All right. And see there's some people. That have already joined the meeting and will be getting started here shortly. And if you can hear me just type hello in the chat window. All right great to see you. Hello. Well good morning everybody. Glad that you can make it. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. OK so I put up a slide deck. That we're going to use.

And let me just make sure that. I can see the check box and if you guys have comments or questions. During this. Webinar feel free to type them into the chat box. New to zoom. So trying to make sure I get the hang of this. Bear with me. All right well let's let's get started. I think the large majority of you either met or spoken to over the phone. And I wanted to. Do this webinar for educational purposes. So we'll just go ahead and jump and dive right in. So I think it was Benjamin Franklin. I know Ben Franklin that said. In this world there is nothing certain but death and taxes. And. I think we can add to that or I'm going to go ahead and take the liberty and just say it's soon to become death taxes and medical bills. There's a showing that over close to 50 percent of. Americans are actually. In debt. Due to medical expenses. And during the time when Benjamin Franklin said that he was referring to contacts he was writing about the Constitution and its presumed permanence. And what I'm hoping that we have now with the way that the direction that health care seems to be going is that we can actually have some impermanence here and that we can reimagine better habits better health. With the right medical model at its vital center.

So most of you know I'm a chiropractor and functional medicine practitioner I've been out in the real world for the last three years at least in respect to chiropractic and functional medicine work. And today I want to stay. Big picture. I want to provide you a narrative around today's conventional model of health care and. The multiple aspects of misalignment at least in my opinion the way I see it cost. Preventative care education and patient participation. So we're not going to dive into really specific topics like how to treat hypothyroidism or how to what's the best. Way to Treat sciatic pain. This is going to be more of a big picture and I think it's important to start here because why does narrative or the story matter here when it comes to understanding how we approach our health stories are our how we make sense of everything it's how we cobbled together different events and data of our lives we assess risk. And projecting and predict so that we can make. Hopefully good decisions. And the stories that we tell ourselves are really. The way that we. See the world how we create an intrinsic understanding what we deem to be true how things are. And. These stories and scripts really hold the key to everything that's possible especially when we're talking about our health and healing. So I'm not going to get into Gonstead which is the practice method I use or all the different labs that you might need when you were if you were to try to go down the functional medicine route.

So let's start here with. What is health care. I think it means different things to different people and I mean it is health care insurance premiums prescriptions. Is it is it a Z pack. I would I would argue that many of our health problems reads like like symptoms and it's due to the deeper disconnect. From from our health. And when that happens I mean you know we all. Work or run businesses or participate in businesses and commercial influence will always be there to steer the ship. So educating for me what is health care. It's educating and connecting patients. With a team of people that can work effectively with them on diet. Lifestyle and behavior. And. I think it's important to make the distinction between acute illness. Or injury and it's very different than chronic illness. It impacts us acute illness and chronic illness impacts us differently physiologically psychologically and socially.

We've made some tremendous discoveries and health care today when it comes to acute care broken bones surgeries spinal infarcts things of that nature. It's absolutely necessary mandatory going when it comes to trying to treat chronic illness and lifestyle based disease is just it there's a misalignment there. So health care. To me is monitoring your function. That's what we need to have a place in assessing risk. In order to allow you to make behavioral changes whether that be diet sleep how you cope with stress those those sorts of things. Now this quote was something written a few years ago by another chiropractor and. I want to bring it to your attention because I think it's actually a really compelling quote that you can read it for yourself but it talks about how miraculous the human body is in itself feeling self organizing itself regulating. At any moment. It's adapting and responding to the environment that we put it in. And in reality. If we put it in the right environment it's constantly striving for optimal function. And you know they teach you in chiropractic school that this is something referred to as innate intelligence is the body's the body's ability.

