Why Some California Doctors Are Turning To Integrative Medicine

Holistic health is on the rise in California. A lot of people might not believe in holistic health or alternative medicine, but now one third of Californians are using some kind of holistic health. Today we sit down with doctors to find out what's going on with holistic health in California. We have a surgeon, Dr. Malamat, who's been actually using holistic health in his practice. Patients coming in, I said, listen, a lot of the pain is because of what cycle that's going on inside the inflammatory process. I said, let's put you on a nutrition inflammatory process. Let's change your lifestyle. Let's get a good physical therapy. Most of the time patients come back six weeks. You know what, I'm much better. So we avoid the surgery basically. We also talked to UC Davis physician who has been at forefront of all of this and seeing a trend of hospitals now integrating holistic health into their programs. Then we go to policy expert in DC who's seeing some changes in the federal government's policies that could impact healthcare in California. I'm Siamak Rami. Welcome to California Insider. Dr. Human, it's great to have you back and welcome back. Thank you very much. It's amazing to be back. Pleasure. We want to talk to you about the rise of holistic medicine in California and nationally, but California is really the hub for the holistic medicine. You are a surgeon, you're a spine surgeon, but you also believe in the holistic medicine. Can you tell us what's happening right now in California? So I do agree. California is definitely the hub, the mega. We do a lot of innovation and holistic is one you're starting to see pop up. With the whole, the healthy aspect of it, nutrition, we're using food as medicine basically, and starting to use what I call non-chemical modalities to treat your non-prescription stuff basically. Yes, California for sure is definitely picking up ahead of the country. From what I have seen being in other parts of the country, we are definitely ahead of everybody else right now. Is there a clash between what you guys have been taught in the med school versus the holistic medicine? I started instituting that about 10 years ago. I learned I don't really feel like just pushing pills or surgeries on patients is the right thing to do. I feel like you have to treat the whole human being as a whole, and that's called functional medicine, integrative medicine, which is how I got into it. Myself as a patient, at one point I was about 9% body fat, but I was pre-diabetic. I had cholesterol very bad. I had acid reflux, and this is about 10 years ago, so I was in my early 40s. My friends told me, well, as you said, traditional medicine friends were like, this is how it is, you get older, this is what happens, your genetics. But I was having a hard time with that. I was like, gotta do better than that. Then I met Dr. Tazeeb. She's the one that opened my eyes into this whole functional medicine. I started taking courses on it, conferences, and I started basically treating myself under her supervision. Thanks to her, completely, basically, I was able to knock out all these issues. No more pre-diabetic, no more cholesterol, and no more acid reflux. Testosterone went up, everything improved, and I've maintained it now for 11 years now, so using food as medicine. But then you have the doctors, as you said, this is the way it is, it's very tunnel vision. Oh, they don't believe in that stuff, so that's the problem. But I think slowly, people are starting to learn about this, and I think patients are the ones that are driving it because they're pushing it. Now with AI coming out, with everything else, I think there's a demand for this. We have to get better. We have to change the medical school curriculums. How does the traditional medical school doctor look at the problems that we have? Most of them are very tunnel vision, the way you learn, okay, here's the problem. You just follow what you were told. You get this pill for this, you get that pill for that, you do this surgery for this, and everybody's focusing on their own specialty. I say, and I tell the patients, your spine is not disconnected from your body. Your spine, you're a human being. My goal is to improve you, the whole body, not just your spine, basically. Unfortunately, many people are just focusing, oh, you have a wrist problem, let me just focus on your wrist. Your gallbladder, let me focus on the gallbladder. Everybody's focusing on their own areas without looking at the whole human body, which is not right. Can you tell us about the time you figured that out, to look at the human body? Can you walk us back? How did you figure that out? I have to give credit to Dr. Tazeeb. She's the one that opened my whole eyes because I was one of the traditional doctors too. I used to believe you give this much narcotics after because you're just following what you're told. You do a lot of operations, right? Yeah, you do surgery, so you follow what you're told, what you learn in residency, so it's passed on from your attendings to you. You hold them in high standards, so you're just following it. And I'm not saying they did wrong or not. I mean, they just know what they know. You only are as good as what you know. And it does work, in a sense. It does work in some ways, but I always felt, one of my attendings, Dr. Miller always told me, you always have to think how else you could improve the patient care. I always went with that mentality. After every patient I see or every patient I do surgery, especially, I always want to figure out how else I could have done it better, how else it could have been. So it wasn't until I became a patient, sort