From Near Paralysis to Vitality: A Pharmacist’s Healing Story

Opening and Guest Introduction 0:00

So I go all the way down to like page 16 and I see the less restrictive diet and I'm like less restrictive. So I look below it and there's one that's more restrictive. And I'm like, listen, you don't know how desperate I am right now. Like, not only might have I been in misery for a decade plus, but now they're telling me I could die. I if you told me to stand on my head and drink vinegar through my nose three times a day, I would do that with a smile on my face, like, whatever diet is. Yeah, I don't care what the diet is.

I would do it, you know, and sign me up. So I go down here and look at the more restrictive diet. And I kid you not, this, this paper, you know, it showed there was a couple of exotic fruits that I had never heard of on there and a couple of exotic veggies, but everything else was just like animal protein, like meat and fish and eggs and some dairy. to Vitality Made Simple. The following production is for educational and entertainment purposes only. If you need medical advice, call your doctor. Now let's go to vitality.

Made simple. Welcome to Vitality Made Simple. This is the podcast that equips she to feel better, look better, and to enjoy better relationships. And it's with joy in my heart that I welcome Jason Barrett today. Welcome, Jason. Thank you. I'm honored to be here. Well, Jason is someone that I actually know.

Jason's Early Life and Pharmacy Career 1:32

We both live in greater Oklahoma City. He is a board certified pharmacist. He owns two pharmacies. He is, has been a father active in his community. And every single person without dad that I've known who also knows Jason respond with, oh my gosh, what a great guy. He's amazing. So you all get to experience some of his amazingness today. And and I thank Jason for joining us. And I thank you for joining Jason. And I so your your story is fascinating. You you know, you from my perspective, were born on the sunny side of the mountain, but a lot of people born on the sunny side of the mountain have some dark clouds that can hit.

So tell us about the major dark cloud in your life. Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you for that very kind and generous intro. You're too kind. But yes, you're right. Essentially, I'm. I'm from small town Oklahoma. Farm boy. You know, I was raised and, eventually went pharmacy school. And, really, one of the things that intrigued me to do that is my younger sister. She's six years younger than me. And when she was six years old, I was probably about 11 or 12 at the time. She got diagnosed with type one diabetes.

And I got to watch all that go down. And I mean, it was just crazy, you know, because we we had to nobody knew what was going on for a few days. She was extremely lethargic and drinking all kinds of water and having to go to the bathroom and just couldn't even hardly get up, you know? And finally, my parents took her to the hospital and they diagnosed with type one diabetes, her blood sugars, like 800, you know, and I got to watch on a daily basis. Insulin kind of changed her life, you know. And that's what kind of intrigued me. It gave her her life back.

She was able to do that. And I'm thinking, okay, like that intrigued me at a young age. When I got older, it just like math chemistry. Plus I was we, you know, my dad's a cattle rancher, so we had to use medication. You know, we had to save our cattle if they got sick or whatever. And so I got to see a lot of this going on at a younger age. And, so that's why I went and became a pharmacist. I wanted to help sick people get better, you know? So I go become a pharmacist. I'm rocking along. You know, all my upbringing, I was very active.

I was I was into sports. I was athletic, I loved hunt, I loved to fish, I love to just be be a boy, you know what I mean? And, go too far. Yeah, yeah. And so I go to pharmacy school every, you know, everything's great. Graduate, get married, healthy as a horse. And it was a probably about two years into my career as a pharmacist. All of a sudden, I start kind of getting these weird symptoms. And, you know, at first I was just because I was kind of raises the mentality, you know, just just tough it out, walk it off, be a man, whatever.

And so I did that and but it wasn't getting better. It wasn't getting better. And I probably let it go for too long. You know, by the time I finally sought out some, some doctors at this point, when I finally go in, you know, they checked me for certain things, and they're like, your labs look clean, you look fine. Your thyroid is a little bit off. So we're here. Here's some thyroid medication. And, anyway, the funny thing is, is, is one of my major symptoms. Ended up being, you know, I started having some, some dental pain.

So I go to the dentist and I get that treated. And, when the, when the numbness wore off, at, I think it was just a feeling like a cavity. Clearly, there was something like it was a high tooth and it wasn't landing properly. And so I called back, I'm like, hey, this is something's wrong, you know? And they said, okay, we'll get you back in probably 2 or 3 days. And over that time, I mean, like, I'm just sitting here every time my teeth touch that one tooth, this just. And it starts to become painful.

Well, anyway, I ended up this, and I believe now I know that my lifestyle back then and I'll go more into this a little bit later on. I was living a very inflammatory lifestyle, I guess I should say, because instead of me being the outdoorsy, athletic, you know, guy who's what I was, I was now living in the big city down in Fort Worth. I was very, it's it's a pretty stressful, occupation. It can be to be a pharmacist, to be honest with you, there's a lot of pressure on you, especially as a new pharmacist.

My diet was terrible. It wasn't. My sleep schedule was erratic. I wasn't working out like I used to. I was just. And I was just powering through it. And all of that was manifesting in, like, a very inflammatory body, you know? And so as soon as something messed up, essentially

Mysterious Symptoms and Escalating Autoimmune Treatment 6:12

it was just going to get worse. And that's what happened. It ended up turning into full blown TMJ, which is terrible. I don't have to tell you how terrible it is. I don't wish that upon anybody. I dealt with that for several years and I ended up having to, go through quite an extensive therapy. And all the while I'm continue. It's just like every day I wake up, sometimes I'm either feeling worse, I'm chronically fatigued, I'm swollen, my mood is terrible. I'm irritable. I don't have much patience or resilience for stressful situations, you know, and, and all of a sudden, I start getting even more symptoms while I'm dealing with the TMJ.

So finally I started getting, like, numbness and and tingling and stuff in my hands and feet. So I, my doctor referred me to a neurologist. I go in, they run a whole battery of tests. They say, hey, like you got nerve logic symptoms, but it's not neurological in nature. You're strong as a horse, you know, you're not showing any weakness or anything like that. So there's nothing we can do for you. We're going to refer you to rheumatology. Well, this is where the real circus began for me. And I mean, I at this point, I was pretty desperate because I was just.

I mean, the floor was falling out from under me. It was just getting worse and worse. And so I start going rheumatologist. They start running all these tests. And that was the frustrating part is a lot of these tests would come back. I say, you're fine, you're clean. You don't have a problem when literally you can look and have you got physical symptoms. You're swollen, you know, and I mean, at the height of it, I had symptoms literally head to toe. I had psoriatic lesions on the back of my scalp and on my arms.

I had rheumatoid fingers, on several digits, I had TMJ, I had cervical crazy pain in my neck, all up and down my spine, way down at the base of my AC joint. Had sacroiliac as I had bilateral ankle swelling. I was again, couldn't sleep hardly at all. Couldn't get any restorative sleep because of the pain in my neck. It would just every 15 minutes you wake up. So you're never getting that that REM or that deep sleep that you really need for your body to detox and restore itself. And so it was just like it was just like a vicious cycle.

I was like, every day I'd wake up thinking, it can't get worse. And then it would get worse. I would wake up the next day and I've got this new symptom, or it's just, you know, something's and I'm not getting any answers. And so we go through the whole basically pharmacy. And I knew this as a pharmacist of anti-inflammatory medications. You know, they start off with like steroids, and then they go into your insides, some of the more mild ones, and then they get to some very powerful ones that, you know, they've got a lot of side effects and you can't use them for very long and all that.

Then we get into your demands and like methotrexate and and stuff like that. And I eventually go through all these and still getting worse. This is probably 6 or 7 years into this thing. I cannot get rid of these symptoms. I'm still working full time, still powering through it. But I am absolutely dying, you know? And, you know, I finally he's like, well, it's time for the big guns. I said, big guns. Where are the big guns? He said, well, we're going to hit you. We're going to research on biologic.