To create homeostasis or balance and just seek out health. And what's health care with without our bodies they just don't they don't really get the credit they deserve a lot of times we go down this reductionist treatment path and disregard just how capable and resilient the body is. If we can sit back and really get to the root of the root issue what's what's going on. OK so seven reasons why. U.S. health care ranked the worst in the developed world and I'm sure there's more reasons or different reasons but this is just what I've. Come up with. And. I want to review these because. You can't fix anything unless you understand how it works. So if we don't understand. Where the disconnect is and how the current model is. Creating problems or gaps. Then we're not we're not going to we're not going to be able to make. Changes. That are going to produce better outcomes. So. The current system tracks and waits. For disease. A pill for every ill. This is this is true in a lot of cases a lot of disease doesn't happen overnight. It's it's kind of a slow boil and it happens over 3 5 maybe even 10 years time. There is a stat I read recently that somebody who contracts diabetes specifically type 2 diabetes. The cost to treat that person annually is about eight thousand dollars. So if you. Treat diabetes over the course of 30 years let's say you you know you contract you you begin to have metabolic syndrome and diabetes in your 30s in the 60s you're looking at about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of medical fees and that's probably not even that's probably a low number because there's other complications as that as that disease progresses heart disease kidney issues liver problems. The next one is the conventional medicine chases symptoms and attempts to suppress them. And. We've seen this all the time whether it's heartburn slap a P.I. on it Nexium Here's your pill. You do that over the course of 10 years. It's reducing the stomach acid and can cause all sorts of gastrointestinal issues. And really doesn't ever fix the. Problem that started the heartburn the Gerd in the first place. Same with hypertension.

You know you see a lot of patients come in and they're on multiple medications. Maybe it's they have they've had high blood pressure and rather than. Utilize lifestyle based changes or some supplements or increased physical. Try to try to be less sedentary they just jump on a pill take it for 20 years that has lots of side effects and and really that's your body's signaling that something's something's awry and you really need to figure out find the levers that are going to correct that without the medication. Medication is great if you know for the short term you just have to have an exit strategy.

Health education is rarely integrated into care model. Most patients when you go to the doctor. It's not set up for somebody to really sit down with you and dig deeper into what what what issues you're dealing with. It's actually. Five 10 minutes some notes in the computer and then straight to the prescription pad at least that's the feedback that I receive from a lot of my patients especially when we sit down and do that initial our evaluations and times it takes longer.

Let's Plays through the rest of these. But we have. How we access approach and pay for health care requires minimal participation and that holds true for a lot of reasons. We. Have very little skin in the game. We're not actually putting the onus on ourselves to change the way we eat to. Go and get the appropriate lab work enough so that we can really see what's going on at the body's systems are really dynamic and you can't just go do your female wellness exam every three years and in an annual physical once a year especially if you are already in some sort of disease state. It's just not it's not going to work tools and lifestyle modifications are not emphasized we've kind of been talking about that.

Health care is thought of as a future. Expense for luxury. You know whether you pay now or later if if you are. In some sort of disease state. I would argue that it's better to pay on the front end rather than the back end. It's always going to be more expensive. And the last part is just the interconnectedness of the body. You'll see Ivan slide later that talks about functional medicine and how it's different than a conventional model. But we need to. Be. Carriages to be more integrated. You know if you if you have an auto immune disease you go see a rheumatologist if you have intestinal issues you're going to go see a gastroenterologist. In reality we need all of these specialties need to be talking together so that we can communicate effectively and get to the root cause again. You'll hear me say that time and time again. I think I saw a stat that that Pfizer CEO last year made 28 million dollars. United Health Care one of the largest insurance companies their profit not their net margin with their profit in 2016 was 42 billion dollars. There is by 2020 I want to say it was six point four trillion in health care expenditures and these staff just keep going on obviously take these steps with a grain of salt but the World Economic Forum just putting it put a recent stat out saying that chronic illness will generate this is globally will generate forty seven trillion in health care costs by 2030. And that's more than the. Annual GDP of the six largest economies in the world. That's pretty that's pretty wild. And these are non-communicable diseases. These are things like you know drinking too much smoking too much being too sedentary not eating the right foods. So it's not only a health issue anymore it's starting to become an economic issue. But so a lot of doom and gloom what's what's really exciting is that. When something's broken it can be it can be great. Why. Because it requires us to engage with the issue and hopefully take the necessary steps to fix it. OK. So I wanted to to include some additional some scary stats. This is not as as you read through the bullets. This is not a flash in the pan problem something that's just kind of cropped up and is going to go away on its own. This is a result of in my opinion poor health education and. A broken system. And not addressing. That infrastructure. Just because something is common. Does not make it normal. 