in terms of healing their immune system and that sort of thing in a direct way, but they did heal their beliefs sometimes to such a profound degree that it really changed the trajectory of their illness and their chronic issues. So this is a big one. It's more difficult to understand. it's really liberating to begin integrating into one's life. So I think the truth is that every one of us grows up and we take in a complex combination of true and false beliefs as we grow up. We adopt these beliefs from our parents. We create these beliefs by interpreting the different events that we experienced growing up whether it's trauma or abuse or how you're treated on or how kids in junior high talk to you and treat you. We continue to pick up these beliefs as we proceed through high school and listen to how professors and partners and bosses treat us and colleagues. And by the time we're adults, we have acquired a complex set of true and false beliefs, some of which are conscious, some of which are unconscious. And it's my belief that if you have a complex combination beliefs then you're going to have a mixed set of results in your life and your body and your mind and healing those false beliefs, eliminating the false beliefs and replacing them with true beliefs where you understand and experience your value as a human being, where you believe that the universe is a friendly place, those kinds of belief changes can be really liberating not only in terms of the motivation they give you to go ahead and do the work to heal your body and the discipline that requires to change your diet and to exercise regularly etc. but to just but even beyond the motivation it gives you and the vitality it gives you. to just have that experience where you really get it, that you bring something important and good in the world, and that you're not... It's just not true that you're not good enough or that you're defective or that there's something wrong with who you are and to eliminate those beliefs so you can experience yourself differently. That's a massive deal. Yeah. It's life changing. And you talk about these life experiences kind of creating these beliefs, that belief system, but it's also around identity as well. Like these experiences that you have throughout your life. kind of shape how you see yourself and your identity. And can you maybe just delve into, I know you talked about the kind of common experience or the saying around, if you don't learn to say no, your body is going to say no for you. And around. Yeah. responsibilities that are put on a lot of people like, um, parents or looking after other people, like in the, the weighing kind of maybe stress or just weighing of responsibility on people and how liberating it can be if they decide to start saying no to certain things instead of just agreeing to everything and piling more things on their back. Um, can you, can you just delve into a bit more of the importance of that? Yeah. So I have spent. over 14 years as working much of that time as a chief of a medical hospital, but also working as a medical director in a psychiatric hospital. So I see the full range of things both medically and psychiatrically and I've started to realize just how and then the research on top of that, which taught me the positive side of all this. So when you see over a period of so many years, the people coming into the medical hospital and into the psychiatric hospital, how stressed they are. and how overburdened they are not knowing how to say no to parents or to place appropriate loving boundaries with their children or with colleagues at work or the PTA committees or all the different things and people just become so stressed that illness becomes a way out of that because their body just says I can't do this anymore you're treating me like crap and I can't do this anymore chronic fatigue or different, a different set of illnesses. And so that's, that is the, the illness is a message. The chronic pain is a message and we are not often enough in encouraging people to sit down and take a look at what that message is and why that message is what it is. And one of the really powerful messages that you were talking about on a podcast people may be diagnosed with like a really major illness, say like cancer, and they kind of say to themselves, it's kind of like a relief because now they can, they need to focus on themselves. Now they have to be the number one priority instead of like always constantly looking after others. I found that a really powerful message. It really struck me. Yeah, it's a really important point. I often talk to people in the hospital, of course, and as they unburden themselves to me and begin to talk about the reason why they are so stressed and we begin to see that the illness really is helping them get some respite from this difficult situation, it might feel too threatening to them to begin to say no right away in the early stages of their recovery. So I tell people all the time, blame the doctor, tell the doctor, the doctor said you absolutely cannot do this committee anymore and that you have to put boundaries around the amount of hours that you're doing taking care of your older parent or taking care of these individuals over here. You need to have some boundaries on it and people sometimes are just too... afraid to do that. And so I tell them to let me be the bad guy and blame it on me, but they have to do this. And it's an important way to begin developing a new kind of life for yourself. The other aspect when it comes to identity and belief, I guess maybe beliefs, is if a runner is injured and It sparks a wide array of emotions. Like people have different responses to being injured and being unable to run. Um, some that I see it can turn into anger, can turn into frustration. It can turn into blaming themselves or blaming others, blaming like a misdiagnosis for a long period of time, and it can slowly form into something that's quite chronic, like their injuries, quite chronic, and they continuously go back to the blame and the misdiagnosis or the, they didn't scan me early enough. the misinformation that was dealt with at the start that made the injury worse and they constantly fixated on the past rather than the future and they're just that's just where their mind goes and it always triggers this anger, frustration, despair. Obviously that's going to have detrimental kind of impacts on them moving forward, it's going to hinder their ability to heal. Yes. purely speaking about the running population here, would you see that as like a possibility? Oh yeah, I mean there's several different ways we can go with this because anger and chronic pain are deeply tied together. And so the longer a person is secreting the neurohormones associated with anger, the more you're going to be continuing the chronic inflammation in your body and not listening to the message or doing the work that creates the condition so your body can heal. And so yes, you want to... because suppressing and repressing feelings creates its own problems for recovery. So I'm a big believer. Feel your feelings fully. but don't let it become something that you create your identity and your heart around. You want to be able to let go of those. Jill Bulte Taylor, as a friend of mine, she's this neuroanatomist who has written some brilliant material around, you know, feel your feelings fully for 90 