Believe Big Podcast
Believe Big Podcast is a bi-weekly podcast developed to help you find answers about integrative cancer treatments and prevention. Ivelisse Page is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of Believe Big which helps cancer patients face, fight, and overcome cancer. Diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer she overcame the odds without the use of chemotherapy and remains cancer-free today. Since 2011, she’s helped thousands of patients move through the overwhelming process of cancer by bridging the gap between conventional and complementary medicine. Believe Big not only helps patients survive but thrive. Not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually as well. Join Ivelisse as she takes a deep dive into your healing with health experts, integrative oncology practitioners, best-selling authors, biblical faith leaders, and cancer thrivers from around the globe. For more information about Believe Big and its programs please visit BelieveBig.org
Believe Big Podcast
104-Dr. Jay Richards - Cultural Shifts in Medicine and Patient Choice
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In this episode of the Believe Big Podcast, Ivelisse sits down with Dr. Jay Richards of the Heritage Foundation to explore the powerful intersection of faith, science, and culture in today’s healthcare landscape. Together, they unpack the major shift from truly holistic, patient-centered care to a system focused primarily on disease management, and what it will take to change that.
Dr. Richards sheds light on why metabolic flexibility is essential for long-term health and breaks down the regulatory and financial barriers that prevent many patients from accessing integrative and natural therapies, including mistletoe therapy. He and Ivelisse discuss why these barriers exist, how they affect patient choice, and what steps can be taken to move healthcare toward a more integrative model.
Whether you’re a patient, caregiver, or advocate, this episode offers clarity, encouragement, and actionable steps for advancing a healthcare future where conventional and complementary therapies work together to support whole-person healing.
Learn more about Dr. Jay Richards at the Heritage Foundation.
Suggested Resources:
- BOOK: Infiltrated by Dr. Jay Richards
- BOOK: Indivisible by Dr. Jay Richards
- BOOK: Money, Greed, and God by Dr. Jay Richards
- BOOK: Eat, Fast, Feast by Dr. Jay Richards
- BOOK: The Anxious Generation by Jonathon Haidt
- Events at the Heritage Foundation
- Believe Big Integrative Cancer Symposium - Replay (link to purchase the bundle)
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Hi, I am Ivelisse Page and thanks for listening to the Believe Big podcast, the show where we take deep dive into your healing with health experts, integrative practitioners, biblical faith leaders, and cancer thrivers from around the globe. Welcome to today's episode on the Believe Big podcast. My name is Ivelisse Page and it's always a pleasure to spend this time with you.
Meet Dr. Jay Richards, background and expertise
Ivelisse PageToday I am happy to have as my guest, Dr. Jay Richards from the Heritage Foundation. He's the Director of the Devo Center of Life, Religion and Family, a senior research fellow and the author of more than a dozen books, including Money, Greed God; Eat, Fast, Feast; and the New York Times Bestsellers, Infiltrated and Indivisible. He also produced several documentaries that have aired on PBS. And most recently, Dr. Richards was a keynote speaker at our Believe Big Integrative Symposium. Dr. Richards has such a unique way of communicating faith, science and culture. Today he's helping us unpack some of the big shifts happening in healthcare, why patient freedom matters, how cultural trends are influencing medicine and what it looks like to make wise values-based choices in your own care. So welcome to the show, Dr. Richards.
Dr. Jay RichardsThanks so much, Ivelisse. It's great to be with you.
Metabolic Flexibility, Dr. Richards' favorite health tip
Ivelisse PageWell, everyone always likes to know what our guest's favorite health tip is, and so to start it off, would you be able to share one with us?