50 percent of Americans are diagnosed with at least one chronic disease. One in five Americans are diagnosed with an autoimmune disease and an autoimmune disease some of the autoimmune diseases they've shown have increased tenfold in just the last two decades. So there's something driving that there's something going on. In. An individual's personal health care co nsumers have just as much responsibility as the health care system itself. Thirty five percent of Americans are inactive no regular physical activity. These are things that we have control over. What's really really scary especially because the cost. But four out of five Americans are undiagnosed pre diabetic or diabetic. That means you're insulin resistant and once you become insulin resistant it sets off a cascade of of health issues. Liver doesn't function properly you're going to have long term issues down the road especially with the brain. Many of you may have heard that they're starting to call Alzheimer's actually just type 3 diabetes the late stage of diabetes. And it's affecting all facets of health it's depression is now the leading cause of disability affecting more than 120 million people. So again it's one of these things where just because it's common doesn't make it normal. I like the quote at the bottom of this slide that talks about it's no measure of health to be well adjusted. To a profoundly sick society. So that really well. I don't see how we can continue to outsource our health like like we've been doing. To the traditional system and act like it's like it's not our problem we really need to refocus and reimagine kind of the the fundamentals of our health and and. Get back to some of those those. Practices. I'm not sure at what point. We are how we incentivize. Personal consumer responsibility but it's just you know the writing's on the wall with all that with all of the disease and and medical expenditures that we're starting to see and everybody. It's not slowing down. When you look at a lot of the research it's actually. Accelerating. So through a couple of little little comics in here that I found. Entertaining. Just on an expiration date under scalp. Want to know what it says or you surprised I included that because you know. A lot of times when we're not feeling our best our our life is we're busy right. With families and jobs and stress and it's one of those things we can just bury our head in the sand and just hope that things turn out. But I would I would really encourage you to take a more proactive stance. This one down here. It always it's always when it's a pet peeve of mine I have a question about my medication why is. The couple in the commercial sitting outdoors in separate bathtubs. Those commercials always cracks me up because they could they they paint a very unrealistic expectation of getting on medication. But what's interesting is that only the US and New Zealand actually allow direct to consumer marketing. Or advertising for pharmaceutical companies. I thought that they were supposed to. They're supposed to be a bill that was going to take that off but it's still going strong. So they're allowed to promote prescription products directly to patients. And here's a couple other ones. I had a patients a couple of weeks ago who when I when he brought his medical history and. I thought I was. I ju st thought it couldn't be true. He had he. He was on 18 different medications and that that didn't even include. Some of the some of the medications where you know you were for as he needed he would take them. They weren't even taken every day or or planned. So there's probably even more is more like 20 or 20 to. The other part that I think it's it's I mean. Important to at least acknowledges that. Medical error. Is the third leading cause of death in America. So. We love our acute care and we need it but at the same time. You talk to most physicians most doctors MDD O's and. They will try to keep you. Out of the hospital try to keep you away from surgery and start with the with the most conservative care because you know the system isn't infallible. There are mistakes happen all the time. All right. So earlier I mentioned we're going to stay big picture and why why do we want to see big picture so. I think we have to. Create a Mind. Set or at least shift the mindset before we're ab le to face some of these more difficult behavioral habits and changes and you can see this is this is a most people that go through. Take a psychology course in neuroscience or even even even the medical world. You'll learn these stages. Of change. Through contemplation you're not even thinking about whether or not you might have metabolic syndrome or high cholesterol or any of those things. Once you