Shift your mindset, shift your life. On this episode we sit down with Dr. Patricia Boulogne to make sense of complex and challenging situations, whether it’s mind, body, or soul, by finding a simpler and better way that gets you unstuck, productive, faster, and measurable results.
Dr. Patricia Boulogne is a Certified Functional Medicine Practitioner, Coach, Chiropractor, Speaker, and Author. She has helped thousands over the last 35+ years stop adapting their lifestyle to pain, and chronic problems by focusing on the whole person.
Listen for actionable tips about sickness, managing symptoms, and getting to the root of your problems!
TIME STAMPS
3:50 What “Einstein’s Time” is (jump to section)
11:11 Focus on setting your intentions for the day to set your mindset & handle situations better (jump to section)
11:50 Daily affirmations & how to process situations (jump to section)
12:39 Tools to use when faced with unforeseen circumstances throughout the day (jump to section)
16:02 Journaling / writing to get things off your chest (jump to section)
20:22 Three reasons why people get sick (jump to section)
29:32 The Grim Reaper Syndrome – are you sick and don’t know it? (jump to section)
34:35 The power of Chiropractic care on sickness (jump to section)
42:04 Lifestyle solutions anyone can do to improve their health immediately (jump to section)
Transcription Below
Kat Eckles: Welcome back, Be Organic listeners. This is Kat Eckles. We are so excited to have you today. I am solo on this episode – solo host, I guess I should say. My husband is not here today, but we are going to fill in for him with an amazing guest. We are so excited to have her. We are gonna be talking about shifting your mindset and shifting your life.
We are so excited to have Dr. Patricia Boulogne. Her motto is, “Fix your health and fix your life.” Dr. Pat makes sense of complex and challenging situations, whether it’s mind, body, or soul, by finding a simpler and better way that gets you unstuck and productive with faster and measurable results. Dr. Patricia is a certified functional medicine practitioner, coach, chiropractor, speaker, and author.
She has helped thousands over the last 35 years to stop adapting their lifestyle to pain and chronic problems by focusing on the whole person. Her clients and patients find out the why and the cause of the problem and identify the starting point of their health journey. Dr. Boulogne is the founder and principal of ask Dr. Pat Health Team Network, a company dedicated to skyrocketing your health, lifestyle, and mindset with strategies and programs that make sense and help you age gracefully, think, move, and feel better and live longer and happier. That is so amazing. And Dr. Pat, we are so excited to have you today.
Dr. Patricia Boulogne: Thank you very much. We’re talking about one of my favorite topics today because, it’s just something that inspires me, and I’m on fire about it. So I’m gonna let you lead into exactly where you’d like this to go, but thank you for the invite.
Kat: Yes, we’re so excited. This is something I love talking about too. I can’t stress it enough, when it comes to health, how important this is and how important your mind and your thoughts and your intentions are. Not just for the outcome of tangible things in your life, but your health and your body and your cells and things that are going on. So I just appreciate that you’ve put so much thought in your practice to this theory and you find it as important as I do.
Dr. Pat: Well, one of the first things, when I had my office and I saw patients in brick and mortar, one of the things I noticed about patients was their concept of “I’m sick.” They went and bought whatever they had going on at Kmart’s Blue Light Special. For them to have that shift, that it doesn’t have to be that way and that pain’s not a lifestyle – because mostly people see chiropractors as for pain.
The biggest thing that I help my patients do is get out of that mindset and look at what their whole life and what their health really look like: why structures function, your posture’s function, and why that’s so important for how your organ systems work in relationship to certain things that we do to help support that, like diet and nutrition and exercise and sleep. That positive mental mindset is like the icing on the cake in how you start your day and that type of thing, but it made a big difference.
Most of my practice was maintenance. Even after 10 years, I still had people with pain problems come in, but I had a significant nutritional practice at that point in time, which is the start to functional medicine. That’s kind of how I got there for doing that aspect of it.
Einstein’s Time
Kat: I love that. One thing you talk about is Einstein’s Time, and I would love to kind of hear your background on that theory and, and why you call it that.
Dr. Pat: Well, I love Einstein’s Time because people know – like if they’re at a craps table and they’re throwing dice and throw seven, eleven, seven – it’s just like they’re in their groove. It might not be holistically the best groove for playing craps and that sort of thing, but just being in something where you’re in your groove. Like if your groove is cooking, you know that when you cook and when you’re making a meal, you know when you’re making it that it’s going to turn out great.
Our thoughts are so important. In the book Water for Chocolate, they talk about this woman who was promised to be married, and she fell in love with this guy, but the guy was promised to be married to her sister. And in the book, they talk about all her sad emotions when she had to make dinner for everybody, when they were going to announce that engagement.
