Hi, this is Nicholas Webb and welcome to another episode of The Healthcare Cure podcast. Today I have an amazing individual, Dr. David Redding, who really has inspired me to to continue my journey personally to to really live as long as I can, and he’s going to talk about his, was it the hundred year club? What was the club that you were talking about?
It’s called the Moses club because he was 120 years old.
120 years. That’s our goal. I love that. And and I love his approach. He combines really a lot of different teachings and a lot of different ideas to be able to bring together a real focus on prevention, over gratuitous intervention, which I think is a big part of the problem. You know, 80% of healthcare costs are now estimated to be represent or 80% of healthcare costs are self inflicted chronic disease, in other words, preventable diseases. And it’s not just the fact that we could save this money, we could improve the quality of lives for hundreds of millions of people. So I think that this is, is good work. And he was gracious enough to be on our on our documentary film, which will be out this November. And so Dr. Redding, why don’t you share with us your amazing journey?
Well, let’s go ahead and start within the very beginning because I was grew up basically in a very poor family, and I was drafted in the military during the Vietnam era. And it led to a series of opportunities that were just quite wonderful for me. When I got out of the military. I had the GI Bill, so I started going to school and I finally found out my niche was physical therapy. So I went ahead and went to Cal State Long Beach PT program, and was a physical therapist there for about 10 years I work at Casa Colina hospital. And a student came in one day after being there about eight years. And he said, Yeah, I’m going to be a physician. Now he was about 35 – 36. And I understood that once you’re past about 30, that you’re really not open to medical education is not really open to you. And then I talked to him about his journey. And he was saying basically that as an osteopathic physician, that they’re much more open to age limitations. And so I said, Tell me a little bit about this osteopathic because I had no idea what he was talking about. And he talked about a philosophy that I absolutely love, which was to focus on the whole person kind of body mind spirit approach, and to see if you could encourage healthy, find out what the problem is, and see if you can address the problem, so not to focus so much on the symptoms, but really what is the underlying cause of their problem? And so I was so enticed by what he said that he went down there and checked it out. And then it started going through all the prerequisites. But I recognized that with my background. Once my mother, I’d come home from PT from working at Casa Colina, and my mother actually was in the process of making dinner. And she said, time for dinner and so I started walking over there. My dad started walking over to the table, and my mother passed out just as I got there. And she went on the floor, I laid her down gently, I said, Dad, call 911. And he just stood there, frozen late, my mother down, tilted her head back, got ready for CPR. I said, Dad call 911. And so finally he did and as I tilt her head back to give her initial breath of air, she started breathing in and when she started breathing in an ambulance came to the hospital and I found out that she had an overdose of a new medication that she was taking. And I realized over and over again, when you look at the statistics related to medication issues, there’s over 100,000 people that die every year in the United States from properly prescribed medications, especially if you take in more than two medications at a time. If you take a look at just gi bleed, which kills about 100,000 people a year, that’s related to people taking insets I’m sorry. So that’s, that’s 100,000 hospitalizations for gi bleeding, and about 6,000 to 17,000 per year, just from dying from using an inset, which we probably have all used. So medications are inherently not safe, maybe essential for many conditions, but they’re not safe. So I thought, okay, so I want to get involved in a pathway in healthcare, that allows me to have more control over medications and to focus on the health of the person rather than the disease of the person and work those two together so that you can through your healthy habits, see if you can get rid of most of the diseases that you have. And I’ve been pretty successful that for people who are motivated. So that was my journey. So I went into to became a deal, and been out practice did my residency in family medicine, and they come back to us practicing at Western University of Health Sciences. And I was going to be there two years initially, but I love teaching so much that I thought, okay, I could affect these students who can then affect their patients in the future. So maybe my outreach will be greater if I stay here, so I work in the clinic there and also teach. So that’s basically been my journey, but the recognition that my health is really in my hands, my mother died of a stroke. My father died of a heart attack, both of them had diabetes and other medical issues. And I thought, you know, this isn’t my genes. So the question is, how much control do I have over my life? And if you take a look at the research, you have a tremendous amount of control over what happens to your body. You’re not determined by your genes alone, something turns them on, something turns them off. So you really have total control over your I mean, you know, 90%, you might have control over your health by how you’re live your life, what your lifestyle is, like. So I think that the essence of the problem is that we need to really take responsibility for our own health. It’s not the doctors responsibility to do that. They’re supposed to determine what your diseases offer and treatment, but if you rely on your doctor, then you’re mistreating yourself because I’m with myself all the time. You’re only with your doctor once a year, twice a year, something like that. So really, the journey has been one of self discovery, self responsibility and the understanding that whatever the symptom is, you can find the underlying cause and let your disease be a teacher. So you struggle with it. You can learn so much more about yourself, your eating habits, your attitude, your spiritual connections with the divine, and so much more, so it makes the journey really good. So every time I get sick now, I think, ah, this is an opportunity to learn. And so I’ll examine my life, see what I’m doing wrong, and I’m always doing something wrong. It’s really hard, but I’m not perfect. And I get to learn from it. So it’s really a beautiful experience that recognize that we can we’re not stuck with our diseases, we can overcome them if we’re motivated and have some degree of education.