of, where she opened my eyes into this, and I took conferences, courses, which I knew nothing about that in medical school. Like, there's zero mention of that in medical school or residency about the whole holistic, functional medicine. Look at the whole human body when you treat gut health, you know, which is the most important thing. So that's how I got into it. I started learning more about how critical gut health is, and I learned how the stuff I thought it was healthy, it was so unhealthy, actually. It was, like, causing me major leaky gut, and I didn't even know about it. The traditional doctors, are they able to use these principles in their current practice? Like, so when you do your spine surgeries, do you bring these principles? A hundred percent. You're the captain of the ship, as they say. You're the one that patients are relying on. So you do whatever you say patients do. So I started educating the patients on nutrition. A lot of times you can avoid surgery on patients, potentially, the body can repair itself, basically. So many doctors, especially, I would say, what I call the gatekeepers, which are the family medicine or the primary care physicians, they are the ones that can start with these modalities, like start really focusing on optimizing the patient's health, not reactive health. A lot of times, okay, here's the blood work. Oh, you know what, you have diabetes now. Okay, let's start you on this medication. Oh, you have blood pressure, let's start you on this, go exercise. But they're not focusing on what I call optimum health for the patient, like increasing muscle mass and other things to improve quality of life, not for you to be 60, 70, and you're depending on all these medications, basically. Do you think the holistic medicine will get adopted much more as we go forward? I think it depends on, really, it starts from the top. I think doctors like me, there's only so much we can do. But I think now we're seeing it in some of the eliminating some food dyes, some seed oils, these are all like lifestyle, basically, lifestyle changes. So I think if we can start adopting it from the top and start pushing the curriculum into the medical schools, that's the best way it's gonna happen. And the public needs to demand more, forcing the doctors to start adopting this. Are there any downsides about this holistic side of things? There are, just like in anything, there are always what I call opportunistic people. In any aspect of medicine or any other profession, there are people who start looking at it as a business and how to make money at the expense of the patient care, basically. Is it as regulated as the other side, the traditional medicine, or is it not? Yes and no. In some ways, it's not regulated because it's new. Most people are not really focused on it. But it is in some ways because we all have a standard by in California, the Medical Board of California, they have some standards you have to abide by. But I don't think it's really, really regulated the way the other aspects of medicine is. To hold people who prey on patients accountable. Is it hard for traditional doctors to accept holistic medicine? Because you were trained, a lot of people are trained for many years, and what they do does work, right? See, here's the thing. I think it does work because you see it work the way you see it work. But have you ever thought about, what if I do something else, could it work better? So you're doing what you think because you see it work, but I always feel like there are ways we can improve because that's how medicine advances. We've gotten better with many things, for example, whether it's robotic surgery now, instead of sticking with the traditional, now you do robotic work because robotics is better now. It's like a surgeon says, no, I'm only gonna do this way. No, there's a better way. So I think it's about educating the doctors more. And I think the hospitals and for example, requiring CMEs to force the doctors to learn about that because many people get complacent. What I've seen, surgeons, doctors, whatever, they get complacent in their way of doing things. And they just want to continue that way because it works, as you say. But I was never happy about that. I mean, the only way medicine advances, humanity gets better is because you always have to think, how else I can improve quality of care, right? How about the business side of it with the health insurance? Because a lot of times the holistic side is not really covered by health insurance and others are. That is a big problem, I think, part of the adoption because they don't recognize any of that. Me talking to the patient, for example, educating them on nutrition, gut health, none of that is recognized by anybody, Medicare or any of the insurance companies. You're not getting any reimbursement for it. You have to show data, that's the thing. So I've been collecting my own data, like a non-narcotic approach after surgery. I have like five-year data, actually seven-year data now, no narcotics, I'm trying to get it published to show. You can do surgery without giving people heavy duty narcotics. You don't have to give narcotic if you focus on their gut health, optimize their health before surgery, and then quickly put them on a good nutrition after, start putting them on acupuncture, like homeopathic stuff, like arnica, ginger, turmeric, fish oil, get the gut health, get the essential amino acids, start focusing on that. None of this stuff is, all this extra work is not covered. But the insurances don't know that, listen, this is actually good for you because it's helping the patient avoid more problems later on, you actually save money. So it brings the cost down for insurance