And she cried the whole time while she was making the dinner, and all her sadness went into the food. By the end of the time that people ate that meal, they were crying. It shows that – because she had to give up the love of her life to her sister– it shows why our intention is so important.
We hit the ground running, and we wake up; our mindset is set in tune to everything that we do. If we’re in Einstein’s time, then things run smoothly. When we start running uphill, they don’t, or it’s more of a struggle. an example in a book that I read called The Big Leap, when he talks about Einstein’s Time, he talks about this guy who lost his wife.
His daughter was at school and called him up about a month or so later. He had to get this article out, and she said, “Dad, I gotta talk to you,” and he said, “Sure, honey, go ahead.” She said, “No, I’m gonna come home. I need to talk to you face to face.” She said, “I should be there in a few hours.”
So he looked at the clock, and he hung up and went back to writing his article, but he couldn’t get his mind off his daughter coming home: “Oh my God, what does she want? Is she okay? Is she sick? Is she gonna die?” You know? And then he looks at the clock: “Oh God, now she’s late,” and it interfered with his productivity and getting the most out of his day and getting the most out of his precious moments in his life while he is living his life and his health.
So eventually his daughter comes in the house and she goes, “Oh my God.” He goes, “Where have you been? I’ve been so worried about you.” And she goes, “Well, I had a little bit of a delay because I stopped because I was hungry. So I ate, and then you always tell me not to drive and talk on the telephone the same time, so I had a telephone call that I had to talk to somebody. And then I had to buy gasoline.” So she goes, “That puts me here now.”
And he goes, “Oh, I’m so relieved. Are you okay? What’s going on? Tell me what’s going on.” He was so worried his whole day, and he let worry occupy that moment. The moral of story is she said to him, “I just wanna drop out of school. I don’t like the curriculum I’m in. I’ve gotta figure out what I wanna do. I’m hating what I’m doing. And I just wanted to get the OK from you that I could drop out of school.”
And he sat down, and he goes, “Sure, drop out! You’re okay. That’s all that’s important.” And then he went and he wrote his article that he needed to get done in the shortest period of time.
So when he got in his groove, in his vibe, and he went back to doing what he needed to get done, he had no distraction around him. He was able to complete that task stellarly. A lot of us get distracted throughout the day, and so a lot of times –women multitask a lot– and a lot of people go, “I can’t exercise, and I can’t journal. By the time I end up eating breakfast, multitasking, and da, da, da, da, and journaling, I’m already at noon time, and then I’m tired.” And they go, “How can I do that, Dr. Pat? How can I get those things in and still be productive and get a lot outta my day?”
I know women are so great at multitasking. And I said, “Well, what you do is, you just have to be committed to being up and out the door at least 45 minutes earlier than what you’re doing right now.” And I said, “And you start your walk by focusing on your breathing, and you’re gonna walk for that 45 minutes.” So you focus on your breathing, and that’s a specific technique I teach to get the most out of that. And then the next three to five minutes, you focus on what you’re grateful for, and you just name them off. You don’t have to write them down or record them or anything.
Then we’re up to 10 minutes now. so in the next 20 – or if you have a half hour, you can space this out accordingly – you just focus on exercising. You just pay attention to what you’re doing, what your posture is. And you’re exercising for the sake of exercising: walking, whatever your exercise is, and then after that, you can start saying, “Okay, so what are the top three things I need to get done today for me?”
You can record them into your telephone because everyone has a telephone with them, usually, just in case, right? So then you have the top three things, and then you have the three things that you can do that you need to do for your business, or for your family – you know, business is a broad term there.
And then you have three things that you have to get done in the week. It’s simple; you record them, and they’re done. And then what you can do is either talk that out or just think it, and then record it. So you have it and you don’t have to worry about, “What did I say? Those are nine things. I don’t know if I’ll remember them all.”
Lastly, you journal. You can dictate your journal. So in that 45 minutes, you can get a lot done: jump in the shower, get dressed, go to work, then get into your day, and you’ll have that done. If you get into the ritual of that, which is practice, practice, practice, and takes longer than there’s a 21/90 day rule for making behaviors a specific habit.
We can talk about that in a second, but if you do something like that to make it a habit, then you have that down to a science, so it’s just part of your routine. Having that in your routine, like getting up and having 16 ounces of water, you know, while you’re in the front part of that walk, and making sure that you’re hydrated, because you need hydration for every pillar and aspect of your health.
