Patient Empowerment 101

0:00Just in time, greetings everyone, I'm Luke Bryan Smith and welcome to Enlightened Empowered Evolved, where we educate, motivate and liberate you through enlightening dialogues, empowering music, and evolving content. I'm excited yet again because my next extraordinary guest is a board certified physician, physician and internal medicine and lifestyle medicine, health coach, syndicated health columnists, speaker and author of patient empowerment 101 and there's a whole lot more but without further ado, allow me to introduce to you to Dr. Ann Hester.

1:00How are you doing today, Dr? To bless the complain, how are you? Absolutely, I'm doing great and I love that to bless the complain. I always say I could complain but what good would it do? And I don't want to place my energy that way in that place anyway. So yes, yes, also, I would like to say that I'm a firm believer of that time is one of our most precious assets and for you to choose to spend even a moment of your time here with me on Enlightened Empowered Evolved, I would just like to extend my sincerest gratitude to you. Thank you very much for being here at this present moment. That's so kind, it's not to be here. Absolutely, absolutely, let's get right into it. So you're a board certified physician in internal medicine. Let's just start right there, lifestyle medicine, health code. Okay, let's start right there, a board certified physician in internal medicine. Give us a little insight on how you got into that and what led you that way and a little

2:06bit of your journey involved in it. My father was a doctor, he was actually the first African American physician at Evans ville, Indiana way, way back when. And you know, I saw him, I watched him, how he helped people and I was inspired and I ultimately decided to go into medicine and I spent a few decades practicing internal medicine basically as an adult medicine, as opposed to pediatrics with GYN. And then subsequently, I learned about another field of medicine called lifestyle medicine. That's all about ways to help prevent, treat and potentially reverse a lot of the diseases that we treat in internal medicine. And I went back and I got training and I became more certified in that as well. So my focus now is more on empowering people with ways that they can live naturally and be healthier, have more vitality and likely live longer.

3:06Wow, that's amazing. And I resonate with that because as I, and I'm just going to be straight up with you, as I've went through my journey, going through my journey and as I'm getting older, I'm getting more into, you know, health and eating right and taking care of myself because I can't treat my body like I used to. I'm not saying it was okay, but the effects wasn't apparent as they are now. So as I'm aging, I have, hey, you got to take care of this, you got to eat better otherwise, you know, my, my, my vitals go off the chart, blood pressure, all that feeling, just everything, the way I look, the weight, all that. It's just, yes, it's just better to take care of yourself, eat healthy and, and find holistic ways to, to, you know, to treat yourself.

4:08Otherwise you will be, and I'm not saying that there's no place for medication for pharmaceuticals, but in, in my perspective, you'll be on a bunch of them if you don't take care of yourself. Yeah. Absolutely. Four out of five business with a doctor or due to lifestyle or any conditions. Right. But I believe it was the Commonwealth fund, and it looked at all the originations in the world. America is at the bottom. We have the most kind of diseases, the worst outcomes of any origination. And as far as healthcare costs were at the top, and you can add a couple of them together, and you still don't get what we spend and help care. So we are big into treating diseases once they occur, right? We need to get into preventing these diseases, because if most businesses to the doctor or due to things related to lifestyle, that tells you what the potential would be if we did

5:10things differently. And there are blue zones in the world where people often live to be a hundred years old. Right. And doing things more firmly than we do here. So we need to learn from that. Right. Right. And there are a lot of holistic people that I follow as well, one being Dr. Sabi. And yes, he, yes. And just people that I've met along the way that are into just herbs and natural medicines and eating fresh vegetables and showing you different ways on how to prepare them to make them more appealing, and just putting that in my mindset, just knowing that we're fighting a battle here against, and I don't want to get into it too deep, but unhealthy foods being pushed to us here in the US constantly.

6:10So then that becomes part of our mindset to get these quick foods that are overly processed and salted and sugar and just not really nutrient rich for our bodies, but just a filler, if you will. And yes. Exactly. And then comes the chronic diseases, and then comes from a pharmaceutical company, if I say, I have the peel for this. Right. Yes. And so if we flip the script and we focus on trying to prevent the diseases in the first place, or longer, and spite at them, frequently being able to decrease our medication when our doctor says we can, that we potentially live longer, have less pain and suffering more vitality at 20 years out instead of being in a nursing home, right, right, as a stroke. Maybe we could be hiking, and mountains, and so we have a tremendous amount of input into

7:17our health trajectory, tremendous amount. Most of our diseases are not related to genetics. If you look at a gene, 90% of the gene is like the background that we call the epigenome, and only 10% of the gene consists of the DNA consists of the individual genes. And so if you have a gene that predisposes you to diabetes, and you're doing all the right things, remember that 90% of the DNA is the epigenome that deals with that part. So if you are trying to switch away from disease, it's not just your genes, it's your decisions and your habits. And those genes can turn off or on, literally, based on your habits. So you can do tests, and you can see the certain genes that light up or light down based on the lifestyle, the foods, all of those things. That's interesting. And thank you for enlightening us with that information.