find out. Now you have the opportunity to do something or not. Preparation you start. Researching and understanding what you might be able to do and then you start to take actions and then maintenance and termination. What's interesting about these stages is that only 5 percent of people can go through all six of these stages. Without having to cycle back and start over the first time. So it's it's not easy. Many of our our lifestyle choices are buried deep in our subconscious mind. Some of them are you know are our defense mechanisms from early childhood that might be hurting us now. A nd are our current. Habits are a byproduct of behavioral up behavioral adaptations. So how you approach. Sleep maybe you have a stressful job so at night you just can't win down and you rarely seize any downtime to kind of address those issues. Or. Baby you you know you don't cope with stress well. So I have some patients that are just really anxious and stressed and that's and you know some some forms of depression and they over exercise because they feel good when they're over exercising. But it puts them into this vicious cycle of anxiety depression exercise and they're fatigued and you know you just around around you go on that or even even managing health risk. Patients come in they had a parent. Die at a young age from from a heart issue or had diabetes and had you know diabetic properties and things like that and rather than. Investigate that for themselves it's too scary to even to even start to address those issues. So it's not an easy thing to do. You know some people say it takes 21 days to make a change some people 90. I think it just depends on the person it's it's it's unique to every individual. And indeed reality. I think if we acknowledge that it's it's hard work to subject our health choices to scrutiny then we we give ourselves a little cut ourselves a little slack that we slip up. We can get back up and keep trying to make those improvements that are going to bring us longevity and keep us out of hospital. And segueing from that. I think it's it's tough to acknowledge our weaknesses and evaluate our our mental constructs. But if you don't do that it's it's gonna be really hard to sustain any sort of change whether that be diet lifestyle. Exercise all those things so I put together this little three dimensional. Health continuum. And. I found it useful. If you look at the top left that's those are the positive attributes and as you go down the slope you get closer to the negative. So for example. Mental flexibility versus mental rigidity if you can embrace that mental flexibility and. And be open to the fact that what you were taught or what you learned about. What food is healthy might not really hold true today. Then you're able to make some of those changes. If you jumped down to a body you can see biologic balance versus disease and that quote that that I referenced earlier. That's what this is about. There's a term called homeostasis and that's just the body trying to get to a point of balance whether that be metabolic balance or postural balance. It's always it's always trying to move toward an optimal state and as you start to lose those optimal states or lose dysfunction that's when pathology sets in and over time that's when when disease sets in. So kind of thinking through some of these I think it provides a good heuristic and that's just a fancy way for saying you know enabling a person to discover or learn something. For for themselves because in reality I think that you know you hear the 80 20 rule or. You know that when you when you eat 80 percent of your your health comes from what you eat the other 20 percent is from you know other areas in your life. Well. I think it's 90 percent mental. 10 percent. Action. Moving on out. So I just wanted to. Talk a little bit about my purpose and my mission and it's in it. It's constantly changing. But initially it was to provide exceptional chiropractic care really be an expert in clinical biomechanics and adjusting the spine. And. Educate and spread awareness. You know this whole lecture this whole sum this whole webinar as it is is hopefully. Part and parcel for that build healthier patients. And. Act as a wellness proponent in the community. So as a chiropractor adjusting the spine has its limitations and you're only going to be able to combat so much when somebody has a bad diet or is not getting ample amount of sleep or has other common comorbidities diseases that they're not dealing with. But what I started to find out and all of these na mes have been changed but this is the sort of thing that. I encounter. Week to week and it's not just I have neck pain or back pain it's. Patients coming in with laundry list of medications. PCOS and hypothyroidism and a lot of a lot of young women. Immuno suppressed patients with heavy metal toxicity or more Lyme disease patients that have been. PPD for years and are are at the point where they have things like Barrett's esophagus where they run when they run the risk of cancer of the throat through through the cells are actually differentiating and creating what's called dysplasia. Crohn's IBS. Acne celiac disease all you name it. There. Is just. A lot more there than meets the eye then just you know musculoskeletal pain and I think that most practitioners are running into this running into this issue. So. With with awareness and that's what I'm. Queerness in education comes some urgency right. It's it's that inkling or sensation once you know something about