Focus on Setting Your Intentions
Kat: That’s so good. What I kind of imagine, when you tell that story about the dad that got so preoccupied with the daughter, is like, if you do some of these things that you mentioned, really focusing on setting your day and setting your intentions for the day and exercising the muscle of your brain and your mindset, when those situations come you’re able to handle them differently. We’re all gonna be met with those things where there’s a thing maybe in the back of our mind, and someone wants to talk to us, and we don’t know what it’s about or whatever it is, but once we’ve done the intentions to make ourselves stronger every day, we can handle those situations better.
Daily Affirmations & How to Process Situations
Dr. Pat: Yes. You can do affirmations on that walk after your three days as a part of that. You can say what your affirmations are for that day. You could easily say, “Nobody can disturb by peace of mind.” So when things come up, you have to ask yourself, “Okay, so what’s really going on here? What do I have to do first? What’s my most important task or what’s my important thing to do?”
And it’s like, “What do they want?” or if you start ruminating, those thoughts can undo any good that you’ve done on your walk, being in focus. So affirmations would be a good,portion of that, or having an accountability buddy that you can walk with, or that you can pass, and share those. “Here’s my goals for the day,” and then check in later: “I did them!” just celebrating those short successes – and long successes too, because those short successes add up.
Tools to Use When Faced With Unforeseen Circumstances
Kat: Absolutely. And what are some of the tools that you use when you’re faced with those unforeseen circumstances throughout your day?
Dr. Pat: Well, I have a very specific time when I look at, for instance, LinkedIn messaging. I schedule things in my calendar, I don’t answer my telephone, especially if I don’t know a number. If I look at it, I don’t know a number, and I’m expecting somebody to call me from a particular area code, I’m going, “Well, maybe I don’t have their number in my telephone.” Then I might pick up and answer it, and if it’s not who I’m expecting to talk to, then I’m off the telephone, literally within 20 seconds.
But I have an agenda that I stick to and where I focus on. So I don’t do emails, for instance, until the end of the day, because emails can be so easy that next thing you know – you open something and go, “Wow, that looks really interesting,” and the next thing you know, it’s an hour.
My most productive moments are usually in the morning. I set it up for myself to be an hour and a half that I just focus directly on what I need to do. If I’m recording and if I have the energy, I will let that run into a second hour and a half, so I’ll put three three-hour blocks with a break in the middle part of it. Sometimes in that break in the middle part of it, I’ll just go out and I’ll walk for 10 minutes, just take a walk and not think about stuff, don’t bring my telephone, just walk and then come back.
Another thing that helps me reframe that when stuff happens – what is it, “Life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans?” – and I have to tend to something, then I’ll just deal with it. Do it, get it over with. I teach the same thing for somebody who can’t sleep at night.
If they’re ruminating on a thought and they can’t get it out of their head, like, “I should have said this,” or “I should have said that,” it’s like, sit up in bed, turn the light on – or don’t turn the light on – identify what it is, and just ask yourself, “Is there anything I can do about that right now?”
If there is, get up and do it. If there’s not, then write out keywords or write out your list of what’s going on in your brain, put it next to your bed, and bless it for your highest good. It will be there tomorrow. It’ll be waiting for you. Then give yourself permission to go back to sleep.
Kat: I love that.
Dr. Pat: Because a lot of times we’re thinking about how you push yourself, and sometimes we push ourselves past our limits without honoring our need to repair, restore, and revitalize so that we can jump in and be vibrant, and we can be healthy, and we can be strong, and we can be happy.
Journaling
Kat: I love that. There’s something to be said for writing down your emotions. I find that to be very therapeutic for me. You talk about journaling, but sometimes even if I’m angry at someone, or if I’m having some sort of extreme emotion towards someone, I’ll sit and I’ll write them a letter knowing that I’m not ever really gonna give it to them, but it’s almost like you said, blessing it, getting it off your spirit onto something else and then being able to move on. I find that to be a really great tool.
Dr. Pat: It is a great tool and I have taught women – women, from what I’ve seen, have a tendency to write those letters more than men do – so when women are in relationships and there are issues with their spouse, their parent, or whatever, I tell them to write the whole thing out and then tell me how many pages it is.Then I ask them to tell me, “Okay, so I need you to take that five page letter or that three page letter and make it into one page to one page and a half max between now and our next session that we talk.” What it does is help them funnel down those thoughts and what’s really going on underneath the surface, that is wearing and tearing at their heart and their energy and their time and their space.
Sometimes they send them, but I said, “If you want somebody to read something, you have to say something nice. Say something nice. Say something nice. And then pivot and say, ‘The reason why I’m writing this to you is because…’” You have to be really crystal clear, and if you do that, then they’re already feeling good because of the first three sentences, and you’re speaking to them in a way that people learn, because some people learn either aurally or by feeling or by visual. I’m much more of a visual and feeling type person. My first training is as a chiropractor, so I have a lot of training that’s visual, and my last learning style is auditory.
