Five Lessons Doctors are Never Taught.

Lessons I learned the hard way, that you should know.

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

Before I was admitted into medical school, I had a naive and wide-eyed view of the profession. This perception justified the great financial and time cost of going through 4 years of education, and 6 years of subsequent training and specialization. In total, that’s 10 years of medical education excluding the years as an undergraduate.

These 5 lessons were never taught in the 14 years of higher education that I received on my path to becoming a board-certified doctors.

I’m willing to bet most doctors aren’t taught these either.

1. The Root Cause of All Illness.

If you are an avid user of social media, you will have noticed many health coaches who claim that the one thing they are concerned about is the most important risk factor for disease.

There are those who claim that the biggest problem is sugar. Others insist it is the presence of seed oils and its derived products in all of our food. Some take offense that humans should eat any vegetables. The list goes on.

Unfortunately for the health gurus, all of these scapegoats fall under a common umbrella.

The answer is refinement.

The crux of it is this: all living beings exist in an infinitely complex harmonious balance with all other things around them.

This balance which exists both within and without is maintained to keep us intact and alive, whilst simultaneously allowing for enough laxity that we may grow, evolve and adapt.

This “force” is called homeostasis.

We exist in a state of fine-tuned balance.

The problems begin when we encounter refined and usually man-made stimuli. Refinement can be thought of as a process of concentrating or reducing a thing to a single quality.

Everything from cocaine, to refined sugar, to aspirin, to blades of steel.

Refinement leads to exhaustion of our homeostatic capacity.

Exhaustion leads to disease.

Disease by Design: The Cost of an Engineered Life.

2. You Inherit More than Genes.

Although this quote may not have been coined by Carl Jung, I have seen an interview in which he said it:

We are not of today or yesterday. We are of an immense age.

Ever since modern scientists proposed the concept of genes, discovered chromosomes, and posited the structure of DNA…there has been an obsessive focus on genetics.

This focus naturally bled into the field of medicine, and has since become center-stage.

These days you will find doctors who will confidently claim that:

• Diabetes is genetic

• Autism is genetic

• Cancer is genetic

• Obesity is genetic

• Alzheimer’s is genetic

…and so on and so forth.

They naturally use this as a blanket statement, but there are typically two types of implications:

1. The disease is inherited by the presence of a disease-causing gene

2. The mutation of a specific gene is the cause of a disease

The question of nature vs nurture had been convincingly answered for quite some time.

Then came along epigenetics - which is a field concerned with gene regulation…which was then determined to be heritable.

Practically, this means that you can both develop and inherit disease…even if the gene in question is not mutated…or even itself the cause of disease. It can simply be turned up or shut off.

This is the current framework of understanding the role of genes in disease. Which is to say that, without the impact of environmental conditions…genes on their own do not account for the occurrence of many diseases.

Which begs the question…if you can inherit epigenetic regulatory modifications…maybe there’s more to inheritance than simply genes.

Almost every field of medicine is slowly turning to this concept. From oncology to obstetrics.

What they are realizing is that we inherit more than just genes.

At the most basic level, a newborn inherits the living conditions of his parents.

A fetus inherits the blood (which is an amalgam of diet, health, temperament, habits) of its mother. It may possess the parent’s gene. But, the fetus is literally made from mama’s blood.

Children inherit behaviors and beliefs modeled by their parents and family.

The parents and environment directly impact the physiologic temperament a child inherits.

We can go on.

3. The Real Cause of Burnout.

One of the things we continue to receive “education” on is physician burnout.

It’s pretty common in our field.

And it’s not just in the United States. It’s pretty common in the Western world.

Which is strange to consider because the West is highly regarded as one of the best places to work as a doctor. In large part because of the compensation doctors receive in this part of the world.

Which is quite telling.

You know...if you were to consider any other line of work that pays as handsomely as medicine…suspicion would set in.

Entrepreneurs, bankers, politicians…mafioso.

Most people in these lines of work who make a lot of money, are often suspected of shady work or moral laxity…if not straight up criminal activity.

But, for some reasons…doctors don’t receive that kind of suspicion.