8:20That's amazing. And another thing I would just like to say is I'm very grateful for doctors such as yourself. And that leads me to say this, and the doctor that I have, I won't say his name right now, but you know, I belong to, what is it? I can't even think of... Oh my gosh, I still go right now and slip my mind. But North Bay, out here in Northern California, is North Bay Medical. So I'm saying that the doctor that I'm blessed to have really encourages me in regards to lifestyle changes so that I will cultivate that healthy lifestyle and get myself off whatever medications he's prescribing for me. So I'm so thankful for that because I haven't encountered that too much. Most of the doctors I've had, and not to talk bad about any because I believe my journey

9:22is going the way it's supposed to go. But I'm just thankful that now I have one that's really... Meaning me accountable is to what I'm doing, what I'm eating, my exercise, and the habits that I have. So that's amazing. Absolutely. It is. The tide is turning and doctors are starting to embrace lifestyle medicine more than in the past. Right. Right. Yes. And yeah. Wow. You're also a... So we know you're a health coach, so we can already hear that. What kind of health columnists can you elaborate a bit on that? I just do a column for the price of business. I do a monthly column on health, practical tips to help your health. Okay. All that. That's amazing. And where can we find this again? The price of business, just putting in price of business, Dr. Anne Hester. Okay.

10:22Okay. That's amazing. You're also an author of Patient Empowerment 101. Can you give us an insight, a little bit of insight on how that book came to be, and a little bit of what it entails. Certainly. Yes. So that's an internal medicine hack. So my book, Mission Empower 101, more than a book, is an adventure. It's all about helping people take a deep dive into how doctors think. So they can expedite their own diagnoses, lower their bills, decrease the chance of bad things happening at a hospital and so forth. So it does everything from teacher how to create your two minute elevator speech. So when you go in and see the doctor, you can hit the bullet points quickly. So he can roll in or roll out things. And so by the time you finish all that sentence, he should have a short list of potential diagnoses, which means fewer tests and procedures to confirm it. Less medication. That's not going to work.

11:22Less cost. Less risk to you. And so that came about because I saw this huge gap between how we think and how patients think. And it's because we never taught them how to communicate with this. But typically happens is people go into the exam room. They'll sit there with the flimsy gown off and cold. The doctor is another 45 minutes behind and people are upset. They're in pain, get someplace and then the doctor comes in rushed and starts throwing out these questions and often interrupts the patient not to be rude, but because they have so much time to get to the next patient and patients become flustered and they don't know how to respond. Now I was timed to patient after a yes or no question. It took her 10 minutes to give me a yes or no answer because she was there. She was thinking of through well, she had to take time to think of through.

12:23So I teach people how to cut through that. When you become sick, you get A, B, C, D, E, I give a basic framework that people can use. So whenever they get sick, they think of these bullet points. So when they go to see the doctor, they can spit them out like this. These are the things the doctors are going to want to know about virtually any condition and it helps expedite the diagnosis. Then I go through how to be safe from the hospital vocabulary that you need to know that would help you communicate with your doctor, how to get the best insurance and a variety of things. But it's really about teaching people how to bridge that gap between the doctors and themselves so they can get better care. And that was absolutely amazing and eye opening and added a bit of clarity because now that I think about it, yes, our doctors have a different mindset in regards to how they're processing

13:24information and we might not be on the same wavelength. So this will help us to be aware of that. So that is absolutely amazing, yes, yes. And the reason why I was smiling is because I've been through that word come in and I can I'm aware now that you know that the doctors oftentimes, you know, they're late, they're behind and they it's kind of like a, I'm at a loss for words, but like where you have one and then you have to go to another one like an assembly line almost. You feel like that sometimes, yeah, yes, and you know, they have, you know, other patients and they only have a certain depress for time often. So yes, I understand and resonate with everything that you said in my experiences with the doctor's office. So yes, absolutely amazing.

