Vitalism and the History of Medicine - Interview with Dr Rick Kirschner

welcome back to another episode of christian natural health today i am very excited to have dr rick kirschner with

us uh rick kirschner is a retired speaker author of nine books filmmaker and vitalist naturopathic physician he

is co-author of the international bestseller dealing with people you can't stand now in its third edition and in 27

languages he is the past president of the naturopathic medical institute medicine institute he has worked with

some of the world's best known organizations and businesses from nasa to starbucks to the us army and national guard as well as city state and national

governments hospitals and healthcare conglomerates his documentary film how healthcare healthcare became sick care

the true history of medicine is available for free viewing on his website talknatural.com he lives just

across the long bridge in segal idaho with his wife one-eyed cat and five chickens

welcome rick thank you so much for joining us pleasure to be with you lauren yeah thanks so tell me a little

bit about your journey from naturopathic medicine to speaking worldwide on interpersonal relationships that's quite

a journey it has been quite a journey every step of the way well you know uh

i've been very lucky in my life to have great things happen that opened doors

for me and one of the great things that happened was when i was a third year student at national college of

naturopathic medicine in portland which at the time was the only naturopathic medical school

on this continent um jim sensanig dr jim sensenig was my

academic dean and one day i was a i was a third year student uh he called me to his office

and he said i want you to go on this tv show and represent the school and i'm like why me and he said something to me

that really had an impact on me he said nobody else is available and you know it turns out that

that's great it turns out that's the main reason why things happen i think

anyway uh so i went on this show and it was a moderated forum there were i think 70 or

90 invited guests representing different stakeholders in the healthcare community the program was called town hall and it

was about uh alternatives in healthcare and so there i was representing the

school and the guy who the moderator said if you have anything you want to say get your hand up in the first 20

minutes because i promise you the last 40 minutes every one of you is going to have something you want to say and we won't have time for you so i'm

sitting there thinking well i should get in the queue so i put my hand up he didn't even finish his introduction

and cameras were rapidly moving towards me i blanked out and yet my mouth spoke

i have no idea what i said to this day [Laughter] but whatever it was it got the attention

of the head of the ob gyn department at the biggest hospital in portland at the time who relentlessly pursued hiring me

for the next three weeks as his physician physician's assistant he called the lab at the school and ed

hoffman smith would answer the phone and i'd say you got to take this call i'm like i don't want to take this call i

was overwhelmed you know we're doing 2500 hours a semester i had a baby at home i i couldn't handle anything more

on my plate yeah and finally after three weeks that said you have no choice you will take this call so i take it and i

was young i was in my 20s i was very flippant the guy says i'd like to make you a job offer i said i'm not looking

for a job he said you haven't heard the offer i said that because i'm not interested we went back and forth like this for a while and then he said the

magic words to me said well he says how about if i buy you lunch and you know when you're a student

that's the weight of your heart yeah i said can i bring some of my classmates you gotta work out right

so i brought three friends with me one of whom was rick brinkman who i wound up writing the book dealing with people you can't stand with years later and we met

this guy at a natural foods restaurant in downtown portland and he was different he is something about

him was very different you know he's very well spoken very well dressed and he's he said i want you to be my

physician's assistant i said why would you want that he said you're a smart guy and i can tell you've got a great future

and i think i can be of help to you and i said you know i'm i'm three years

into a medical school program and i'm not a quitter i'm going to finish what i started so i'm really not interested he

said then let me be your mentor wow i was like well what does that involve he says i'll give you books to read i'll

send you to training programs and you'll get an education in communication and i said and why would i want an education

in communication i want to be a doctor and he said most

doctors make their patients sick by the way they talk to them and most and most

patients would get better if their doctors would just listen to them oh wow i had a blinding flash of the obvious i

was like wow that right there is so profound so i said okay and rick came with me

and uh this guy did it did we said he gave us books to read he sent us a 21 day residential training program of

communication at the university of santa cruz um and then advanced trainings we did all this kind of stuff and we felt

like we should offer this to our classmates we should find a way to take what we learned package it so that our classmates could

learn it because it seemed like this is the foundation of being a successful

doctor well we put together a little workshop we call it the magical nature of communication i remember the flyer we

made for it if for the price it was like about 23 dollars because we were really important business people and

uh and uh half of the student body showed up for the first workshop oh it's awesome

