SCOTT: Welcome everybody! This is the Life Enthusiast Podcast, I am Scott Paton, your co-host, and joining us, as usual, is Martin Pytela, health coach on Life Enthusiast! We are here to restore vitality to you and the planet! Hey Martin, how are you doing?

MARTIN: Hi Scott, I’m doing good! I’m ready to record our next session today! We will be talking about a documentary that is worth seeing!

SCOTT: Cool! One of the things we have been talking a lot about is all these different chronic illnesses. And of course, what happens in our medical system is they try to deal with the symptom versus the actual cause. So if you have pain here, they say it is fibromyalgia, if you have pain there, they say it is something else, but all our pains probably come from one or two unique causes.

MARTIN: Yeah. The same thing with cancer, right? You can have cancer in the brain, cancer in the colon, uterus, breast, lungs, all the different body parts. And doctors are saying: “well, these are 50 different types of cancer.” But it really is just one disease attacking different body parts. Cancer is one disease, and it is really not cancer as a disease, but it is the process of cancering happening inside your body, it is cancering in different places where it blows up. Similar to that is inflammation, the process of inflaming causing all different kinds of symptoms, I could have a migraine headache, or I could have low back pain, or I could have a thyroid problem, but it is still caused by inflammation somewhere in the body, the pain is just a result of that, by treating the pain as a symptom, you are not really addressing the root cause, the inflammation. The medical system likes to classify things based on location in the body, they like to diagnose, and they make it sound like there are all different kinds of diseases, but in fact, it really is one thing, which is histamine-mediated, chronic, inflammatory, an auto-immune disease. It shows up in different parts, looking different in different body parts, but it all comes from the same cause. And that’s what we have been preaching for the past 12 years. If you have pain, most likely you will be prescribed a drug, a painkiller, an anti-inflammatory drug to block the immune system from doing what it wants to do. But that’s not how you fix it. You need to go after the cause, not symptoms.

SCOTT: My favorite analogy is this: imagine your car runs out of oil, the light that says there’s a problem with the engine lights up, so you take the chewing gum out of your mouth and stick it over the warning light so you can’t see it, and you continue to run your car. Soon you start to wonder why it is not running very smoothly, and then all of a sudden it stops, and you have no idea why. You ignored the cause for too long.

MARTIN: Another metaphor that I like to use is to imagine there is smoke coming into your bedroom through the window. You go to a doctor to consult about that, and he will say: “I have two solutions. One is a fan and the other one is a filter. So we can install a filter in your window, or we can also install a fan to blow the smoke back out of the window.” Not once is the doctor asking: “Where is the smoke coming from? What if your porch is on fire? What if it is going to spread to the rest of the house?” That’s exactly how they are doing it. They compartmentalize things, they isolate them, because the premise of the symptom-oriented medicine is that they want a silver bullet, and they actually have that in their books. They are seeking a silver bullet that solves the problem, which is totally workable for something like a broken bone or an infectious disease. Like if you have tuberculosis that is caused by the tuberculosis bacteria, you deal with that and you have fixed the problem. it is easy to fix gonorrhea, but it is not easy to fix a chronic inflammatory auto-immune disease. The only system of medicine that can handle it is called functional medicine.

SCOTT: This is where we are dealing with the cause of the problem, as opposed to the effect of the problem. The medical system is set up for emergencies, and if you are in an emergency situation, it can do wonders. That’s what happened with me when my liver stopped, and my pancreas got inflamed and I was at the death’s door, they have pulled me back, and I really appreciate it. But the part of the story that we never talk about is the fact that two weeks before my emergency I had gone to see my doctor, who sent me to the hospital, the hospital hydrated me and sent me to a specialist, a specialist looked at the results of my blood tests and said: “come back in a month.” Well, two weeks later, I was almost dead! So it wasn’t bad enough two weeks before for them to do anything!

I have a friend who was on death’s door too, and of course, when she was almost dead, she went to the front of the line, they looked after her, she got the best care, they didn’t quite fix everything, but she was no longer dying, so she was sent home. So she went home, thinking: “I still have this problem, but I’m not dying.” Because she was not dying anymore, they weren’t interested in seeing her, there were many, many, many more emergencies that needed to be looked after before they would get to her non-emergency situation. It was a little bit of a Catch 22, right? If you want the medical system to really work and help you, you have to be pretty much on death’s door. If you are not on death’s door, then it is: “come back in a couple of weeks.” So, people who have fibromyalgia or some of these other chronic diseases, they are not dying, so they are really not a high priority, so they end up suffering for a long period of time.