We're going to search on embroil, which is I got to pause here and talk about that one, just because I know that there's a lot of people who are who have to resort to this. But you got to know I knew what this was. As soon as he told me what it was. And their mass, the very, very powerful immunosuppressive drugs, you know, they go in and, you know, some of the other drugs like steroids and NSAIDs and these other ones, they go in and kind of modulate part of the immune system to where it will, you know, it won't really dampen your immune system, but it'll just affect one branch of it or it'll kind of decrease the inflammation.

But these big these biologics, they go in turn the volume down on the entire thing. I mean so not so it's kind of a double edged sword. Yes. They're powerful. Yes. They'll decrease the inflammation. But simultaneously they're making you more susceptible to any sort of infectious disease. Whether that be a spider bite that turns into a staph infection or the common cold or the flu or whatever. And what happens is when your immune system needs to go fight, it can't. It's it's hampered down. And so it can turn any minor infection into a serious serious I mean, it could turn into sepsis. It could end up being fatal.

It's happened, you know, and these are risks. The other big risk is, you know, your immune system on a daily basis. All of us, you know, there will be a rogue cancerous cell that will pop up in your system. And when your immune system, when your immune system is working optimally, it can identify it. It can flag it, it can target it, and it can eliminate it. And essentially you're back to being cancer free. Does it every day. You know, people don't realize that, but that that is very much a part of everyday life for your immune system.

When when you are in intentionally holding your immune system back from being able to be able to send the cavalry and do that job, you increase your risk for several types of cancer. And I mean, they tell you that as soon as you get on the medication, you can read the literature. It's right there. And so in the back of your head, you're kind of like, okay, this does help. But, you know, an increase the risk for infections and cancer. And then the other thing is, is let's say it works and you feeling better, and then all of a sudden you get the cold, or you get the flu, or you get any sort of infection, you have to stop the medication.

It'll take, you know, a week or so to get out of your system. Then you'll start to battle the infection itself. But your inflammation will go through the roof again. So now you're suffering on this side. And so anyway, I did this and I will say, you know, I when I first started it, it was the most powerful thing. And I was I was being optimistic. I was, you know, hopeful that it would work. And and then what I didn't realize is that even though they do work and they are the most powerful option, they don't work forever.

You know, these are antibodies, that that are going in and working as basically as a drug. But your, your immune system is still doing its job. It's identifying them as foreign and it makes antibodies against those antibodies. And so it basically decreases the effectiveness of, of this. And as soon as they do well they switch you to a new biologic and a new biologic. And I was on at least 6 or 8 of those over the course of a couple of years. And finally, I'm still not getting better. And I'm like, listen, please, just referred me to the Mayo Clinic.

I've got to get some answers. I'm hopeful that maybe they'll do something deeper or find the root cause or anything, shed some light on something that because I'm trying everything and nothing's working here, you know. And so anyway, I go all the way up there on the lab right again, poked, prodded, tested images, scans everything. And at the end of the week, it was a little disheartening, but it was eye opening for me as well. I'm sitting in the room and the doctor's dictating into the mic. It was the rheumatologist that was over me and he goes, I overheard him say this.

I kind of wish he wouldn't have said it in front of me, but he did. He goes, I'm at a disadvantage because this patient comes to me with a prior diagnosis of ankylosing spondylitis, and I almost came out the chair on this, you know, because it's like, what do you mean? You couldn't have told me you're at a disadvantage before I drove all the way up here and took time and money and all this to come up here and, and then basically from that, since he was at a disadvantage, he found that I had sacroiliac is, you know, the inflammation on my AC joint.

And he said we're going to stick with his diagnosis. And I'm thinking, you're the Mayo Clinic. Why can't I just come in and you don't care what somebody else said I have? I come in as a blank slate. You come to your own conclusion, we'll see if they match. If they do match, that's beneficial to me. If they don't match, that's also beneficial to me. I need to know, like if you have a difference of opinion. But that's what I left with. So on the drive back, I'm talking to my wife and I was just like, well, I mean, at least he didn't say it wasn't that.

So I guess I'm just going to stick with it. Well, fast forward to another year or two. I continue to degrade. I continue to get worse and worse. I'm try and don't get it wrong. It wasn't just the medications I was trying. I was trying supplements. I was trying different regimens. I tried a whole bunch of different diets and different therapies and no lasting relief and so anyway, I get back and a couple of years later and I'm just seeing just my regular primary care physician at this point, and she was only giving me like Flonase for allergies.

And so I sat at the end of it, she goes, hey, is, is there anything else I can do for you? And I just kind of jokingly said, if you can get rid of this pain in my neck, this is my chief, chief, chief complaint. This pain right here at the back in long Neck, right at the base of my skull. I said I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll buy I'll buy you 12 steak dinner right now. You know, whatever you want. And I said, and listen, I don't want pain medicine. That's not I don't want pain pills. I'm a pharmacist.

I've got personal reasons I don't want. I want something that's actually going to get to the root cause and get rid of this pain without pills. I don't want that. And, she goes, well, let's do some imaging. And I'm like, I've been doing imaging for a decade, and every time I do, they say it's clean sheets. Let's just do it again. I said, okay, got nothing to lose. Let's do it. This was where it was a little bit different. So she calls me the next day or a couple days later. I'm at work and, it was a number I didn't recognize.

It was actually her personal cell phone. She was calling me, I didn't, and so I answered hello, and she told me I was like, oh, are you calling me from, like, your phone? She said, yeah, I want to get in touch with you pretty quickly. I said, what's up? And she was, well, I'm not trying to scare you, but we got back here imaging and, I'm not a radiologist, but even I can look at this image and I can see that it's C1 and C2. Those two vertebra, you have significant erosion. These are the words she used.

And I'm immediately I'm just like what? Like what is that? What causes that? What how? And she was like, that's the thing. I have no idea what. I've never seen this before, she said. But it's very concerning to me, she said, because just like she said, those those two vertebrae vertebra are becoming so thin and brittle that they could fracture quite easily if you took a hit to the head at all, she said. So for that reason, I need you to, you know, be, you know, be safe. Don't. No contact sports, no roughhousing.

Try not to get rear ended in your car, you know. Yeah, like and hers is as keeps me. I'm sorry to interrupt you that more our listeners. Jason has three boys, and he's a very involved father, and, I can just imagine that you're out playing with him all the time, and. Yeah, you know, living life to the fullest despite the pain. How old were you at this point? At this point, I was probably about 32, 32, 33 maybe. Yeah. Yeah. I had three boys at home all under the age of ten. Yeah. Well, her next sentence was what really got my attention.

She goes, she was listen, the reason I it's a big deal is because since those could fracture quite easily, it's just like with any spinal injury, it depends on how high up the spine. It affects everything below it, you know. So depending on if you took a fracture on the spine, you could end up being a paraplegic. You can end up being a quadriplegic. And if it's high enough up, you know, if it's your neck, then you could die. And she goes, here's the thing. You're at C1 and C2. Those are the two highest vertebrae, she said.

C3 controls respiration. And I'm like, are you saying what I think you're saying right now? And she's like, I'm saying what? Yes, you heard me correctly. And I'm like, oh my God. She goes, I've already referred you to a neurosurgeon.

Mayo Clinic Visit and Rock Bottom 17:28

You need to get up there as soon as possible. And again, you know, no, don't take any chances. I don't want, you know, so just what you just said. The first thing that comes to mind. I've got a wife at home. I've got three young boys and the provider for the family at this point, because she's she's raising our kids, you know, because they're all younger at this point. And I'm thinking, you've got to be kidding me. You know, how could it have gotten this bad with me being the most compliant patient, taking these medications, doing everything these doctors are telling me to do, going all the way to the Mayo Clinic.

I'm doing everything right. And despite all of that, they're telling me I could die now. And so at this point, this is what I call that my rock bottom. I got very desperate at that point. And at this point, I started to consider things that I've just rejected before. And, and that's essentially what drove me to start seeking out through a series of calling interventions. I had a, buddy of mine, he said, hey, you know, there's a doctor I think you should go see. That has really helped, some people with some, you know, some issues kind of like yours.