So what is that you know, you I’d be very interested in what what does that look like for you for you know, your both your parents died from what would likely be preventable conditions, right? What what are you doing in your life? And what would you recommend for your patients to do that would improve their quality of life and their longevity?
Well, there’s actually a lot of things you can do and sometimes it’s so simple, like drinking enough water every day. You know, you flush out the waste material, you know, with water consumption, urinary bladder cancers goes way down. heart attacks and strokes go down between about 27 to 47%. So a lot of diseases are profoundly affected by just the amount of water so 6 – 8 glasses of water a day, you know, 10 – 12 ounces or so it’s one of the simplest things you can do. So I make sure that I drink that much water every day. You know, I’m not not rigid about it, but I’m pretty consistent with it. So simple things you do. So they got my water going up. When I wake up, I have an AM exercise program that I do. So I go outside, even in the wintertime, I get a little sunshine, usually have my shirt off get a little extra sunshine. And I’ll go out there and do my AM exercises. And so that’s part of and then in the evening, I go for usually, a mile, two mile, three mile run. And then after dinner go for about a mile and a quarter walk you know so make sure the exercise strengthening stretching and cardio is part of my everyday experience, and because if you don’t do that, you know, slowly you go downhill then I when they love about a regular exercise program, I can still compete with our students in a lot of different activities. And I’m usually pretty good sometimes I’m the winner sometimes a loser, it’s okay. You know, I and but it’s at least you’re in a good condition where if you want to do an adventure in life and not stuck being this old person with joint problems because you can’t do it, you know, so if you take care of yourself, you have such a freedom to explore this world and to do a lot of activities that otherwise you would not be able to and I think about grandkids. You know, when become a grandparent, your grandkids if you’re so old and decrepit, you know, you really can’t interact with them as much as you could or should start really taking care of yourself. So exercise is really good. I’m a vegetarian. You know, I’m not strict. Although I don’t eat no red meat. I don’t eat any land animals. And you have some fish once in a while. But vegetarian so healthy food. It’s a lot of it’s organic. Some of it’s not organic, but my wife and I are both committed to a really healthy diet so, and that some of the best things I’ve learned in medical school and doing research is if you eat nuts, now I call it a chap diet, C.H.A.P., cashews, hazelnuts, almonds, pecans, and you can throw wallets in there too. There have been lots of studies on those. I’ve done one study myself, and it shows your cholesterol drops. HDL goes up, your LDL goes down, your triglycerides go down. And my prediction is if somebody would eat that, three to five of them every day, that their likelihood of having a stroke, like mother or heart attack, like my father goes down by at least 70% maybe 80%. So it’s a simple thing and they found it with nut consumption. All cause morbidity and mortality goes down. You know hypertension, down to 10 to 20% diabetes down by 10 to 20%. So there’s so many nutrients in the foods, the healthy foods that are available to us if we simply consumed them on a regular basis. And nuts probably being maybe top of the line, that that’s really, really important for you. And I think, you know, body mind spirit to try to build in some time, every day where you become quiet, and meditation and try to connect with whatever your definition of the Divine is, you know, its nature, if it’s God, it’s Jesus, you know, whatever that may be, try to connect with it, quiet your body down, open yourself up and let that become part of your life. And I think that’s those three things, the body mind spirit, working with it are really, really important for longevity, and well being for again, so you can be free to do whatever you want in this life and not be stuck with a lot of serious chronic diseases. But I tell my patients, oh go ahead.
