Ep. 161: From Sick Care to HEALTH Care with Sachin Patel

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Robyn:  Hey everyone, it’s Robyn Openshaw, and welcome back to the Vibe show.

I don’t know if you’re thinking detox yet, but we are over here at GreenSmoothieGirl.

I want to invite you into my video masterclass about what I learned over the course of 25 years of studying human detoxification: how to make it simple, how to make it doable, and how to really turn your life around by getting a lot of the toxicity out of your body that’s holding you back and contributing to disease and symptoms.

We’re going to kick it off big first of the year, like we always do, but you want to get educated about it early. If you want to jump in on my free video masterclass about the Green Smoothie Girl 26 Day Detox and the most important things that I’ve learned about detoxifying along the years of my research, jump in at greensmoothiegirl.com/detox, and you can be watching those videos between now and the first of the year as you’re thinking about what changes you want to make so that 2020 is your best year ever.

[In the] meantime, I want to introduce you to my friend Sachin Patel. He’s a philanthropist. He’s a father and husband and has a functional medicine practice and a successful coaching business. He’s a speaker all over the world. He’s a bestselling author.

What he’s going to talk to us about today is this philosophy he has that the doctor of the future is the patient.

Let me say that again because I think what brings us together, here on the Vibe show, is this very concept, the doctor of the future is the patient.

[Sachin Patel’s] whole goal is to keep people out of the medical system by empowering us through education and self-care and remapping our mindset. Sachin founded the Living Proof Institute. He had gone through his own personal transformation, and now he goes all over the world and he coaches practitioners in how to step into their power to help people be well and help empower whole communities.

He does a lot of community workshops, and he’s really advocating for changing up the whole healthcare paradigm. I think you’re really going to enjoy this interview today.

Welcome to the Vibe show Sachin Patel.

Sachin Patel: Thank you Robyn. I appreciate us getting a chance to connect and dive a little bit deeper into our favorite topic, which is health and wellness, prosperity and abundance. Thank you. I appreciate this opportunity.

Robyn:  This is going to be some really deep stuff here. I’m excited about it.

When I was looking at Sachin’s bio, I was like, “I know he’s a doctor. Why does this say nothing about a doctor?” I did the intro with no credentials and then you and I were talking and I was like, “Why am I not talking about you being a doctor?” It turns out that’s a great way to set up what it is you do and why.

Sachin Patel: Awesome. Well, thanks. Thanks for diving right in. We’re going to go back to many, many years ago. I started off and trained professionally and retired my license in great standing because what I want to demonstrate to people is that the doctor of the future is the patient.

What I want people to know is that the real solution to healthcare is us individually becoming our own best doctors and not necessarily going to see a doctor. I would argue 90% of what people can do to unlock their health is completely up to them.

I trained as a chiropractor, studied functional medicine and built two practices using functional medicine. Then I transferred into coaching. I coach healthcare practitioners. What I realized is that I knew so much information, but there was so much of it I couldn’t use.

There are so many things that I couldn’t say — the truth that needed to be spoken — because of my license. My license was essentially a muzzle for me because there’s so many injustices that are happening, and there’s so much opportunity for people to really leverage themselves, and nobody’s really talking about it because a lot of people in the medical profession have something to lose, which is their license.

The majority of my income, at this point, was coming from coaching healthcare providers. I wasn’t actually in practice seeing patients. I have a team of practitioners that now sees the patients, and it allowed me to really unlock my own voice and speak the truth and say things that other people may not be willing to say.

Robyn:  Your refusal to put doctor in front of your name (even though you earned that advanced degree and did the work and treated patients for many years) is part of your paradigm to elevate the patient and empower the patient and have the practitioner step back and be a collaborator? Is that it?

Sachin Patel: Exactly. Our ethos for our company is that the doctor of the future is the patient. I feel that’s really the only solution because even if we were to train every practitioner as a functional medicine practitioner — or whatever you feel is the best system of healthcare– there clearly will never be enough of us to help all of these people.

There’s nothing that can save somebody from themselves. We’ve got to become our own best advocates of our own health. Really nobody should care about our health. It’s impossible for somebody to care more about our health than it is for us to care about our health.

That’s really what I want people to get, is that there’s so much that they can do for themselves and so much that they can leverage that they can really influence the results far more. Of course, in emergency situations and acute scenarios, that’s a little bit different.

In chronic disease, what we’re capable of is just absolutely astounding. We need to take ownership over that. And I think that’s one of my missions is to get people to take ownership over their health.

Robyn:  You’re totally singing our song around here. My story starts 25 years ago when Western medicine failed me and nearly killed my child with the injections he was given, that set his health way back and [problems] that we still have to this this day that we deal with.

I started to ask myself questions, “What shots am I going to give him? If I’m not going to keep tripling the number of vaccines that my child gets, what else? What other things that were being prescribed aren’t working for him since he’s in and out of emergency rooms, hospitals, and doctor’s offices and on all kinds of meds?”