and you had to know how to do a magic trick to take the workshop so people had to do something to get in

but you know you had people with rope tricks and disappearing hankies and rubber balls that come out here all this

kind of funny stuff yeah and i will say the first five minutes of that workshop i was shaking like a leaf

i'm like okay i'm not really a speaker same reason i blanked out on that tv show

but five minutes into it my nervous system completely calmed down and suddenly it was just me and my friend

rick sharing information in a really fun way and we had such a great time doing it

and people loved it when it was over the people who missed it heard about it we had great word of mouth

so they said could you do it again so we did and then somebody was visiting from western states chiropractic they said

would you come teach it at our school we're like yeah okay so we went and taught it there and somebody was had a cousin visiting from the aerospace

industry in california and he said would you come and teach this to my managers i'm like no no no this is for doctors

and medical students and he said no it's not this is for everyone absolutely

so the doors just started flying open rick and i just did it for fun for about four years and one day we're like you

know we should make a business out of this because money and you know it's a lot of fun

so we created an institute we offered workshops and classes and

in 1986 uh somebody told the biggest training company in the world about rick and rick

and uh they reached out to us and invited us to their headquarters and

we went to work for that training company and they asked i'm going to keep going until you stop

maybe it's great so they were having a big banquet and nobody knew us at the company except the founders and they

asked all of their training staff to come wearing uh a suit

and to bring six minutes of their best material and they were going to film a promotional video and they had 55 people

on their training staff and with now with us included 55 people and when i heard that they were going to

have everybody all these speakers talk in a row for six minute bits i was like that's going to be the worst room on

earth to be in it's going to be so dull so boring you're going to hear people stealing each other's stories and joke

oh my goodness and then i thought well how can we take advantage of this and rick and i had a conversation about it

we called the company we said we want to go last the reason we wanted to go last is because you know you have two

opportunities to make an impression if you go laughs right uh-huh so and we

knew nobody else would want to go last why would you want to be at the end of that lineup you'd be sitting there waiting for it to end we were supposed

to be each other's audience yeah yeah so we wrote two six-minute scripts that

were uh funny uh we thought they were funny and we figured well we'll do them together even

though we're supposed to do them separate and but because there's two six minute ones we'll each take lead on one of them

we're kind of inside the letter of their law yeah and we knocked it out of the park we came in

uh things you can't do nowadays because they'd considered too politically incorrect and unwoke of course but back

then anything goes you know we had don rickles on tv insulting everybody so

nobody was right yeah that's sensitive about it so we put on uh complete military

outfits uh fatigues castro hats fake wigs and fake beards

and mirrored sunglasses glued the comedy noses and had cigars they had cigars and

we walked in with a boombox playing santana's oyokomova

and you were sitting over the top of it difficult people can be so difficult and

you got everybody singing along anyway people loved it they couldn't believe it

it woke everybody up the vice president company was weeping in the front row from laughing

and next thing you know we got an invitation to create an audio program on how do you deal with difficult people

which was their best-selling training program at the time yeah we've done nothing for them we were total unknowns

nobody ever forgot what rick and rick did at that banquet for years people talked about and we made an audio program with we put

all kinds of humor in it we had to leave it to beaver we had a star wars thing in it where the you know i want those

rebels on my desk by morning and you hear bill you know we just put all this weird stuff

we had paul and paul mccartney and john lennon having a dialogue using only beetle lyrics as a way of illustrating

these communication points and it became a best-selling audio program sold hundreds of thousands of

copies then they asked us to make a video we made a three volume video sold hundreds of thousands of copies and then

in 19 i guess it was 1990 simon schuster asked us if we'd write a book on the subject

that's great so we we wrote a manuscript sent it in it took them 14 months to return it to us with edits they took out

everything we liked about it we took back the deal gave them their money back went to the second biggest publisher in

the world mcgraw-hill who got it done in a year's time and that was dealing with people you can't stand which is now in

three editions it's on itunes with video and audio in it it's on kindle it's everywhere

so it turned into one heck of a career it took me all over the world doors open for me for all kinds of amazing

opportunities and yet so you went from there from being like you know all about the

communication and how to deal with difficult people and speaking all over the world to being the president of the naturopathic medicine institute what was

that journey like how did you get there and what's that and what's the institute all about all right so when um

uh so jim senzanig who in my opinion was sort of the george washington figure of the modern

