Ep 575: The Spiritual Side of Chronic Illness: From Suffering to Sovereignty with Dr. Kelly McCann

Podcast Introduction and Guest Background 0:00

Welcome to the Health Fix Podcast, where health junkies get their weekly fix of tips, tools, and techniques to have limitless energy, sharp minds, fit physiques, or life. Hey, Health Junkies. On this episode of the Health Fix Podcast, I'm interviewing Dr. Kelly McGann. She's a board certified physician in internal medicine and pediatrics. She integrates science, intuition, and spiritual psychology to help people heal at the deepest levels. And in fact, she went and got her Masters in Spiritual Psychology, which is really cool and I really wish I would have done that before I started seeing patients So huge.

Now through her private practice, known as the Spring Center in Costa Mesa, California, she has transformation programs. She guides clients through suffering to sovereignty and reclaiming their health with purpose and power. she's hosted three worldwide summits reaching over a hundred thousand people and she is an author of a forthcoming book that explores how illness is not the enemy but a portal to healing the whole self. And she's also working on a project called the Unforgetting Project. So stay tuned for that at the time of this podcast.

It's not released quite yet, but we'll keep you up to date on that one. Now the other really cool thing that Dr. Kelly presents in this Podcast is the idea that maybe having health conditions isn't a bad thing. When we look at what is The message the body's trying to give us through this illness. What is our opportunity for growth that we can take from this? How can we transform our health and our total body wellness by looking at whatever we're struggling with with a complex illness as not being bad, but a springboard to transform your health.

We dive into how the body's symptoms are messages, wake up calls, little nudges to say, hey, it's time to do something about this. It's Let's get our health back on track. Let get out desires. Lets get ourselves. And that's really what Dr. McCann is talking about. She's wanting you to not forget who you are. Not forget your true self. Good stuff here. I look forward to hearing what you guys think of this podcast. So let's introduce you Dr Kelly McCan. Dr, Kelly mccan, welcome to the health fix podcast!

Thank you so much for having me Janine. Really happy to be here But I'm looking forward to our conversation because just chatting before we hit record, we have a lot in common in terms of thinking about chronic illness and kind of, you know, a lot of people are calling it root cause medicine and this and that, but really at the root,

Root Causes of Chronic Illness 2:56

I think there's many roots in, in chronic and I'm thinking you're probably at in the same thought process in that department. Yeah, there are definitely big buckets. I see them of root causes. And that can be mold, chronic infections, of course, up in Wisconsin you see I am sure a Environmental toxicants is a huge piece that I think conventional medicine has no clue about, EMF, etc. And then, you know, even deeper though, underlying that is the thoughts, the beliefs that we have about ourselves.

Am I worthy? you know, for love, or being on the planet. All of these things, all these misperceptions and misbeliefs that we have, limiting beliefs that have a connection to ourselves and our spirit. I think at the root, that's what leads us to be energetically more susceptible to mold, infections, and, you I couldn't agree more. I think you probably came to this conclusion after some years of looking at like, okay, how do I, you know, find the right protocol? And then you're going through it and you are like these protocols aren't working.

People aren''t getting better. What am I doing wrong? I don't know if this happened to you, but it definitely was a little bit of the trajectory I felt for the first probably decade of my career. Wondering like what's wrong, what is going on? Why am i not helping? Did you experience anything like that along the way? You know what? Yes and no. Fortunately for me, I actually got a Masters in Spiritual Psychology at the University of Santa Monica starting in 2008 to 2010. That's when I started my practice here in Southern California.

And so my understanding of the mind-body spirit and how closely linked they were was really embedded in the beginning of my practice. And so it informed how I showed up for patients and, you know, how i perceived patients. For those patients who were willing to look at themselves, look their lives, and look the beliefs a little bit differently, they are the ones that got better. You know the people who are stuck in a victim mentality, who were not open to the possibility that the mind and the body are linked and they came in and like fixed my body, my will, and my spirit, you know, well not my brain, but my drive is good, But my BODY is failing me.