We're not getting answers. And then when I looked into it, he was an MD. But he was also well versed in integrative and functional medicine, which, you know, very there's quite a bit about that. And I didn't know much about it at this point. I mean, I had heard of it, but I didn't really know exactly what it was. I didn't realize it was very root causal and holistic, and it was actually going to do what I wanted. If I were to know that ten years prior, I would have gone there first, you know? But but now we're telling the world, Jason, exactly what?

Like, long story short, I went and saw him and told him the same story I just told you, and he did all the normal lab work that any other doctor would do. But he did a couple of extra ones. One of them was a food sensitivity panel, a very extensive one, and that shed so much light on what was really causing what was adding fuel to the fire of the inflammation in my body, you know, and that that was where I found my answer. I mean, that was where I got my life back, to be honest, with you. So praise God, it's so exciting your and your enthusiasm at telling people when I first met you and you tell me this story, I just thought, I know that your mind is misery is going to be a ministry to help people know they can find root cause and they can feel good.

They don't have to be in fear. They don't have to be in pain. So. So keep going from here because it just gets better, folks. Absolutely. So essentially what I found out from this extensive food sensitivity panel, which is a blood test, I got it back. And, I mean, it took a couple of months. I kind of had forgotten about it. And then I get this message from him and he's just like, oh my God, like, you've got so many food sensitivities, allergies, whatever you want to call it. And so I pull up this report, I'm thinking it's going gonna be like a one pager.

This is like a 17 page report that breaks down so many different foods, you know? And then not only that, it actually breaks it down into the three categories that you can be sensitive, which is IgG IgG and C3B gives a numerical number to let you know how sensitive you are in each column. And it gives a color coding. That's cool. Like a stoplight red. You cannot eat this food. Yellow probably ought to take it away and maybe try to bring it back and see if it's problematic. And then green means you can eat it all day long.

And basically he goes, he goes, oh my God. Like, I can't believe how many foods you are allergic or sensitive to. I would recommend starting with the less restrictive diet. So I go all the way down to like page 16 and I see the less restrictive diet and I'm like less restrictive. So I look below it and there's one that's more restrictive. And I'm like, listen, you don't know how desperate I am right now. Like, not only might have I been in misery for a decade plus, but now they're telling me I could die.

I if you told me to stand on my head and drink vinegar through my nose three times a day, I would do that with a smile on my face, like, whatever diet is. Yeah, I don't care what the diet is. I would do it, you know, and sign me up. So I go down here and look at the more restrictive diet. And I kid you not, this, this paper, you know, it showed there was a couple of exotic fruits that I had never heard of on there and a couple of exotic veggies, but everything else was just like animal protein, like meat and fish and eggs and some dairy.

And when I go up and I look at the list above, I'm thinking, oh, by the way, like, what did I eat for lunch? Yes. Like literally the day before I got this report and I thought because I was trying, I was overweight, I was inflamed. It's trying to be healthy. I was very desperate again. So my wife had brought me and I remember what I had for lunch the day before. And for lunch I had had a salad that had it had lettuce, it had spinach, it had some avocado. It had walnuts, it had, I think some tomatoes, a couple other things, some olive oil.

And then it had some, some grilled salmon on there. And I go find each item on this report and I'm thinking, okay, this that had to have been healthy. I mean, how do you get healthy it in that kid? You not the only thing that was okay I'm not okay. This was the salmon. I'm not kidding. The Senate couldn't. It said I was sensitive to lettuce. Lettuce didn't even have anything in it having to be sensitive to it, so I would. I never figured this out. I would have never figured this out had it not been for this.

And so anyway, I'm come home and I'm thinking, okay, you know,

Food Sensitivity Testing and Carnivore Diet 23:08

I immediately think of I had heard of the carnivore diet, but I thought it was the craziest thing I've heard about. It is preposterous, you know, because of what you hear and what we're taught in school and everything, I, I thought red meat was inflammatory about saturated fat was going to clog all my arteries. I thought the lack of fiber was going to cause, you know, chronic constipation. And, you know, there was going to I was going to have gout and I was going to have all these problems from this.

But once this report said this, I'm like, listen, I got nothing to lose. I have nothing to lose and only stuff to gain if this diet works. So and I'd already tried a whole bunch of other diets at this point. I told my wife, I said, I'm going to try for 30 days. I'm going to see what happens. And so it did. I went carnivore and not kidding you. Within the first ten days of doing this diet. I fell to the inflammation like I could feel because you can just wake up and they it's properly named. Whoever figured out that the name of that is inflammation.

The root word of that is flame. You are on fire. You can feel it in your body, you know, head to toe. I felt it going down like at the source within the first ten days. In the most powerful way, way more powerful than even on those biologics. And I couldn't believe it. I was in total disbelief. I told my wife, I said, listen, I don't know if this is just a fluke deal. I said, but if this thing keeps going half as well as if it's just gone, this is these first ten days. Ain't no way I'm stopping this diet in 30 days.

There's no way. And sure enough, we get to day 30. I'm I'm killing it, you know? So I did another 30 and I did another 30, and then another 90 and then another 180. And before I know it, I've been on this thing for a year. And you got to understand, I was at the level of desperation that even when I was tempted with like holidays, birthdays, especially, you know, special occasions or whatever, and some of those foods that I loved would come back, would show up, I would still go, nope, I'm not going to do it.

I'm going to stick to the diet because this is what has helped me. And remarkably, I, after being on that diet for about that for about that time frame, I ended up completely changing my physique because I was able to rest. I was in a better mood. I wanted to workout. It wasn't like, oh, I need to go work out. It was like, I want to go work out like this. I actually feel good. I want to go workout. I was able to recover and so I was able to put on some, some, some, some, some muscle. And I think that revs my metabolism.

And I ended up losing 50 to 60 pounds over the course of that year. Got my whole life back. I didn't tell the rheumatologist, but after, you know, probably close to about that time, 12 months or so, I got off every single anti-inflammatory medication that I was prescribed because I just wanted to test, do a little test run and see. And sure enough, I now I kept going to because I wanted to make sure I did not need the medicine before I officially fired my rheumatologist. But probably six months to a year later, I fully fired him.

And to this day, I don't even take a baby aspirin for an inflammation. This is a pharmacist, folks. You know, Jason, one thing you said to me the first time we met was, nothing tastes better than good health. Absolutely. I mean, that's that's the Jason Barrett quote that I tell so many people now. It's a world famous quote because, you've lived that. Absolutely. Yeah. No, no. And and really, the way that, that that quote dawned on me was after I'd been on a diet for some time, I kind of wanted to test bringing some of the what I knew to be problematic foods.

I thought, oh, I've been off of it. Maybe my gut has healed, and maybe I can now tolerate some of these foods that I couldn't when I was super inflamed. Unfortunately, even to this day, this has been almost six years later. When I bring back some of those foods that I absolutely love and I ate them for 20 some odd years and had no problem. That's why it's so hard to even know that they could be problematic, is that I did it for so long and it never caused a single issue. But. Well, yeah, you didn't know it.

I mean, it's, I mean, you didn't feel sick after you ate it raw 100%. Yeah. And that's why they're kind of invisible. Because, you know, you're you're not thinking of them as likely culprits. But anyway, if I bring it back, some of those old symptoms try to rear their ugly head. I can feel coming back. I'm never going to let them come all the way back, you know? And so after I did that, probably a couple dozen times, I finally dawned on me and I got to listen. This five minutes of pleasure to eat this food is not worth three days of torture afterwards.

And so eventually I just said, you know what? Nothing. Nothing. That donut, that cake, that ice cream, that pizza, whatever it is, nothing tastes better than good health. Nothing does. And so that that, that that's my motto. I mean, that's how it's easy for me to stay on this diet because, it's what's given me my health back, you know? And there's nothing more powerful than that. Oh, you're, you're story so powerful now in your diagnostic process, did you actually get, diagnosed with the HLA b27 gene?