companies. Yes, yes. But you have to spend a lot more energy and effort, right? Yes, it is more because you have to spend time to educate people about their lifestyle. You know, here it's like, you come in, I have this problem, I have done physical therapy, let's say, I've done epidurals, I'm now a better doctor, I'm ready for surgery. This has been going on for a year, my quality of life is bad. It's very easy for me to say, okay, you're right, let's schedule the surgery. But it doesn't feel right, I have to say, listen, let's, okay, we're gonna do the surgery, but surgery is not your long-term answer. Why did this problem happen? Let's look at your lifestyle. So I started educating the patients on their lifestyle, nutrition. I said, listen, the nutrition after your gut health, how you take care of yourself after is gonna go a long way of hopefully making this the last time you have a problem. You know, I'll say, I'm gonna do my part, but I need you to do your part. All of these, it takes time, basically, to educate. It takes a lot of resources, my staff sending them stuff. It's resources that you have to spend. After the surgery, so is the big percentage of your patients don't take the painkillers or? The biggest painkiller I give them the most is usually tramadol, which is a very low-acting opiate. It's not in the traditional narcotic like Percocet, Vicodin, Norco, Oxycontin, Dilaudid, Morphine. Which is getting some people addicted to that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, 99% don't get that stuff. And we tell them ahead of time. A lot of them, our patients are skeptical. They're like, how could it be? And I tell them, when you educate, that's the thing. You educate them, you get them mentally ready. They're like, okay, this is not as bad as I thought. Because now they're optimized, you can heal. Is there a comparison between when you were giving painkillers and you were doing it non-holistically versus now that you're mixed? Huge difference in their recovery. I mean, they're up and about right away. They don't get constipated. They don't, they have bowel movements fairly quickly. They're not like foggy, basically. They're much more with it, much return earlier to work. To their functions, basically. Much less pain and much faster recovery, 100%. There's some really good news. Shen Yun is coming back to California. If you haven't seen Shen Yun, make sure to check it out. This show is amazing. It's showing what China used to be before communism. And I've been going to it every year. It's reviving this ancient culture that's been lost. If you have heard something negative about the show, just be mindful that the Chinese Communist Party has been trying to shut them down since their inception. They're showing what China used to be and they're trying to revive the traditional culture of the Chinese people. Chinese Communist Party has been trying to eliminate this culture. And now Shen Yun has been growing across the globe and they're performing everywhere in a lot of different countries. Let me show you a quick trailer for what Shen Yun looks like this year. Each and every is what you've been waiting for. Shen Yun. Get tickets now at ShenYun.com. Now we go to Dr. Michelle Dossett to see what's going on at UC Davis. Are we seeing a rise in the use of holistic health in California? Absolutely. All of the major University of California medical centers have integrative medicine clinics embedded within those medical systems. University of California, Davis, UCSF, UCLA, UC San Diego, UC Irvine, all have integrative medicine clinics. And many of the other healthcare systems in California like Sutter also have integrative medicine clinics. Are there any data that shows that Californians are using holistic health more now? There is data on a national level that use of complementary, alternative, integrative therapies has increased over the past two decades, quite dramatically across the country. And the West Coast is one of the higher using regions of the country. For example, use of mind-body approaches such as meditation and yoga, we have close to 20% of the population has tried that in the past year. Many more people are using dietary supplements. Use of acupuncture is lower. It's probably closer to something like 5%. But we've definitely seen these numbers rise over the last two decades. Do you think insurance coverage will come into this space? We're seeing that more and more. For example, because I'm a physician, consultations visits with me are covered. Many insurance providers are now covering acupuncture for some indications. Even Medicare will cover acupuncture for chronic low back pain if it is delivered in a particular situation where either a physician is giving it or a licensed acupuncturist who is supervised by a physician. But we're not seeing insurance coverage for, say, attending a course where you would learn how to meditate and integrate that into your lifestyle for reduction of blood pressure and improvement in other health parameters. You mentioned that on campuses now there is practices of holistic health. Is this going to get combined with the traditional medical programs where doctors are going and getting training? So where I practice at UC Davis Health, we are fully integrated into the conventional medical systems. Why we call it integrative medicine. Primary care physicians, specialists refer patients to me. I send them copies of my notes. I can see their notes. We are working together to help patients resolve their health concerns. I also, because I'm at an academic medical center, I'm involved in teaching. I have medical students and residents who come and rotate through the clinic and learn about what we are