They are doing God’s work, after all.

I hope you can tell from my tone that I do not share this belief.

On the contrary, I believe that the high compensation of doctors is a major contributor to burnout. Let me explain this briefly.

In many ethical frameworks around the world, there is the notion of clean money and unclean money.

Halal income, or haram income. Permissible, or sinful.

Doctors know…and they see it every day with their patients…that most of what they are doing isn’t really helping. It’s either “managing” their disease or just relieving their symptoms.

This is not lost on anyone.

And…yet, they get rewarded so handsomely.

No matter how you spin it to yourself…your conscience knows something is amiss.

You are heavily profiting from the continued suffering of others, while they are also charged a handsome fee. No matter how much you convince them or yourself you are helping…you cannot escape your conscience.

This is the real cause of burnout.

Then, there’s all the other factors which make their day-to-day seem futile, whether it is insurance companies or hospital/clinic policy tying their hands about how to help a patient.

4. Modern Medicine is the “alternative.”

One of the great scams of the 20th century has been making the population believe that “conventional” or “traditional” medicine is that which is practiced in the current allopathic industry.

This could not be further from the truth.

Modern allopathy is the odd one out.

Traditional medical arts from all around the world have far more in common with one another, than any of them do with modern allopathic medicine.

In reality, modern medicine is the “alternative” to the traditional medical arts which have survived for millenia.

5. Your Physiology has a Temperament.

Many healthcare providers like to talk about “personalized” health.

“Biospecificity.”

Often times, they are referring to use of genetic testing to determine how some compounds may interact with your body.

Unfortunately, all the modern practices miss the elephant in the room.

Temperament.

Temperament is a concept that has existed across the world for millenia, before the emergence of modern western medicine.

The Greeks, Romans, Indians, Arabs and even Medieval Western physicians understood the importance of temperament.

To understand temperament we must first understand the primary qualities of all things in nature. These primary qualities exist on two gradients. The primary qualities are: hot, cold, moist and dry.

From this framework, we can see that everything from the cold hard earth to the hot fiery Sun accounts for the extreme qualities of our world. Like all living things, we live somewhere in between. The matter of our body consists of material/fluids which manifest these qualities to varying degrees.

Each of our four primary humors (blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm) exhibit a dominant temperament. Our blood is sanguine, which has a hot and moist temperament - naturally epitomized by air and the spring.

At each level of organismal complexity, this temperament manifests in different ways:

Anatomically, the Sanguine temperament manifests as smooth skin, hairy body, middle stature, oval face and head, and prominent veins.

Physiologically, this can manifest as good appetite and quick digestion. Yellow and thick urine. Pleasantly warm to the touch. Sound sleep.

Psychologically, this can manifest as good judgement, optimism, cheerfulness, extroversion and romanticism. Confidence, grace and enthusiasm.

The four dominant temperaments have explanatory power at every level: the seasons, the food, the fleshy body, physiologic processes, the psyche, and of course the spirit of the person contained within the body.

The health challenges of the sanguine person is not the same as someone of another temperament. For instance, because of their tendencies, their health challenges are usually related to excess heat or excess blood. These often manifest as inflammatory conditions.

There are also states of dis-ease which manifest as different temperaments, masking one’s true temperament. For instance, a sanguine dominant person can have a choleric-appearing temperament which needs to be teased out. This is rather easy to imagine, as both these temperaments are characterized by heat, but vary in their moisture.

Without knowledge of temperament, you cannot make a complete and informed decision regarding the Four Pillars of health and vitality:

• Consumption - food, drink, information, social stimulation

• Environment - Climate, home, lighting, EMF, etc

• Activity - Exercise, hobbies, breathing, posture, etc

• Heart/Intent - Understanding the self, what aligns with your spirit, what moves you, what gives life meaning

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UPDATE: By combining information from several sources, both modern and ancient, I have developed a self-assessment questionnaire that will help you understand your dominant/sub-dominant temperaments and its implications.

Very soon, this self-assessment will be available for a pilot-test for my paid supporters.

Subscribe and stay tuned!