Since I took control of my family’s health, I haven’t put my children on any medications — no antibiotics in 25 years. I don’t know that there’s a family of four who can say that. I haven’t found one yet. People should write me if you’ve had four children raised to adulthood without being on an antibiotic.

My kid was on liquid steroids, bronchodilators, and antibiotics. I just didn’t know any better. It’s like I took the wool off from in front of my eyes and started to learn this world that you’re deep in as well.

I want to know what took you there and how do you describe what’s wrong with medicine? How’d we get here?

Sachin Patel: If I had to sum it up in one sentence, I think what’s wrong with our healthcare system right now is who is responsible for that individual’s health.

Think about how much time people spend in school, and there’s no meaningful education that they get about how to take care of their beautiful bodies, right? We should be learning about our own personal health every year in school — something meaningful.

Imagine what potentially you could unlock in somebody if you actually showed them how to leverage this meat suit, so to speak, this consciousness that we have and turn this into something amazing and turn our lives into something amazing.

It’s purposely left out, in my opinion, of the curriculum. If you think about it, there’s three things that they don’t teach you really meaningfully how to do in school; how to grow your own food (how to feed yourself), how to take care of money, grow it, invest it, and manage it correctly — [they] don’t teach anything that meaningful at least –and they don’t teach you about your health.

Those are the three most lucrative industries that we have. If people reclaim their health, learn how to manage money better, and started to grow their own food — even some of it — our economic system would collapse, the way it’s designed right now.

A lot of people will say, “There’s no money in healthy people.” That’s true if the economy doesn’t shift or doesn’t change because healthy people have different spending habits.

If there’s more healthy people, then you increase what healthy people buy, and being healthy becomes more affordable. There’s a different economy that’ll exist.

I visualize [our current system] like somebody drowning in the middle of a pool with a life jacket on, and you throw them a life jacket and one of those life jackets is toxic, [and] they dissolve every half hour.

You’ve got to throw them in another one. That’s a drug. The other life jacket is a dissolving life jacket as well, but it’s made out of natural straw. It’s kind of how green medicine is, right? We’re not really teaching the person how to swim.

When somebody’s drowning in a pool, then the economy’s going to scale in the direction to make cheaper life jackets. When that person learns how to swim and get out of the water, they’re going to need running shoes. A new economy will be built. There is money in healthy people, just not with the way the economy is set up right now.

Robyn:  That is very visionary, and you have a lot of hope that we’re going in a better direction. What gives you hope in that?

Sachin Patel: It’s not even about having hope, it’s about having a sense of purpose. That’s one of the reasons that I’ve been put on this planet. It’s really interesting, Robyn, to be totally open and honest with you that I feel like this is my calling. This is a direction that I am being led in.

To get spiritual here for a second, this is the direction I feel like I’m being led in, and now I view it as a responsibility. It’s what I would consider my Dharma, to really change the narrative.

The future is only grim if we’re not willing to do something about it, and we can certainly we owe it to our children to at least try. [If] we’re not going to try then, what’s the point?

Robyn:  I totally agree. I sort of peeled away the layers of why I do what I do full time now. At first, I was going to save my baby’s life. He was failing to thrive — very near death many times between his first and second birthday. That was when I used to go into the doctor’s office and put the responsibility on the doctor to make my son healthy.

Every time we left, things just got worse [with] new symptoms and more drugs. That little path that I took to becoming empowered and educated and changing our habits was [was motivation]. I was the most motivated patient there was, right? I had a baby who was going to die.

I don’t think I’m more courageous or better than other people who are still walking in the doctor’s office and tasking that doctor with returning [their] child’s health.

I was extremely motivated because he came so very close to dying so many times. For a while I thought it was about saving my son’s health, and then all the changes we made totally turned around the health of the rest of us who didn’t seem like we were near death over and over again. We started to thrive where we weren’t.

Then I started doing these little classes in my kitchen, and 20 neighbors would show up on New Year’s Day for me to teach them to make a green smoothie. Then I did little things in my community, and 135 people showed up at this little health food store for me to do a green smoothie demo.

Then it’s become this thing where there’s a podcast and hundreds of thousands of people reading our newsletter and whatever. I’ve been led here too, Sachin, and I appreciate that you’re following what your heart tells you is your highest and best purpose.

I didn’t picture any of this. I didn’t imagine any of this, but I’m just going with it. I’m proud of you. I’m proud of you. I’d love for you to tell us where you’re taking medicine and how you’re doing it.

Sachin Patel: Awesome. We’ve got a proven track record helping some of the, unfortunately, some of the sickest people in our community, and some of them are local, some of them are all over the place because we get to the root cause.

What we try to focus on is getting to the emotional root cause, the spiritual root cause, the physical, biochemical root cause. We look at people from a multi-dimensional perspective.