seconds and then let go of it. And don't make that your identity. Don't build that into your heart and the way of seeing yourself in the world. that's critical for all the neurochemistry of this stuff. It's critical for not continuing the chronic inflammation that chronic anger is associated with. And you want to get in the present. You want to get into a positive mindset about, okay, what can I do now? What is the message of this pain? And then do the work using these pillars or what works for you to create the condition so your body can heal. And that's the way out of this. Yeah. And so that's what you would, I guess, in that situation, if a runner is dealing with a chronic injury is fixated on the past, is that kind of the interventions that you would maybe advise them that they just go through that process, their emotions, but recognise that is not their identity, that they need to kind of dissociate or detach away from that, the heat of that moment and then focus on something positive for the future. Yeah. I mean, I'm a psychiatrist, right? So I'm going to absolutely tell you it's important to validate the feelings, but you don't want to create that as your identity. You want to then let go of the feelings, be grateful for the message, look for what the deeper message is of this, and then create the conditions so that your body and your mind can heal. And that's a very different set of work. Yeah. That's great. Like what we've covered so much is there. As we just wrap up, is there any other maybe misconceptions or any other takeaways that we may not have discussed yet? I know we've pretty much covered everything I need to. Yeah, I think it's just so important to help people realize that they matter. And if there's one thing that I've learned from all these 17 or 18 years of research, it's that people need to sometimes just simply be told that they matter, that they bring something unrepeatable and good into the world. And the most important thing you can do if you really want to heal is to do the work that eliminates any false beliefs that get in the way of experiencing that. Do that, set up a life that is respectful of you. Don't let people in your life who don't treat you with respect and dignity and do their best to unconditionally love you. And then create the conditions so that chronic pain and issues can heal. That goes so much further than anything I was taught in medical school, I can assure you. And provides pathways that we just simply do not examine nearly enough. in medicine or psychiatry. As I've spent the last 10 plus years in clinics or as like an online physio, constantly see injuries of different durations, sometimes a couple of days, a couple of weeks, a couple of months, a couple of years. And I'm slowly starting to see, now that I'm looking for it, starting to see more and more of a trend of those who have chronic pain. No matter what the injury they have them, they talk about who they are as a person. They talk about like maybe a history of depression, anxiety, constantly, like having like a weight of responsibility, having a lot of like expectations, a lot of like unhelpful, well, not unhelpful, but just like sparking a lot of, a lot of stuff would trigger them like emotionally and whether that's anger, frustration, whether, like I said, they're fixated on the past, like All of these qualities I start to see as something that's like leading them up to, or maybe increasing their likelihood of an injury becoming chronic. And it's something that's preceded their injury, like their, um, how they would approach like conflict or how they would manage an injury if they were to get. If they were to get injured, I have to step out from fitness or exercise that they love. And so it's important that we talk about these things. It's important that we sort of bring up the wider scope. And like you say, in order to help someone effectively, we can't have this specialized intervention. We have to take a wider scope and look at them as a human being, what they do outside of running, what they do outside of everything and really get out of the specialized scope and take a broad range of their nutrition, how they're managing all that sort of stuff, as well as the... Completely agree. Yeah, great. And so I want to thank you. I want to thank you for coming on. I really admire the mission you've gone on to start asking the right questions and trying to find the answers of what you know to be true because I... I'm a proponent of falling into the physiotherapy advice and, you know, just only listening to physiotherapists and following the gurus that have been teaching for 30 years and just trusting what they, what they say and trusting that would be true, um, to go out and break out of that and say, you know, maybe there's something else, maybe there's other questions that we haven't really answered yet and. The book is, um, is cured. Uh, I've got it here, the life changing science of spontaneous healing. Is there any other, um, I guess social media platforms, or, um, I know you've got your website as well, which I'll link to anywhere else that people can go to find out more about you. Yeah, sure. Dr. Jeffrey Reddicker.com is my website. Uh, I'll certainly post your, um, podcast on social media and I appreciate that. You know, I've got one little funny story here with running. I read a book called Born to Run by a Harvard trained journalist years ago, and it really validated my experience. I grew up not being able to afford the nice running shoes or anything. I just never had foot or orthopedic injuries with all my running. Once I read that book, I realized, oh, well, maybe it's good I could afford all the fancy shoes because I run on flat shoes. And the body, the bones in the foot, there's so many bones that it comes. all the different movements that we make when we run or walk whatever and I think I just thought it was a great book and the writer of the book healed his own orthopedic injuries by interviewing these ultra marathoners and that sort of thing who were sometimes barefoot runners or running in flat shoes and helped him realize that the expensive shoes for running were so soft and cushioned that they were creating probably a lot of the orthopedic injuries. Yeah. Well, thanks for sharing that experience. I'm glad you've had that. I'm also flat shoes. shoes cost like $60. I don't think I'll ever, there'll ever be a stage in my life where I'll pay $300, $350 for some running shoes. I just don't see that being me, but never say never. But yeah, thanks for coming on. Good luck with your running endeavors. Hopefully like you get to like a marathon one day and yeah, thanks for coming on and sharing such wisdom. And that concludes another run smarter lesson. I hope you walk away from this episode feeling be a run smarter scholar. Because when I think of runners like you who are listening, I think of runners who recognize the power of knowledge, who don't just learn but implement these lessons, who are done with repeating the same injury cycle over and over again, who want to take an educated active role in their rehab, who are looking for evidence-based long-term solutions and will not accept problematic quick fixes. And last but not least, who serve a on the right information to other runners who need it. I look forward to bringing you another episode and helping you on your Run Smarter path.