your health or your b ody it can help kind of propel you to take action with that new knowledge that you gain. And. If we wait until we're ready there's a quote I think it was from I saw it on an Instagram post but it was if we wait until we're ready well wait wait wait for the rest of our lives and. That's when damage. At least from when you look at it physiologically becomes irreversible. And you don't want to enter into that perpetual waiting game. I have patients in their 60s and 70s and they all wish they can turn back the clock and have been given some information so they can have different outcomes. And. What I think is. Important to acknowledge is that true health is not the absence of disease. It's when the body is functioning. Very close to its natural capacity. OK. I know I've been I can relate to this particular. Quote. Do you ever feel like your body's check engine light. Has been on and you're still driving it. I'll be fine. So. We all have periods in our life where where we have higher lev els of stress. Or we're just not feeling like we used to. Or maybe we can't get our weight. Under control. You name it. There's all there's all different avenues. But when you start to experience these things that that's really it's really crucial that we. Figure out a way. To. Address and get dig deep enough to get to the root of the cause. Because you wouldn't you wouldn't. When you're check oil light comes on you wouldn't put a piece of tape over it. Dr. Mark Hyman who works at the Cleveland Clinic is there. He oversees the ultra wellness clinic and the functional medicine. Operation there. Is always says you know if you have two tacks in your foot you don't take one. One of the tax out and take an ad Bill. You take Bill tax out and move from there. You don't want to mask the symptoms of an issue it's actually it's really fortunate that your body is sending the signals so that you can get to the bottom of it. The. Other part of this quote is that. If you keep kicking the can down the road and you don't address what's going on then what you're saying is that I'm okay with sacrificing long term health kind of for short term peace of mind. And that can be a really. Difficult thing to overcome because we're all inundated with with our responsibilities and. Sometimes it's easier to just procrastinate. Even though you know that you should be taking action especially when it comes to your health. Its health is really a a disciplined pursuit. It's not easy and considering the backdrop of the 21st century that we have today where we are more sedentary than ever. We're taking lots of medication. We a lot of people work at a desk job where we're sitting down all day we're high stress for constantly connected through. Through our social media and through our work and our e-mail and art and our smartphones. We never really get that chance to. Decompress. So what I want to talk a little bit about is how you approach your health and what model you should use if the conven tional system is broken and then I have to give you at least some solution for that. And I think the solution is functional medicine. I keep talking I keep hearing you say that though this word root cause. So what's the purpose of Functional Medicine. Well in order to understand the root cause of a disease and find the right tools at the right time and individualize for each person that's really what it is in a nutshell. It's finding out. How to treat elevated cholesterol type 2 diabetes leaky liver leaky gut adrenal fatigue which is often creates what is really what's called HP access dis regulation. But these are the sorts of things that patients will complain of in addition to you know the nerve pain or or muscle aches or joint pains or twisted ankles and things of that nature. And. If we don't address all of these sorts of disease states and problems. Through a net through at least attempt to use natural treatments to do this the only other option is medication and the medicatio ns come with a lot of side effects and there's not necessarily an exit strategy like I mentioned before. So. I forget who who says that but the wise physician treats disease before it occurs. So all the more reason to be proactively trying to understand. Where you are from on the spectrum of of health and disease is your body healthy. And that's where blood tests and. See seeing a functional medicine doctor or your integrative care provider or just somebody who you know is going to approach your health more holistically. So as a as a chiropractor I respect the. The the neuro dynamic consequences when you have spine and joint mis alignments. It literally creates crosstalk between the brain and the body and leads to compensation. And what you don't want to build is capacity on dysfunction. And so when you're taking these medications a lot of time it's masking the symptoms and allowing you to build capacity on top of on top of dysfunction if you have for example if you have a pelvic mi salignment and you start doing strength exercises without correcting that that pelvic misalignment and the movement pattern that dysfunctional movement pattern that accompanies that misalignment. You're going to hide that issue and it's going to be harder to fix that in the long run. So I mentioned functional medicine. And here is the the key distinctions between functional medicine and the traditional care model. I won't go through all of these but we've kind of talked about. Most of most of the issues. One that I think is is critical is