Those people who had this deep schism between the Mind and of the Body, they continue to struggle because we are not mechanics. We're not robots. We are flesh and blood that is imbued with energy and life force in every single cell in the body. And so the idea that these two things are separate crazy and I blame Plato and Descartes. Unfortunately Christianity, because they think the body is terrible, at least the early forefathers did. So when we start to think about the human being, Having a spiritual experience, or spiritual beings having a human experience.

And I'm not talking about religion or anything like that. Most people know when you look at somebody who's alive, when we look somebody whose deceased, they're different. There's fundamental differences between something that's Alive and something it's not. Whether you believe in God or not doesn't really matter. We know that there's something alive in us, right?

Mind-Body-Spirit and Healing Readiness 6:32

And that thing that alivens us is our spirit. our intuition, our soul, and we have to pay attention to that in healthcare, in our lives. We can't separate them. I bring up Descartes. Descarte said, I think therefore I am. And so the mind and the will as supreme and body is like, you know, this vehicle that you move around in the world with, but it's just dust, right? That may be the case, it is still what we've got right now. Yeah, I mean, there's so many different things I can kind of ping off of there because I'm like, yes, the early forefathers, we've kind have been, dare I say, brainwashed into thinking that, yeah, that disconnect.

And then there is the coping mechanism of disconnect that goes even further. I think for many women that have felt like their bodies are betraying, and I am going to say that for references because they hear it a lot. especially in midlife when things really do start to shift. But it's also, and I'd love to get your idea here, it is also an incredible spiritual time because we're kind of really getting to the point where we are awakening, where maybe the kids are out of the house, maybe we get to a point we start figuring out.

Who am I? What is going on? So it's a very fascinating time in life where I feel like energetically we're almost set to have this and at the same time we are not acknowledging as much as we could in the medical system as to how these things happen. Absolutely. I really appreciate that you bring this up because I think, you know, in a world of complex chronic illness it is sometimes easier to see but the truth is We all have stuff, you know, that we have come to believe about ourselves. Some of it starts in childhood, some of that gets piled on later through our life experiences.

And, what I'm really proposing is the body isn't against you. It's not betraying you, in fact, it had your back this whole time, right? And what's happening is it's giving you messages. And I know that sounds very cliche, but let me explain. So imagine that our bodies are a little bit like a driver assist car, right? And i know i just said we're not robots, But just go with me here. You're in a Driver Assist car. If you've ever been in one, you start to veer off the lane. Like, I don't know. in my Lexus it just the wheel shifts right okay um that's just feedback right just feed back and you do it enough except my little thing would come up with a coffee cup and say time to take a break I love that.

I was like, oh, that is so cute. So what if the messages that we get, the symptoms that experience, it's just feedback. It's your spirit, your intuition, all working in synchronicity to give you feedback, hey, going off course. You're not living in alignment with who you're meant to be on the planet and how you are meant show up because you have these beliefs that you take care of your aging parents, or you have to be a certain way or do a thing, show up a way, and what if that belief is not true?

So if we could just start with the possibility of maybe your body isn't against you. and see where that takes you. Absolutely, absolutely. And I like the comment you made about, you know, your thoughts. Because for my entire life, until I started studying spirituality, I kind of thought exactly that, which many people do. What I come up with in my brain, therefore, this is what's reality for me. I think for a lot of people coming to that conclusion, like, wait, think things that aren't even real?

What? Are you serious? How do you work with folks? on that level because, you know, one of the biggest things I find in chronic illness and also perimenopause, menopausal, a lot of, I'll call them women's issues. Women are often told like it's in their head. And so then we go, how do I tease out this concept? It's, it, in my head, but it isn't, But it is. How do, How, do we tease that out? How Do you help folks to, to kind of think that through? Because I'm sure you get folks that have seen 20 plus doctors coming into seeing you and they've been gaslit.

They've You know, all those things. Yeah, how does it, what do you, you know. You, know it's often not where I start, right? That's where we jumped in today because. Yes. I'm kind of excited about this concept and I think it needs to get out there more, but it is not when I started. Right? I am present and with the person where they're at. There's still very much, many of my patients have mast cell activation, they have mold exposure, and all the same things that you're seeing too, I sure do. And we gotta get them to feel a little bit better, right?