In current medicine there’s really only one touch point. With the contingencies of medicine, doctors are really relying a lot more [on] lab work. Lab work is a snapshot in time. It doesn’t really paint the picture of what that person’s physiology is going through on a regular basis.

It’s almost like taking an image of a couple and pretending you know all the nuances of their relationship. They might be smiling in that picture, but they might have been fighting on the way there.

We have to really look at health from that perspective and realize there’s certain things that we can measure transiently. There are certain things that we need to really work with and measure in real time.

What’s cool about modern technology and advances that we have is we use neuro feedback and visual feedback and give people an amazing perspective on their health and what’s going on inside their body in real time.

There’s been an amazing set of advancements in wearables, for example. An aura ring is something that I wear. I use a heart math device, which is something that helps me tone train nervous system to be more resilient to stress.

We can really shift somebody’s healing potential by bringing some of these health strategies into their home. That’s what I believe is a solution, giving people a better understanding of how their body works.

We’re not fighting disease as a health strategy. We’re creating an amazing life. That’s part of our health strategy.

The thing I remind people of is that your health is your foundation and your ceiling. It’s going to lay the foundation for your life because you need health to live a great life. It’s also going to be the ceiling. It’s going to limit your potential as well. If your health is a six, then sadly everything else in your life is less than a six, right? If your health is a six, your relationships aren’t going to be a 10. It’s impossible because there’s something missing there.

That’s vitality. I look at somebody’s entire life being limited by what their health potential is. We want to get people to not wait until they’re sick and then learn the best foods. I don’t want people learning about what you do and what I do after they get cancer. It’d be nice for them to know these things before they develop these challenges and problems.

Imagine if they were drinking green smoothies for 50 years instead of abusing their body for 50 years. Imagine the potential of that person spiritually, emotionally, physically, biochemically.

That’s really how we change the future, not by building cyborgs and robots and stuff like that. It’s by really unlocking our own inner potential. I feel like we haven’t really quite achieved human 3.0 yet. I think we’re kind of stuck in 2.0, and we’re looking outside of us to find all the answers.

I think the answers are inside of us, and we’ve got to focus inward. We’re going to see an amazing shift take place in humanity and in consciousness. It’s pretty epic when I can see it in my head.

Sometimes it’s hard to articulate, but that’s what I hope for, and that’s what I’m going to work towards. I know that’s what you’re going to work towards. We’re going to climb this mountain together.

Robyn:  I’ve had so many conversations with functional medicine practitioners, including Dr. Petra Wiechel, who runs the former Paracelsus Clinic in Switzerland that I’ve taken people to for eight years now. I’m running my liver detox retreats there next year in May/June.

She always tells me the same thing I’ve heard from so many other functional medicine docs here in North America, “I just wish I could get people when they were upstream. I wish I wasn’t always dealing with the people who’ve already gone over the waterfall. [Now I have] to go figure out what got them here, and we [have] to back that up.”

I really relate to that. Even though my interaction with people is on a much larger scale in that. Every January we have a few thousand detoxers come into our 26 day detox that I spent many, many years developing in research and putting it into practice.

We were out there on the internet as these sort of earthy, crunchy mom like, “I’m looking to keep my kid healthy. I’m willing to do things for my children that many people aren’t because they haven’t gone over the waterfall yet.”

That’s who was doing our detox. Then a couple of my colleagues told their huge audiences about my detox, and these are cancer people and autoimmune people. It was like the whole supporting people in that detox completely changed.

That’s when I could really relate to all these practitioners who say, “I really wish I could just get to the patients before they’re totally catastrophically sick. I wish I could save more of them from going over that waterfall.”

What you said a minute ago reminds me of that saying — I haven’t been able to find who says this, but — “A man with his health has many dreams. A man without it has only one.”

It’s like you said, if your health is at a six, then everything else you could possibly achieve in life, you’re going to hit your head on that ceiling of six.

I think of people who are so advanced in their careers, and they’ve got all this education, all this experience — they’re basically an international treasure — but they’ve got terrible heart disease or they’re battling some autoimmune condition that keeps them from being productive even eight hours a day. It’s an international tragedy because that’s happening in scale.

Tell us how you’re working with doctors because, you know what, Sachin, I am a little bit frustrated with functional medicine because of — you alluded to it — that over-reliance on labs. I wouldn’t even blame the doctors necessarily.

They’re on the brink of this next frontier where so many patients are turning away from the, “Give me a pill for everything” approach. I just see too many functional medicine doctors who probably just can’t learn it all.

They’re out on their own trying to find answers, and they really love the labs, and they really love prescribing supplements. [For] a lot of them, it just stops there. They just hawk their favorite supplement line because they understand it.

Where are you taking the movement and the many functional medicine practitioners that those of us listening to this go to? It’s not just Western medicine, it’s also some of our functional medicine practices that seem limited to me.