So if I’m learning a language, I have to see it, talk and feel it, put the stickers all over my house, that kind of thing. I learned from my own stuff that I did when I would write out how I felt and I would journal that, I would sit there and ask myself, “Would I read this?” and the answer usually was no. So then – to what you said about writing your emotions – sometimes I would take that and I would just throw it in the fireplace and burn it.
Kat: Right. It’s more for you. It’s more so you can get it off your, chest. It’s funny; I have teenage girls and we see it on TikTok all the time and laugh and it’s like, “Girl, you’re writing him those paragraphs and those letters and he’s not reading it,” especially when they’ve left the relationship, but it’s just therapeutic for the person going through it, to be able to probably identify with their own feelings. Sometimes it’s just the process of acknowledging to yourself and putting words to what you’re feeling.
Dr. Pat: Yep, and then you can move on. My mentor’s wife, who was also a mentor to me too, always said to me, as far as relationships go, you don’t have to do anything. If someone’s gonna hang themselves, they’ll do it pretty quick. Mm yep. Just be you, be happy, be strong. Just be who you are and step into your future.
Kat: Well, and there’s something when you’re operating from that authenticity and from that positivity – you can use the new age words, vibrating at that… whatever it is – but when you’re putting that out, you’re going to attract that, and other people that are like-minded and operating like that are gonna be drawn to you. So it’s a win-win, really.
Dr. Pat: Yeah, my mentor – the male part of it – used to say to me, “A red flag is a red flag is a red flag. And he goes, “What color is a red flag?” I said, “Red.” And I go, “Got it. Got it. Got it.” Although I didn’t listen to him all the time, but… got it.
Kat: That’s funny.
Dr. Pat: But that is good.
3 Reasons Why People Get Sick
Kat: Well, let’s pivot here and let’s talk about why people get sick. I know you talk about three reasons that you believe why people get sick or the three Ts. Could you explain those to us?
Dr. Pat: I can! Actually, we just talked about the third one, which is thoughts, on some level, but the first one is trauma. The second one’s toxins. And the third one is thoughts. So trauma would include from nine out of ten births have some type of cervical damage in the neck from the birthing process. So that’s why you want to have those biomechanics of a, even a newborn checked out by a chiropractor who does a lot of infant and natal type care in their offices. There are specific chiropractors who specialize in that. Having those segments in alignment because structures function, that’s that fifth pillar of health that I always talk about. Also, if you don’t take care of it, then you start the body sitting up from birth, starting to have inflammation in the body, and you don’t want inflammation, because inflammation isn’t something that happens one day and then gone. It stays there and it accumulates over a period of time, and so when it accumulates over a period of time, it will try to settle into your weakest organ system.
So a lot of people, their weakest or system is their gut, which leads us into toxins. Toxins include any everything from the air that you breathe, the water you drink, to the food that you eat, the cosmetics that you use, whatever you put on your body, what you use in your garden, and what you use in your house for cleaning.
On that note, eating very high quality food and eating very clean food is important. Knowing what ingredients are in your cleaning supplies is important because a lot of them are carcinogenic. Glade air fresheners that you plug into the wall have been linked to some types of cancer. Why they still sell them, I don’t know. So there’s the air that you breathe, your sheets that you use in the dryer. Those things that – you don’t want those in your house if you really want to be healthy, if you want to take control of your environment, because how your genes express themselves is how they’re expressing themselves in a given moment to the environment.
So if those things keep on accumulating, it’s important. We all know that what you put in your mouth is supposed to nurture you and nourish you so that you can make it through even your longest day, and a lot of times, people are so nutrition deprived, or they have such poor combinations of food, or their food looks like food, but the list of chemicals and list of ingredients in it is really toxic, like a lot of things that have sugar and corn syrup in them.
On that note, we can’t do too much about the outside air, but we can do something about our inside air. So having a good air cleaner in your house would be an ideal thing to have, especially if you live in the inner city. If you’re living in the city or inner city, or people who are very sensitive in the country to even pollens, that type of thing.
And then the garden thing, it’s just like someone just posted – I was so upset. Someone just posted my dog breed, and one of the reasons we were supposed to do this before I had to cancel – my dog passed away from old age. But someone did a post on my breed of dog, and this dog was like three years old and had lymphoma. And lymphoma – whatever dogs get, humans get also – a lot of lymphomas, when I first hear lymphoma, I’m always going, “What’s their heavy metal toxicity? What was the exposure to glycophosates like Roundup?” And other insecticides, herbicides, that type of thing, fertilizers. We don’t realize how much our environment affects our ultimate outcome.