That is for ankylosing spondylitis? I think I'm saying it correctly. I think it. Yeah. But, I mean, a lot of times that's the, the diagnostic factor, right? In some patients that I've seen and, ironically, or a diet diametrically opposed to what you're saying, these people are told this is a genetic disease. There's nothing you can do about it. Just take the medicine you're going to decline. Plan on that. I mean, it's devastating. Oh, in in the patients that I've seen, Jason, you know, there's always this whole component of, inflammation in the gut with the gut defined, as, you know, starting at the mouth, you know, north to south.

So, so speak on that, speak on what you found in your life in terms of these, these other areas of inflammation besides food that have impacted you? Yeah, for sure. I mean, inflammation has so many. I mean, it's it's the root of all disease. And a lot of it is metabolic in nature. And or at least that can be the trigger that kind of starts it once it's that fire started. There's so many other things. Stress is a huge one. You know, a lot of people carry around a lot of anxiety and stress these days.

Just the the nature of the world that we're in, you know, with social media and all these things that are constantly distracting and grabbing attention and, and, not as many people are spending as much time outdoors in nature, you know, getting sunlight and seeing, you know, being able to really enjoy that or getting plenty of vitamin G, you know, that gratitude vitamin that we all need so much because without it, it's very hard to fall, you know, to become negative or pessimistic or kind of take the wrong approach.

And that right there alone will feed inflammation in a huge way. Another one is we're surrounded with you know, like all these unnatural lights, especially blue lights from all these screens, from these smartphones, from a computer screen, from these television. And if you're staring straight into that, especially late in the evening, when normally, historically, it would have been getting dark, your body would have naturally started increasing melatonin production, which causes you to, you know, relax and get tired and get drowsy and your eyes get heavy and you go to bed.

Well, when blue light unnaturally is hitting and and your brain is interpreting, it's still it's still daylight. Like we don't need melatonin. And so circadian rhythms get thrown out of whack. And if you don't have a rhythm, if you don't have some sort of a consistent thing

Recovery, Weight Loss, and Health Philosophy 30:48

where you're pretty much trying to go to bed and get up at the same time most days, I mean, surely you mean there's going to be special occasions where you can't? But if you can get that consistency, you really do give your body the best chance to recover and detoxify. And and you're going to wake up feeling optimal, I guess I should say. And when you do that, guess what? Inflammation. Your immune system's going to be working optimally and your inflammation is going to be in check. But yeah, I mean there's so there's so many different triggers these days.

And then, you know, especially these days, one thing that that I and I'm not just going to bash all of them, but nowadays it's almost this is kind of like the era of add more, you know, instead of remove things. And so like if you've got a problem, they'll go, oh, let's not consider removing anything. Here's a supplement. Go take this supplement. It's the it's the cure all for everything. Go take this and you'll feel a million times better when the problem may not be that you need to add anything.

It may be that you need to remove or eliminate some of these things out of your out of your presence, you know what I mean? And essentially that's, going back to the carnivore diet. I didn't even realize that's what it was until it was happening to me. And I was doing it to eliminate all these bad foods. It's an elimination diet. That's why I worry. It's not that the meat or the eggs or the fish are magical. If that was the case, you could go to McDonald's right now and order a Quarter Pounder with fries and a shake, you know, and that meat would do the works.

That's not what it is. What it is is giving your body a premium source of fuel. It's got plenty of protein and all your essential amino acids. It's got plenty of fat. That is a very premium source of fuel. It can break down into ketones, triglycerides. It also contains all the both essential fatty acids which your body can then use to produce all, all the other fatty acids that it's going to need and no extra garbage. You know, all the processed and ultra processed, all the seed oils, all the sugars and the grains and the preservatives and the additives and the coloring agents and all the things that are basically there to make the food look good, taste good, or last longer, you know, on the shelf, those are removed and what happens is when you give your body a clean source of fuel, your body can then run optimally, and then it is the best medicine you could ever take.

Your own body knows how to fix itself if given the chance, and not inundated with these toxic things every single day. And so it's the removal of those bad things that allows the body to do it. It's not taking a supplement, it's not taking another pill. It's not eating something in addition to what you already. It's actually removing that. And that's what's beautiful is it's this diet is very simple. Now I'm going to say it's not easy. I never said it was easy, but it is very simple. And, you know, when I, when I first started doing it, it's funny, you know, the name of your podcast is Vitality Made Simple.

Going back to when I was deciding to do this diet, I had to ask myself, like, what's the purpose? Why am I going to do this? Am I doing it to lose weight? Am I doing it for this, that, or the other? Because there's a million different reasons to do it. But for me, it was. I just simply wanted to feel good again. It had been so long since I've felt good, like that was worth more than anything to me. I just wanted to feel like I used to feel for 20 some odd years when I wasn't sick. And so I kind of came upon that term vitality.

Way back then, I was like, I just want vitality. Vitality in. The funny thing is, is carnivores is a pretty simple diet. So for me, that's my vitality made simple. Oh, that's so great. Thank you for that, Jason. Well, and for a pharmacist to say the answer is not in a pill. That's huge folks, because I mean, you make your living selling pills and but you know, that's that's why your testimony is, is so powerful. Well, tell our listeners about your experience. You had this, temporomandibular joint problem, this TMJ problem that, you know, people lose.

We naturally, as humans move to lesser pain. So when something happens, we move away from pain. And sometimes that causes us to do things that, later we, you know, that I have moved away from that pain. I maybe should have confronted that pain. Yes, absolutely. Well, I mean, back then, I was just so naive. And, I wish I would, you know, I wish I could go back then and know what I know now, but unfortunately, back then I didn't, and so I was I was very trusting. I really thought that this problem was going to be solved.

I did not know it was going to just continue, you know, but yes, you're right. When I first started going to, I should have jumped on the as soon as the high tooth happened and they were kind of blew me off and said, three days. I should have just gone, you know, I'm gonna go to another let's let's tackle this here and now and I'll just go to another dentist and let them take a look at it. Because even when I went back and, like, did their adjustments or whatever, I still wasn't right. I knew something was still wrong and I just was like, I whatever, you know, I didn't realize how big of a deal it could become.

And then when I started going to the TMJ specialist, the first one I went to, unfortunately, was not very successful. We jumped straight to steroids. I'm talking mid-roll injections straight into my face. Yeah, right into the right into the TMJ joint. And yeah, they were effective because why wouldn't they be? But they didn't last, you know, because we weren't getting to the root of the problem. We weren't finding the inflammation. And at that point everything I was doing was inflammatory. And so it continued to get worse and worse.

Until, you know, when I actually moved away just by chance, I didn't, and when I did, he goes, oh, I'm glad you're moving. But I was moving back to Oklahoma, back here to Norman, where I live. And he goes, oh, I'm I'm actually glad you're moving there. There's a really good TMJ specialist there I'm going to refer you to, and thank God. I mean, that was just by chance I happened to move here. And yes, he was a whole different experience. This guy did not believe in steroids. It was more of a natural approach, more of an appliance approach.

I had to wear a daytime and nighttime appliance. Pretty inconvenient. Uncomfortable. I'm not going to lie, because I couldn't ever let my teeth touch. Ever, he said. Even when you brush your teeth, take the daytime appliance out, brush your teeth, hold your mouth open, put it back in, he said. When you're eating, eat with it in. You can't take it. So I mean, it's kind of like reminds me of football mouthpiece trying to eat food with a mouthpiece. It's not very funny. It's a bowl of food gets you got to rinse it out, put it back in.

It doesn't taste pleasant, you know. And I did that for probably about two years, you know, and, and yeah, I mean, from there, just since the, since the root cause wasn't really going away. Now, don't get me wrong, there was something about that, those appliances that slightly changed the structure of my face, which is the intent. And he told me from the beginning, he said this could happen. This is kind of what we're after. But the, you know, one of the crazy and I don't know if this is a correlation, but, it did relieve that and thank God, TMJ, my TMJ is completely, completely gone.