Sachin Patel: You bring up a very great point, and I’m glad we get to address this. I think that there’s a very important thing that naturopathic medicine taught us and that’s the therapeutic order. [In] therapeutic order, you go from the least invasive things to the most invasive things. You don’t start with drugs and surgery, right? That’s the last resort.

You start with lifestyle emotions. You start with so many different factors. Of course, nutrition is a big one of those as well.

One thing that we see is an over complication of health. Here’s the reason that we will never find solutions using our current paradigm of health — this requires people to kind of expand their mind a little bit and be open to a new concept, which is hard for people to grasp initially — and that is called “fractal mathematics.”

The human body, all of mother nature, everything you see in the world, is built on a fractal mathematical platform. In fractal platform, you have infinite surface area, which means you have infinite data storage capacity, which means you have infinite intelligence.

Woven into everything is essentially a fractal pattern. Nature is very, very complex. That’s why if you look at research and science, there’s more and more studies being published every year. It’s kind of a double edged sword because the more research we’re doing, the more questions we have, which means the less we actually know.

Nature has infinite complexity. The human body has infinite complexity, but it’s that complexity that creates sophistication because there’s an innate intelligence, and that sophistication allows us to take care of our health very, very simply.

Our current medical model is trying to match the complexity of the body, which it’ll never be able to do. Bruce Lipton calls this the cosmic joke. What we do at Living Proof is leverage the simple things that people do and realize that those things that you do affect thousands of processes in your body.

For example, somebody going outside for a walk in nature activates thousands of different processes in their body. They’re getting fractal stimulation when they’re seeing nature because again, nature is built on fractal architecture. That’s feeding their brain with information. It’s activating their right brain, unlocking their creativity. They’re getting fresh air; they’re getting sunlight; they’re circulating their limbs, and there’s thousands of things that are happening from that person doing something that’s simple.

Simplicity is really the answer. The solution that you’re providing — which you do, you try to keep health simple, not complicated — is leveraging the sophistication of the body and following the principles of nature.

The moment we start getting super complicated and trying to match the complexity of the body, we automatically set ourselves up for failure because we’re trying to understand a system that has infinite capacity and infinite intelligence and infinite surface area and infinite nooks and crannies of hiding new information.

That’s why, again, Bruce Lipton calls this the cosmic joke. That’s the big difference that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. A lot of people haven’t seen it quite yet.

This is why herbs work so well in the body. Herbs are built using the same fractal mathematical architecture versus synthetic supplements are not built using that same architecture. They don’t have the same embodiment of intelligence that a natural plant would because again, the mathematics are different.

Robyn:  That’s so interesting because I just today interviewed Hyla Cass, who’s a psychiatrist — you probably know her –and she was talking about the same thing but with different words.

She was talking about the entourage effect and how you can’t just isolate one nutrient. It’s just such a seductive idea to patients. They love the idea [of] isolating this one magical thing that was in this plant. Then [they] want to let a pharmaceutical company –because pharmaceutical companies own most of the supplement companies now — isolate it for [them].

I think it’s failing more and more of us. As we start to go to functional medicine doctors, seek them out, pay out of pocket (some of us), I think insurance plans are going to start to adapt to this new model where people get to seek out different types of treatment.

Talk about some of those simple things besides going for a walk, and talk about some of the different aspects that come into play from this one simple thing. It’s like Naaman in the Bible: you go down, and you do something simple, and you don’t have a lot of faith in these simple things. You’re saying we [need] to go back to these simple things and they have many, many positive effects.

Sachin Patel: Yeah. Steve Jobs echoed Leonardo da Vinci. What da Vinci said was that, “The greatest sign of sophistication is simplicity.”

Think of your computer, right? We’re both using a computer right now. If we had to understand the complexity of the computer to be able to use it — and understand how every component of it worked — then we probably wouldn’t. It would be way too complicated to use it. What makes the computer sophisticated is that it’s simple to use.

The body’s the same way. If you believe in a grand design or whether you believe in evolution, it’s irrelevant in this case because we’re proving this through mathematics, and we’re proving this within the current paradigm of health. We can prove it, and we can also prove it in the new paradigm of health, which is driven around self-care and unlocking your own inner potential.

We’ve got something that we call the Daily Dozen for people, and it’s 12 simple things that they can do, and they can hold themselves accountable to it every day.

One of them is joyful movement. Joyful movement is different than exercise because exercise is something that people may not want to do. They always feel better after they do it, but some people don’t want to actually do it.

Joyful movement is different. It’s doing something that you love doing, and doing it consistently. You actually look forward to it. You feel better afterwards.

We also want to promote stillness and meditation, but we actually want to build resilience. We actually give our clients a heart math device, which then gets them to understand how to get themselves into a parasympathetic state.