What about sleep?
Oh, very good. So sleep. It’s actually another area that’s really, really important. You know, for instance, they know that a lot of neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s, they have a great difficulty with getting enough sleep or the quality of their sleep. And they find that there’s a lot of waste material that builds up within the crank of the brain itself, beta amyloid and other other waste material from cell metabolic activity. That sleep it’s only during deep sleep, that these compounds are removed anesthesia and deep sleep. So if you do not get deep sleep, you’re actually building up waste material within the brain. So getting and it varies from person to person, you know, for about seven, eight hours, eight and a half hours is really probably ideal. But again, it depends on the makeup of the person. But sleep is incredibly important. If you’re not getting your sleep, then you need to make some changes. You make your room darker, quieter, music, something that prepares you for going to sleep.
That is a great checklist. I did pretty well on it, although I think I may need to add a little bit more exercise. But I think most of what you have prescribed, I’m fairly good at but that’s interesting. Um, I have another question and this is a this is something that people ask me all the time since I work at the Center for Innovation at Western University of Health Sciences, which of course has an osteopathic college. everybody’s interested in this concept of OMM. Can you tell me is, what is it and why should people care about it?
Okay, I’ll make a distinction between OMM and OMT. Okay, so OMT osteopathic manipulative treatment, OMT, versus OMM, which is osteopathic manipulation or musculoskeletal manipulation. And it’s really kind of medicine as a way of addressing what’s going on with a body in such a way that there’s a relationship between structure and function. And I’ll give you an illustration of this one young lady 19 came in she was involved in a car accident, she versus an 18 wheeler, her car was totaled. And she from that point on started developing urinary incontinence. So in a store, she was walking down the street, she just, you know, urinate on herself. And so she went to several different doctors, they were going to go ahead and do a surgical implant for electrical control over the bladder function. And so she I’ve worked with her mother once before so she brought her in, and I went ahead and examined the leg links, the innominate bones and the sacrum and the lumbar because that’s where the innovation to the bladder comes from. Specifically the sacrum it’s S234 and her her nominates were had shifted in position and rotated and her sacrum was slightly out of position. No one had ever checked up before no one, in medicine, generally speaking, even deos don’t do enough of a structural examination to see if there’s a structure function relationship. I went ahead and corrected that I use actually a lot of force to see if I could match the forces that are placed upon her body. But after just one treatment, she was then no problems with urination for about six weeks, she came back, she said it bothered me a little teeny bit, not bad I can live with this. And I went ahead and corrected it again. And that was the end of it for her. And I’ve seen that over and over again. So when people don’t address the structural component of a person’s problem, then maybe the tenitis maybe the headaches, maybe the cardiac arrhythmias and gi problems, you know, you can have these problems that have a structural foundation for them, that medications cannot fix, they can only subdue the symptoms. So that should be really in my opinion, almost every patient should have a structural examination performed on them, and then treated appropriately to see if you can get the body back into a normal symmetry. So.
Now so help me again, though. OMM versus OMT help me understand that delineation, I’m not sure I completely caught that.
