Weak, Sick, and Stupid – Episode #1

Hello, and welcome back. I am Dr. Mark Smith, the Good Living Doc, goodlivingdoc.com. Thanks for showing up to episode one. On episode zero that I posted before this, I outlined what I want this podcast to be about and I introduced the concept of “pillars” of health and the supporting lifestyle factors that go into keeping us healthy and helping us prevent disease. I call those “pillars” of health because they basically prop up our chances of being healthy and living well…good living. 

And those kinds of things, like nutrition and fitness…I mentioned stress relief and stress reduction…and healthy movement, fun, and things like that…sleep. Those are the things that I’m going to ultimately concentrate this show on. But before we do that, I need to lay the groundwork for a concept that basically guides everything that I do in my practice. 

This is a health and wellness podcast, and I’m going to be talking about concepts that involve medical care, disease, natural solutions and interventions. I may say some things that are contrary to things you may have believed your entire life. Some things I say may make you a little uncomfortable, it’s going to challenge your beliefs. So it’s important to say that as much as we’re going to be talking about these things, I’m not your doctor. And because of that, nothing that you hear me say is meant to be taken as medical advice. So, you shouldn’t attempt to treat, diagnose, or cure any medical condition in yourself or anyone else based on what I say here. So don’t change your current doctor-prescribed health care program, or begin a new one, without consulting a licensed health professional. Because I’m not your doctor, please listen in for informational purposes only. Ok?

So, we have to lay this groundwork going forward because everything that I do in my practice and whenever I’m trying to find solutions for health problems or other conditions, it’s always with this underlying thinking that just underscores everything. And it’s important to introduce that concept because that concept is what makes me approach health problems in a different way. 

1. There’s probably three types of people that come to see me for the first time. The first type are just people who love chiropractic. They’ve been to a chiropractic before, they love it, and they’re just people who already know what chiropractic is about and they’re just here to maintain their health and they come in regularly and it’s just part of their lifestyle. 

2. The second type are people who are trying to avoid medical care. They’re aware that medication does not fix their problems. They’re aware that taking pills either changes symptoms or covers up symptoms, but doing that kind of treatment does not actually fix the cause of their problem and they’re here because they want to try something less invasive and less expensive to try to resolve their problems simply before going down the road of testing and treatment and testing and treatment and you know, the kind of loop that you get into sometimes when you have a complicated problem and you’ve got to see specialists and all that kind of thing…spend lots and lots of money…and they’re here hoping that there is going to be a quick, easy solution and sometimes there is. So, I applaud those people because, you know, I believe that drugs and surgery are things that we should try after natural methods, trying to help our bodies fix themselves first. But, you know, that can be a scary thing depending on what’s going on with you. But that’s the second group. 

3. The third type are people who have already been down the medical road and they’ve done the medication and they’ve had the tests and they’ve seen the specialists and they’ve maybe even had surgery. And sometimes it’s years and years, people are suffering, looking for answers and they just can’t get any. And I’m going to say off the top of my head, and there’s no way probably for me to really determine the exact percentage here, but I’m going to say that 90% of those people who come to me as a last resort get life altering results. And I’m going to say also that maybe 75% actually have their problems resolved completely. 

The Big Idea

And I believe that it’s because of a shift in thinking. I believe it’s because of this concept that I call The Big Idea. Now, I did not invent the Big Idea. People have been talking about the Big Idea for centuries, but I have my own personal variation of this Big Idea and that’s the underlying thinking when I approach a person’s problems and I believe that it is the reason that people get well in my office where they don’t get well anywhere else. 

Now I don’t have any knowledge that no one else has. I haven’t discovered any secrets. I’m not carrying any special skills that other people don’t have. It’s simply an approach that changes everything. And if you can take this leap of faith, and you can incorporate the Big Idea into your life and into your healthcare decisions, your health will change forever for the better, if you can truly make this part of your life. 

So what’s the Big Idea? The Big Idea is…your body is intelligent. Now, I’ve said that in front of groups of people in the past when I’ve done group talks or health panels. Whenever I say the body is intelligent, I look out into the crowd and I can see people nodding. We all believe this. If you ask your medical doctor, is the body intelligent? They’ll say yes, of course the body’s intelligent. But that’s where it stops. 

Weak, Sick, and Stupid

Even though we understand, we believe, that the body is intelligent, that’s as far as we take it. Because mainstream health care treats the body as though it is weak, sick and stupid. What is the prevailing understanding and belief in mainstream health care? The underlying belief that all of their treatments are based around is that the human body is weak, that we are genetically prone to disease, and that it is totally natural and normal for our bodies to fall apart as we age, and that we are going to slowly, but surely, crawl into our graves one day and there’s nothing we can do about it. 