The secret to all health is the tone of your nervous system. When you’re sympathetic dominant, which is fight or flight, the average person is in fight or flight all the time, right from the moment they wake up in the morning: they’ve got to get the kids to school, they’ve got to make their breakfast. [Then] they’re eating it, and they’ve got a rush to the office. That’s the majority of people.

They start with stress, stress, stress, and their job keeps them stressed. They come home, they have stress. That’s sympathetic dominant. Interesting, fun fact about sympathetic dominance, when you’re in fight or flight, you have an 80% decrease in the blood flow to the liver and kidneys and the digestive system.

Imagine, Robyn, somebody doing your detox program, and we want to get them to have an amazing response. If they’re sympathetic dominant, they’re going to have decreased blood flow to their detoxification organs because detox isn’t important if a lion’s chasing you.

Those systems down-regulate because the blood flow down-regulates. I’ve got to send that blood to the arms or legs, so I’m taking it away from the core, and where I send flow is where I send function. If I decrease flow to a body part, then I decrease the function of that body part.

Getting people into a parasympathetic tone is extremely, extremely valuable. Every nasty chronic disease lives on the sympathetic side. The healing takes place on the parasympathetic side.

Meditation is not just about stillness, but it’s about building resilience. We use heart math to do that. We also get people working on their relationships, not just with themselves, but with their coworkers, their peers, and their friends.

If they’ve got old grudges, they’ve got to work on getting rid of those because those can be very toxic to the emotional health of somebody. We also provide our clients with a gratitude journal. They document what they’re grateful for because gratitude rewires the brain.

We also get them spending time in nature. Fun fact, somebody who sits inside their office all day at their desk gets less fresh air than somebody who goes outside and smokes. I’m not suggesting that people start smoking, but people spend a lot of time indoors, [in] toxic air, and [in] the toxic environment. [In a toxic environment], there is EMF, blue light, mold. A lot of buildings have mold nowadays.

There are all these environmental issues and getting outside actually activates your creativity. You get fresh air, you get sunlight. You’re retraining their circadian biology, so that now your brain knows what time it is of the day.

We also want to get people to eat lots of plants. Plants and herbs provide a lot of nutrition. I’m personally as close to vegan as you can possibly get. My diet is completely plant-based, so to speak.

The deep sleep is huge. In fact — I didn’t tell you this before — but last night I had food poisoning, and [I’m] still trying to figure out what happened. I couldn’t sleep all night. I threw up a couple of times. Today was a really busy day for me. I listened to my body, and I skipped my team meeting because I didn’t sleep last night. I knew how I wanted to feel for this conversation. That two hour nap did me wonders.

Most people would try to push through it. They take coffee, they do this, they do that. You know what? I needed to get parasympathetic; my body can heal and repair because it didn’t do that last night. Valuing and honoring sleep is huge. The most successful people that I know honor their sleep. It’s a priority for them. Just like exercise in the morning might be a priority for some people. That’s the priority for people as well.

I tell people to speak their truth. If we keep our emotions bottled up, that’s going to be a big problem. It can really impact us in a negative way.

Hydration is another big thing. Most people are dehydrated. There’s been times where I feel I could do better with my hydration, [and] that’s something that we get people to focus on.

Simple things. Sunshine is another one. Healthy bowel movement every day. Then journaling. Journaling is extremely powerful for people because it gets them to dump things emotionally if they wanted to — unload on their journal, so to speak.

Robyn:  Those daily dozen habits are really simple. I hope that everybody wrote them down or at least listened to them and evaluated how many of those are you doing.

The sunshine thing — some of us are heading into six months right now of no sunshine. I’m going to have to go to someplace sunny. Last year I never went, and I really felt the impact of that because I get so much charge from the sun.

I wrote the book, Vibe, which is about all the things that raise your vibration, and you just named them. The cliffs notes of the book, Vibe, is drink a glass of water. If you’re feeling stressed out — if you’re in sympathetic dominance — drink a glass of water, go outside, lie down in the grass in the sun, take deep breaths, and think about what you’re grateful for.

Sachin Patel: It’s so simple, right? The beautiful thing is that we have 25 years of research that demonstrates this. The tone of your nervous system is so critical.

I do want to spend maybe a couple of minutes [on this] because this might be the first time people are hearing this concept. Our stress triggers occur in the limbic part of our brain. Our prefrontal cortex, which is the newest part of the human brain, that’s the part that is our intelligence and thought process part.

The limbic part of the brain is not so intelligent. It’s just trying to recognize danger in your environment, and it creates a physiological response before you even know what’s happening. This is where people get stuck in knowing how they should respond, but their physiology beats them to it because their limbic brain is wired in such a way.

A lot of times it’s people’s subconscious associations that are creating stress in their lives, and they’re constantly fighting their nervous system. It’s important for people to address their subconscious stress triggers — not just do yoga and not just do meditation as a retaliation for being triggered.