If you feel like crap 24-7, there's no bandwidth for dialogue about spirit, it would just be almost a fet because that's not where somebody is. So it's really about the timing and understanding the other person's capacity for hearing what we're talking about. I've had patients, I have this one patient I just remember, she came in, in her 30s, not menstruating at all. She's got an eight-year-old daughter, Oxalate issues, all sorts of issues. Just no sense of joy, no happiness.

Symptoms as Messages and Reframing Illness 12:22

Every review of systems was checked. She felt terrible all the time. Couldn't really tolerate much of my supplements. And it was probably a year and a half, almost two years before finally I was like, oh, you're ready. Let's have a conversation. It was just this recognition that she was ready for this kind of conversation and I have to tell you I saw her last week and barely recognizable. This woman was glowing. Absolutely glowing! She's now studying to be a medical intuitive. She has so much joy in her life.

And it's amazing to witness. Absolutely amazing, the transformation. Unrecognizable. And I think it is in part because she was willing to go there. In fact, she more than willing. As soon as we had this conversation, She went out and got a book that I recommended about Amy Scherer's book. How to heal yourself when no one else can. Amazing book. I highly recommend it. Amy shares delight and she's awesome. And this patient used it as a workbook. writes out different sections and she's asking questions and encouraging you to ask yourself similar questions, and do muscle testing to figure out what are the answers?

What are root causes for you? process those misbeliefs and clear them using the Emotional Freedom Technique and a variety of other techniques. And then this woman went on and she did a little bit of a group chat program and took some stuff from that. She did the Amia Pigians. biology of trauma work and then she started working with other healers and other medical intuitives and just went on and on, and taking bits and pieces of the things that worked for her. And that's the other thing too, I find a lot of times people are like I did the Gupta program and that didn't work.

Yeah, you did that often. That is not how it works. You gotta do the work, the program won't fix you. Right. So a lot of this is about a conversation from the practitioner's side. When is this person ready to have these conversations? And oftentimes, it's a nudge here. It's the suggestion there. You know, would you consider? What about the possibility? Let's reframe this. These kinds of ideas within the context of just general follow-ups. So we're talking about mold, and we talk about these different protocols, the supplements, doing the testing, things like that.

paying attention to the opportunity of when people speak and say, you know, they might say something with a real negative bent to it. And hearing that, really listening and offering, well, what if you thought about it this way? What if we thought of it that way. One of my other patients with mast cell and POTS, the first time she came in, it had taken her two weeks to fill out my paperwork to come in. And then she had to rest for like two weeks afterwards because it was so exhausting just to fill out the paperwork.

And she has to lay down the entire appointment because whenever she set up her heart rate was in the 2140s and she couldn't profuse her brain and participate in a conversation. Fast forward a year and a half, two years, she's really starting to get better. able to walk around and function, and her husband decides he wants a divorce. And she's absolutely devastated. She's like, this is what we've been working for, for years. We had been together for 15 years before that, right? And now she is finally getting better and she was saying, you know, he's been my rock.

He's the only person who's done that for me. I said, no, that's not true. You're the constant. And just that simple reframe, it's like, yeah, her body seemed to be against her. She definitely felt it at one point, but when she was able to reframes the fact that, no, she body was actually doing the best that it could and it kept her going this entire time, and not only that She was the one constant that she could rely on. And how beautiful was that? To be able to like look at a divorce and be sad, of course, right?

But then to recognize that, she had all the tools and all these skills and the capacity to be there for herself and to find a practitioner to partner with and get better. Huge. So huge. You know it's interesting how this does seem to happen. The divorces will show up in the midst of someone working on their their health and I don't know spiritually I always think like is it the energy shifting things you know what's what happening. I'd love for you to kind of share a little bit too on what other types of resources you might recommend for folks when this happens because I mean gosh I wish it wasn't so but I would say in probably 50% of the cases this does seem to show up or at least marital issues will show for the folks.