Okay, so OMT are the treatments. So it’s the manipulation. So we do like muscle energy, high velocity articulatory techniques, myofascial techniques counter strain, there’s a variety of approaches to see if we can address whatever the musculoskeletal component is. Is it too much hypertonicity we can calm that down muscles too tight, we can stretch those out. If the joint is slightly out of position, usually caused by the muscles pulling on them, we can get those particular muscles to calm down, stretch out, relax, reduce the tone, so that those bones those segments, spinal segments can go back into position. So same with the pelvis and the sacrum. So that’s techniques, treatments. And OMM is basically it’s a concept rather than a set of techniques, such as static, manipulative medicine. So it’s like, you come in with a problem and you say, I have you know, I have tinnitus. I go Okay, so tinnitus. Hmm. Where’s the innovation for the nerves have been to the middle ear and the inner ear. So I think okay, so the sympathetics come from T1 to T4. That’s where they originate. They move up through the cervical spine, and then they’re distributed throughout the pathways and the head. So if there’s a disturbance with T1 to T4, sometimes T5, then I can correct that there’s an asymmetry vertebrae is rotated out of position, you know, maybe you’re right handed and use one side a lot more like football or tennis or something. Then the other side, you can create the distortion and position these vertebrae which can then influence those nerves that come from those exact same segments that go up into the head. So I could potentially put that back in that position. And that will correct it. There was just one lady when I did my residency that came in stennis has medicus so she’s in that tripod position going, and only thing she could focus on was her next breath because she’s running out of air. So I didn’t answer any questions practically, you know, she just focus on breathing. And so I was resident there and the doctor said, go ahead and admit ICU so admitted ICU, she’s on her second nebulizer treatment, trying to get enough bronchodilation so the air can come in easier. And I was thinking after I wrote my orders up, and she’s breathing and not doing very well at all thinking, Oh, yeah, I’m a DO. So I went ahead and felt along her T1, T2, T3, T4 nerves going up into the head and also the innovation to the lungs bronchi. And she was there was two vertebrae in particular that were distinctively rotated to the right. Now all the normal treatments that we have the person’s lying supine, so I had to make up based on whatever side in school makeup a treatment that she could remain in seated position. So I just basically took her head and took a T1, T2 and did our de-rotational articulatory technique, and within one minute of doing that technique 80% of her symptoms disappeared.
Wow.
She was discharged the next day. And I was just happened to be walking down the hallway and I said, How are you doing? And she says, I’m doing really good. I just want to tell you that, you know, when you did that thing to my neck, I felt this like this wave of energy go through my body, and it felt much better immediately. And of course, I’m not magical. It’s the recognition you know, OMM, osteopathic manipulative medicine, I recognized innervation to the lungs, and went ahead and treated whatever I found, which was a T1, T2. So structure, function, relationship, correct the structure and if there is some kind of problem created by that structural abnormality? I can correct that potentially. Y’know, which was real clear in her case. And now that’s one reason I love OMM and have focused on away from family medicine into OMM, because it’s often missing in medicine, is that structural component of a person’s problem. If I can take a look at that, then I can potentially think about, Okay, so these are the symptoms, is there a structural component to that? I can correct most structural dysfunctions. And then I’ve seen so many miracles happen, just because that seems like it’s the underlying problem. Maybe they tripped and fell. Maybe they lifted something too hard with one arm or they caught something that was falling. You know, there could be 1000 different things, fall off your bicycle, a dog pulls your really hard, thousand different things, and the body is pretty versatile. But there are times when it’s a little too much. And those muscles expand too much. And they’ll pull on the vertebrae, or the pelvis or the sacrum and create a problem so I can address that number one one thing about being a DO, you learn to assess the structural assessment of the entire body, and then you’ve tied how to then correct whatever you find. So it’s a beautiful missing element in medicine, in my opinion, it’s simple. It’s cheap, and there’s no hardly any danger related to it at all.
Yeah. So, you know, I love the fact that, you know, we started out talking about the fact that so much disease and so much problems and quality of life come from the foods we eat a lack of complying with something that’s really pretty simple drank water, rest, get reasonable amounts of exercise, eat nuts, which is said to be the most nutritionally dense food on the planet. And then, you know, and I love the fact that we’re also talking about ways that really having real impact on patients without drugs and surgery and, and you know, I’d love you know, wouldn’t it be great and wouldn’t be great if the conversation we’re trying to start with this film, really talked about this very thing, the incredible power of not getting sick in the first place. Now being involved in innovation my whole life in, in healthcare. You know, my job was to wake up and invent a medical technology that I got paid for. And the entire industry was incentivized to create interventions. There’s nobody that I’m aware of, that really gets compensated for not doing something, or selling something to a patient. But it but I love the fact that, you know, as you pointed out, and I’ve seen it in my own life, that if you can comply to some pretty simple lifestyle changes, and look at, you know, wellness and health first, then, you know, we’re onto something. In fact, I was also up in Sedona just this last weekend, and as you may know, that’s very much a sort of spiritual healing area. I had a chance to talk to a couple spiritual healers there. Now, this is the kind of stuff that that gets people to reject what you have to say like when I talk to somebody about a whole foods diet, they immediately stop listening to me, right or if I talk about the impact of of connecting with source or, you know, being in a quiet place and and you lose people unfortunately. And anyway, what I’ve witnessed from some of these, these healers in Sedona is that the results are real. There is one case in particular where this 60 year old woman, this is what I just heard of last weekend. All she did is wake up every day and think about and talk about and complain about her irritable bowel syndrome. As long as she was obsessed by that’s all she talked about. That’s all she thought about. That’s all she communicated. And, and she went to this healer the healer said let’s change the conversation. Let’s talk about health and let’s talk about you know what’s right and let’s and and just that, that, and this may sound crazy, but just that that self dialogue, that change of self dialogue, ended symptoms that she had deep, life altering symptoms that she had for nearly five years. It’s incredible.