14:25So you have a platform, ptrreset.com, can you tell us a bit about that? That is my lifestyle medicine arm and so lifestyle medicine is an emerging field that is now like 57 countries at least and is based on decades of research that show ways to prevent treat and potentially reverse many chronic diseases, for instance, in medicine medical school, the thought of putting type 2 diabetes into a mission was like the gypsum is like this is never going to happen. But after all this research, we now know how to put a lot of people type 2 diabetes into a mission and often get them off of the medication, hope, the progression of the kidney damage that was leading toward our alluses, all of these things that the painful nerve damage that used to wake them up, that could be mitigated.

15:26And so that is just the tip of the iceberg, ways to decrease the risk of multiple forms of cancer or live longer despite that cancer, ways to decrease the risk of dementia, heart attack, stroke. I mean, it just keeps going on and on. So lifestyle medicine is basically made up of six pillars, a whole food plant predominant diet, meaningful movement, connections, meaningful connections actually leads a hormone called oxytocin that counteracts the stress hormone cortisol. Another one is stress management and we have toxin avoidance and the sixth one is restorative sleep. And so it's not one plus one level equals six. You add these together, it's like 500 because they play off each other, they act interchangeably and they augment each other. And so when you do these things, you follow the six pillars that lifestyle medicine, then you are likely to hit a variety of bullet points and hit that epigenal.

16:30So it switches those genes toward wellness and not toward disease. So PTR reset is prevent tree reverse, PTR prevent tree reverse. So PTR reset dot com. And so there is a free course on there is the sneak peak that gives people a quick video of all the pillars and then there are other levels of courses, but people also find other courses from other people because they actually started with my eternal medicine on them. And I wanted to educate people on a variety of conditions. And so I have an obesity course on there led by an inner chronologist, obesity expert. I have coach Dr. Mike, who was recognized by the World Health Organization. He is an individual cardiologist and a coloring medicine professor and professional chef. So I have a variety of courses on there for other things, but I merged it to so if you

17:30go to PTR reset dot com or patient world dot net, you're going to end up on the same page. Wow, thank you for that information that vital, what I like to call vital information. That's amazing that you've developed this and yes, it's just when I'm listening to you, I hear wellness, you know, wellness, health, awareness and cultivating and deterring, you know, in a way that you can, you can get in front of these problems before they happen and not even have them at all. So that's absolutely amazing. And I want to add something to that, I eat blueberries and I think you know what that means. I eat blueberries. Yeah, I found that out in one of my, one of my herbal books are, yeah, so yeah, amazing.

18:32The other little tidbit is they found that countries that consume more dark chocolate have more noble laureates and I wasn't asked what are my neurology colleagues, you know, what they said about and it's because they feel that the dark chocolate, not the milk chocolate, but the dark chocolate has very positive effects on the brain and so you can get organic dark chocolate, you know, the powder online and it has like 25 calories. So sometimes I just take a scoop, put it in my coffee and it's like drinking hot cocoa, I'm only adding 25 calories, but I'm adding a powerhouse and nutrition for my brain. Thank you for that. You're welcome. Wow. Amazing. I'm going to try that. And I just, I spoke with a friend, actually, it was a mechanic. I took my car in to get an alignment and we talk health. See, I, I, I stay in that vibration and yeah, I stay in that vibration and we were talking

19:37about blood pressure because I went to the doctor and my blood pressure was still a bit elevated. So he told me he said, take some raw honey and some garlic and chop it up and, and, and eat that. I don't know if you ever heard of that, but he said, it will help. And I'm like, okay, but just, I just love connecting with people and getting their perspectives in regards to, to health and natural health and things like that. I stay in that vibration. So what I'm, what, what I'm meeting with that too is that people automatically know that's the type of dialogues that I engage in, that life are verming dialogues. Don't come to me with the, the, the, the world is about to blow up and this and that, okay, I, okay, I know that, okay, but I'm not going to, this is just me personally. This is not an attack on anyone else. But, yes, I like to keep my, my mind full of what I like to call life affirming information,

20:37you know, and that, that's what I like to stay on, you know, and if I am complaining so to speak or not complaining, but focusing on something that's non-life affirming, it's, because I'm seeking a solution at the end. That's why I'm trying to figure it out or trying to figure out what, what the lesson is in there. And, and that's it. That's how I geared myself now and I'm, yes, it's amazing. That's why having these engaging in these dialogues are just elevating to me and just amazing. I love it. So, you know, regardless of the viewership and I do want this to grow, I do, I'm not, I'm not going to act like I don't because I want to get this out there, you know, I, yeah, but it just enhances my life. It really does. And then I want to share this experience with others. So, it's, it's amazing. Thank you so much, doctor. Yes. Go ahead.