How much of it's your spiritual, you know, your energy changing compared to your partner. Your partner being like, whoa, who's this now? Yeah, I do think it is a lot of that. Gosh, and I remember probably in the early 2000s, there was a book called The Dance of Intimacy. And she wrote a LOT of books, similar type books I think. It was about exactly that, when you change the steps of the dance. that forces the partners to either change with you or step back. There are only kind of two possibilities there.

If you're going to stay in partnership, they're gonna keep up with or they are not. I would say that we love to believe that our marriages are forever. Nobody goes into a marriage with the expectation that they're not gonna get divorced, hopefully. And yet people grow and people change, and sometimes that's like, I don't know, personally I believe in karma, whatever people believe, but I think that there's a season for things. Just like we may not have the same friends that we did when we were five, right?

It doesn't really work that way. People come in and out of our lives and They're there for a reason, we're in each other's lives for reason and then sometimes it's time to move on and we need different people, different energy. I'm really trying to take the perspective as much as possible that nothing is bad. Right, I think this dichotomy of good and bad It really is very harming in the broad sense of things. I mean, I definitely believe there are evil people in this world. That's pretty clear. But I think when we're talking about the general population, living your life, I want to see the good.

I wanna believe that things have purpose and meaning and significance and even if something hurts, if we have this perception that pain is bad, feeling bad is that, you know, don't want that. So there's a lot of judgment about experience that is more harmful than useful. What if life is just a school and what we're here to do on the planet is to grow, evolve, change. understand ourselves better, live our purpose. When we are being ourselves and we're living our purposes, we feel joy, were in flow, We feel love, feel happy, and those are the most magical things in

Body Maps: Thyroid, Heart, and Adrenals 20:10

the world. And yet we have these perceptions that we need to be in a different way, right? We have to make money, you know, be a good mom, a wife, And yeah, those things are true, but you can still do it in your own way. We should be showing up in our own lives the most authentic versions of ourselves. And when we do that, everything gets better. Everything is in flow. When we have hard times, that's opportunity. It's an opportunity for growth and change. You know what? We learn best through adversity.

I think that is a fascinating way to reframe chronic illness in particular. as what is the lesson the body's trying to tell you? What is... the story here? Or what it, you know, obviously if you're mentioning before the symptoms, there are just messages like, hey, I didn't like this. Hey, i like tis better. And the good and bad, oh my gosh, if we go deep into that, and I don't necessarily want to go down this rabbit hole, but it's the food stuff, y'know? And I think for many women, good food, bad food.

Good behavior, BAD behavior. And this can get so deeply rooted. And I can see how many women in particular would have such deep connection to, am I a good girl? Was I good today? Kind of a thing. It seems very rudimentary, but at the same time I could see these things could really tie in and move into But at the end of the day, if we flip it and look, like you said, at like, what is the story? What is our body evolving, you know, and trying to explain? You know it takes a little bit of a pressure off of The Chronicle.

Yeah, it take the pressure, off it, takes the victimhood off. It takes, y'know, What I tell my patients who are in it. Right? They definitely don't feel well. They're struggling. And if were having these kind of deeper meaning conversations i say you know what i think your being soul whatever you want to call it came and said i want it to learn this as fast as i can and evolve as quickly as I can to show up as my authentic self as far as they can right they're on the like bullet train to getting to that objective.

Because you can't ignore stuff when you feel like crap. Absolutely. Especially when we go into MCAS for a second. I joke lovingly with some of my patients. It's like, okay, we've got to put you in a bubble. But why do we put in in bubble? To help the body figure out what's up. You know, it's almost like the protective bubble so that you work on figuring out What your body really wants and needs. Right. Yeah. It gives you the bandwidth. So going back to more medical stuff, it's calming down the MCAS, calming the symptoms, working with the nervous system, the vagus nerve, and the limbic system.

Calming all that stuff down so you have more bandwidth to start to investigate, okay, what are these symptoms trying to show me? What is the message? And the other piece that I love about the book is that it is a map. It's a map. We have the traditional Chinese medicine, the gradient system, we have this chakra system. And we talk about metaphor in English, right? I have butterflies in my stomach because I'm anxious. What's that chakra, that's our third chakra. That's like our soul centers. How we present ourselves to the world.