Then your cosmetics – if you can’t eat your cosmetics, you should not put them on your skin. Your skin absorbs 65% of whatever you put on. Reading those labels and taking a look at what it is before you use it, then you are making an educated the choice about whether or not you’re gonna use something that’s not so good for you. Even in supplements and vitamins – there’s a lot of supplements and vitamins and drugs that have binding portions in those, and those things can be quite toxic and quite harmful.
It’s like if you take a steroid one time – no big deal. But if you look at the different types of steroid, there’s some steroids that have a cumulative effect that leads more towards chronic illness and disease. So that toxin part is a big, huge part.
It’s like, – you know, do you drink …. I don’t know what part of the world you’re in. You’re in North Carolina, right?
Kat: Yes.
Dr. Pat: So you might call it soda, but up north in Michigan, where I grew up at, we called soda “pop,” and you’re looking how much – in a typical can of Coca-Cola, I think there’s 11 or 20 teaspoons of sugar in it. The diet ones, they have aspartame or some other type of sweetener, and people who are losing weight and using sweetener to lose weight… it is not the thing to do. They actually have found that those people are gaining weight and they struggle a lot more than people just using natural, normal things.
When people juice, I always tell them like to use more vegetables than fruit. In fact, I personally don’t like mixing fruits and vegetables together too much. I pick and choose on what side of the spectrum a fruit is. If it’s very acid, if it’s sweet, I food combine those together when I’m making something specific, if I’m gonna be juicing or something like that.
The big deal about thoughts – it’s unfortunate, but if we get stuck in our thoughts, then we don’t get a handle on it. If we’re worrying too much, or if we have anxiety or we’re depressed, you gotta go back to the gut, number one, because I now know that the gut and the brain connection on those types of mental wellness issues are directly connected, but then it undoes any good that you do.
If you figure out how, like “I’m gonna get structurally sound and see my chiropractor and I’m going to exercise and I’m going to get toxins out of my life!” but if you can’t get a handle on your thoughts, it undoes at least up to seven times the whatever you did to correct those other two issues.
So when you’re looking at “Why do people get sick?” They get sick because of traumas and inflammation that never gets handled. And they have a new norm – they get sick because of toxins from all those things that I mentioned that was a whole litany. And they get in their thoughts, asking, “is there anything I can do about this?” or “What did I learn from this?”
That’s a good question. Something happens: “What did I learn from this?” If you know what you learn, if you can identify what you learned from it, then you can say, “I’m not going to do that again. I’m gonna do the best I can do not to do that again. What can I do to set it up do I don’t walk that same path again?”
Kat: Right.
Dr. Pat: That’s when the mentor thing comes in: If it’s a red flag, it’s a red flag, it’s a red flag. We just have to pay attention to that. That’s why people get sick, basically.
Kat: Yeah. Well, it makes so much sense and all of it, especially the toxins piece – we’re just surrounded by it all the time. Even if we’re making the best decisions, like you said, it’s in our fertilizers or in our water. There’s just so many times that we’re met with it. So we really need to make sure that we control the things we can control, which is our thoughts and working through our trauma. I just did a week actually, out in Idaho, my husband and I did EMDR sessions, which are amazing for trauma and really going through your life and working out things. It’s something that we all need to just really work at healing in ourselves so our terrain can be healthy enough so that when it’s met with those toxins, we can detox them correctly.
Dr. Pat: Right. For sure. One big thing is to stop being so hard on yourself. We all make mistakes. The idea is: “What did I learn and how do I get past this?”
The Grim Reaper Syndrome
Kat: Yes. Something I wanted to make sure we touched on is something that you call the Grim Reaper Syndrome, which is when people are sick and they don’t even know it. How are people supposed to know that they have something going on and how can they identify what’s up with their bodies before it gets to be too out of control?
Dr. Pat: So I call it Grim Reaper Syndrome. We have signs and symptoms that go on in our life. I’m gonna give you an easy one, like people who have floaters. When I was 47 years old, I didn’t have floaters In my eye, even then, but I had friends who did. When I went to acupuncture school – because I’m an acupuncture physician also – they tell you that floaters are related. If they’re clear, then it relates to your liver – in your liver meridian, not in your liver itself. If they’re dark, they relate to your kidneys. Then you can ask better questions about other functions that are happening in the body based upon that. So there are signs and symptoms that we put off, or we say, “I could eat anything, but just in the last three months, every time that I ate, blah, blah, blah, I feel bloated.”