I've never had another even small bout of it, and I am so eternally grateful for that because at one point I couldn't even out my mouth. I couldn't even eat a banana. I couldn't even fit my finger between my teeth because it would lock on that TMJ. Super painful. You don't override that pain. You don't just power through it and it affects every part of your day. And then sometimes it would open a little bit more. But when I would open my mouth, it would go like, over to the when I would, because that, that hinge wasn't working properly, that TMJ joint.

And so this side was working on this side. And so it would, and it go over to the side. It's very subconscious about that.

TMJ History and Dental Inflammation 38:48

It was very, you know, every time I'm having a conversation, if I open my mouth too wide, my jaw is going over, you know, to the side. And, it affects you on every level. You know? And I guess that's another thing that I realized when I was going through all that is that health can be broken down into a bunch of different buckets. You know, you got your physical health. But when that starts to really deteriorate and you can't get answers and you're trying everything now, it starts to affect your mental and your emotional health, you know?

And then when you're not able to sleep well, you're not able to recover, it, it starts to affect your relational health, which that's the biggest one. I mean, when you when it's affecting your relationship with all your friends, your family, your colleagues, your employees, your customers, everybody, you count your, you know, your fellow church members, whatever. Everybody knows something's wrong. You know, it's not a fun feeling to know that it's slipping away and there's nothing you can do. And it just feels like a like a vicious like, yeah, just like a dark spiral that's going down.

And it's really it's. I'll be honest with you, it was. That's why I call it my rock bottom. That was the deepest, darkest period of my life. I was very hopeless. It was very hard to be optimistic when it just. You get pounded day after day, year after year. You know, and every single thing you try early on, you're optimistic in your hopeful. But after dozens or hundreds of different things and it just still won't go away. It's really it takes a lot to muster any of that up because you're just you're beat down, you know.

Yeah. And I know that's what people are. And so essentially what I'm trying to say is you know for me I tried so many different things, so many different therapies, so many medications, supplements, diets, all this stuff. But to me it's almost like I was confronted with like multiple, you know, you got all these different options. You can do whatever you want. And it's like, okay, here's door number one. Let's go through here. Okay. Maybe it's and then you go for any level. Oh whoa. That, that. No that's bad okay. Let me try door number two.

And you're optimistic every time you go through this. But after you get to door three, you know, you're on. If you go on to 372 doors, it's kind of hard not to be skeptical when you're about to go through door 373, you know, and that's how it was until and you don't know. I mean, in my case, I had no idea a carnivore was going to provide me with that. And that was that was door 373 for me. You know, you don't know what the answer is going to be. And then it worked. And so for me, if I can help someone else that has any relay, if they can resonate or relate to the story I just told about my health and they don't know which door they're on, if I can save them the time, it'd be like trying door 373 first, I don't know if it's going to work for you.

I don't know, you know, it may or may not. I'm not not guaranteeing anything. But if I would've known about door three, 73, ten years ago, that would have saved me a lot of trouble. And that's essentially what I'm what I'm doing these days. And I've had the, the, you know, being in my setting, I get to I recognize patients that are either on the same medications. I was on or I just get to know them and I can kind of tell their story. And so I've shared my story with a few dozen, and it has been massively, massively helpful in, in, in quite a few patients at this point.

So that's why I like, I know the value of it, not only for myself, but I've seen it happen hundreds of more times between just personal things. And then some of the people that I've met online and stuff. So yeah, it's it's it's it's truly amazing. But now you feel better. Jason. So now you're looking for other, hidden areas of inflammation. You'd had root canal that tooth had was so painful. Yeah. Tell our listeners about your experience. You know, with what I call the forgotten orifice, the mouth that gets so, you know, relegated to somewhere else that, you know, we too often think the mouth doesn't impact everything else said.

So give us your take on that. Yes. So after, I kind of had a bad history with dentists and so I kind of a I'm not going to lie, I kind of avoid because I ended up with TMJ after that one. But eight years later, I finally was like, you know what I need? I need to go get a teeth cleaning done. So I go back to a new dentist to get the teeth cleaning. And while we're in there, he goes, hey, you got a cavity back and one of your back molars that is starting to decay. He said it could go out tomorrow.

It might be a year or two. He said it is not going to last. And I said, okay, well, what do you what do you suggest? He goes, I can fix it today. Got no appointments right now. I can put you a new filling in there on now. I said, okay, I'm already here. Let's get after it. Go, go for it. So he does. He removes it and then he goes out and I'm like, what? He goes, it's way worse under there than I thought. Like, there's way more decay under that ceiling than I thought there was. And you need a root canal.

And I'm like, okay, so what are we going to do? And he goes, well, actually, I still don't have any appointment. I'm wide open today. I can do it right now. I'm like, you can do it right now. He said, yeah, we can make the crown. We can do the whole thing. You'll be out of here in 3 or 4 hours. I said, okay, I didn't plan on doing this, but we're already halfway there. Let's go. You know? And so, and I was already numbed up and everything. So he does the root canal, and, I go home and I'm very numb, you know, for quite a while.

Well, anyway, when it wears off, I'm in intense pain. I mean, something clearly in dental pain is crazy, you know, like you don't. It's a whole different type of pain now. Well, he's already closed for the day, so I'm like, yeah, I mean, it was sensitive to even when I just took a breath, the air that would hit it was it would just make it go crazy cold, hot, everything. Whereas eating or drinking or whatever. So I called him in the morning. I was like, hey, I don't know what's going on with this tooth.

I went in there with no pain and I left with massive pain. We got do something, you know. So I go back in, he re scans it does X-rays and all this stuff, and he goes, I don't see the problem. He said, but we'll we'll redo it. I said, okay, but does the whole root canal again takes the crown of whole root canal, makes a new crown. And I was wanting that for quite a while. Again sends me, sends me back home. This time it wears off and there's still pain, but it's not as severe. You know this instead of being like a tin of tin, this was probably like a 3 or 4 and up again to your note.

I should have went back and demanded to be pain free and probably taking care of this thing, but I'm just like, I, I guess I can live with it. So I lived with it, and probably about six months later I'm at work, you know, working, working the bench as a pharmacist. And also my pain goes just through the roof on that same tooth. And I'm I mean, I'm sweating it. It's hurting so bad I can't think. There ain't no way I'm going to eat and went on to do nothing because I called him. I said, hey, y'all got to send me something and I'm dying.

And you have to get me in like, this is an emergency. You got to get me in 6:00 in the morning, whatever. And I go, okay, we'll get to you in first thing in the morning, and we'll send in something. We sent in a medical dose back. And so I'm like, I don't think this is going to touch this pain, but I'll try it. So I took it, barely took a little bit of the edge off. Anyway, I get home that evening, they're already closed for the day. My pain is on a level I've never even comprehended. What is the big deal for you, Jason?

Because you've lived with all his pain I've been in. Oh, and he's not new to you? No, it's not, but this was different because that nerve that that dental pain, you know, I felt like I've been shot in the face, literally, like, right there in my jaw. I'm sitting here, I'm sweating. I'm trying to, you know, put ice on it. I'm taking Tylenol, ibuprofen. I'm doing everything I can. I there's no way I'm eating dinner, comes down, go to bed. Ain't no way I'm going. My adrenaline, everything. My heart's pounding, I'm dying.

And so I go sit in my recliner trying to just rest. And I had an appointment that it like, was either 6 or 7 in the morning and I can't fall asleep. And it's 11 and it's 12. One, two, 3 a.m.. I finally doze off at like 430 or 5 a.m.. Not sure half did that, but I finally did. And when I woke up, my alarm went off because I had to go to the dentist. Just like an hour later, I woke up and I noticed the pain is gone. That's weird. And then I reached up and I felt my face. And I've got just like this huge bulge coming down off the side of my face and walk in the mirror, and I look and I mean, boom, huge.