I think of yoga in some cases like a fire extinguisher, right? That’s how some people use it. You want to use it as a tool, not as a fire extinguisher. You want to use it to build yourself up, not put out the fires that your emotions are creating for you.

Emotions are a big part of people’s physiology, and the moment they get triggered, what ends up happening is there’s an immediate shift in the function of every organ and every cell in their body.

Now the nervous system is telling the body, “We need to go into fight or flight.” Virtually instantaneously the liver shuts down, digestion shuts down, the pancreas shuts down, kidneys shutdown, reproductive organs shut down. Blood sugar goes up because cortisol’s main function is to raise blood sugar, and then you have an increase in breathing. Your mouth dries up because making saliva is not going to help. Stomach acid is very metabolically expensive. We’re going to shut down production of stomach acid.

This concept is very well documented in the medical literature. We know this. The beautiful thing is that the opposite of this is, our healing journey takes place. If we can get people to shift to becoming more parasympathetic, that’s where all of their goals are. That’s where their goal for better detoxes, their goal for better sleep is, their goal for better weight loss, digestion, immune function, and blood sugar regulation.

All of those things live on the parasympathetic side of the fence. Somebody who’s sympathetic dominant, taking the best supplements, following the best diet, is not going to get the same results as somebody who’s not taking any supplements and being in that relaxed state.

One thing I ask people, Robyn, and — maybe you’ve asked people this too — is how many days into your vacation does it take you to feel better? Most people will say, “Three days. Three days in, my pain is gone. I’m happy, I’m excited.” I’m like, “I just proved to you there’s nothing wrong with your body.”

Most people, when they’re on vacation, they’re not eating healthier. They’re probably not compliant with their supplements, but it’s the state of their nervous system that changed, and now they’re starting to feel better, and they’re feeling amazing.

It’s actually cheaper for people to go on a vacation for a month, depending on what part of the world you’re going in, than to buy all these supplements over the course of the year from a functional medicine practitioner.

I think there’s a lot of things that we can be doing for ourselves that supplements can’t do, but there’s things that supplements can do for us — especially if they’re herbal based — that we can’t do for ourselves. There’s this interaction, right?

Sometimes if we’re eating certain foods our entire lives, then we might not need to take them in an acute dose of supplementation because that plant or that herb would have been doing its job. There are many plant based products that can address infections. H pylori can reintroduce nutritional status to somebody or bring them up to a certain point.

I think that ultimately, it’s important for us to develop skills versus taking more [supplements]. That’s part of the direction, unfortunately, that some practices tend to go in. Our mission — to get back to your original question — is to help practitioners look at health from a new perspective and prepare themselves for a new paradigm in health because that’s the health that they want for themselves.

That’s the health that they want for their families. What they want is their kids to not just stay healthy, but to be healthy. Health is going to be our greatest competitive advantage. It’s not going to be education here in the next decade or so. Health is going to be the greatest competitive advantage that a person can have. It’s important for us to recognize the value in it.

The healthcare I want for my family is not for us to live on [an] unawakened life, so to speak, and then develop some chronic disease, and then be thankful that there’s a cure for it. I’d rather not. I’d rather not live the life that created that disease in the first place.

If that’s what I want for my family, why shouldn’t I want that for other people’s families? Why should I want for them to wait until they’re sick to come and see me in my functional medicine practice after they’re a decade deep into finding out what’s wrong with them?

It’s wishful thinking, but it’s my commitment to do whatever it takes to move the needle in that direction.

Robyn:  So many things that I want to ask you about. I want to make sure that I ask you about how you’re raising your kids that is different than everybody else’s.

First of all, I want to mention that we’re grateful that you’re here with us just knowing how very ill you were last night. You wouldn’t know it today. I’m glad you took care of yourself, and thank you for being with us after all the things you’ve had to cancel, and how you were feeling last night. I’m really sorry that you had food poisoning.

We were talking a minute ago about these Daily Dozen that you’re trying to get practitioners to help their patients with. That would be more useful than just a pill for every ill. It reminds me, too, of doing six things at once that I tell people to do, if they’re having a terrible day or they’re chronically stressed out. Just go outside every day, get yourself in contact with earth, get the sunshine on your skin, do it for 10, 15 minutes, meditate, and feel grateful, and hydrate before you go out there.

You’re an electrical being.

You called it limbic brain, but as a psychotherapist, I trained myself to think of it as lizard brain. I’m not the first one to call it lizard brain.

One thing that was very helpful to me early in my practice is that the more I learned about the way the brain works, the more I realized that if I’m not mindful, I live in lizard brain where most human beings are just constantly vigilant, on the lookout. Anything other people say, for instance, is some kind of insult to my ego or some kind of personal attack.

I got really clear that I don’t want to live in lizard brain, and that I’m better than that. I want to live in the front of my brain where I can live in compassion and generosity and kindness and forgiving and love. Those are the high vibration emotions that we talk about in Vibe and that we often bring up in the show.