So people – who do they have a tendency to ask first? Their best friend, right.? Or their mother. Somebody like that. “Hey, I’ve been having this lately. Have you ever heard of anybody having that? I just don’t know if I should be concerned or not.” And they say, “Oh, don’t worry. I had that when I was your age, it goes away.”
Then you realize, because you didn’t pay attention to those, minute signs and symptoms, three years later, it’s worse. And now you have IBS, you have other type of digestive issues. You have gluten sensitivity, you have other things going on because of those things.
In my book Why Are You Sick, Fat, and Tired?, which was an Amazon bestseller, it tells you look at where your weakest link is, and then look at how that’s playing out in your other 11 organ systems. When you look at your body as a Swiss watch, it’s all supposed to work together. When it doesn’t, you know exactly where to spend your time, energy, and your money, looking at this is what seems to be going on, and talking to somebody who could put the pieces of the puzzle together for you. And then saying, “How do I get outta here? How did I get here in the first place?”
So other signs and symptoms that you could use – I used to ask a patient of mine all the time, “Why don’t you tell me about your stools?” He’d say, “Oh, Dr. Pat, I don’t wanna talk to you about my stools.”
I said, “Just tell me if they’re well formed and what color they are.” He’d say, “Oh, sometimes they’re like small pieces, you know, and blah, blah, blah.” Well, in Chinese medicine, all that stuff means something. Whether they’re well formed, whether they smell and such, because they shouldn’t smell if you’re eating well and if you don’t have any heat in your body, in a Chinese form.
So when you have that heat in your body, it’s when you have stinky poops. Paying attention to those things and then saying – you know, anybody who has a business and anybody who has a has family, they don’t want the crisis to happen. They want to be aware of it before. So like, “Okay, I have these issues going on. Let’s fix them now.”
Let’s not fix it after you’re in crisis and it’s gonna cost you a lot more money. For instance, in a business situation, or you have a family discord that could possibly cause some kind types of rifts. A lot of times we have perceived ideas about what’s happened or what’s not happened.
So there’s a lot of signs and symptoms like your eyesight. You have perfect eyesight, and all of a sudden you need reading glasses to do that. There’s exercises you can do for your eyes that helps you prolong the strength of the muscles of your eyes, because when those muscles get weak, it changes how the eyeball is shaped.
Kat: Right.
Dr. Pat: So there’s tons of things that you could – I used to get up and only go to the bathroom once at night, but now I get up and go twice, and the second time I can’t go back to sleep. How do I get back into that deep sleep cycle so I can have the high melatonin levels that I need in order to repair and revitalize my body and my body can detox normally.
Another example is like having, you know, how many bowel movements does somebody have in a day. Sometimes people have four or five, and that’s a lot! You’ve got to take a look at the big whole picture, but that’s what Grim Reaper Syndrome is. It’s not paying attention at the get go, that “I’ve got this going on and this has been going on” and then it turning into something that you don’t want to happen.
The Power of Chiropractic Care on Sickness
Kat: Well, that’s why I love chiropractic care, especially, because you’re going in, like you said, a lot of your practice is maintenance and that’s what we do at this point with our chiropractor. You’re going in to see this doctor who knows you, who knows about your health. They’re fixing the most important thing, which is the spine, but then you can talk about some of these other things, like, “Hey, I’ve noticed this,” or, “Hey, I’ve noticed that,” and you really get to look at yourself from a functional medicine approach, generally far before something ever turns into anything, and it could be as easy as adjusting a vertebra or adding a new vitamin or whatever it is. I think there’s all these very early steps we can take to prevent that stuff down the road.
Dr. Pat: I had one patient one time. She’s like, “My stomach has been so upset for the last couple days.” I said to her, “Okay, tell me more about that.”
So she told me more about that. So in Chinese medicine, what was cool about becoming an acupuncture physician is that there are segments on the back that I learned as a chiropractor did something in a certain organ system, basically, because all those nerves go to every cell, organ and tissue. So in Chinese medicine, when somebody tells me they have stomach issues, I’m going like, “Ah, stomach therapy!” And then I have it in my head: urinary, stomach, 25, and then organizing what lumbar segment goes with that. So when I’ve adjusted those and this woman especially got up, she goes, “Oh my God, that’s gone!”
I had a woman one time that had severe pubic pain in the front. Severe. I was filling in at a doctor’s office and I just said to her, “Wow, has anybody ever looked at your pubic bone before?” And she said, “What’s that?”