doing. There is a lot of data out there already that mind-body practices, things like meditation, can be very helpful for reducing stress and reducing the negative health effects of stress. And so we have studies ongoing that are continuing to build that evidence base. One of my colleagues is very interested in the potential of particular medicinal mushrooms in the field of oncology. And so she is doing a study with patients with ovarian cancer and examining particular regimen and how that works and could that be helpful in improving quality of life and outcomes for women with ovarian cancer. And we have other studies as well. Would the medical doctors give pushback to the holistic medicine and not take it seriously? Has that changed? It is changing. You know, I think the evidence base for these therapies has grown dramatically over the last 25 years. And physicians are also, you know, their patients are doing some of the stuff and they're seeing the improvements. And from both directions, I think the medical profession has become much more open-minded. If you're going to see a provider in a private practice out in the community, it tends not to be integrated because of the barriers in communication with electronic health records that the providers in the community don't know about the full details of the patient's medical history because they don't have access to those records. And vice versa, their primary care physician may not have access to their naturopath's records or their acupuncturist records. And so that can be a lot harder to integrate. Do you see California as the hub of holistic health? One of the hubs of holistic health. We have a number of centers here in the state where there is a lot of really excellent patient care, groundbreaking research, and training the next generation of clinicians that's happening. Not only in our medical schools, but we also have naturopathic school in the state. We have an acupuncture school in the state. We have osteopathic schools in the state. All right, so there is a lot going on in California in the area of holistic health and integrative medicine. Are there any major risks for patients? I mean, there are always risks even in conventional medicine, right? And so you want to make sure that any provider that you see has the training and qualifications to diagnose and treat illness within their scope of practice, that they are a licensed provider. A good provider is going to know their limitations and know when to refer you out because what you're coming in with is beyond their scope of practice or not appropriate for what they have to offer you. And I would say it should be a team approach. So keep your primary care doctor informed so that they can work with you through that process as best as possible, even if the provider is outside of your healthcare system. And Michelle, how did you get into this? You seem very passionate about the holistic health. Yeah, I grew up in a family that used a lot of these therapies before they became mainstream. I myself had a lot of ear infections and sore throats as a kid and was on antibiotics in the winter every six weeks. And my parents said, you know, there's got to be another option here. And so they started exploring and tried some different approaches and started getting sick less often and for shorter periods of time. And that really sort of inspired in me that there can be a way for these two worlds to work together to improve health outcomes for patients. Since this space is new, do you guys see some misconceptions from the patients or from the community? All the time. I do a lot personally with mind-body medicine and teaching meditation to my patients. And I think one of the biggest misconceptions out there is that you're supposed to blank your mind when you meditate. You can't do that. The mind is going to wander. That's normal. And so I'm busting that myth almost every day in my practice when I'm with people. And have you had cases where you didn't have to do the surgery for them because you kind of found the solution before? All the time. Patients coming in, they've been told they need a dish replacement operation, something extensive. I said, listen, your disc is degenerated. I get it. But a lot of the pain is because of what the cycle that's going on inside the inflammatory process. I said, let's put you on a nutrition, inflammatory process. Let's change your lifestyle. Let's get a good physical therapy for you. Let's rehab you. Give it about, I said, just be patient. Let's give it about six weeks. Just six weeks. See where you are. I'm not saying in six weeks, you're going to be perfect. I'm saying in six weeks, you're going to be better. Let's just see what happens. Most of the time, patients come back six weeks. You know what? I'm much better. So we avoid the surgery, basically. But there's no money in that for you as a doctor, right? There is money, actually. The biggest money is actually the satisfaction you get. To me, that's worth any money because those patients keep referring you more patients. You keep the patients happy, they become your best source of referral over time. They keep sending more and more patients because you're an honest, ethical, not a knife-happy surgeon. And how did you learn that? I had good mentors in residency, actually. We had some amazing mentors that everything was about patient care. And I tell you, before I went to medical school, my dad said, you have three priorities to keep in mind. Priority number one, patient care. Priority number two, patient care. Priority number three, patient care. I was in 95 right before I got on the plane to go to Pittsburgh for med school. And then as I was graduating, when I was the chief resident, I