There are many experts in this and many resources in that can start to provide ideas for entry. For example, so many women have thyroid issues, right? Let's see, let's look at the thyroid. Where is it? Right here over the voice box. Between the head and the heart. Hmm, are you speaking of truth? Are you living in alignment with your head and your heart? Not the truth that you think that somebody else wants to hear. The truth of who you are connecting your hear and you head in coherence and speaking that out in the world.

Gosh, what comes to mind is Louis Tate, right? Yes, yes. Genius for all of those connections to emotions and organs. And you have the thyroid of Biggie, the heart too. The heart with palpitations. We have a lot of folks with AFib and PVC. premature ventricular contractions for those who go like, what is a PVC? But those kind of things, that heart center, you mentioned coherence. One of the things that I've found and I'd love to kind bring in a little bit of what I find and want to hear kind what you'll do often with those.

But before I see patients, I'll often put my hands on my heart and just kind breathe for a bit before podcasts will do that too. Just to kinda feel things because I don't think for probably at least 40 years of my life that i even connected in. and i went to naturopathic medicine school and we think you know all kinds of stuff's going on there but the truth is they were trying to be so western that they forgot about a lot of our roots and a lots of us came out of there not having these connections more allopathic than mds Exactly!

Like, almost now I'm like, it's shameful. Because I love how you went to school. I loved how, you know, had the training of the spirituality background, right off the bat. If I feel like dang, I'd be jealous if I would have done that right of off-the-bat, Right? You know I could have helped a lot more folks in the beginning, but at the same time, we're all on our own journey, so I am not going to guilt-break. Exactly. Don't do that. Who knows, this podcast may like Change your trajectory completely.

It definitely, you know, and that's what I'm hoping for folks listening to is because it is something that, I've gently been knocking on doors with the podcast mentioning these kinds of things. But, looking at the heart, the thyroid is so huge. The adrenal glands and the kidneys. I would love to hear how you talk about the spiritual connection there with those adrenals and kidneys and all of that stuff. Give us your thought of it. Yeah, so in traditional Chinese medicine, I was trained as a medical acupuncturist.

So I did the Joe Helms course and all that. I don't practice acupuncture now, but I really appreciate, because I think we've got time with complex chronic illness to do acu-puncture. Or I summoned an acuppressurists. They're better served that way. But in tradition Chinese Medicine, there is no adrenal gland. It's the kidneys. And so those energetically are one in the same. I do believe that we all come into this world with a certain bank of constitutional energy, which is kiwi-chi, right? And that's just kind of where we are.

It's from our parents, it's our genetics, our epigenetics, maybe our karma. And then we have the capacity to spend it, and spend unwisely, or conserve it and not frugally, with a conscience, I guess.

Perimenopause, Trauma, and the Unforgetting Project 27:38

And one of the things that I've really realized is that It's exhausting to not be yourself. And how hard is it to continually not-be-yourself and put on a mask for your husband, for kids, your friends, everyone in your life, because you don't think that you deserve to show up, right? And, how depleting is that going to be to your adrenal and your kidney G? I don't always explain it this way with the spiritual piece. I think my evolution as a functional medicine doctor has been that, you know, ten years ago it was all about the adrenals.

Now I understand that adranals and leaky gut, and now I know that if you don't address the mold and the chronic infections and all those things, those are surreptitiously going behind your back and depleting your adrnals, right? But ultimately, as we started out the conversation, it's who you are at the core and whether or not you're allowing your true self to show out and be shared with the world that is the most depleting. Because energetically, if we don't have good boundaries, we're not really good at saying, okay, this is my stuff, and this everybody else's stuff.

If we are not good with that, that's the signal that we send to our immune system. Of course our immune systems are not going to work right. Because we don't have good psychological, emotional, and energetic boundaries. How is our system going follow our lead? Yeah. It can't, right? It's going say, well, you know, this might be foreign. This might not be good for me. I don t really know because I do not have a good blueprint. Yeah. So I think all of these things are very depleting to the adrenal glands and kidneys.