I said, “Well, turn over. Let’s see what’s going on here.” Let’s strengthen the muscles that are attached to it. So if there’s strength, they’ll align up on their own. And sometimes you hear a pop when that happens, when they align up on their own. And we’ll see if that’s helpful for you, because there’s nothing here that’s like going – I don’t know if we’re missing something or if it’s coming from above, if it’s an ascending or a descending problem.
So I did that and I was standing out in the lobby of this office, and the woman’s coming out, and she was profusely crying, and I thought. “Ooh, this is either gonna be a good thing or it’s going to be a bad thing, and I’m gonna have to go back in there, gonna have to do this all over again.”
She goes, “Dr. Pat, in four years, this is the first time I don’t have any pain.”
Kat: Awww, that’s amazing.
Dr. Pat: And I just went like, “Let’s celebrate!” because that was such a big win for her and it changed her life. I was just so glad to be part of being in the right place at the right time – because I think nothing’s by chance – and helping her have that moment where she ended up having no pain. Pain’s only indicative that something’s wrong. It’s not the end all.
Kat: Exactly, and that’s why I think functional medicine and seeing a doctor like you is so important. There’s a place for modern medicine, and we can go there. I think that’s great, but they might look at someone like that and, you know, prescribe pain relief. They might not look at the reason behind why it’s happening. For you, you were able to pretty quickly and easily switch something in her to relieve her of that pain.
Dr. Pat: Yeah! It’s just tuning in and tuning on. Doing the work, getting inspired, having intention, purpose, focus – that whole spiel. It’s fun when those things happen, even for me who did it, they’re “wow” moments. They’re going like, “Wow, this is the reason why I do this. This is the reason why, and I like that. I wake up every morning ready to solve problems. So we can solve a problem. We can take the long way or the short way.
I like the short, fast, simpler way. That’s better. That gets people unstuck so they can move forward and they can have results, faster and better. That’s always the way that I have functioned, when I’m looking at somebody or, when I’ve been bored at an airport waiting for a plane, when I used to fly a lot. I would walk up to people and go like, “Gosh, how long have you had knee pain?”
And they would just turn around: “How do you know that?”
“Well, you’re limping, and your ankle’s moving, but it’s affecting the rest of your spine. You should see a chiropractor and get that [worked out], because structures function. You have to have that good structure in order to be able to have good function.”
You mentioned something about functional medicine before versus traditional medicine. I teach in my course Be Stronger Than Medicine the difference between traditional medicine, functional medicine, and lifestyle medicine, and why lifestyle medicine and functional medicine kind of go hand-in-hand. With traditional medicine, you have to have something before they can diagnose. You have to have the flat tire. Not just the leak in the tire, you have to have the flat tire, and they do a lot of tests. I always say, if we’ve got something going on, go do the test, tell me, give me those test results and give me their diagnosis, and then we’ll fix your problem. In the meantime, we’re gonna get there anyway.
Functional medicine really deals with the person, because it isn’t one-size-fits-all medicine. You’ve also got to take a look at what somebody does in their family, how those genetics are playing out. [For example] wondering why in my family, everyone has heart disease, but I don’t. Well, what did I do?
I changed my constitution by changing the food that I ate, and choices of my food that I ate, because that will change how your genetics play out by changing your constitution and improving that. Lifestyle medicine is just the art of taking what you know from functional medicine and then creating those lifestyle solutions so that you can unravel those problems that you’ve got going on. And how do I get there faster? And how do we monitor it?
In lifestyle medicine, it’s without drugs first. You’re looking at diet, you’re looking at exercise, you’re looking at targeted supplementation, and then you do a drug and the idea isn’t to do the drug forever. The idea is to do the drug, to get you back to a norm that you have something that you can work with.
Kat: I love that.
Dr. Pat: It’s great. It’s just like that. This is like when you know those pieces of the puzzle – and certainly Western medicine is important. If you’re having a stroke, I am not the person to call. 911 yourself and get to the hospital ASAP, because especially with a stroke, it’s really important, because you want to be able to get past that dangerous zone and be able to do rehab. And so it’s like, “What can I do now that this has happened?” There’s always something you can do to improve your life so that you can live better, think better, and move better.
Lifestyle Solutions to Immediately Improve Health
Kat: I love that. Well, as we wrap up, I would love to hear a few lifestyle solutions that anyone could do to improve their health immediately. I know you have some good tips in that department.
Dr. Pat: Well, I have a long list. I usually say I’ll give three and I end up giving around ten, but I’m trying to keep it to three today.
So the first thing is understanding that nobody knows if their body’s functioning a hundred percent and their organs are functioning a hundred percent of the time. Health is not the absence of disease or infirmities. So if that’s the case, the five components of health are diet, nutrition –you’ve got to have a great diet that’s supported by great nutrition– and you have to exercise. You’ve got to move or you’re going to die. You have to be able to sleep and you have to have sleep things. Then you have your positive mental attitude, so your mindset stuff from the time you get up in the morning to the time you get down.