So, the goal then becomes to treat our symptoms, make ourselves feel better for as long as we can, as well as we can to avoid outward suffering until we die. Now, it is true, we all are going to die. We’re eventually going to get sick and something is going to kill us. There’s no way around that. But also there is no way that we should be seeing the first signs of heart disease in teenagers, which we are these days. There is no reason why 20 year old’s are becoming diabetic. 

So, the idea that we just are born and then we just start taking drugs because our bodies just fail…as soon as we’re born, they just start to fail. And I don’t know, I don’t think in my more than 25 years of being a chiropractor. I don’t think any person has ever come into my office that was not on some kind of medication. Everybody’s medicated. And the problem is that those medications are treating problems that are many times lifestyle related. But the idea behind treatment is that there’s nothing you can do. And I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people say this, that they’ve just been told there’s nothing that can be done. 

But there is no way that a third of the American population should have diabetes or pre-diabetes, where a third of the people in this country, their pancreases just stop working one day. Your pancreas just can’t make enough insulin. That’s what? A third of the American population is what? Let’s just round it off –  a hundred million people. Their pancreases just up and stop working one day. To me, that’s ridiculous. There has to be something going on rather than, “well, your grandfather had diabetes and your father had diabetes and that’s why you have diabetes and there’s nothing you can do. Take these pills and eat sugar free food.” That’s not a solution. So that is how mainstream medicine goes, your body’s weak, sick and stupid. 

But if Your Body is Intelligent

But if your body is intelligent, then it is always intelligent. Not just on some days and in certain circumstances. It’s always intelligent, if it is intelligent at all, and if you don’t think your body’s intelligent, I have to say it’s probably because you’re not thinking very hard about it. Because there are literally billions of processes that are going on inside your body right now that you have no idea what they are. You’re not controlling them, you have no conscious knowledge of them, but your body is working. It’s an amazingly complex organism doing all these things for you without your knowledge and it doesn’t even need you to help. 

Something simple, like if you’re cooking dinner and you cut your finger. Your body’s intelligent, and so it’s always intelligent…I mean, if you cut your finger, do you think, ”Oh my gosh, this is just going to get worse and worse and I’m just going to bleed out and die?” I mean, there are people that does happen to but they’ve got other problems. They’ve got other issues, but for the average person, that’s not a fear because we know we’re going to clean up the cut, we’re going to put a band-aid on it, and in about a week, we’ll take the band-aid off and there won’t be any sign that it ever even happened. 

Well, what did you do to fix it? Nothing. You didn’t do anything about the chemical signals, you didn’t do anything with white blood cells, you didn’t create new skin. You didn’t do anything. You just went about your life. So, that’s a very simple example of the fact that the body is a self-healing organism. It heals itself, because it is intelligent. 

Is Muscle Tension Intelligent?

I’ll give you an example. Let’s take muscle tension. Let’s say you go for a 10 mile walk, and like around mile six your lower back starts to get tight, you start to feel those muscles tighten up, start to hurt a little bit. So what does this mean? Well, if the body is weak, sick, and stupid, it means that your lower back is just trash and it can’t handle it. And it’s broken and you need to go home and take some anti-inflammatories or maybe a pain pill and you need to put some heat on it and you need to just take care of this broken back and maybe not do that ever again because you’ve got your bad back that your grandpa had.

Or if your body is intelligent, maybe it means that the joints of the lower back and the soft tissues of the lower back are being stressed more than usual, in a way that they’re not used to, and they’re tightening to protect those joints and those nerves so that you don’t injure yourself. So those muscles get tight as a matter of protection. 

So you see, if you think about the body being intelligent, your approach to these tight muscles in your lower back changes. The answer becomes, not how do I treat this problem, but why is it happening? That’s the question that you tend to ask when you believe that your body’s intelligent. Why? Why is this happening? Why is my back tightening up? Maybe it’s just trashed. My lower back is just trashed, or maybe it’s an intelligent response from stressing the lower back in a way that it’s not used to.

So, remember when I talked about the diabetics? Why? I wanted to know why. That’s the question I always ask, why? Why does 100 million people’s pancreases stop working? And if you start asking why, you start to go down a different road. Because if the body is weak, sick, and stupid, then that’s your answer. “Why do I have this problem? Because my body’s weak, sick, and stupid. There’s nothing I can do about it. I’m just going to take my meds and live as best I can.” But if the body is intelligent, that’s not the answer. There’s got to be something else. Let’s look into this. Let’s try and find out what the body could be doing that is smart. Why is this happening? If my body is smart, what’s it trying to do for me? 

Is Pain Intelligent?

How about pain? Let’s take pain, since we’re dealing with the lower back, let’s talk about lower back pain. I don’t understand why some people believe that they can just go about life and do whatever they want, and never do any kind of maintenance on their bodies, and it’s just supposed to last forever. It’s never supposed to give you a problem. People are surprised. 