should say, my residency, Dr. Miller, one of my mentors, he said literally the same thing to me. He said, just forget about money. Forget about that. Don't worry about it. Money will come if you take care of the patients. And he was so right. Do you think a lot of the medicine field, money has become a big factor because there's a lot of cost for doctors. There's a lot of headaches with the insurance. And huge, huge factor. I mean, we're the only profession that has not kept up with inflation. We're the only profession that our reimbursement have dramatically decreased. And our overhead, like staff wages, salaries and stuff has gone up significantly. Almost, you know, you could say close to double in the last 20 years. But our income has not doubled. Our income has anything has come down dramatically. Insurances keep cutting more and more, more difficult to get paid, more denying things. We don't have a union. So some doctors are doing things that are not supposed to be doing to make up the money. What about the Maha movement? How do you think that Maha movement will impact California and this holistic? What do you think needs to be done with the Maha movement to improve what's happening in the healthcare system? I think the Maha movement, there are two parts to me, the way I look at it. There's the vaccine part and then there's the other non-vaccines. I think it's great to start having more quality vaccines and spacing them apart. Vaccines saves lives, but you want to make sure it's quality vaccines, you know. But we go to the other non-vaccine, which is the healthy aspect of the human being, which is like, for example, cooking your French fries in like a very, like beef tallow instead of seed oil, trying to eliminate process like schools. I mean, my God, our kids get the worst nutrition in our schools. We're trying to eliminate all of that. So I think the Maha movement in that sense is great. But I think the other thing they should do, push the hospitals. The hospitals need to adopt the Maha movement because think about it, you're ill, you go in there, you need the best nutrition. So we're not following healthy principles inside the hospitals, even though we're going there for healthcare. That is the one thing that is like, I've seen it's not talked about. The dietician at our hospital, like she knows, she's like, I agree with everything you're saying. I'm all for it, but I can't. We have these guidelines, we have to, otherwise we get dinged. The guidelines are way outdated from like 40 years ago, basically. Now we go to Jennifer Ghilardi, who's a policy expert with Heritage Foundation to see what's going on with the policy side of this holistic health rise. We want to know what's happening with Maha and how's it impacting California. California was one of the epicenters and genesis of Maha movement. California people are the OG Maha people. They are the moms that homeschooled, people that were reading nutrition labels. They're always skeptical of kind of big pharma, big food. You're hearing words that a lot of people that used to be on the fringe of kind of the health movement are now becoming part of the everyday lexicon. Things like metabolic health, metabolic disease, metabolic dysfunction, or the microbiome or the gut brain connection. All of these things that used to be just reserved for kind of like the Huberman podcast, Andrew Huberman podcast, or the people that were like health dorks like me are now being thrown into the mainstream and people are beginning to question, which I think is fabulous. Can you paint a picture of what this Maha movement gonna do? Is this going to change the diets? Is this going to change the way we have medicine or healthcare? It's all of it. It is changing the entire perspective of how we look at health. You know, for the past many decades, it's all been about preventing infectious disease like COVID or a virus or a bacteria. And now we're looking more at chronic disease, these kinds of factors that are really affecting our healthcare because they're causing the healthcare prices to skyrocket. We do have an obesity epidemic. We do have a chronic disease epidemic, food intolerances, autoimmune disorders, gut irregulation, all of these things. So I think we're shifting the whole conversation and we're also shifting the attention from symptom treatment. We're now seeing the body as a holistic ecosystem that your gut can affect your brain. What you eat affects your energy, how you sleep, all of these lifestyle factors that are super important. And that does include kind of the cost of healthcare because I think it's about 85% of our healthcare costs go to chronic disease management. And by definition, chronic disease is something you can mostly treat with lifestyle changes, diet and lifestyle changes. So essentially this movement is to get into the lifestyle of people and change the diet, the lifestyle. And how would it manifest into their day-to-day lives? When you think of holistic, that means everything has a role to play. When you say is it school, is that it is so many different things that the Maha movement, everybody's kind of got a place in this movement. Everybody has a passion project. Say Moms Across America and Zen Honeycutt is really doing great things with pesticides and glyphosate. We've got people focusing on that. Then we've got people focusing on the vaccine schedule, like children's health defense. And then you've got people focusing on medical freedom bills, parental rights. And all of these people have a part in this movement. And I'm just kind of skimming the surface of it. There's people that are really deep into the mental health issue and how does the gut affect our mental stability and