A tip would be: always start your day on a good note, on a positive note. If that means reading a couple quotes that are positive or your quote for the day is this, and writing it down and putting it in really good places for you to see, that would be one thing.
And then structure is function in the posture portion – biomechanics of the [body].
So the biggest thing that goes with every one of those is hydration, because you need hydration to digest your food. You need hydration to bathe your body and keep it hydrated so that it’s functioning. You need it for your joints, you need it for digestion, you need it to sleep. If you’re not hydrated, you will not sleep. When you sleep, biggest suggestion is turn your equipment, whatever you use off – turn your telephone off and use your airplane mode because that electromagnetic energy coming from your telephone emits farther, especially if it’s right at the head of your bed.
You need hydration for sleep, also – I just got off on a tangent on that – and you need it to be able to think well. Your brain needs fluids. Your body needs to be that aspect of your brain and your brain detoxifies in that deep level of sleep, which is the third and fourth level, and that’s where all the really great magic happens for your health.
You also need it, you know, for the structure-function part of it, your ability to be able to adjust your posture – it’s just so ingrained your organs. They tell you that people who drink a 16 ounce bottle of water first thing in the morning, starts that process of hydrating. So how do you know how much water to drink? Tip: 50% of your body weight. The 50% of your body weight is like, if you weigh 170 pound or 150 pounds, you would have 75 ounces of water.
If you hate drinking water, cannot stand the taste of it, first off: don’t drink tap water. You want to have some quality high level of filtered water. So you drink the filtered water, and if you don’t like drinking it, then drink it out of a bottle that’s measured so that you can drink at least that amount. You can drink it with a straw, because the reason why people get upset stomachs from drinking water is because they’re swallowing air.
Or psychologically, if the rim of a glass is hitting your nose, psychologically, they say that that represents to somebody that they might be drowning. So if you’re really sensitive or claustrophobic, drink water out of a straw.
You can put essential oils like lemon and lime and grapefruit in your water, because it’ll pick it up – or fresh lemon-lime that same thing, in your water, so that you stay hydrated. But hydration’s one of the biggest things you possibly can do to maintain and help your health.
Kat: Awesome. Well, that’s all such great advice, Dr. Pat! I’m sure we could talk all day long. You just seem like a total wealth of knowledge, but I appreciate you giving us [this information].
Dr. Pat: I channel this. I channel this stuff.
Kat: I would love for our listeners to know where they could find more about you. I know you mentioned an Amazon book and maybe your website – just any information about where we can learn more about you.
Dr. Pat: You can! You can find out about me on LinkedIn, and my media sheet that I gave you has all my links to connect with. So, people can connect me with me on healthteamnetwork.com and they can connect with me on LinkedIn. I have a Facebook page. I don’t use that very much.
I focus on doing a lot of podcasts. You can listen to my podcast. If you go to YouTube and put my name in Dr. Pat Boulogne. The last time I was in there, 50 of the 150 podcasts that I’ve done in the last year are there, so you can get information like that. I have an upcoming course in October called Be Stronger Than Medicine, and I can email you the link for that so people can find out more information about that.
I also, if people buy my book, give them an opportunity to have a 30 minute consult with me at no charge, just to help them make sense of how their chart plays out in their health snapshot that they get from the book called Why Are You Sick, Fat, and Tired?
Kat: Awesome. I love it, Dr. Pat. Well, like I said, thank you so much for your time today. I know our listeners are gonna love this episode and, um, we hope to stay in touch and have you back on in the future.
Dr. Pat: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. I love helping people and having those conversations so that the light bulb goes on and they have better options. Then they can make better decisions moving forward in their health.
Kat: Absolutely. Well, thanks again, God bless, and we will talk soon.
Kat: Thank you so much for tuning in today to Be Organic. We’re so excited for you to become healthier and body and stronger in spirit.
Landon Eckles: So, if you like what you heard today, please be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcast to never miss an episode.
Kat: And we’d love to connect with you over on Clean Juice’s Instagram. Give us a follow; slide into our DMs with any suggestions for guests or topics that you might wanna hear more about.
Landon: Alright, y’all, thanks for listening. Have a great week and remember to Be Organic.
Kat: Just a quick legal disclaimer. We are not doctors. While we absolutely love discussing wellness and nutrition with our expert guests, you should always talk to your physician or other medical professional before making any dietary or lifestyle changes. They can assess your specific needs and come up with a plan that works best for you.
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