And it was an abscess. It had, it had blown basically the tip off of that root downward. And so I now I'm fuming because now I know for a fact this was a, there was a massive infection. It was that's why all the pain was in there. And so I, I was googling and doing all the research I could. And that's when I came across and ended on toast. I didn't even know what it was until that. And I went and I said, listen, you got to affirm to and and Adonis and he goes, I already have. You got an appointment? 30 minutes go.

So I was like, okay, so I go up there and anyway he's like, oh yeah, you got a, it's a bad infection. We're going to have to lancet, we're going to have to give you some antibiotics. And then after we get that infection to go away, he was like, I'll repair it. But when he looked at it on an X-ray, it showed that of the four roots that were coming off of that molar, one of them had a little dogleg that went off. And that's why the dentist was missing that spot. That was the problem the whole time.

There was a the tip of the root was going off to an angle. And apparently a regular dentist is not good about getting those unless they go straight down like they're supposed to. And he goes, you know, we got a couple options. He's like, I can either drove through the Crown and repair it, which he said, you know, we got a good chance of that work and I can't guarantee it, he said. Or, you know, we could do an incision below and essentially put almost like a crown on the bottom of it. And I said, let's just, you know, whatever you.

And he goes, I think we can just drill through it. And so he drilled through it, fixed it. I thought we were good to go and, you know, and it did help massively. Yeah. The pain was gone. The, the obviously the abscess was gone. And then that's whenever I got curious and because I still had, you know, I knew that something even though carnivore helped with my inflammation in a huge, huge way, I still know something's driving this inflammation. And that's when I started, you know, looking into some more research.

And that's when I found you, and you taught me so much honestly about because I had never put two and two together on that. You know, I knew that the gut was huge. I knew that's why, you know, the metabolic problems and the dietary things were huge. I never thought about the mouth being part of the gut or having a microbiome of its own, you know? And so whenever I came in and we did the cone beam X-ray and we go look at this exact same tooth that has been like that for, you know, 7 or 8 years, shed so much light on that, not only that, I did a, the oral, microbiome saliva test to show some of these bugs, like, phew.

So bacterium and a few others, were there. And not only were they there when we did the GI map of my gut, since every time I swallow anything, it's going straight there. They're also there. Well, that really connected the dots for me. And, I'm like, I never even thought about it then.

Lifestyle Habits for Healing and Resilience 50:12

I never even thought about that. That that may be what's majorly, majorly driving inflammation in my body. And so whenever you told me, hey, I mean, look at this. You showed me, I saw it. There's you could see where the bad root canal was. You circled it on there and said, there's a hidden infection. It's sitting right there in plain sight. And I'm convinced if I were to go on to 99 other dentists that weren't looking at doing it through, through the angle that you look at, I don't think that they would have seen it.

I don't think they would have ever told me there's anything wrong with that tooth that it needs. We need to get it out. We need to get out of your head. It's not doing any good. And in fact, these problematic bacteria are linked to a plethora of long term bad outcomes. So. But, Jason, you you were curious. You were a willing learner. You were an open receptor. You know, your, your, your mental terrain wants to learn. And I so appreciate that. Because it's hard to tell somebody, okay. You've spent all this money on this tooth you've had all this time.

It feels okay now. But wait, there's more. And, And that being a pharmacist, you have this scientific brain, so you you understood? Okay. These bacteria, they start in the mouth, but they don't stay in the mouth and kind of like, a dead to the root canal tooth is a tooth on probation. I say, you know, it's a it's a taxidermied body part. So kind of like in the garden where the weak plant is, where all the bugs hang out and it gets weaker and weaker. That's sort of how, a root canal tooth can be.

Every root canal is not bad, but, you know, your, your immune system when you've got a root canal that's got that hidden, silent infection, it doesn't really hurt, but is getting into your bloodstream, getting to your blood brain barrier, affecting your gut, sequestering your immunity. I mean, your immune cells were having to go there to keep it from hurting, so. So I just really applaud you for, for thinking through it. And we just had such a vibrant discussion over all of that because, because you were a learner.

Yeah. I mean, you're right, and I can't say that I was always that way. You know, it's part of it's because of, you know, what I went through. And I'm continually seeking answers now, you know, once you once you experience your health, hit rock bottom and then you get to climb back out of that hole and you kind of get a second lease on life, you realize you're kind of in control of certain aspects. You're not in control of everything, obviously, but what your outputs are going to be equal to the quality of your inputs.

And, you know, so that has to do with what you're putting in your mouth, what you're listening to. You know, your relationships, the what you do in your spare time, what's going through your eyes all that well, and you can essentially live an optimal lifestyle. Well, I'm always trying to make it better. And again, like I said, if I try to bring back some of these problematic foods that would be considered healthy to most, they're not to me. I have to ask what all is there anything else I can do?

And that's whenever, you know, I thought, you know, I've had all these dental problems. Every time I go, I need the guy, you know, I either end up a TMJ or end up having to do a root canal that blows up or what? You know, there's gotta be a connection here with the with the mouth. And that's what made me seek you out. So you're right, I was I was looking, but honestly, I didn't expect it to be, you know, I mean, you shed way more light on this than than I thought I was. I was going to find out. And it's I mean, it's huge because I think to your point, I've heard you say that it's basically a hidden epidemic in, in America these days.

There's a lot of people that it could be the sole cause. It could literally be the main driver of their chronic inflammation, and they have no idea they are taking all these pills. They're doing all these things. And it could go 12 years back when they got a root canal done, that they thought was fine. And it ain't fine. It's in there like it's tapped right into their bloodstream just dumping, you know, inflammation straight in. Or they have gum disease low level disease. You know, I even in my functional medicine classes, Jason, when they show gum disease, they show like, you know, Billy Bob teeth.

You know, they show this, you know, teeth are all crawling over each other. They don't they don't show what I see every day. And that's even moderate gum disease. Just a little bit is still a big deal for the body. So, you know, thanks for for, for that affirmation. Now, there's other things I'm sure you're doing for your health. So I know you work out. You're, you know, really strong. Tell our listeners about just some of the adjunctive, we might say, lifestyle strategies that you practice. Yeah, absolutely.

Well, you know, again, it stems back to I'm motivated to do it because at one point, I was it was taken away from me. I wasn't able to enjoy it. Or if I did it, it was painful and I kind of paid the price. But yes, I'm very, I try to have like, I've already said before, I try to optimize my circadian rhythm. I try to get to bed and wake up at the same time every day. And I'm kind of an early bird now. I didn't used to be, but I really do enjoy in the, you know, that quiet time in the morning that I can kind of spend with myself.

I can, I can read a good book, I can spend some of my time. Some of my closest time in my faith is when I'm by myself. You know what I mean? I can close my eyes. I can drink a cup of coffee. I can get caught up on some stuff. I do like to take a walk almost every day if possible, especially outside. If if weather permitting. Because there's just something about nature I don't know how to put my finger on it, but when you do that, and I know that just from my days being a country boy, you know, hunting and fishing and, it's there's something just like a psychological reset when you go spend some time out there.

I like it literally lowers cortisol trees. Yes. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Right. Hormones that lower cortisol. I mean, it's just so cool how God designed it. Yeah, yeah. These days, I'm very, selective about who has surround myself with. Because, again, you know, you're kind of you kind of say you're the average of the five people you know, you surround yourself with. So I try to surround myself with people. I want to be more like, you know, if they're optimistic or they're generous or they're kind or they've they've done something or whatever.

I'd rather do that than surround myself with with people who are constantly going to be Negative Nancy or have the glass half empty, you know, mindset. Because if you do that, you may not realize it, but it definitely does have an impact on you, and especially if it becomes a daily practice and it becomes a habit. You know, essentially what I realized is you're the quality of your thoughts determine who you are, your character, your destiny. What you achieve is largely dependent on it. All starts here.