MARTIN: Right! But yet, this is a hundred billion dollar business for the drug companies, and they love it. Nobody is going to die of these inflammatory conditions, but they are  going to live a fairly painful, miserable, difficult life, and they will be in great need of many medications, none of which are effective. I don’t really want to go through the list, but it is the advertisements that you see on television talking to you about one drug or the other, they all have a long list of side effects, and they tell you all this information on TV with a soft voice, while they are showing you images of ladies dancing on a meadow or something.

SCOTT: So we sort of talked about the depressing part of all of this, so let’s introduce this documentary that came out, it is going to show us something we can do differently!

MARTIN: I surely hope so. They have interviewed 75 experts and patients in the field, each of which has either watched or facilitated or experienced the reversal, both of which I have done, you as well with your health issues. So if you don’t believe me, you can hear it from 75 more guys with multiple degrees and on a hi-res screen, it is the docuseries called Betrayal.

SCOTT: Yes, about how the medical system has betrayed us.

MARTIN: They have! They have completely betrayed their Hippocratic oath.

SCOTT: Yes, first do no harm.

MARTIN: Yeah. Well, it is longer than that, but yes.

SCOTT: Cool. So it is available, we are going to have a link for you somewhere in the description of this podcast! Let’s talk about some of the people that are in this movie, the first one is Tom O’Bryan, he is the host, and he is a speaker, an author, workshop leader, he made his name I believe with the gluten sensitivity program.

MARTIN: Yeah, Tom is a great speaker, great doctor, he understands stuff really well.

SCOTT: Another one of these guys is Mark Hyman.

MARTIN: Yes, he is very big in functional medicine, he talks to the president and the government, and puts out great books. He is the director of the Cleveland clinic center for functional medicine, he is a great guy, good thinker.

SCOTT: One I have to mention is Jeffrey Bland, PhD., he is known as the godfather of functional medicine.

MARTIN: Oh yeah, totally, he is an awesome guy. There are many others that I know well because I read their stuff and I agree with what they are saying. Another person worth mentioning is Sara Gottfried, the lady that really stands out for me. And Sarah Ballantyne, the Paleo Mom, I have her fat book on my coffee table. it is hard, difficult reading because it is quite sciencey and nerdy, but she can explain it so well!

SCOTT: I have to mention this person, I have never heard of him, and I’ll probably say his name wrong, it is Datis Kharrazian, Ph.D., DHSc, DC, MS, MMSc, FACN, all the letters of designations that he has gotten, he is an expert in non-pharmaceutical applications to chronic illnesses, auto-immune and complex neurological orders.

MARTIN: He has just put out a couple of books, mostly about thyroid and adrenals, and he is an expert in the endocrine system and has helped people out of terrible trouble.

SCOTT: One documentary that’s really causing a lot of waves is called Vaxxed. There is a medical doctor and expert in vaccines and auto-immunity in this movie, and it would be interesting to hear what she has to say about the connection between some of these issues and the stuff that we are poking into our skin, directly into your circulatory system.

MARTIN: This documentary is really loaded. The stuff we hear from people all the time is: “They don’t believe me. I’m in pain, they don’t believe that this is real, they think it is all in my head.” This is going to be the science telling you and the world: “Oh yeah, it is not in your head, it is all really happening.”

SCOTT: We had mentioned that some of the people in the documentary are not physicians, not experts, they are actually people that had suffered, and got through to the other side. To give you an example, Mary Capone is a celiac patient, she is founder of Bella Gluten-Free, she even wrote a cookbook, and she talks about how to make gluten-free dinners and that sort of stuff. So obviously somebody who had a real problem and was able to get through it. One of the things that I like about this documentary is the fact that it is also a lot about hope. It is not just about things like: “here is our theory as to why vitamin C works better than some drugs,” it is about real people having problems and fixing them. This message needs to get out there, into these different chronic illness communities, because you really can do some things that are going to help you.

MARTIN: Here’s a really interesting point. James Maskell is one of the speakers there, he is the founder of Evolution of Medicine, and he has figured out how we can all get off of the mainstream medical nonsense. It is through health insurance, saying goodbye to the wrong health insurance model and saying, hello to the new insurance model. You can be covered for treatment by all of these functional medicine doctors. So instead of doing the stupid stuff, you can do the right stuff. I can’t imagine a better world.

SCOTT: Cool! So it is called Betrayal! We really strongly recommend that you take the time to go through this documentary, it is going to change your life.

MARTIN: I have done this stuff, I live it, I’m an example of it. I try to tell pretty much the same thing that these people are going to be telling you, so this is not new, I have done it. I’m simply expecting that this is just going to be a confirmation of what Scott and I have been telling the world for the last 15 years!

SCOTT: Thanks, Martin! Thanks for joining us, everybody, we appreciate having you! This has been the Life Enthusiast Podcast, restoring vitality to you and to the planet. See you next time!