That was a fabulous description of kidney change. I see it quite often, you know, it's kind of the mask of, put on the good wife face, whatever it may be. And also with friends, also co-workers, careers, I that's a big one for a lot of people. I love about what you're saying is like, you know, that connection to depletion. And if we go even further to perimenopause-menopaus, our kidney chi and the grounding with our heart energy, yin and yang, since kidneys so ying, for those of you who are like what in the heck is she talking about right now, guys, I'm talking the balance in Chinese medicine, yang and yong.

But we'll see this come up very often in midlife where it seems that this is the time where we are hitting our walls. The battery's been depleted as far as it can go. And then we really start to tip that scale. Do you tend to see that kind of happening for women as well? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it's a variety of different things. There might be a couple of classes of how we show up with perimenopause and menopausal. I definitely see sort of, yeah, yin and yang, masculine and feminine energy imbalances.

If somebody is a go, go go very masculine energy, like entrepreneur, business person, et cetera, they might have more difficulties because the body is really calling you back to your feminine side to try and balance those energies. I mean, I really think we are here not only to be like our most authentic selves, we're here to as balanced as possible. You know, that's why the symbol of yin and yang is a perfect balance of masculine and feminine. And so that might be one group of women's experience that they're too masculine, and then they are fighting that battle of that feminine energy, not having enough of it.

On the opposite side, then it can be that same sort of thing where there's too much feminine energy, not enough masculine energy or beliefs about ourselves like the crone is not valuable in society, getting older is a terrible thing and there's a lot of resistance about getting old and beliefs that you're no longer valuable if you are not this beautiful person or this younger woman. So I think there is Stuff potentially to unpack and you're right the body is saying okay time out You can't get to ignore this stuff anymore We're no longer sweeping it under the rug.

You gotta face some things. And if we bring in this idea of the body as a map, and the map provides the clues of where you need to do the work internally. That's what I mean by map. We can use things like Luiz Hei, we can us things traditional Chinese medicine, the chakra system, You know, any kind of metaphor that you can come up with. I mean, the thing that's beautiful is that there are systems of ideas about these metaphors, but ultimately it comes down to, you know... How is it that YOU are showing up it with yourself?

in this situation. At the University of Santa Monica, we say, how you are with the issue is the issues. You go a lot of directions on that one. I know. And especially the way I look at it, I see it in terms of the manifestations of different illnesses. How you're with an issue, is how things will show up. Quite frankly, it's how I think it seems. Go ahead. Um, I guess I was gonna say one more thing. I also think that many of my mast cell patients have a history of trauma in their life. And it doesn't have to be sexual abuse, although many times it is.

It doesn' have be physical abuse. it can be neglect. Neglect is a huge driver for feelings of inadequacy. Last year we lost Beth O'Hara, who's a real light in the world. I never really got a full story, even though we worked together on a virtual summit for mass activation, but I got the sense that her upbringing was much more about neglect, that she just didn't feel that love from her parents, and that the illnesses themselves are calling us forward to really look and heal not just the physical body, but the emotional, psychological, and spiritual issues and misbeliefs that we have developed because of our experiences, whether they're Big T traumas or Little T Traumas.

And I talk about trauma because I think it's important, But if we are able to reframe even the way that you think about Trauma, Yes, it was a terrible experience, but it's all for your growth and learning so that you can become that person. And I'm not saying that sexual abuse is good or any kind of abuse as good, But if we can pull back from that judgment, which clouds our ability to see the silver lining or gain wisdom from, That experience, I think, will go a lot further. You know, it's kind of like with cancer patients.

When you get that diagnosis of cancer, the way that society thinks about it is, bam! All of a sudden, your life is potentially finite, as if it wasn't before. But, like, nobody gets out of here alive. But, you know, we have this perception. Bam! You get this diagnosis of cancer. Okay, I gotta change my life. I'm gonna do whatever it takes, right? And many people will take cancer as a wake-up call and oftentimes afterwards will say, that was the best thing that ever happened to me was to get cancer!