I just want to point out those Daily Dozen that you are very committed to bringing people back to. Most of us aren’t doing most of them every day. Those are the things that take us into those even frequencies of calm and peace and joy and love.

Sachin Patel: The way I look at it is, it’s like a plant, right? If a plant is wilting, I’m not going to start doing genetic testing on it or start running labs on it. I’m going to ask myself, “Am I giving you enough water, sunlight, and nutrition through the soil? Is the temperature, right? Is it an indoor plant? Is it an outdoor plant?”

I’m going to start asking myself really simple questions, and usually the answer is really simple. I need to do more of this or less of this. What’s interesting about that concept is that you can’t take a plant and put it in the closet in the darkness and say, “I’m going to water it more to compensate, all right?” You’ve got to be doing all of those things. Not just some of those things really, really well because they all work together.

There’s a web-like fashion through which these strategies work. When clients call me and they say, “I’m not feeling good,” or, “I thought I’d be feeling better.” I just tell them, “Send me your Daily Dozen because that’s where we want to start.”

If we’re not doing these things, then we’re never going to reach that. These are the basic fundamental requirements. This isn’t asking much when you really think about it. You’re already doing a lot of these things. Just be conscious about them.

Robyn:  I’m going to run through the ones that I remember. Joyful movement, stillness or meditation, forgiveness, gratitude, journal, eat mostly or all plants — and Sachin and I both eat virtually all plants — hydration, speak your truth, don’t stuff it. Sleep, deep sleep, a nap if you need it. Sunshine. Did I mention that? It’s a quiz. What did I miss?

Sachin Patel: I’m pretty impressed actually. Journaling and gratitude, I think you can probably combine those two. Then healthy bowel movement.

Robyn:  Some of the other things you said cause that. If you eat all plants, you do it. I’ve never said this on my podcast, and it may or may not fit here, but if you eat all plants, you don’t have stinky poop. You just don’t. Am I wrong? [Laughter]

Sachin Patel: I wouldn’t know at this point, but I would imagine so.

Robyn:  I just had a conversation with someone close to me about that and I’m like, “If you just stop eating dairy products and animal products in general then your poop doesn’t stink anymore.” Anybody ever smelled horse poop?

What I’m saying is eating all plants helps the healthy bowel movement that isn’t constipated and hard and foul smelling and all that. It just comes through.

Sachin Patel: In India, they use cow’s dung to build patty huts and all kinds of stuff. It’s a building material there, and you would think it would smell. If you were to use a dog’s [poop], it would be horrible. Meat-based diets tend to produce stronger smelling stools.

Robyn:  What we feed our dogs and cats is pretty gross, and that’s why their poop is so awful — well, cats because they also eat animal products. Of course it goes right through. It’s not as bad as if people eat animal products, and it may stay in their intestines for days or weeks.

I feel like this model that you’re moving to is where doctors become coaches. Can they make a living doing that? Do we have a market for the health coaches? There’s some doctors now who are like, “I can’t hold people’s hands and teach the classes and get my hands dirty going into their house and clearing out their pantry and teaching them to eat differently.”

Is that why we have all these health coaches popping up and all these certification programs? Do you think there’s a big role for health coaches or do you just want to see the practitioners come down to that level?

Sachin Patel: I actually wouldn’t say come down to that level. I would say go up to that level. To me, that’s really, really important.

The key is you’ve got to build a team around you. There’s different ways to educate people. Part of somebody’s strategy might be going into people’s homes.

Part of their strategy might be doing training videos, or you can even do it through Zoom nowadays, right? You could have somebody use Zoom on their phone or you can do a walkthrough of their entire house if you wanted to. There’s so many ways to deliver this and to share this information and to get it out there.

Here’s what I think. I think that the way our healthcare system is set up right now, clearly is financially failing.

What I’ve learned in the past is when something is failing miserably, do the exact opposite. The answer is so simple. I don’t have to measure anything. I just have to do the exact opposite. If I can do that, then it’s a blue ocean strategy for me.

Our objective — and this doesn’t have to be everyone who’s listening’s objective — is to get people to learn how to take the best care of themselves possible. What I strongly feel is that a coaching component is extremely important.

I love coaching. Who as a practitioner isn’t in some way coaching their patient? I think coaches play a huge role. I just spoke at the [Functional Diagnostic Nutrition] conference. I’m a huge supporter of health coaches, and the role that they play.

We’ve got a couple of health coaches in our practice that add an amazing element of care and compassion. We’re able to leverage their skill set as well because coaching is different than being a practitioner. It’s a different skill set, and it’s something that certainly we can develop over time.

I feel that having a coach or having training in being a coach is quite powerful. One of my clients that I train one-on-one [is][ a medical doctor. One of the first things I had him do is take the FDN training.