There’s that one saying the mind is the builder. And the body is the result. So if you’re thinking negativity all the time, then you’re gonna create dysfunction in the human body. So you gotta watch your attitude, attitude of gratitude, no matter what goes on, is really important.
I believe it and I see it in my own life. I have a book coming out in 2021, called Heyday. And it was from lessons that I got from Native American chiefs from metaphysicians from just about every person you can imagine, kind of all came together with this sort of same message. And one thing is, for sure, is that and I don’t know if you’ve read the great book, the Biology of Belief, I mean, really a great example of the impact of our thinking on our physical health. Well, Dr. Redding we’re out of time right now. I appreciate you you sharing your ideas with us and your willingness to contribute to our film. And needless to say we’re hopeful that our film can start a different conversation right now the conversation seems to be, how do we provide more drug access to communities? How do we get more access to treatment intervention? How do we get more and more and more, and if we can just change that conversation that there is a possibility that maybe that’s the wrong innovation target, maybe at this trajectory of healthcare, the new innovation should be about how we leverage science to find ways to avoid getting sick in the first place. It sounds almost obvious and ridiculous, but it’s certainly not the way that the healthcare, economic ecosystem is structured. So again, thanks so much for your willingness. If I did want to ask you one question, which I’m asking everybody. If there was one thing in your mind that could really fix healthcare, the biggest fix that we could make, the one thing we should really think about in fixing healthcare, what would that be in your view
You ever hear about the Scared Straight program?
Yeah, of course.
Okay, so I’m thinking, you know, juveniles get into criminal activity, go to jail, spend some time with hardened criminal and they scare them because prison life, especially for some young male is horrible. But if we went ahead and took children, you know, maybe teenagers, maybe before that and link them up with either a parent, a grandparent or somebody who’s had their legs amputated, who’s had a stroke, and they’re drooling on one side of their mouth and dragging their leg behind them. What if we let them see the consequences of their diet and lack of exercise? I would think somehow, you got to make it real for them. Because if you just teach it in school, and they’re all textbook examples, it’s not going to drive home the reality that your health is your responsibility, and the things you do today will manifest themselves decades later. So that would be the first thing I think I would do is somehow allow them to see the reality of what they’re doing to themselves over time.
Yeah, I love it. That’s a great idea
And for innovation, so if you had like, a, like a single pinprick on your finger, and it would come up with your sed rate, C reactive protein, cholesterol, LDL, or LDL, HDL, then I think that then people could every six months get that done and they say, Oh, look at I could see my hemoglobin A1C’s going up a little bit, that would let them know that they’re on a pathway towards disease. So that would be a great innovation.
Well, I think definitely the the movement towards including real time continuous blood sampling. I do think that we are getting quickly to continuous monitoring. The problem is, is that people are asymptomatic. And if we could have intervened, having having known just some basic biomarkers, we could have saved a lot of money and saved a lot of risk and suffering. So I think we ultimately get to continuous patient monitoring a lot quicker than most people realize we’re working on some technologies that monitor head movement, which is an area called head movement AI where we have breath AI, we have voice AI, facial colorization AI, we’re starting to have all these unusual things that we’re starting to have the the intelligent machine look out to understand the meaning of those data signals. And I think that as we get more and more data, and we build a tsunami of data from real time continuous monitoring, we’ll have the ability to find disease processes, I think really, really early on and, and, you know, the C reactive protein, you know, most people aren’t even looking at that during standard annual, you know, health blood panels. You know, which is, I think, a mistake because there’s a lot to learn there, right?
Inflammation, that’s in how many diseases.
Yeah. Well, listen, thanks again for your time. I really appreciate it and we’re very, very excited to see you up here and once we get to the final cut of the movie coming up in November.
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