Dr. Jay RichardsYeah, absolutely. Eat for metabolic flexibility. So that is sort of embedding multiple ideas into one simple piece of advice, but I really do think that the way God made our bodies, is we're supposed to be able to survive in different kind of climates in times when you'll have plenty and in times when there's want. And as a result, he's given us these two metabolic systems. We're like walking around hybrids like Priuses. We don't have of course, batteries in gasoline tanks, but what we have is that the sort of, glucose side of things in which our body converts carbohydrates to glucose and can store and use that for energy or it can use, uh, dietary fat or body fat and convert it to ketones that our cells can use that for energy. Unfortunately, because of the standard American diet, most of us never use that second system. We use the first system where we're just constantly on this carbohydrate glucose cycle that's about every four hours and so, the idea of say, going a long period of time without eating a sale, extended fast, or eating ketogenically, it's terrifying to most people. But I think what we're doing when we do that is that we're recovering this natural design plan because we live at a time in which, the, you know, our, our bodies don't, by necessity have to go without food. And so we have to actually make it a practice. But I think if you do that, if you, you eat in such a way that it's easy for you to switch between these two different metabolic modes, that all things being equal, you'll more likely be healthy than not.
Ivelisse PageYeah. That is such great advice and it's something that a lot of our integrative practitioners that work with cancer patients are sharing, that it's really important to be flexible in that way. So thank you for sharing that.
Cultural Shifts in Medicine: From Holistic Care to Disease Management
Dr. Jay RichardsSure.
Ivelisse PageSo from your perspective, you know, how has our culture's approach to medicine shifted over the years from caring for the whole person to primarily managing disease?
Dr. Jay RichardsYeah, I mean, I think that it happened in several stages. I mean, if you read the original Hippocratic Oath, it was very patient-centered and, uh, Hippocrates of course is not a Christian, maybe the sort of classical Greek and the Hippocratic Oath was then infused into the sort of Christian, European way of viewing these things for centuries. And I always remind people that, even in the Christian West, it took us about 1800 years to fully get that all men are created equal. You know, I mean, I, I say how is it that Christians for centuries, couldn't abolish slavery. I said, that's how hard it is, right? That it took even almost 2000 years of a culture being told all men are created equal to sort of figure out the implications of it. And that's the case here. I mean, the reality is that if, if you're a Christian, you believe the human being is this integrated spiritual and material whole, and the whole is much greater than the sum of his parts. And so you need to treat the whole person and the Hippocratic Oath respected that in that you're dealing, you're not saying, okay, what's the kind of common good solution to my treatment of this patient, or how do I sort of plug in the interest of this patient into some big social good? It's like, no, what is the benefit, of this particular patient? And so I think honestly, first I a kind of collapse of that, that worldview that understood human beings in their holistic sense in the 19th century, uh, kind of materialism in which everything that matters is made of matter. I came to the fore, that's still the kind of dominant intellectual orthodoxy, at least in the academy. So that was part of it. And then I think a hyper specialization as we learned more, you know, so we learned more about things. It turns out even, just studying an eye or, you know, even just the nose, right? You can be a specialist in these things. And so by necessity, no one can handle all that stuff. And so you end up with all of these, sort of hyper specialized fields. And so no one is really asking the question, okay, what if I'm dealing with a, a symptom or disease and what's this kind of systemic source of this? It says, look, I was trained with this set of blinders. And so I don't think it's generally a kind of intellectual deficiency on the part of physicians. I think its that kind of philosophical framework we've been schooled in. And then I'd say, here's the slightly nefarious part of that is that there was a concerted effort, I'd say early in the 20th century to specialize the practice of medicine so that it looked like something you'd have in a department, at a research university. So anyone, for instance, that studies pediatrics will know, you know, the pediatrics that when it was initially formed was basically a bunch of scientists, males that wanted to wrest control of the birth process from the midwives. I mean, it was kind of that shameless, right? And so now we have these medical organizations that, lots of great doctors that are members of them, but if you think the American Academy of Pediatrics is mainly about patients, you don't know what's happening. It's actually, it's an industry organization. It's usually captured by particular industries that have an interest in financial interest. And so all of those things together, I think they squeezed out both a holistic view of the human person in treatment, and then also tended to alienate any sort of practice or care. The patients might say, Hey, this works really well, but doesn't fit in any of the sort of traditional boxes. And so I think that's why we're, we are where we are. Why your insurance company can pay for one thing, that you might say, I don't know how great this is gonna be and you have to pay out of pocket for another thing. But that's just the moment in which we live.