No matter if it's starting a new business, or writing a book, or starting a podcast or whatever it may be. It all started here. It all started right here as a thought. And so, I do that. I try to spend as much quality time with my kids, you know, like, of course they're boys. So they love sports, they love games. They. And so to me, a good philosophy. And I like to keep the balance here is work hard, play hard. If you only work at some, that's just it's it'll end in disaster because you're going to burn out.

You're going to you're you're going to get tired or whatever. And if you only play well, you don't get any work done. You know, nothing, nothing good happens. So but if you can get a strike, a good balance between plenty of work, plenty work hard and play hard, you know, you can really live can be pretty magical. And I think you can really appreciate it and be grateful for for everything. And the other thing is, and I haven't always had this, I'm now in my 40s. And so this is kind of a newer revelation for me. But it's just that every day we wake up, you know, just naturally you're going to have good days and bad days and then everything in between.

I appreciate all of those days, even on the bad days, I appreciate those because without those, the good days aren't even. They wouldn't be as good as they are. If every day was a good day, they never just be boring everyday. You just expect that everything to be hunky dory and go perfectly. How fun is that? You wouldn't. It wouldn't even feel good. It would feel just normal, you know. So I, I appreciate that. And then, you know, I can always compare my worst day now with what I was going through when my health was just gone.

And oh, my, it's it's a million times better even on my very worst day now. So it's very I, I'm kind of at an advantage, I guess I should say to, to to be, more, more grateful, you know, for even the worst day that I could go through. And so that's kind of I try to keep, I try to keep that, that system going and then to be consistent because when you got that consistency you give yourself, you give yourself the best probability, the best odds to to live the best life. Yeah. Oh that's fantastic. You know, I think with that, knowing it, you probably, harness a lot of the benefits of humor because, you know, for our listeners, Jason is hilarious.

And, that that's a big deal to have a belly laugh. It's really been shown to be so immune building. So, you know, that's one of your strategies. There's probably just, goes it comes naturally for you, but. Oh, absolutely. There's nothing I like more in, in any of my close friends know that. You know, I'm, I'm, I, I don't hold back, you know, I'm pretty, I love there's nothing I love more than a good laugh. And, you know, I jab home and we'll we'll we'll we'll basically, you know, talk crap to each other.

But it's funny, you know what I mean? I'd rather do that and enjoy it and just try to make the most of it, because what's the point in walking around just like a stick in the mud, you know? Oh, I, I have one lingering question, Jason. And that's these, these neck, vertebrae. What how did that story all go? That. I'm glad you asked. And I've gotten that question several times. And the funny thing is, is it was probably about it was close to right when I was about about the fire, my rheumatologist, you know, and I go in there and I'm feeling good.

I mean, and she even noted she's like, you look at you, look what you're doing. Great. Like any complaints? And I'm like, nothing. I just wanted her to do my lab work and make sure everything still looked good, you know? And she goes, you know, I'm looking back here. And this was a different rheumatologist at this point. It wasn't the same one that I was going to when, all that went down and she goes, I'm looking here and I see that you had it, you know, you had it, you know, some pretty serious neck stuff going on, some cervical stuff going on.

Hope, Root Causes, and the Hidden Health System 1:01:18

Here she goes. Whatever. Whatever happened with that. And I'm like, oh, the pain's gone. I honestly, I don't care. I'm at one point my neck was so painful and stiff I couldn't even turn my head. If you were standing to my right and said my name, I had to turn at the waist to to look at you. If I'm sitting in my car to back out of the driveway, I couldn't turn to look when I'm. I'm like I said, I'm a hunter. If I'm deer hunting and I'm up, you know, I'm on my stand and I here behind me, I. I couldn't turn my head.

I had to stand up, turn it all the way around, you know, to try to see it so bad, you know. And so, me being able to be pain free in the neck and everything moves great. I don't care what the scan says, I feel good. That's. That was my vitality is back. That's all I wanted. So she goes, well, I want to do another. I want I want to do some scans. And I'm like, wow. She goes, I just want to say, you know, because this was pretty serious. So I said, okay, I've got no objection. Let's go. So we did it.

And this had probably been a good two years had passed since since, I had went carnivore. And, anyway, we get these results back and I check them and I'm just reading straight from the radiology report because it was I got a portal message that it was there, and when I pull it up, it said normal anatomical font. No problem at all. I mean, like luck had grown back, apparently. I mean, now this radiologist, I don't know if he even knew that I had anything going on before, but when I read that report, I'm like, you have got to be kidding me, because when I had gone to that neurologist and he had, he said, listen, the weird thing about your, your, you know, this, this erosion at C1 and C2, he says normally the body does the opposite of what yours is doing.

He said. Normally when you get all this information, the body will naturally try to fuze those joints together, especially in ankylosing spondylitis, and go Google ankylosing spondylitis and look at the spine of someone. And in stage the whole spine is completely fuzed, like it's just like a rigid candy cane looking thing, you know? And it's why it's such a terrible disease. If you fell over at that point, it would just shatter. It'd be like dropping a candy cane to the floor, and it would just shatter that same thing that would happen to your spine.

And so he said, especially with your diagnosis, this should not be you. You should be doing the opposite. And he goes, he goes, we're going to watch it. And he said, he said, I think that he should try to fuze on its own. So then when I go back and it's not only not fuzed but it's back to normal function, I'm like, are you kidding me? No medication, no supplement? No, none of that. Oh, that was change my diet in a very big way. But I went on an elimination diet, and I allowed my body to do what it does.

It grew the joints back, and that's why it's pain free. I mean, I've got full range of motion, everything. And for years I did not. So. Yeah, it's a good question. I'm glad you asked that. Well thank you. In there just shows how our bodies are designed to heal and I in if our listeners are left with one big thing, you know, nothing tastes better than good health is your Jason ism. And then also, our bodies are designed to heal. And even when the doctors tell you, oh, this is just this is just going to get worse, it's a genetic thing.

Nothing you can do. Take this medicine, you're going to get progressively worse. Don't believe him? I mean, look in the mirror until, you know, speak words of truth. My. I'm designed in the image of God. My body is designed to heal. I'm going to, with God's help, figure out what to do to speed this process along. And that's exactly what you've done, Jason Barrett. Absolutely. And I'm glad that you mentioned that, because, you know, I've been a pharmacist for 16 years now, and my my, my outlook and opinion on it has changed quite a bit.

You know, not not only just from being a pharmacist, but probably the all the exclamation points come from when I became the sick patient. And this modern medicine did not help, you know. Now, let me make a distinction here. When it comes to acute therapy, like say you break your leg or, you know, gunshot wound or you get in a car wreck or something and you go to, you know, like a trauma center or something like that. They're very good. Okay. That is we are we are, we are top of the line. But when it becomes something chronic, when it becomes something, especially if it gets autoimmune thrown at it, all of a sudden it just goes into a bucket where they go, oh, there's no you, there's no you have zero chance of ever, this is not going to go away.

You're going to have to take a pill for the rest of your life. You're going to have to see me for the rest of your life. And so essentially, after a few years, I was looking at. And then I'm not only then I've got these. I'm, I've got these patients coming in. Well, the whole reason I think most health care providers decide to become health care providers because they want to help sick people get better. I don't think they go that's the main reason for most of us. And so I got out thinking that's what I was going to do, and that's not what's happening.

These people are coming in better than in fact, they're probably getting more side effects or new symptoms. And now they need even more medications, and they're complaining that they have to go to three different doctors and come see me twice a week at the pharmacy. And so after a few years, I'm kind of like, man, this like, the system's broken, you know, and and then after I open my own pharmacy and I got to see even deeper behind it, and I got to see, you know, from, from from an ownership in an operational perspective, kind of, you know, the way the insurance works and some of the, the payment systems and the way that they are, I realize this is not broken.