naturopathic profession amen his hands were in everything his ideas were in

everything he taught almost all of us uh he knew all the old timers and all the

old ways and so jim since reached out to me right about the time i retired

when i turned 67 i retired after i'd had kind of a falling out with

our national professional association because of what i perceive to be corruption at a very high level right um

jim asked me to get involved with the institute which was his last act of creation he'd been involved in the

founding of the aanp the american association of ethnic physicians he'd been involved in establishing the cnme

the council on naturopathic medical education he had taught at almost all the schools he just

you know he was such a creative being uh he was involved in the textbook project foundations of naturopathic

medicine institute he he was involved in all these things institute for natural medicine jim was there

he founded the nmi the native paddock medicine institute as his last creative act and the reason he did it was he felt

like our profession was drifting so far away from its roots from its foundations

from its paradigm that it was it was losing itself and something had to be done and nmi was

established specifically to provide continuing medical education

to naturopathic doctors coming out of our schools who knew nothing about our medicine

and he asked me to get involved probably because of my communication knowledge i wanted me to take on public

affairs so i did so so i think jim wanted me to be

involved in the public affairs part of nmi because of my communication background and

i was happy to help because i had the same concern about the drift in our profession away from its roots

i've felt for a very long time that the world deserves an alternative to this drug and surgery model reductionist

model of the medical industry and i had made a movie in 2015 about the

history of medicine including how we got the sick system that we have this for-profit system that we have

so jim tagged me and asked me to get involved so i did and i

i was active and i participated in everything and i think people get along with me for whatever reason pretty well

uh so jim passed away as my wife and i were flying to mexico for our annual vacation

i get a call at seven in the morning from eli camp dr camp telling me that jim has passed and asked me if i'd be

willing to step in to the position and this was 20 this was in 2019

december so i wound up being the president of the institute in 2020 which

most people think of as the year from hell or at least it was until 2021 yeah i was

gonna say at this point it's just rolling but yeah that's just a year like gotcha yeah pretty much okay so that's how i wound

up with that yeah so all right so you talked about the reductionistic versus the vitalistic concept can you define

vitalism for us yeah i think i can so vitalists recognize that there's a

healing power of nature that is inherent in living systems and that under the

proper conditions it can be used to restore the sick to health

that's very different than the whole idea of you know we're machines you reduce everything down to an organ or an

organ system and then you name the problem and throw the specific drug at it like you've got a cookbook

that says this happens do that this happens to that vitalists operate in a different way we

consider health to be a human being's natural state an illness to be an

adaptive response to a disturbance in healthy function so if somebody's not doing well there's

a disturbance in their system if you treat that disturbance you can restore

people back to health or or their system can restore them back to health and to that end we work with patients to

achieve six desirable treatment outcomes that we at the nmi called lindlar six horses uh named after

henry lindlar's work who was one of the seminal people in the early naturopathic profession lindlar said that if you do

these six things you can help people get their health back the first thing is to establish

natural habits in a natural environment that if people are you know constantly

chasing a carrot of some kind or after the brass ring and they have no time for their home and their family especially

people that love family but spend no time with it or claim they care about their health but don't eat properly or

rest properly that when you're that's unnatural and it's unhealthy so

a good vitalist pays attention to that environment how do you take care of yourself what are your processes and

patterns second thing is what we call economizing the vital force so the v so the vital

force is that animated element that makes us alive instead of dead you know when people pass on the

body remains but it doesn't do anything anymore what changed that animating spirit has left

so we call that the vital force and when we say economize it that means that if

people are expending energy they're leaking energy you want to

notice where those leaks are and help the body use that energy for healing

that's why i always tell people when they're sick you know get on a simple diet or drink water so your body can

focus on healing instead of digestion because you're pulling all that blood and all that attention your your

physiologic attention away from where you want it to go which is into healing right the third

horse lenoir's third horse would be give the body what it needs so

when people are uh not nutritionally uh adequate when they

are not getting enough sunlight when they're you know to make vitamin d or when they're not getting enough of a

particular mineral there are downstream consequences of that because these vitamins and minerals

and protein and fats and carbs all these things serve important functions

in our health and wellness and well-being so you want to give the body what it needs and that's where a good

vitalist really is paying attention to what they can learn about the patient that individual patient to find out

where are the leaks to economize the vital force what isn't the body getting that it needs in order to restore health