With complex chronic illness, all we can have is this, like, slide into feeling terrible, and we don't really know how to stop the slide, And we really don' know know to fight the because we don't have that, bam, you gotta do something about this. Yeah. So it's so true. I totally see that slide where it goes slow and you know, we can easily push it off and be like, I gotta keep, for an entrepreneur, typically what I'll see often is like I got to keep going, my business needs me, My kids need me.

You know? I've got keep it going. Push it to the side, push to to side. Whereas, yeah, cancer's a little different. For some reason. It gets a different weight in our society. I'm hoping that these kinds of conversations can change that because we all deserve to be happy. We all deserved to in love with our lives. Right? That's the goal. That is the purpose. To live the life that you want. And yet we have these beliefs that keep us stuck. You know, let's throw that out and see who you are and where you want to be.

Absolutely. I think that needs to kind of be the mantra for what we need to put out on social media. My personal opinion, yes, hormones can help, but I would love to see this much more than here's your hormone replacement therapy for everything. It will solve all your problems. And that's part of, you know, one of the things that I think a lot of people in the chronic illness space, when you see the backslide,

Spring Center Practice and Patient Care 37:48

You start grasping for straws. You're looking for that miracle. you're desperate to get an answer. Desperate to have some relief. And understandably so. But also looking at that, hey, your are free to be who you want to. Your message is so on point with how I see it too. It's just so beautiful. So I finally came up with a name. I've been struggling for the past six months trying to figure out what to call this. It is the Unforgetting Project. Forgetting project. And here's why. But I told my mom this like a month ago and she's like, why not just remembering?

What's the difference between unforgeting and remembering. Well remembering is kind of like you remember a fact. You remember date. Remember I have to go pick up milk before I go home. Hopefully it's not real milk. But anyway, sorry. You guys are from Wisconsin. We don't drink milk in California. It's okay. I'm probably the weirdo within Wisconsin here, you know. But yeah. Anyway, I digress. Okay, remembering is facts, right? Unforgetting is more about removing the very thin veil of the distance between ourselves and the truth of who we are.

We just forgot. You know, we forgot when somebody scolded us when we were little kids. We shouldn't be so loud, or we shouldn' do this, and we should be this. Good little boys do these, good little girls do those. We've forgotten who we truly are because of the stuff of this world, right? And our objective is to UNFORGET. And when we UNforget that, because it's right there, it is so close, its always accessible to us, then we can really flourish. absolutely absolutely moving into the unforgetting project we gotta talk about the spring center and i'm super curious why because you've got the unforgettable project what's the meaning behind the Spring Center i started this spring centre in 2010, I think.

2009, 2010. And I really loved the idea of growth and rebirth and an adjective of moving forward. So it's got a lot of beautiful connotations and my favorite colors are blue and green. It's just really playing on this whole theme of of rebirth and growth. So, yeah, that's where that came from. And the Spring Center is our brick and mortar practice in Southern California. I do have medical licenses and tour of other states and have the capacity to do telehealth elsewhere, although we do ask all patients to come to California to be seen in person.

And I have a medical team who works with me who are fantastic. They've been with for a while now and they're able to navigate and manage the complex chronic illnesses of the people who show up. Then you can find me on social media at Dr. Kelly McCann. I also have website where I'll have blogs and webinars and more resources. We're in the process of building out a website, designing a logo, building our website for the Unforgetting Project, and I anticipate having a course at the beginning of the year, so eventually there'll be a wait list for people who are interested.

Awesome, awesome. We'll make sure we get that in our notes at drjcrowlsond.com. I'm fascinated by what you guys are doing. And of course, guys, for those of you wondering where in California, Costa Mesa, California is where she is located. You're bringing folks in. So is it like a VIP day where they spend a couple hours with your PAs? How does it work? I am very curious. So people will fill out paperwork ahead of time. We're transitioning to a new electron medical record so we actually have a wait list while we're tweaking it.

It's AI based so it helps us with the transcription and the medical dictation and then, you know, helping the providers be more efficient. People can spend longer periods of time, oftentimes they don't, but it might be helpful. Usually it's just an hour plus. And then if people are coming from a long way away, and they're interested in doing IVs or seeing the practitioners a couple days in a row if that's a possibility. We do recommend that. I have a few patients when they do come in to see us annually.

