[00:00:00]  Ghazenfer: In this episode of Lessons From the Leap. I sit down with Dr. Dusty Hess, founder of Upstream Health to explore why it really means to heal by going upstream. We talk about why treating symptoms keeps families stuck. How faith and functional medicine can work together and what returning to God’s original design for the body looks like in everyday life.

Dr. Dusty breaks down complex health concepts into simple practical steps. Families can actually follow. This conversation is for anyone feeling frustrated with modern healthcare, curious about root cause healing, or looking to build healthier rhythms for their family physically, mentally, and spiritually.

[00:00:56]  Ghazenfer: Hello and welcome to Lessons from the Leap. I’m your host, Ghazenfer Mansoor. On this show, I get to sit down with entrepreneurs, founders, business leaders, to talk about bold decisions, pivotal moments, and innovative ideas that shape their journey. This episode is brought to you by Technology Rivers.

At Technology Rivers, we bring innovation through AI and technology to solve real world industry problems. If you’d like to learn more about us, head to technology rivers.com and tell us more about your project.

Today on lesson from the leap, we are joined by Dr. Dusty Hess founder of Upstream Health and a functional medicine doctor helping families realign their health with God’s design. Dr. Dusty, welcome to the lessons from the leap. Just give us introduction. Tell us about yourself, about our audience, so everything you want them to know about. 

[00:01:50] Dr. Dusty: Yeah. Ghazenfer, thank you so much for having me on number one. Um, you know, I, I’m just really excited to be able to be on a platform that I can be able to talk about what I’m passionate about.

And what my passion has really shaped is my leap. It’s really shaped why I’ve created the business that I’ve created, why I’ve created the magazine and edit the published, the magazine that I published and the scope of the people that I talked to most and the cultural war on health. Why I speak across the nation on these topics of health and prevention and proactive awareness.

My company that I built was off the backs of, decades of, experience of working internationally, northern and Europe. In Northern Europe and working, uh, across the country in the US experiencing healthcare in different forms and different shapes. Seeing the progress of patient progress from acute care to chronic care, to emotional health and wellness and from all different silos and all different backgrounds and all different occupations trying to work either independently or together to give a better outcome. And I saw the pluses and the minuses of that.

And when I looked at that and took a step back and saw it in the big picture of things, Ghazenfer, I decided. None of this is really working out. The future is looking here and when it comes to entrepreneurship and, and seeing things and finding solutions, that’s really what led me to build upstream health.com and it then led me to publish our magazine and create resources the way that we’ve created them.

[00:03:23]  Ghazenfer: Thanks for sharing that. So you often talk about realigning health back to God’s design. So in your experience, where do you see modern life drifting most from that original blueprint? 

[00:03:37] Dr. Dusty: Oh, I mean, there’s pretty much almost in every aspect. And just similar to what I talked about earlier where, um, I saw the problems within healthcare and I took a step back to try to find a solution. Most people aren’t taking a step back. Most people are staying in to be able to figure out, okay, well what do we need to go back to? Or what do we need to do here? Or, you know, this symptom, I need to be able to cover up with this.

And what we really need to establish, number one is we live in a created world. We live in a world that’s incredibly designed, it’s intelligent. It solves problems on its own. We have cellular distribution within the, with. Inside of us that is death and regrowth and rebuilding and transport and communication beyond belief where the amount of technology that we’ve established over the course of several hundred years doesn’t even come close to the, the technology within our bodies.

And so we’re, I think we’re coming to a breaking point where we need to start respecting the technology within us that is innate. And we need to reestablish that so we can see that in every aspect of life. But we have to take a step out in order to realign it instead of trying to manipulate it to come into the ecosystem that we’ve created for us.

[00:05:02]  Ghazenfer: So when, when families here root cause, what does that really mean in real life? Not, not in theory. 

[00:05:11] Dr. Dusty: I think a lot of, a lot of doctors and just practitioners throw root cause out very willy-nilly. Like, oh, you know, this other practitioner doesn’t know what they’re doing. We need to get to the root of this. And I think that the, the eyes and the eye, the beholder with that, you have to be very, very personalized in this industry of health.

When you see an individual dealing with an ailment, especially a chronic ailment. And you have to be able to figure out how to deduce serving them and that’s the biggest issue is most are trying to solve or get to a root cause of something. A cause of something. But they’re not even listening to the person. They’re not seeing a person in front of them. They’re not seeing the season of their life, they’re not seeing what they value. They don’t see whether or not they, they’re married or they have kids or they come from a divorce past, or they, they grew up in Indonesia or Syria and they have trauma passed.

They silo their expertise and they bring, they invite that person into their siloed expertise and then they call it specialization and they call it root cause. It look, if, if a doctor understands the GI map and runs the GI map and finds a whole mess of nails that they want to hit.

They could say that the root cause of what they’re dealing with is what they found on the GI map, but what we all know is you have to take a step back and realize that what is the largest nail that you need to hit? There could be a hundred nails, but what is that? So root cause really does mean that you have to be an expert in a myriad of different systems and a myriad of different silos that are distributed to be able to figure out for this one person, what do they need? And maybe that’s not me.