the fourth uh of linlar's horses is to uh promote

elimination of waste without injuring the organism so

you know we have all these built-in systems plumbing systems if you will that eliminate waste and that includes

the among trees our skin is an elimination organ it's huge and it's got a job to do

so we want to support that function of eliminating waste because if waste builds up in a system it creates a

disturbance and that leads to poor health uh the fifth of these horses is correct mechanical

uh uh lesions so you know you've got a hip out or a rib out or your neck isn't

aligned properly well that can inhibit nerve function as the chiropractors talk about

so we want to restore that we want to find where something not in alignment and bring it back into alignment to

correct that mechanical lesion and then last but certainly not least and this to

me is maybe maybe the the most powerful of lindlar's six horses

umar said arouse the individual to the highest level of personal responsibility

and self-awareness yeah now when you put those things together

that's a completely different paradigm from the reductionist paradigm that the

medical industry uses to sell all of those drugs and procedures yeah absolutely so and you talk about

the journey from the history where we actually were looking at how to restore

health to where we are now in your movie so i know i'll link in the show notes to

the your website so people can go watch it but can you give us like a little teaser to the story absolutely well you know it's actually

one of the great stories of human history is how did we wind up with this medical system all over the world now

right that uh basically throws drugs at problems and when the drugs quit working cuts off uh

troublesome body parts how do you wind up with a system like that seriously so

so this is an amazing story and the reason i think this is such an amazing and important story is we're seeing it

being played out at an even higher level on planet earth right now with this uh

stuff about the virus that we're seeing uh the system that was put

in place a hundred years ago fully expressing itself now in trying to take control over our bodies and the

choices that we make so that's the story i was curious about i decided and how did our profession

wind up on the sidelines how did the naturopaths who i believe were on to

the real keys to health sidelined what's that story so i went

back i did probably did a thousand hours of research um i everything is documented by the way

i'll every claim that i make in the movie i back it up i work with susannah sirenko who's a

wonderful doctor up in canada um susannah was the sort of the historian

at national university and she was managing the library there and all the historical

documents there and she created a series of books called the hebert collection so

i decided that i would make her my partner to un to get to the root of the story because she knew everything about

our early founders oh wow yeah so she and i spent an incredible amount of time

talking on the phone arguing back and forth about how does it work and how do we get there

so in the movie the story that i tell is how was medicine practiced before the

20th century in the united states of america and in europe and interestingly enough most people

used natural medicine all over the world before what happened at the beginning of

the 20th century and also interesting is that our profession the naturopathic profession

was born at the exact same time that the monopolist set out to take over

medicine and convert it to profit so here you have these two things emerging in the world at the exact same

time the reductionist system buying up the whole the whole business of medicine

and the naturopaths trying to help people get their health back so it's it's an amazing story and if i'm going

to make a long story short i would just say this a gazillionaire by the name of john d rockefeller hired a guy named

gates big surprise no relation though

i don't really know but whatever but they set out to take over how medicine

was used they wanted to uh rockefeller had all these investments in oil and oil related

businesses like chemicals and drugs and they wanted to switch the medical system

so that it focused on those things instead of on health restoration and that's exactly what they did so i

tell that story of how they did it um and i think everybody that wants to

understand what's happening now on a global scale ought to know the story of how we got the sick system in the first

place now having said that i have great respect for any doctor of any type that

works with people to get their health back that uh that treats the ill the the

sick the injured and the dying i have nothing but respect for people that care

about the human race and seek to serve it amen yes my issue is at a higher

level it's with the institutions and the organizations that have taken over our world and converted

it to profiting from human sickness yes absolutely and it's a fantastic

movie we'll definitely link in the show notes to that i highly recommend all listeners to go check it out

so uh what would you say is your hope and your vision for the future of medicine from

where we are now where would you like to see us go well i guess it kind of depends on what

happens right about now in regards to the uh pandemic

if enough people wake up and realize how disserved they are by the existing

system which it has demonstrated that it's not in the business of helping humans when it tells people i'm sorry

you didn't get the job we're not going to treat you right that's that to me is unconscionable it's such a violation of

medical ethics or when they say we're going to throw out the nuremberg code which came from uh it's like one of the

few good things that came out of the second world war where people doctors and nurses who are

complicit in the nazi crimes were held to account for what they did and now now they're talking the head of the eu it's