They'll stay for two or three days. At this moment in time we are still billing insurance and so for insurance purposes there's amount for reimbursement so it's an hour for a new patient and 30 minutes for follow-ups but if you have you know three 30 minute appointments after your initial that can be very valuable and can go deeper and deeper each time so that's how it structured right now. Power to you for sticking with the insurance. I know it's helpful for a lot of people. It is. Yeah, it is a membership-based model as well.

So we do bill insurance and then have people pay extra for the membership and they do have to become a member of the practice and pick a membershp level. And the membership level that you choose depends on your needs. For people who do complex chronic illness, oftentimes they need to be seen at least monthly. you know, you really get on top of things and so they are encouraged to pick the higher level plan because financially that would be the best option for them. So that's how that works. Nice.

And last but not least you had mentioned, and this is something I'd love to hear from kind of your perspective, chronic illness and really working with the spiritual side of thing takes time. I heard you say you've worked with someone, a year, two years, things of that nature. On average, just so folks get a little sense of of how it works. What's the average amount of time that you can find that work with folks? Well, for the folks who are local, they become so ill they'll never go away, but the frequency with which I'm seeing them obviously reduces substantially.

And that's really the goal. You know, everybody's a little bit different. It can be six months and they're doing great. That's on the super fast, super bullet train side. Most people, I would say, it's like, a year to two years before they feel solidly, I'm in a better place. But I saw a woman yesterday, she's been with me for two months and she sees substantial improvements just in those two I'm not sure why she's on narcotics and, you know, trying to find a pain doctor to prescribe narcotic is really challenging these days.

And she was recently in a flare around her menstrual cycle, which is very common with a lot of folks. You know rather than being in bed for a week afterwards, she actually was able to still kind of function. Still be able go spend some time with her friends. She didn't feel great, but her level of functionality improved substantially just in a couple of months. So, you know what? My encouragement to people out there listening is to know that it's going to take time, But you're not going feel as terrible as you feel right now.

You're going see slow incremental progress. And then at some point there's a real turning of the corner. and you kind of take off. You know, it really does depend on the person. It depends on what they're dealing with. I've been really honing my skills and using my intuition, as I'm sure you do too, Janine, and as all good practitioners do, you hone your intuition. Like, I got 300 different supplements I can give this person, which ones do I start with, where do having that intuitive sense as to what's going to be good for somebody and it's everything is everybody is different but honing that sense and then figuring out what are the what the order that i need to add things in super important and that has been really profoundly helpful many of my my colleagues are like okay you have mass activation you're going start with h1 blockers you going go through you know, two weeks on each one to figure out which combination is the best for you.

What? I feel terrible. I don't want to take 15 years to try every single thing that I could try. And so I really feel like it's on me as the practitioner to do the BEST that i can to give the recommendations. And I'm not perfect, right? Of course. It's a work in progress. This is the art of medicine. But I do feel like the more that I practice that, the that more I tap into my intuition, The faster and smoother it goes. Absolutely. So huge, so huge. Love what you're doing, love to hear about the spiritual side of things.

I hope those really, you know, a little bit of an eye-opener here just to here that it's not another protocol, it is not the 5,000 supplements that are going to be the answer or one magic pill or hormones for that matter. It's some work and we have the ability to regain, its not bad, the abilities to regain who we were. Yeah. Unforget. What's a more beautiful thing than that? To un-for-get who you are. I love it. Thank you so much. Hey, my pleasure. Thanks for coming on, Dr. McCann. Look forward to putting this one out and guys, we'll make sure that we've got all of her websites, thespringcenter.com, drkellymccann.

com, and even some of the books and folks she mentioned. We will make that is in our podcast notes at drjcrestind. Thanks again, Kelly, or Dr. Kelly. It's okay. Thank you, Janine. Bye-bye, everyone. Hey fellow health junkie, thanks for listening to the health fix podcast. If you enjoyed tuning in, please help support me to get the word out about the podcast, subscribe, rate and review and just get that word. Thanks again for