Ivelisse PageAll right. So
Challenges in Integrative Medicine: Mistletoe Therapy and Regulatory Hurdles
Ivelisse Pagewhy do you think innovative and integrative medicine or natural therapies like mistletoe faces so many roadblocks in today's healthcare landscape?
Dr. Jay RichardsWell, I'd say so there's a kind of a perfectly understandable reason, and then there's a sort of dark side. The dark side is always, and as you mentioned in my bio at the beginning, I've written a lot on intersection of economics and, and ethics. And the funny thing is, is you might think we live in a free market economy in the United States. So, everybody loves that and owners of businesses love sort of open competition. The dirty little secret is that if you're a large company that has massive market share, the last thing you want is competition. And in fact, you might even like regulations as long as the regulations give you a carve out and make it hard for small upstarts to compete. And so that's what we tend to have over time in industries is you'll have massive regulations that the massive companies and entities are actually in support of, 'cause they've, they've written them for the most part, right? And they can afford them, whereas a kind of small entrepreneurial upstart cannot. Now, so apply that to medicine. Almost anything that's a, let's say a fairly simple natural compound or, or take something, not like mistletoe, take something like fasting, right? If fasting has therapeutic value, nobody's making money off of that, right? I mean, you're literally not eating. And so there's not a massive financial incentive to promote that. Whereas if companies spent hundreds of millions of dollars to get a drug approved, they've got an obvious financial incentive. Now, I'm not saying you'd have to doubt everyone and that everything that happens is the result of nefarious financial incentives. No. Most people that I think are trying to develop products, they, they are trying to do something for the benefit of their customer. Nevertheless, if you have those kinds of interests, then if someone finds something that, you know, in the case of mistletoe is a traditional treatment, it's widely used in certain parts of Europe, not that expensive. It is, literally though, there's some processing involved, this natural compound compared to some massive expense like radiation or chemotherapy, it might as well be free. Now it's not, in fact, people have to pay for it out, out of pocket, but that creates a kind of market situation in which it's very hard to penetrate it and think of that happening over and over and over again with therapies, with medical devices, with drugs, and all of a sudden you can see what's gonna happen over time is you're gonna get a kind of alternative market, that's in, I hate to say it, but kind of a luxury good for people that are able to afford it. And then the kind of official market in which all of the sort of powerful entities involved, whether they're the insurance companies or HMOs or drug companies, they, they all sort of control that market. And so, that's why it is sort of odd that you can get things that you think, gosh, there's such low efficacy and such, such high risk for this treatment and it costs a hundred thousand dollars. My insurance will cover that, but they won't cover this thing that costs a couple hundred dollars a month. That's the problem. And then of course, there's, you know, the truth of the matter is, is some things people try might genuinely be bad for them. And so I'd say that's the kind of positive side. There's the desire to protect, but that desire to protect is always used as a justification to prevent innovation as well.
Ivelisse PageYeah. And I see that in, in the case with the, the mistletoe in the sense of, they'll say, well, it has to go through all three phases of a clinical trial, and it's really difficult for natural substances that can't be patented like mistletoe to go through that. Because like you're saying, there is not a financial benefit to companies when there's not something that can be patented. So that's why organizations like Believe Big and and philanthropic efforts to make these natural therapies go through all three stages here in the U.S., even though there's been 160 completed clinical trials all over the world on mistletoe therapy for a hundred years, it's still not able to be done, used here conventionally until it's gone through all three phases. So yeah, I find that another, you know, huge roadblock.
Dr. Jay RichardsAbsolutely. And that's part of the market, right? Is that the regulatory regime. Okay. It's set up obviously to, if we're gonna test some substance that has never been ingested or injected into a human before, right. It makes sense that we'd have those kind of rigorous processes. But as you said. If this is a natural substance or an extract of a substance that humans have been, may be ingesting or consuming in certain ways, for long periods of time, clearly there should be some kind of other pathway for that. And this is what I always say, look, if something's been in the human food supply for thousands of years. it gets the benefit of the doubt. If somebody wants to propose, let's try this weird cotton seed oil thing, that's where the burden of proof should be. And it's the same way if somebody wants to propose a highly unusual chemical compound, hey, that we need to have really, really high, uh, rigorous standards for that. If it's something that's natural that humans have experience with, we're dealing with a different situation.