like yeah we want to get rid of the nuremberg code it really doesn't apply anymore well it does apply it's the foundation of ethical medicine

absolutely so and we have hospitals laying off frontline workers who are there through the whole early stages of

the pandemic because they won't submit to a medical product that has no long-term studies

and because it has known risks that have already proven to be way greater than

any previous so-called vaccine so anyway i i just think people ought to

know how did we get here so that they can understand what's going on right now because there's a lot of money in the

medical industry it's probably the biggest planetary employer if you include all of its various parts

distribution chains and so on um it's where all the investment money is gone

uh all the big tech companies are heavily invested from amazon and apple and google all in facebook all invested

in pharmaceuticals uh who is it that guy from shark tank he's now gone into the

drug business and he's doing that loss leader thing where you sell drugs very low price to get rid of all your

competitors then you just back it up wherever you want to take it mark cuban that guy's just gone into the drug

business so it's a big business it's massive it's probably the number one industry on the planet the medical industry and

it's a front for in my opinion for the drug industry and the drug industry is all about

shareholder value not about human health right right absolutely so what have i not oh yeah go ahead so

you asked me what's my vision for the future yes uh-huh i went down you got sidetracked yeah go

for it i don't know why i would go down that rabbit hole i don't know everything in our world for the last two years but

anyway right so if we can come out of this

i fully expect that every vitalist naturopathic doctor is going to be busy

beyond their wildest dreams with all of these people who are trying to get their health back because if the covid was a

wake-up call for anything it was that the human race is sick we have an incredible amount of obesity

diabetes chronic disease on this planet all these things being managed with

drugs that don't solve the problem they just kind of if you're lucky it stabilizes you for a while before you need a higher

level of intervention so with all these sick people i believe they're going to be seeking uh health care rather than

sick care as a result of this whole crisis if we can get out the other side of this and take the heavy boot of it

off of our off of our decks in that world uh i think our profession uh for the

time being is gonna have to um it's it's i don't see how our profession

is going to prosper as a generalization but i see where our vitalist doctors are

going to be very busy and they're going to do quite well helping people get their health back and

i think after the passing of this current generation of graduates from our schools who have learned basically how

to be uh green uh alopez how to prescribe drugs

for problems and you know that seems to be where where the focus of our schools is going i think after

this generation has passed our medicine will come back roaring back and if we're

lucky it'll become a major player on the world stage because the human race needs

and deserves a health care system interested in health amen rather than

medical products exactly right yeah absolutely so

what have i not asked you that you want to make sure you leave with our audience i don't know

i don't know um you know uh i've had a great life and

i'm 72 years old 72 and a half i like to say uh i'm not childish i'm childlike but it

ain't great uh i've had a great life i've had incredible opportunities i've tried to

be useful i've tried to be of service my entire life i still am working with people for free now because i'm retired

and one of the greatest things in the world is when you don't need to make money from helping absolutely i love it so much and i do

quite a bit of that um but i have to say in a time like this

where there's so much darkness and so much fear and so much anger and so much division and so much polarization

we the people have to find each other's hearts again and we have to remember to live in service to one another that that

we all prosper as individuals when we help each other out so

i tell people if you're struggling right now if you're going through a really hard time you need to practice the attitude of

gratitude that's where you count your blessings when you get up and when you go to bed you know i do this and most of

people i know try to do this but we all forget sometimes to do this and it's really fundamental to our

health and well-being to be grateful for our life for the life that's coursing

through us to appreciate every breath we take every beat of our heart every

connection we have with another human being and my vision for the future is that we find each other again that we

find our way back to each other again through gratitude from life

that's beautiful yeah absolutely so where can people go to learn more about

you rick well i do have a website i put it up after one of the big tech platforms uh

got tired of censoring me and just proved off that sounds familiar

i thought okay i'll build another website and this time i'll make a i'll put a blog on it and where i can just

talk freely and they can't stop me and probably within three weeks of starting my blog i discovered the

telegram app where i created a private channel where i can communicate with people that are interested in uh hearing

what i have to say or what i'm reading and paying attention to and anybody that's interested in that

covet excuse me in that private telegram group is welcome to ask me for an invite

there's a contact form at talknatural.com and just say i love medical freedom and

i will send you an invite excellent fantastic so i will link in the show notes to your website and people can get

all those resources there thank you so much for your time rick that's been this has been fantastic

super fun to be with you and keep up the great work thank you