Dr. Dan Stickler
speaker
120 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Dr. Dan Stickler’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Yeah, it's a great new opportunity for a lot of people.
I became disenchanted when I first got into medical school because I used to love my pediatrician. He was great because when I would go, he would always ask me about the sports I was playing and he would give me guidance on how I could be better. At doing these things, you know, I didn't care about it. I didn't mind about the shots or anything because he was such a cool guy.
And so I had this impression that this was what medicine was, making a person better at something. I didn't have any medical people in my family. So from third grade on, that was all I wanted to be was a doctor. Yeah. And I got into medical school and it was all about disease and pharmacology to me. And I was like, well, you know, what about like nutrition and exercise?
And there just wasn't much of it. And then I had to decide what I was going to do. And I didn't want to do family medicine or internal medicine because I saw it as, oh, it's a stepwise postponement of death. I mean, you just accumulate diagnosis and medications over time until you die. And that didn't resonate with me.
I ended up choosing to go the route of surgery just because I could take someone who had a quality of life that suddenly dropped for some reason. I could intervene and at least bring them back up to baseline. And that was something that I enjoyed doing. I loved working with my hands, and there was some reward with it of bringing people back to baseline.
And then I discovered age management medicine. This was about six years into my career. Private practice of surgery. And it was about optimizing the human system. I was like, wow, this is a new concept for me. They were using hormones and nutrition and exercise. I thought that's really cool. So I started doing that as a hobby on the side just because I enjoyed it.
And over the next five years, I was fully convinced that it was the way to go. And we had added stress and genetics. And I started seeing the complexity of the human system. And I was like, this is the problem. We've been looking at it like a... in a reductionistic way in the human system is complex. Epigenetics opened that up to me and we started teaching people epigenetics.
I walked away from surgery in the end of 2009 and said, this is what I want to do. And so I dedicated myself full-time to this and I've been learning systems biology, systems health, Over these years, and I am fully convinced that this is the new paradigm of health. We actually started that way, though. I mean, ancient medicine, you know, you look back at Ayurvedic medicine, and you look back at
traditional Chinese medicine. It was all about balance and harmony in the system. It wasn't about the parts and pieces. It was truly the harmony. And even the early Greek stuff was about the balance and harmony of the four humors. And then along comes the later Greek period where they started getting into the parts, breaking things down to understand them based on the parts of that.
And then Descartes and Cartesian dualism really started to solidify. And then you had the germ theory. And then you had the Fleckner Report. And I mean, we just solidified reductionism as this is the way everything works and how it should be done. And we lost that initial understanding of the harmony and balance of the system.
And now systems medicine, systems health has, I mean, this evolution is like a spiral. We keep coming back around to it. And so now we're coming back around to the harmony of the system. I mean, just think of something like inflammation in the body. Everybody looks at it as a bad thing. It's the body trying to balance. It's the body trying to get back into harmony.
And we take anti-inflammatories to treat it, but we're treating the response of the body to get us back. Understanding the human system in this way really has changed the way that we look at patients and the way that we treat them. And it's made a dramatic difference in the outcomes we see.
Oh, for sure.
Oh, I mean, we work with a lot of... executives and and high achievers i mean these are these people who have built their kingdoms basically a lot of entrepreneurs that have exited companies and and suddenly they have lost meaning and purpose in life you know they they built this for the last 20 years and now Now what?
So a large portion of our clients, that's one thing that they don't realize is missing, but it's a piece that is impacting them across all different categories of health. And so we help them to identify meaning and purpose in life. We work with belief systems and expose them to various belief systems that may resonate with them, give them some perspectives. It's an important process.
area to work with i mean even even in in designing interventions for people understanding and respecting their belief systems is so important and it's ignored in a lot of the medical community yeah what would it look like to design an intervention for them We get a detailed questionnaire on spirituality.
So we've developed one that it's a 30-question questionnaire that asks them about their meaning in their relationship, their purpose in life. Do they feel in touch with a higher power? Just to get an idea of where they are in five different categories of spirituality that we have.
And that is so illuminating in people because you're like, wow, I really thought that this person was really in a solid place with this, but they're obviously not really connecting well with that aspect of their life.
Yeah, I mean, it's like a rainforest. In a rainforest, you can't treat that in a reductionistic way like we repair a car. In a car, we know what each individual part is responsible for, and we can predict what a failure in this one part creates in the outcome of the overall car. In the rainforest, I mean, it is a complex ecosystem that relies on feedback loops and emergent properties.
And the human system is the same way. Looking at the human system as a whole allows us to look at the human ecosystem. Say, you know, what are these feedback loops? What are the feed-forward loops? What are the interconnections that are being made between these systems that create the outcome? Instead of going, oh, okay... They have high blood sugars.
Showing 81–100 of 120 · page 5 of 6
← Previous
Next →