I wanted him to become better at being able to coach his patients towards health. He’s not going to be prescribing moving forward. He’s going to be coaching them to make better decisions. A pill you can prescribe, but a skill you have to coach somebody into doing

Robyn:  I think it’s a brilliant model because I think that if people’s doctors will lead the way and teach the classes and do the Zoom calls and require these things of their patients, then we’ll get a lot more compliance.

We really need to task our healthcare practitioners with that because we call it healthcare. [It is] time for them to step into it regardless of the deficits in their training.

Just this week I went to the screening here in Salt Lake City. They didn’t even tell us what the film was until the last minute, but it’s the Vaxxed II film.

I’ve recently just interviewed Stephanie Seneff of MIT and Bobby Kennedy, and talked to them about issues around vaccines [I] can’t talk about anywhere else on any other platform. I can explore those subjects here on my podcast.

They went all over the country, 45 of the States, with this bus that they printed “Vaxxed” on the side of it. 7,044 vaccine injured people signed the bus. There wasn’t an inch left of the bus left to sign.

They had a lot of doctors show up. They had pediatricians, they had internists, they had GPs, they had PhD immunologists show up and say, “We have a major problem with what we’re injecting people with.” They got on the bus, and they went on camera.

They had the courage to say, “Nobody taught us anything about what’s in these vaccines. Nobody taught us what’s in here. Nobody taught us how they worked, and they just told us we needed to inject everybody who comes into our office on schedule or there will be hell to pay.”

I love the idea of just busting the whole model wide open — like you are — but in such a gentle way. I’m dealing with the actual patients, not the practitioners for the most part — although we have a lot of health coaches who follow us.

How can [the patients] get involved in your movement? Where can they find you? I know you’re into community building as well, with this. This has to be in the communities, which I love. How can they be involved, and how can they get a different kind of functional medicine care if they’re going to these chiropractors and naturopathic doctors who run labs and prescribed supplements?

Sachin Patel: I think they’ll always be a place for that. That’s something that we do offer to our more complex cases. I do want you know, let people know, that there are going to be instances where you need to dive a little bit deeper, but you’re always going to have to do the self-work. That’s going to get you amazing, amazing results.

[Doing the self-work] is going to get you much closer to what your potential is, and it’s going to put you in this state of healing and repair. Our primary objective, Robyn, is actually to keep people out of our office.

I know that sounds kind of weird, but we have a program, and if you go to www.30in30.org, what you’ll see is there’s an opt in page there. People can go and sign up for our 30 day program where we give 30 of our best tips away.

I take people through my condo at the time — I live in a house now — and I just show them the basics, the fundamentals. That video series was recorded four years ago, and it’s just as relevant, if not more relevant today.

We’ve been preaching this message for a long time, and we want people to be able to do their part in their health. If they want to learn more about our practice, they can go to www.becomeproof.com and they can learn more about some of our services as well.

Robyn:  Wonderful. Last question. How are you raising your family that looks different based on your knowledge of this more holistic approach to health?

Sachin Patel: I love this question. I could talk a lot about this, but I’ll keep it brief. [We are] really changing belief patterns to fit a more positive narrative of a future. We don’t have cable television. I think that makes a big difference. [My son]’s not being programmed, so to speak. We don’t really listen to commercial radio.

The best advice I can give a parent is be the person you want your child to become because they’re watching you. They’re watching everything, and they feel you too. They feel your energy, and they feel your sympathetic or parasympathetic tone. That part of it is very important.

It’s not about telling our kids what to do, it’s really about showing them what to do. For me, being a father is my most important role, and my most precious role. It forces me to be hyper-conscious, especially around my son, because I want to role model of health for him.

Robyn:  I’m glad that you figured out so early that they’re watching you. My four children are adults now, — they’re 19 to 26 — and there isn’t a day that goes by that one of them doesn’t say, “Mom used to do this when we were growing up.”

I am not sure that I was nearly as conscious as you are — that everything that I was doing, they were taking note of, and that I was their role model in all things until latency phase took over and they started looking more to their peers.

I’m not going to say I wish I had it to do all over again because I think there are many things I did right. There were some things that I just wasn’t aware of.

You are so right. The things that we say, the lectures that we give, even the food we put on the table isn’t as important as how they watch us running our own lives. Thank you for living yours in such an exemplary way and for having such a big mission.

Any final words for our audience?

Sachin Patel: I want to say thank you for everyone, for tuning in and expanding your mind and expanding your consciousness. Thank you, Robyn, for this amazing opportunity to share this time with your community.

What I want to leave everyone with is there’s an amazing life that awaits each and every one of you. If you can unlock this potential just by doing the simple things that Robyn and I talked about today. It’s pretty amazing how fast the shift can take place within days for many, many people.

Thanks for tuning in. Again, Robyn, I appreciate this opportunity.