Ivelisse PageYes, I agree. I agree.
The Role of Faith and Hope in Healing
Ivelisse PageYou know, you've written that true human flourishing includes body, mind, and spirit. What would it look like if our healthcare system truly embraced that vision?
Dr. Jay RichardsI mean, uh, honestly, this is, it's actually part of what I do at the Heritage Foundation. I chair an initiative called Restoring American Wellness, that is essentially trying to build out a policy portfolio that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. articulated in that famous speech in August of 2024 when he said that we have this massive chronic disease crisis, uh, we need to start focusing on the root causes of disease and not just treat symptoms, think about health and, and wellbeing and not just sickness. And so, that is, you know, it's a perfect way of framing things because we're, we have the chronic disease crisis because of things we've been doing over the last few decades, and we've been doing those things in part because we're not thinking of this stuff holistically, and yet there's scads of evidence for this. There's scads of evidence that we're body, mind, and, and soul. In fact, in a couple of weeks at the Heritage Foundation, we're gonna have the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has just written this amazing book, The Anxious Generation, and it's just about the data we already have, about the damage that social media and kind of hyper interactive screens can do to the brains of children. Now, I'm not saying everybody has throw there's screens away, but look, these are untested, right? And we now have data that this actually harms kids. And then so, and that's true just from the kind of physical effects of this. Now remember the fact that social media and the internet can be disease vectors of toxic ideas like gender ideology, right? That tells kids they might be born in the wrong body. Guess what? We've had like about 5000% increase in gender dysphoria diagnoses over the last decade or so, as smartphones have proliferated. And so if you understand that, that humans are not, we're not just bags of chemicals, we're bodily, of course, um, we're, we're mammals, but we're not mere mammals. We also are spiritual beings. And our ideas actually have an effect, can have an effect on our health and, and on our bodies. And so really getting a grasp of that, I think that's the kind of key thing. If we can get the truth about the human person right in our medicine and in our public health policy, that's gonna help us orient toward this new way of looking at things that, okay, we're gonna focus on root causes and not just on the kinda specialized symptoms that we might be looking at in isolation.
Ivelisse PageYeah, that's really good. Um, I actually already signed up for that event. Great. And, to watch it virtually. We'll also put the link in the show notes for anyone else who's interested in, in watching and listening. At Believe Big, you know, we often remind patients that healing isn't just physical like you mentioned, it's emotional and it's spiritual too. How do you see faith and hope influencing the healing process?
Dr. Jay RichardsNo, I think it's absolutely crucial. In fact, this isn't just a hunch. I mean, there's, there's real data on this. It's true with respect to physical healing and healing from disease. It's true for things as simple as whether you're gonna get married and have kids. If you don't have hope in the future, if you think, okay, every kid that is born as just a one other carbon footprint, right? You're much less likely to have children than if you think, okay, God told us to be fruitful and multiply. Children are gifts. Might be hard, but we should do it. That's gonna have a different outcome, in the same way, if you have now, of course, you might see death as an enemy and it is the death and and illness are the result of a fall and we should fight it. But, there's also a transcendent hope that we have. None of us wanna suffer death, but we also know that death is not the end. And what's funny is that when unbelievers hear that, they say, well, if you're always thinking about sort of dying, going to heaven, you're not gonna have a good life here. It's actually not true, is what it does, is it allows you to detach a bit from that so that you're not constantly in a state of panic. And so I really do think that faith, which is faith, isn't just believing a bunch of crazy things for no reason. It's a trust. It's trust, and robust faith, it's trust in the goodness of God, is just absolutely crucial. And I think people that, uh, live a life of faith and struggle with something like, you know, advanced cancer very often will tell you this. But we also do know from the social science literature that faith and prayer and and spiritual practices have this kind of healing effect. And, you know, again, it's hard to nail that down in a randomized control trial, but there is actually some, some pretty darn good evidence even in those terms, for this phenomenon.