21:37My pleasure. I do want to weigh in on the garlic. So, there is evidence that garlic can lower your blood pressure, so that being said, make that an adjunct, don't make that the center. I will never forget. I think I was a medical student and I'll never forget this woman. She was on the back end of the emergency department, probably about 70. She had a stroke and her blood pressure was like over 200 for the top number. Oh, wow. And then her medicine is like, well, I don't take medicine. I just use garlic. And so, certainly there are natural things that can help beat shoes, can help a lot of things. Restortive sleep matters, you know, a dash diet, Google that, the dash diet, D-A-S-H, D-A-S-H. Okay. Dash diet, that is a clinically proven way to help lower your blood pressure as well.

22:39Okay. Well, always follow up with your doctor because what may be good for one person may be enough to control their blood pressure without medication. In other person, this is, and may stop their medicine and end up like my patient who had a significant stroke because of that. So you do everything in conjunction with your doctor. And if you find that exercise and you weight loss, the dietary just was a so forth, help your blood pressure to the point your doctor was to decrease the medicine. That's great. I have a client now that the doctor decreased the blood pressure significantly because of his lifestyle changes. But I can't do it on their own, so the doctor nation that was going on and the doctor needs to be the one to say, okay, let's cut this dose and have for less hold on this one for a while and come back and see me and see where we are. Yes. Yes, that's how my doctor is, too, because I've decreased the milligrams on a medication

23:39or two. So, yeah, that's amazing because of what I'm doing. I'm doing a little bit more cardio and just cutting out the fast food. Yes, things of that nature, lower sodium, not as much sugars and processed foods, fresh foods. So, yeah, I'm steaming vegetables, chicken. That was good. Yes, yes. And just eating more fruits when I want to snack instead of reaching for those bag of potato chips, I go and get a piece of fruit and cut it up and yeah, yeah, so, yeah, I'm actively doing something, I just want to put this out there and again, I'm not trying to call anyone out in any negative fashion, but just do little things, it can be hard because these foods are highly addictive with the salts and the sugars, so I know how hard and challenging it can be, but just start because only you can really make that difference.

24:43I mean, you can rely on doctors to keep pumping you full of pills and stuff to offset what you, yourself, or are doing to yourself, but you got to take some initiative and please allow dialogues like this to hold you accountable and if you will, as I'm allowed it to hold me accountable as well, I'll go back and watch this and, you know, I like watching information like this. It helps keep me motivated. Now, the ultimate motivator in my life is me, but I can be inspired and I can continue to stay like what I said, what I mentioned earlier, that level of energy and thought and frequency. So, this is amazing. Yes. But anything else, Dr., that we that I did not highlight that you would like to share or anything that you would like to say before we completely.

25:46Well, you said that very eloquently. Thank you. Doctors prescribe medicine, often as a result of diseases that never had to occur if people had done things differently. I just want to leave people with the concept of smart goals, like micro habits. So for those who aren't aware, smart, S is specific, M is a magical, A is a cheap R is vulnerability, it's time down. So let's say you want more vegetables, be specific. I want to eat more green vegetables, S specific, more green vegetables, M magical, I want three more servings a week, A is achievable, yes, I can afford more vegetables, the supermarket is down the street, our relevant, very relevant to your health, it can help you live longer. Tea time down, try it for a week, see how you feel, and then recess. And so instead of trying to bite off a tremendous amount, if you do smart goals, okay, now I've

26:51gotten to this sparkle and eating more vegetables, now the next smart goal is to eat more fruit or the next smart goal is to sleep eight hours a day. So you do it stepwise, and over time, over a few months, those things add up. So that is how I want to leave people with this. You have power to take back your health. Yes, yes, thank you, wow, thank you, I won't try to add anything to that very beautifully orchestrated, that's how, that's what I like to say, thank you, thank you very much again Dr. Anne, and yes, for being here and appreciate your knowledge, your insight, your wisdom, your intentions, your passions, your gifts, just, I can go on and on, but thank you for being you and for bringing you here to enlighten and power to evolve. That's an honor, thank you for having you.

27:53Absolutely, and thank you everyone for watching End or Listening. Be sure to hit that like button, hit the subscribe button, so you can continue to get more of this information, this is what it's all about right here, and share it, not only help the platform grow, but help get this vital information out to everyone. I appreciate you, and I just want to sing everyone love and appreciation, thank you for supporting me and supporting this and being a part of this. Until next time, enlighten and power to evolve, see you soon.