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If you would like more detailed medical information, please contact Integrative Medicine through their website at https://integrativemla.com/ Show Transcript Welcome to Better Medicine, a return to when medicine made you feel better. Now, here's Dr. Jason Amick and Dr. CJ Pabla. Hello, this is Dr. CJ Pabla. This is Dr. Jason Amick. Welcome to Better Medicine. This is our first podcast. We're excited to do this, to start this endeavor, to share kind of our thoughts, our philosophy, and a lot about our practice, and to talk about things that are relevant and important to people every day. So one of our big philosophies at our practice is returning to when medicine actually made you better. And that has so much to do with our integrative approach to medicine and healthcare in general. So, Dr. Pawa, tell us a little bit about why you started the practice, how you developed functional integrative medicine mindset. I practiced emergency medicine for 18 years and this is where Dr. Amick and I kind of connected, but, uh, we'd see a lot of chronic stuff in the emergency department. Not necessarily acute stuff. Uh, women that had gut problems, multiple CT scans, and, uh, no one can really find what's wrong. We could tell them what it's not, but what was it? Right. So I started thinking about like, why are so many chronic stuff in this country just handled with just medication. So that was kind of the philosophy, could we work upstream and find root causes to these problems if we dug a little bit deeper. So that's kind of the philosophy behind that practice. We're not anti-medicine. I think medicines are great for stabilizing symptoms and getting people kind of stabilized, but you know, we kind of look at it as a band-aid. And then, you know, what can we do to work upstream? So that's kind of my philosophy and Dr. Amick's philosophy, and we know the gut is linked to many things. Dr. Amick can kind of speak about that, but so that's kind of why I decided to get out of emergency medicine and deal more on the chronic side and look at more root causes for patients. I think we both had some personal experiences we can talk about, but I you know, I can remember a long time ago we work in the ER. We would have patients come in with sometimes pages, two, three pages of medicines. I can remember even back then kind of thinking to myself that, gosh, you would think that if medicine solved problems, the more medicines you were on, the healthier you would be. And it was never the case. The more medicines they were on, the worse off they were. So I know early on, we started kind of questioning our training and the standard medical model, you know, 20 years ago, kind of going, nah, does this really kind of make sense? And so, you know, from my perspective, you know, I kind of stumbled into integrated functional medicine just through, you know, lots of different experiences that I had, including some hospital administration roles and really getting to see what happens behind the scenes, you know, how the insurance model affects healthcare, how it drives clinical decisions in healthcare organizations, looking at different types of healthcare models, you know, from emergency medicine care, under MTALA and all those things, all the way to cardiac and cardiovascular care, you know, acutely and chronically, you know, in those two areas, I would say in a lot of areas, the United States, we surpass every other country with our acute care model when it comes to trauma, cardiovascular, you know, heart attacks, strokes, you know, when, when an insult occurs to people, we, we are bar none the top of the world in managing those. Yeah. But when it comes to preventing those things, we really, it's sad and embarrassing how terrible we really rank against other countries, even some of the countries that aren't necessarily considered first world countries. So, from that perspective, I kind of, you know, really took into account, okay, so what else is out there? And that's kind of why I stumbled into functional medicine, integrated medicine, and really understood, going into it, that this is an approach where you start with basic physiology, basic biochemistry. Like, how do we actually make people better? You and I talk a lot about the systems biology approach, right, the whole body is connected. So you don't have a liver problem, you've got a body problem that manifesting in the liver, that sort of thing. So that was kind of my experience. And then also understanding the healthcare model today, I think as a lot of people are acutely aware, isn't really about making you bad at it. So that's kind of where I came from. And I think you had some personal first-hand experience maybe with some back injury or back pain. And so tell us about that a little bit. Yeah, so, you know, like Dr. Amick said, chronic care, we basically manage symptoms and do we actually get patients better? You know, I snowboarded for many years and was having a lot of chronic low back pain and, you know, went the traditional medicine route, did an MRI, which is important to look for structural issues, saw a back surgeon and really wasn't getting any better until I saw a doctor that did myofascial release and that made a world of difference. So you know, getting that done, getting look at muscles that were inactivated, that weren't functioning right, made a big difference in my pain management and I was able to get back into working out and being healthy. So, you know, besides my personal journey, you know, I realized that, you know, what can we do to affect change? And, you know, as a physician, I really didn't know a lot about nutrition, right? So, you know, you study a little bit of it in medical school and I realized that the countries that do it well, the core is changing the way you eat, you know, eating not only so what does it mean to eat healthy and we can get into that down the road but you know, eating not only, so what does it mean to eat healthy and we can get into that down the road, but you know, really eating whole foods and avoiding foods that tend to be inflammatory and you know, and it's harder and harder to eat healthy. And so, that's kind of our take on it, you know, really establishing a core of, you know, good foods, some proper supplementation, and then really focusing on gut health. Yeah, and you know, I've said for a long time, I continue to say, and I think the two worst things we say in medicine and healthcare is, eat better and exercise. Yeah. Because no one really knows what any of that means. Right. And so, we have to take a really broad look at, what does it mean to eat better. Well, it's not just, you know, removing processed food and things that are bad for you, but it's also understanding how your body reacts to the foods you are putting in your mouth. Because again, from a systems biology approach, I mean, every single organism on this planet, and you can take a good hour and watch some really good TV programs about nature, and what you learn from just watching, whether it's a butterfly or a snail or a Capuchin monkey or whatever, you know, they're intimately tied to their environment and what they eat How they eat and what's available to them and that's something that you know from a biological perspective. We've gotten away from yeah and so there's absolutely a recourse when you're eating processed foods and chemicals and things that just aren't natural to your biology, and that has some long-term effects. So we see a lot of things in our practice, and we manage a lot of that, not just, you know, from a food and nutrition perspective, but a lot of chronic diseases. We talk a lot in here about inflammation, inflammatory processes. We do a lot of disease management for patients. And I think one of the things that sets us apart from a lot of other practices is our deep understanding of the physiology, but also our ability to explain physiology to our patients and educate them. Yeah. And you know, emergency medicine gives you a broad perspective on a lot of different pathology because, you know, as a ER doctor, you might see trauma in one room and then you got a heart attack in another room and you got ortho in another room so it gives us a broad perspective and also in graduate school I studied a lot of physiology and biochemistry and really I think the battle is won when you look at the cellular level you know how does toxins how does inflammation affect the cellular level? And, you know, we spend a lot of time on Dr. Emick on whiteboards, kind of nerding out and, you know, drawing formulas and looking at organic molecules and looking at different pathways that are interrupted by inflammation or interrupted by, you know, toxins in our environment. And so, I think, you know, this is not just some pseudoscience. This is actually science at its best, I believe, where you really have to understand the pathways. For example, B vitamins, I mean, what are they? Well, they're cofactors. They make enzymes more efficient. Minerals, they make enzymes more effic