Ivelisse PageYeah, and I think you even mentioned it at the symposium is that, you know, we're, we're all gonna die at some point. Mm-hmm. No one escapes death. And I think that's where faith plays a role is that whether it's now, or whether it's years down the road, we have this hope of a future of knowing that our eternity is secure in Christ. And so, that faith gives us peace in the moment of dealing with a crisis. I know it did for me in my life when dealing with cancer and knowing that no matter how things ended, I still won. Yeah. So I think, you know, faith also helps our body to heal. Like you are saying, the science shows that when you're in a state of peace, your body can heal and restore. Yeah. But if it's in a state of anxiety and stress, it's tight, it's, anxious and mm-hmm. It's not gonna be able to restore and to heal. So faith I agree, plays such a crucial role in, in the healing process of everyone.
Dr. Jay RichardsAbsolutely. And we know the opposite of like extreme anxiety, right? It increases your cortisol levels, it increases inflammation. It makes you unable to sleep for healing. And so now I almost hate to say that because then if someone is having anxiety, then they, that makes them more anxious. Right? But, but it, it's, at least it sort of describes this, this reality I think people experience. 'cause everybody knows when you're in an anxious state. It's not good for you, you know? Yeah. And so if it's true, then a genuine faith is almost certainly gonna be healing.
Ivelisse PageExactly, yes. And reading scripture, you know, when you are in those anxious states and those breath prayers, that, that really help to get you through those moments because we all do face fear and anxious thoughts at, at points in our lives, but it's how we move forward with them, that allows us to get through that. So yeah, thank you for sharing that.
Support Believe Big: Giving Tuesday and Corporate Sponsorship
Ivelisse PageSure.
Believe BigWe hope you're enjoying this episode of the Believe Big podcast. We'd like to take a moment to thank Kelly Benefits, a proud 2025 corporate sponsor. We're incredibly grateful for their support of Believe Big and our mission to help families face, fight, and overcome cancer. Today is Giving Tuesday, December 2nd, and it's a powerful opportunity to make a real difference. Believe Big is proud to be rated four stars by Charity Navigator so you can give with confidence knowing your support is making a meaningful impact and you don't have to wait to make a difference. Your gift today helps us move closer to our goal and serve even more patients and families. Our Giving Tuesday goal is $25,000, and your gift matters now more than ever. And here's the incredible part. Your gift will be doubled. Thanks to a generous match, every dollar given today, Giving Tuesday will have twice the impact. Together we can change lives one act of generosity at a time. Give now at www.believebig.org/EOY or text BELIEVEBIG (no spaces) to 5 3 5 5 5. Thank you for bringing hope where it's needed most.
Barriers to Integrative Medicine: Financial and Regulatory Issues
Ivelisse PageSo, in overcoming barriers and encouraging change in our, medical system, what do you think innovative or natural approaches or, why do you think they're often resisted by mainstream healthcare? Are there barriers more than cultural, financial, or educational?
Dr. Jay RichardsWell, I mean, there's definitely the, the financial part of that. There's also, what in Washington DC is, is what policy wonks call this regulatory capture. And what that is, is you might imagine, okay, so the FDA or the CDC, or let's just take the FDA, that's, that's simpler, okay? Their job is to hold drug and food companies accountable. And so there'll be this kind of adversarial relationship in which a drug company really has to prove to the FDA, that they're on the up and up. But if you look, it's like, okay, well who funded the drug study that you're using to approve this? Oh, the company that wants the drug approved. That seems a little odd, like there might be a conflict of interest there. Where does the FDA get its funding? Very often from private industries. Thousands of of employees at the NIH actually get royalties from private companies, from private drug companies, even while being government employees. When I tell people this, they'll say, why? Why aren't those people in jail? I said, because it's legal. That's, that's how the system works. And so what regulatory capture refers to is this basically a collusion or a fusion of what you would think of as private, entities and public entities in which you might imagine that they're adversarial. Uh, but if you look for instance, at at, at some of the folks that had been fired from the FDA and the CDC recently, the really, the, the higher up people. Where did they go? They inevitably go to serve on the board of a drug company that they were supposed to be regulating two weeks ago. And so, you know, it doesn't take a cynic to realize that okay, a system like that, is probably going to have some serious problems. And, and that's a sort of irony is that then you can get substances and technologies that end up not working really well, but pass through the official symptom or through the system. Then you'll have alternative treatments that you have massive clinical, uh, okay, anecdotal. But if you've got thousands of patients and physicians that know individual patients telling you, look, this made a difference. And that's just almost entirely, uh, uh, disregarded or even treated with contempt. It's really frustrating, especially, I know for physicians that are well-trained, uh, but also integrative and functional in their approach, and yet there's kind of no, there's no slot at the moment, bureaucratically for them.