anxiety and depression. And so it's like a behemoth to attack. And that's why you need all of these groups doing their specific thing, coming together. So what you're saying, the type of movement you're talking about, it's going to change a number of big industries. It's going to impact pharmaceutical industry. It's probably going to impact some of the agriculture space. How much pushback are you guys getting from these industries? Because they've been doing their way for many, many years. It's a lot of pushback. There's a lot of money to be made in sick people. Callie Means spoke about this when this movement was first starting, is that if you get children dependent on pharmaceuticals, you've got a customer for life. We can try to incentivize better behavior like through the SNAP program. So we can limit soda that you can buy through SNAP dollars. We can limit junk food that you can buy through SNAP dollars. But ultimately, it's the people that have to wake up and say, the only thing I have is my health and I'm going to take back control of my health. I'm not going to leave it in the government's hands. I want sovereignty over my own body, over my own medical choices and over my health. And that is the educational piece that's going to take time. But you are going to see pushback because there's no money to be made in a healthy person. So this movement needs to be a cultural movement. Where does it have to start? Does it start from the people? Is it education? Is it the doctors? Is it the big companies? Who has to make the changes and how it could work? Well, everybody, I would love to see changes to the medical programs, to what doctors are being taught. You do see people going outside of the system. This is why California has probably the most prolific source of alternative healing doctors, right? People that don't take insurance. Yes, you have to pay for them. But if you think of these doctors are really looking to heal you, as opposed to just whack-a-mole symptom, you know, give you something like a drug, in the long run, it will pay off, right? Your upfront costs might be a little bit more, but you are now not paying for pharmaceuticals and kind of inflating the insurance market. And so there is a pathway. I think what you're going to see are parallel pathways of health. Some people are going to choose to kind of stay in this old model. And some people, as they wake up, are going to start seeking alternative options, whether that's alternative options for food. They start to find more local farmers, more CSAs, more farmer's market, which is, you have an amazing opportunity for those things here in California. You have farmer's markets within a stone's throw of wherever you are, at least once a week, if not multiple times a week, depending on where you live. We've got so much access to great agriculture here. You're going to kind of see these parallel systems build where people are going to start choosing different companies, choosing different ways to get their health care. For me, it's not the government's job to tell people where to go. It's to get out of their way and to allow people to make those choices for themselves. So you have to have some of the political action as well to unburden some of the regulation that causes people to feel like they're trapped. So some people believe in science and science has become kind of like the ultimate religion for some people. But science has, there's different outcomes. It depends on which scientist you talk to. They have a different opinion on that issue. Different people follow different kinds of scientists and now there is a battle between what people believe. How much are you guys seeing that in your movement? Because I assume there's different opinions on which scientist is right and which chemical is good, which chemical is bad. How much of that do you see in your efforts? The controversy over what science is and who's doing the science is huge. Always follow the money. Always know where the research funding dollars are coming from. Because it's going to be a conflict of interest if you have Coca-Cola funding a study on the impacts of insulin and sugar in a diet as opposed to kind of a neutral scientist. And this is part of why the Maha movement came to be is that so much of the research that's coming out has been funded by the corporations that profit from certain outcomes that say, sugar's not that bad for you. Or say vaccines, they don't cause certain things or they're harmless. Or it doesn't matter if you get five vaccines within a week for a child that they have no effect on autism. That's the big one when it comes to vaccines. And I think you need to follow the money. I think you need to know where this research is coming from. And like you said, science should always be questioned. You mentioned the studies. It seems like these companies have found a way into the academia and then from there. And this is the way academia gets funded. They have to find the money to do the studies. Is there enough of it independently done that doesn't have a company behind it? Somebody gets curious, a professor can actually go and get it. Is there funding for those kinds of studies? I think some has already been done, but it's been suppressed. So there's that. And hopefully, this new administration will bring some of those to light. But also it is, that's a big part of the NIH is what are we funding, right? And I think Jay Bhattacharya is really trying to make those changes instead of just funding research on infectious disease, like we were doing in Wuhan, that we're funding investigations and research into chronic disease, into diabetes, into autism. So that's a major shift in the direction of the NIH. That is