I live in Indiana, so you know, we’ve got like seven months when it’s cold and we don’t do anything, you know, it’s all indoors. So after somebody sat inside for seven months, spring hits, they go outside and they spend five hours pulling weeds and then they’re like, “Why is this happening? Why is my back doing this to me? Why, why is it punishing me like this?”

Well, that’s not something that anyone couldn’t predict, like you’re going to have pain when you overdo it.. You know, your spine could be completely healthy, not have a problem, and you go and try and lift somebody’s car, you’re going to have pain in a couple of days. If not right then. So you went out and pulled weeds and now your back hurts. 

What do you do? Take some pills. Sit down. “I’m just old.” I have 30 year old’s that come in here and tell me how “old” they are. “I’m just old.” One lady was here this week complaining about her left knee. And she said, “Well, it’s just old age.” I said, “Well, how old is your left knee?” She said 58. I said “How old is your right knee?” She said 58, and I said, “well, if it’s old age, then the right knee should hurt too. Shouldn’t they both be hurting.” 

But that pain maybe isn’t a mistake. Maybe it’s not something that you should just try and cover up. Maybe it’s something that the body does on purpose to guide you, or to change your course of action, or wake you up to a problem. If there’s an intelligent reason for the pain, then the approach to the pain becomes very different. And that’s why people who believe, or function in terms of the Big Idea, with the Big Idea as the underlying thinking behind how to approach this person or this problem, get different results. And I think that that is the reason that so many people get better in my office when they don’t get better everywhere else. 

There are plenty of chiropractors even who are focused on treatment. They’re focused on pain relief. They’re focused on doing pain relief, physical therapy, and they’re treating the pain. And then they don’t get any results, and they come here and we treat them like their body is intelligent, and they get better. 

I guarantee if you start asking why, and you start treating your body like it’s smart, you will get healthier and your quality of life will increase exponentially. If you believe that your body is weak, sick, and stupid, you don’t have any options. Medical care, pills, surgery. Drugs and surgery. That’s your option. 

And even if mainstream medical care is your forte, and you don’t want to do anything outside of that. Or maybe you want to make sure that you stay in that system because you believe in it and you think that the answers are going to come from medical specialists. There’s a period between taking drugs and some kind of much more severe intervention is necessary like surgery. Eventually, you know, they’re going to want to cut out some organs. But in between that and in between the drugs and the surgery, there’s sometimes a lot of years, sometimes decades. Now, you can let those years pass and do nothing, ignore your problems, until the day the surgeon says it’s time. Or you can spend those years asking why and trying to find some natural interventions to make your body healthy.

I don’t treat disease. My goal is not to treat disease. I can’t treat disease. The limitations of my license, I can’t prescribe drugs. And it’s wrong to try and treat disease with food, or exercise, or anything else. It’s the wrong question to ask. So I don’t treat disease. That’s not my arena. 

What I do is try and help people become healthier. I try to raise your level of health. Because a healthier body can deal with whatever problems that it’s having better. If your body is stronger, healthier, and more vibrant and functioning better, it can better handle the conditions that are dragging you down, or that are interfering with your life. So that’s also a very important shift to go from disease treatment to just living healthier. 

I was reading this quote today. Let’s see if I can find it. Okay, yeah. This is very fitting. Interesting that I found it and wrote it down. This is a quote by Dr. James Chestnut. 

“We have gained incredible advantages in safety and technology, and emergency health care. And we should make use of these. What we must not do is assume that these advantages can make up for unhealthy changes to how we eat, move, think, and behave.” 

That’s everything that I’m saying in a nutshell. That, yes, medical care is necessary and can save your life. It can save your life. But the fact that emergency medical care is so effective and so amazing, and so advanced does not take away from the fact that we need to live right. And that we are responsible for restoring health to ourselves.

It’s our choice. There’s plenty that we can do. Our bodies are not weak, sick, and stupid. We are not genetically designed for illness. We are genetically designed for health. We are programmed for health, innately from birth. It’s how our bodies were made. Health is our natural state. So, if we learn the things that bring about health, we can take plenty of measures, do plenty of things to try and help our bodies work better so that we can have a better quality of life

Good living. That’s what this show is about. So, as we go forward with these recordings, this is the platform from which we’re going to talk. That the body is intelligent. About the Big Idea. And we’ll be taking the big idea forward into our future podcasts. 

Okay, that’s it for today. Thanks a lot for listening until the end. I am the Good Living Doc, goodlivingdoc.com. There’s going to be more of this stuff coming. So please tune in if you like what I’m saying. If you want to hear more, tune in, download, like, whatever people are doing these days, you know, follow. And I’ll be talking to you soon, hopefully. Until then, take care.