This is this was this is it. This is this is actually working exactly the way it was designed to some somebody is benefiting from this current model and you have to step back and go, you know what's more profitable to big pharma and and big insurance. And when I say big pharma and big insurance, I'm not talking about individual pharmacist or practitioners or pharmacies or clinics talking about the big ones, like the multi-billion trillion dollar pharmaceutical company Giants and big insurance, which dictates everything.

They tell you which doctor you can go to, what tests he can run, what drugs he can prescribe, which pharmacy you can go to. And they're controlling a whole lot more behind the scenes. As you know, in the dentistry world. Well, basically, when you look at it from their perspective, what's the most profitable business model here? If you know, and I'll tell you, there's two distinct patients that are not profitable and they have no interest in one is healthy people. If you're healthy and you don't need you don't have any problems, you're not going to go to the doctor.

You don't need any medications. And you're and they're not making any money on you. The other is dead patients. They're not making any money if you get so sick that you die. But if you can be in the Goldilocks zone, right in the middle, where you get sick enough to have to go to the doctor and get diagnosed with something where they're going to only treat the symptom and not the root cause. They're going to let the root cause fester in the background, and they're going to throw a pill at you, which may help with the symptom, but it's going to completely ignore the root cause.

Also, it comes with side effects. Also, it could cause, you know, it could cause you know, depletions or deficiencies down the road, which then manifest as new symptoms. And then they're like, oh, you got a new something, you got a new side of, oh, don't worry, we've got another pill for that. And before you know it, that one patient just started coming to see you for one medication. Fast forward three years. They're on a half a dozen or more, and they're not feeling better. They're not happy about it.

They're doing every single thing that their doctor's telling them to do, and they are not getting better. There's nothing more frustrating as a pharmacist that is trying to help sick people get better than to watch people basically get stuck in this spiderweb. They walk in and they get one medication and before you know it, they can't get out. And then eventually it'll just continue to, to get worse until maybe they do get a worse diagnosis where it's, you know, a chronic condition or an autoimmune thing, or it could be cancer or whatever it may be.

And there's one other group that's in there with Big pharma and big insurance that's part of this vicious trio I call them. And that's big food. And and especially in America, these foods that are in America are so toxic. Most of the foods, you know, especially especially fast foods, if you go to a supermarket or grocery store, if you're leaving the perimeter of the store, where you where you have single ingredient, whole food options that you know what is in there, and you can add seasonings or whatever that you want, but at least you know what's in there.

If you go, if you get out of the perimeter and you get on the inside of those aisles, oh my goodness, you turn that around. There's 17 ingredients in something that should have 1 or 2, and all of those things are in there to either make it look prettier, taste better so you get a bigger dopamine hit when you eat it, extend the shelf life to increase their profitability. And so they're very addictive. You go home, you eat them, they taste amazing. I'll be the first one to say they taste amazing. They make you feel good.

You get that dopamine hit. They're addictive in nature. And so essentially they get you addicted to these foods that are seemingly harmless. And over time, it's just like taking a little bit of poison every day. It's cumulative. It's cumulative. And so after 100 days, 500 days, a thousand days, maybe a decade, who knows how long it's going to take. Boom. They manifest in some metabolic problem. And that could be anywhere, anything from chronic inflammation. It could be a gut disease. It could be diabetes.

We know that that is definitely metabolic in nature. There's so many, so many, so many different problems that all stem from that. Well, big food, they got you addicted. So they've got you on a subscription now you're sick. So you have to go to the doctor to the doctor. So big insurance has you on a subscription. And then you've got to go to the pharmacy to get all these medications. So Big Pharma has you and you are on a subscription you did not want. And you it's a lifetime subscription that you can't get rid of.

You know, it's massively profitable and it's disturbing, you know. But it was it was designed that way. I mean, I've seen it forever, you know, it definitely was designed that way. But Jason, you're giving people hope in hope in and of itself is a nutrient.

Podcast, Final Advice, and Closing 1:11:48

Maybe we should call that vitamin H. You know, because it really is. I mean, I just see people light up when they have a little bit of hope that they can get out of that vortex you're describing. You know, you have to think of those three circles you mentioned. And as they come together in your life, that overlap gets bigger. And that's where you're sick, sick, sick. And so you have to pull those apart. You have to say no to the food. I jokingly say that the nutrition label is really a warning label.

I mean, there really is. If you see a nutrition label on food, it's a warning label. You're not going to find a nutrition label on, you know, a big roast or a package of steak or even an apple or a banana. You know. No. So, so it's really a warning label that you're. I really thank you for the hope you've instilled today, because that is huge. And it's what every single listener needs, regardless of what they're facing, regardless of the relationships in their life of who they love. We all know people who are not living with vitality.

And and I thank you for this. Now, I want you to tell our listeners about your podcast and, where they can find you. Yes, absolutely. So, yeah, I just recently started a podcast. I've got seven episodes out. I'll have the apron out this week, and it is called Meet the Truth, and that is spelled M e 80. The truth. You can find me on basically all the socials at this point at, at carnivore and that's spelled C.a.r. in. I've got like I'm not telling you what like a pharmacist. I think that over name.

Yes. And that's going to be on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, all the socials. And then if you want to get in contact with me, the easiest way is going to be through email. And that's just going to be carnivore spelled the same way at gmail.com. I'm putting the final touches on a website which will just be WW, carnivore, dot com. It's not out quite yet because I've just gotten started here a little over a month ago, but it's coming. And so I invite you to check it out and yeah, I mean, one other thing I wanted to touch on because you were, you were just talking about that is on the, on the whole, you know, like it's, it's almost like a sign, you know, whenever something's happening.

Well, for me, this is what I want your listeners to hear is when your body has a symptom instead of it being something's wrong with my body, and I need to go to the doctor and I need to get on a medication immediately. It's what it is. It's it's a it's a signal. It's your body saying something's wrong. It's like the check engine light coming on in your car. If if the check engine light came on in your car and you went down to the to the mechanic, or you took it down to the shop and he goes, oh, well, it's actually not fixable.

It's it's it's what we're going to have to do is I'm going to sell you this bottle of additive, and you're going to have to add it to the gas tank every time you fill up. And every time you run out, you're going to come back and you have to buy it from me. And what it will do is it's going to make the check engine light go off. It'll it'll go. But as soon as you stop putting it in there, the check engine light is going to come back on. You would be like, you're crazy. What are you talking about?

That makes no sense at all. And so for me, it's like when your body is has a symptom. It is a red flag. It is a signal. Your body is trying to tell you something's wrong. And let me just. I'll just encourage people if if you're going to the doctor and they are not trying to figure out what the cause of the problem was, and all we're doing is symptom or disease management, as they call it, and allowing it to continue. Seek keeps, keep looking, keep looking. You know, a good place to start would be in integrative or functional medicine because these these these people who are doing this, there are there's still Dos and MDS and pharmacists and all, you know, dentists and all kinds of health care. They it's beyond the degree.

So they understand the same. They got the same schooling as everybody else. But they've looked further to where they can look at the entire picture and find the root cause. And I'm telling you, there's so much power in that. And in a lot of cases, like I said, sometimes it's so simple, but it's just the removal of something. It's not do not trying to add a subscription. They're trying to remove one. And so that should be good news to a lot of listeners. It's totally good news Jason, thank you so much.

Thank you for your time. It's wonderful to know you. I mean, you just light up wherever you are. And I know you've lit up the the airways for a lot of people listening right now. And two other listeners, thank you for joining us for Vitality Made Simple. I think we're in 165 countries now, and I don't know, 60, 100 cities, but that's because you're sharing your please subscribe. Please. Just let somebody know there is hope. This is AB, a podcast about vitamin H. We're going to we're going to coin that term, Jason.

And, I hope you all just, have a great day, enjoy vitality, and may God bless you richly. Thanks for listening. joining us on Vitality Make Simple podcast. Be sure to visit Doctor Debbie osler.com for our courses and resources designed to help you feel better, look better, and enjoy better relationships. Please remember to like, subscribe and share. Thanks for joining us.