the job of the NIH, right? Is to fund the right research to provide better health outcomes. Jennifer, how did you get involved with this? A lot of people in the Maha movement feel that all of our prior experiences have prepared us for this moment. And I definitely feel that my life is that kind of story. I moved to LA in 1998 after a couple of years out of college. And I abandoned my degree in public policy, which was my undergrad degree. And I wanted to get back into the creative arts. I was a dancer growing up. And people tend to come out to LA when they're lost and they're looking for something. And I think that was me. And I pursued kind of a dance career that led me into a fitness career. Started teaching classes in Southern California. And then I started to get into the production side of fitness, doing DVDs. If someone would pay me to go back to school full-time, I would do it. So I was always a student. So I always wanted to kind of keep up with the trends and not just learn about, like, tai bo or dance, but I wanted to learn, like, how muscles moved. All about fascia. I always wanted to learn about the body and anything that affected health. So whether it was physical fitness or recovery therapy or nutrition. So I ended up going back to school to get a certification in integrative nutrition in New York. And in the meantime, I kept doing my fitness stuff. And then I got into kind of the mental aspect of health with meditation and yoga. I decided to go back and get my master's in public policy because I had all this experience in health. I knew what was happening. Knew what was happening during COVID was wrong. And I really wanted to make a difference in a different way. You know, in teaching, I got to make a difference in people's lives. But I thought, I always loved politics and policy. And I abandoned that to have this life in LA. And so I said, I think I'm going to go back and get my master's. And I did. I got my master's in public policy at Pepperdine. And I quickly realized that health policy, and this was my instinct from just not being in the medical system, this is why I don't want to be in it, was that health policy really had nothing to do with health. It was a sick care system. It was designed to keep people feeling just well enough to get through their day, but not to really thrive and flourish. And that to me is not health. Just because you don't have symptoms, that's not necessarily a benchmark of good health. But I quickly realized nobody was interested really on a policy level in having those conversations. One of my thesis papers was on changing the agricultural food supply system to encourage better nutrition and better health. Those were not the conversations people were having. You had the USDA over here, you had the HHS over here, and ne'er the two shall meet. There was no reason for those two policy tanks to align or come together. Kind of the food is medicine idea, right? And so I kind of started going down the path of IR, international relations, because I always thought I was going to be like CIA or FBI when I was younger. I'm like, that seems like a really cool job. And so I kind of went back down that path. And then everything changed when Kennedy dropped out and supported Donald Trump. And you heard my language being spoken. It was like someone in a foreign land and a leader all of a sudden is speaking your language. Kennedy was now speaking the language that I had been speaking, and that so many of us had been speaking. And I just, I said, this is kind of the moment. Like I said, I feel like God had prepared me for this moment the whole time. And it took me a while to make the inroads, moved back, left California, moved back to the East Coast, started going down to DC a little bit more, got to know Jay Richards at Heritage Foundation. And then he got this Restoring American Wellness initiative off the ground. And I was the first hire. I had started writing for like the Federalist, the Epoch Times about these ideas and just kind of kept putting one foot in front of the other. We had Mia Bonta on the show and she talked about food as medicine as an initiative in California. Some people in the legislature in California are really behind these thoughts. How can you guys work with them? How can California get involved with these initiatives? Yeah, I mean, that is kind of the crux of the Maha movement is that the things that you put in your body, food can be your medicine. And California has always been the epicenter of that with its farmers markets. But part of the Maha ideas are the more local that you can get, the better, the closer to the source that you can get your food in the most natural state that you can get it, the more possibility it has to heal, the more nutrient dense it will be. And I think because of California, its climate, its mindset, its focus on healthy living and activity, this is the kind of prime center. This is where the Petri dish of this experiment should be of food as medicine. And as I think the saying goes, as goes California, so goes the rest of the country. I mean, whether we like it or not, that is, there's a lot of truth to that. So if California can successfully pull off the food, growing the food as medicine culture, growing that environment, I think it can be shipped out to more people. I love that I can come to California and buy raw milk in a store. You can't do that in Virginia. So it's, I hope, the beacon of light in that way. Let us know what you think about the rise of holistic medicine in California. You can always email us at siamak.californiainsider.com or comment. We read all of your emails and comments. I'm Siamak Khorrami. This is California Insider. We'll see you next time.