the biochemical individuality of everyone. You can't treat everyone the same. You're going to get different outcomes there and a lot of times. The current model isn't built to give everybody the time that they need and actually if they've surveyed doctors and shown that it was 86 percent of doctors were dissatisfied with their ability to provide. Adequate care to their patients. That's because they don't think that you're not they're not even able to spend the appropriate time with them. But if anybody wants this presentation I'll offer it to you so you can read through some of these things. All right. So. Coming to an end here what what can you do. What are the actionable steps towards a longer and healthier life. I'm trying to cite all of the issues and problems with the current framework so that you can. Create a different evaluative lens when you're when you're when you're considering your care. So it's important design matters how you enter the system what sort of care you get in the system. We need to be thinking about that and also value is not the same thing as price. So if you're paying fifteen hundred dollars a month on a premium for a family of four. That that fifteen hundred dollars a month may not you may not be getting that sort of care. It's more of a safety net insurance policy. It might not really be setting you up for success down the line. We talked a little bit about behavioral modifications and. This stat is really really important because 85 percent. Of chronic disease is driven by our behavior and environment. It's not our genes so we're not doomed to repeat our. What happens to our siblings to our parents. And only 6 percent of Americans consistently engage in the top five health behaviors identified by the Center for the CDC. The top five health behaviors are not smoking. Getting regular physical activity. Consuming alcohol no alcohol or alcohol in moderate amounts. Maintaining a normal body weight. And in obtaining. Daily sufficient sleep. So all five of those are definitely within our grasp and I'm working on a. On an e-book that's going to get more into the details of how to care for yourself and how to approach health care. Hopefully you know. Stay outside of the health care system for as long as you can utilizing it when you need to to understand your risk profile. But the five pillars include eat to serve your health. Connect to your physiology through movement. Optimize r epair and healing through sleep. You just can't underestimate. How important sleep is. How important moving around moving your body exercising and doing it in a way that is healthy for you where you have adequate recovery times because you can't just. They've shown you can't sit at the desk for eight hours a day and then work out for an hour. It's not enough to counter the effects of that set that eight hours of sedentary possession. So we need to be moving more throughout the day and finding ways to make that into our daily routine. Counteracting negative stress through planning relaxation. Really that's more about time management and developing better than our coping strategies for stress getting out back into nature. Things of that of that nature and relationships and community are powerful. I think really really to sustain change you have to have a community that you can lean on a community that keeps you accountable. It's difficult when you decide that you want to reclaim your health and you start eating healthy but you know your spouse or your your work colleagues aren't supporting you in that in that endeavor and you have to cook your own meals and things like that so relationships community are very powerful in driving sustainable and. And powerful change. So just a few more comments here and I'll wrap it up. I think humans are we like to. We like to figure out and spot patterns. So we're good at categorizing our actions into bad good healthy unhealthy clever foolish. But there's definitely a gray area and healthy. Health is not a binary system. It's really complex It's non-linear and it takes experimenting on yourself. And contextualizing what's going on. And really years of self participation in your own care. And health it rarely comes in a bottle. Or going through the motions at the gym. It won't resurface after a couple liver cleanses and medications. Definitely short term they can be necessary but in the long term they're usually not the key. So for those of you who received the email invite you may have saw a quote and I'll I'll end with this quote but it was it's by and the mom and she says the evidence is in and you are the verdict. And though I interpret that to mean we are in control of our health of our thoughts of how we approach life. And just like. Nobody's going to do the work for you there's definitely people out there. Hopefully I'm one of those those people that can help provide education and answer questions when you when you want to get back to health and streamline it. Then at the end of the day the onus is gonna fall on you to take those initial steps whether you fumble through it a little bit. I think that's probably just par for the course. And. Hopefully we can continue to shoot to push. This movement forward so that we all can have more cost effective. Better care. That is. More centered on an actual health and not disease management. So I'll end with that. And if there's any any questions feel free to. To drop me an email. Follow me on social media. I post a lot of tips on my Instagram account which is Dr. Nicola Barada.