Ivelisse PageOkay. Well, what practical steps could help to shift policy and funding of medical education so that integrative medicine becomes more accessible.
Dr. Jay RichardsI almost hesitate to to say this because in some ways, once a practice becomes official, it kind gets sucked into this, this sort of corrupting system. And I also think that the benefit we have right now is there's a kind of wisdom of crowds. And so, you know, I benefit as a researcher dramatically from being able to be on social media and I can watch people sort of argue things. And so people, if they have some basic competence, can actually have the ability to do a lot of research on their own that we didn't have before the whole world is connected, as it is. And so I think in some ways that, that, that makes the integrative, medical approach, quite healthy, being sort of on the outside, but I also think being on the outside, it's preventing a lot of people from getting healing, that, that aren't getting it right now. And so, I do think that, both at the N-I-H-N-I-H and the FDA, there need to be a regulatory structure set up to recognize this particular approach. I mean, this happened with MDs and doctors of osteopathy. It's happened, you know, it happens at the state level. Now it is states, that are primarily responsible for regulating the practice of medicine in their states. That's not the federal government. The federal government regulates the, the use and the approval of drugs. So a lot of this stuff could actually happen at the state level if say, the state of Florida, which is very entrepreneurial. They have a, a board of health, a board of medicine, a board of osteopathic medicine, and I think a board of a chiropractor even. Right. And so a board of integrative, and functional medicine or something like that, could be a really good first step because the Justice Louis Brandeis said that our system is a laboratory of democracy. In other words, things can get tried in different states, before you sort of federalize it. And so that's the, that's the sort of thing I'm hoping for. And then also, um, just a kind of release of some of the owner's regulations at the federal level that are within the jurisdiction of NIH or or at At HHS largely, I mean, I don't wanna assume everybody remembers how these things work, but H, health and Human Services, that's the big monster bureaucracy that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Is in charge of. And then you have the NIH. It's an agency at HHS that does medical research effectively, and it's headed by Jay Bhattacharya. There's a lot that can happen over a two or three year period in the so-called rulemaking process just to loosen up on some of the regulations. But I really do think that the innovation is likely to happen in some states and there'll be some leaders, and I wouldn't be surprised, honestly, if it was Florida.
Ivelisse PageOkay. That's, that's really interesting and it's, it's a really good point that starting at the state level before making it a federal is,
Future of Medicine: Human Flourishing and Holistic Care
Ivelisse Pageuh, is a great way to go. And, and you often talk about the human flourishing, but what does that look like when applied to medicine and patient care in the future?
Dr. Jay RichardsWell, I mean, that's the question because, so essentially right now we have a sick care system, that it's not focused on health and flourishing. And the word flourishing you know, I use that because it incorporates both the kind of the spiritual destiny of people as well as our physical needs. And so it's not like, okay, we don't want for our children, well, I want them to be really spiritually deep and also hungry and never able to pay the bills. What you want is that got a full life that includes all of these things. And that's what medicine should want. And so if you're focusing on the whole rather than the parts, well, focusing on the whole is gonna, A big chunk of that is, okay, what should we be doing normally every day when we're not sick to maintain our health, which is what makes it so outrageous that that medical doctors don't, either one, don't know anything for the most part, about nutrition. And if they have learned something, it's almost certainly wrong because it was, you know, it's based on outdated science. But a focus on things like nutrition and your natural environment, the types of toxins you may be exposed to that's focusing on the soil. And if you don't get that right, then ultimately all you're gonna be doing is treating symptoms if you've got the soil right, most people, most of the time will be in good health. And the ideal is that, that we live forever this side of the kingdom of God. But the ideal I would say is that people live long, healthy lives and then when they, when they die, they have a very short period of time where they get sick and they die. What we have right now is, we're good at keeping sick people alive for decades. We have excelled at that. The question is, why are people sick for decades before they die? And so increase the lifespan, increase the health span too. But to really do that, we're gonna have to focus on the, uh, the sort of root causes and the things that, that keep us healthy, rather than just focusing on the incidents in which it breaks down. And then you go to the doctor.
Ivelisse PageYes. Yes, a hundred percent.
Final Thoughts and Encouragement for Patients
Ivelisse PageWell, as you imagine a healthcare system that honors both science and the sacredness of life, what encouragement would you offer to patients trying to make sense of all their options?
Dr. Jay RichardsMy encouragement would be this, that there's, in some ways never been a better time, to be able to access this information. I mean, I was involved as, as you know, for several years and still am fighting pediatric gender medicine, trying to close these clinics down. And I can tell you, nine times out of 10, the mother whose child has been transitioned secretly at school knows more about the issue than her child's principal, probably the pediatrician, uh, the school counselor, because she has such strong motivation and because she's not only, it's not just motivation, she has access to the information. And that's what's amazing about the time in which we live. I mean, the fact that Believe Big exists and can, you know, a aggregate and can bring information and experts together from all over the place where people don't have to necessarily be in, in Maryland or Colorado to be able to access this stuff. That's, that's the good news. I mean, if somebody's watching this right now, they should remind themselves, Hey, I'm in this amazing informational environment where if I, I work and I use some discernment, I might, I can find some answers to the problems that I'm, I'm suffering from.
Ivelisse PageYes, yes. Yeah, that was, that was a challenge, for my husband and I, because back in goodness, 2008.
Dr. Jay RichardsOh yeah.
Ivelisse PageYou know, we, we, we, we were searching and thankfully he knew where to search, but it's not what it is today with the information that we have and the tools. So, absolutely. Yeah. It is, you're right about the options for today. And so finally, you know, what's one piece of wisdom as we close the episode, would you like to leave with our listeners, especially those navigating hard medical decisions right now, like cancer.
Dr. Jay RichardsWell, first what we've already talked about is the necessity of hope. And so my wife, right around her 30th birthday, we're a lot older than 30 now, but she was diagnosed with papillary carcinoma. So it's a thyroid cancer. She had very severe anxiety and found peace listing at the time to CDs by, uh, Christian Singer John Michael Talbot, singing the Psalms over and over. And I've still got 'em burned into my neural pathways from this. Now we had, she had terrific doctors, thyroid cancers actually one of the better cancers to have 'cause it could be treated really decisively. But still, I mean, it was also a spiritually, uh, trying experience in, in, in that solace was a absolutely crucial. The other thing kind of on the, how do we think about this level, is to think about the rise of chronic diseases. And, and the increase of certain kinds of cancers in particular that I've been in looking into. As an example of what's called in the literature discordance. And so there's this original design plan. Think of our human common ancestors, right, that, that all of us descended from probably more genetically diverse than any of us individually. And the different people groups, we adapted to different locations and different climates and different latitudes, uh, but had all these cer certain things in common, we tended to go outside a lot. We tended to have experience of the Song of Birds. We tended not to eat 110 pounds of sugar a year. In fact, nobody did that. You can list about 50 things that we have changed in really in the 20th century. They perfectly correlate with this massive increase in chronic diseases, including increases in cancer. And so just a kind of a way to think about that is, okay, what if that's true? How do I, what kind of things practically can I do, that will get closer to the natural environment of the original human design plan? It doesn't mean throw away your phones and you gotta go out and sort of, uh, revive the paleolithic lifestyle. It's just that you sort of start going through those things and what you'll find is. Oh, we kind of know a lot of these things that actually probably causing the problems.
Ivelisse PageYes. Yeah. That's great advice. Well, thank you so much for taking time today to be with us and to share your insight and your wisdom. We really appreciate it. And uh, and God bless you.
Dr. Jay RichardsGod bless you. Great to be with you. Hope to talk to you again.
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