Maybe that’s a, a therapist. Maybe that’s a family counselor. Maybe that’s something else. And then from there, it leads to the next layer, which leads to the next layer, which leads to the next layer. That’s reestablishment. I would say that that’s root cause. Root cause is not running some specialized test and finding something that’s underneath a symptom that could be healing the gut and then everything else is, it starts to feel better. It’s the wholeness of the aspect of everything. 

[00:07:27]  Ghazenfer: I was gonna ask you, as you mentioned this last statement, like, how do you really find that root cause is there are tasks, are, I know there are different doctors, different practices do different type of those tasks. Like for example, even when they do, let’s say the food sensitivity test or genetic testing. does that tell anything? 

[00:07:50] Dr. Dusty: It gives information, but it depends on where that individual is at, and what they actually need. ’cause sometimes those things can be more of a distraction than an actual establishment of something that is the root driver.

Everything works in systems. Everything works hierarchically. So even though you find something, it doesn’t mean it’s the number one driver. So it’s easy to do a genetics test and find some single nucleotide polymorphisms in a form and say that, oh, this could be. You know, why you’re not methylating or why you’re not absorbing, or why you might be more susceptible to breast cancer.

But it, it says nothing about the overall ecosystem of whether or not those genes will turn on or off and whether or not that childhood trauma growing up in Syria and seeing war and death and post-traumatic stress disorder is really getting them to a point of not having those breakthroughs. ’cause you could try to heal to get all you want.

You could try to create a, a healthy environment around those genes. To make them express themselves in a healthy way. But if you’re not dealing with the trauma or you’re not dealing with the nutrition, or you’re not dealing with the environmental toxins or the family breakdown that’s why I always talk about the cultural war on health and the reestablishment of the whole and I think that when I talk, when I give that talk, I help people understand, gives them for that they’re coming in if they really want to get healthy. Right.

They have to understand the difference between acute care and chronic care. If they really want to get healthy, they need to also then in those categories, figure out the leadership that they wish to place alongside their family, and when they find that they have to then.

Understand that not all doctors are created the same, right? Not all doctors went have the same curriculum. Not all doctors have the same background. Not all the doctors have the same focus and the same philosophy and so forth and so forth. So I help them establish a level playing field of their role within their own healthcare, their leadership of whether they choose to find their leadership within their healthcare, but then also within their acute care and understanding the difference between those.

And then it allows for them to be able to have their values supported and well established, and then it gives them more of a power place to be able to lead their family into a healthier future. And that is what I’m most passionate about Ghazenfer, is transgenerational health. So if I can get parents to get healthier from the inside out, and then I teach them to be able to teach the next generation.

Then when that next generation gets to about, you know, their twenties and they start having kids, that their health and their ecosystem inside and out is healthier, to be able to then pass on what’s necessary to that next generation, that that placenta and that fetus that would then lead to a healthier next generation.

We’re talking about two. You’re talking about genetics. You’re talking about two generations down the line of epigenetic precursors that are being disseminated. Then if we don’t talk about transgenerational health, the future of whatever culture is gonna put boundaries on different things is gonna be the healthiest culture future pacing by understanding all the different things that are going to create an unhealthy environment for those genes to pass down through generations.

And it’s gonna take two generations to turn this around. You see it exponentially getting worse within autism, cancer, all of these different aspects, because we’re two generations in. It’s gonna take us a couple generations to get out of it, and it’s gonna, it’s gonna need people talking about cultural care way more than symptom management to get out of it.

[00:11:33]  Ghazenfer: Oh, that’s very scary. Yeah, the cancers, the toxic, all of that. So are there any strategies for people to expedite that detoxification process that we inhale toxic all over, through food, through many different ways. And these habits, obviously over the bill, over the years we have accumulated. So are there any strategies, are there any ways to expedite that the detoxification process so that at least you move towards that path towards the healthier path today?

[00:12:10] Dr. Dusty: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, talking about detoxification is just one pathway within the body, right? And there’s so many different ways to, you know, as, as we take things in and then we basically create waste and we get rid of that. So we, we have to be able to understand the design. Then from the design we can support it and with that comes knowledge and information. So when we look at our environment of our homes, we look at our environment of our air, our water, just the basic things we think about foundationally, right? So you take a step back instead of looking at.

Most people, let me, let me pause here for a second Ghazenfer, because most people, what I experience is they’re on TikTok or Instagram and they see some pills on detoxification, or they’re looking for something to open up, a channel to be able to have a breakthrough. And we’re trained with this acute mindset to apply something to get a result. We purchase something, we take something, we put something on our skin, we inject something into us, we see that there is a problem and we need a solution for that problem.

The thing is that there is not one person or one industry or any, if you combine all industries, the side of eternity on earth, all of that together is nowhere near as intelligent as what’s inside us right now. When you look at metabolic health, when you look at, detoxification, when you look at all of these organ systems working together in collaboration at down to a cellular level of transport molecules and angio-neogenesis, and molecular mimicry even, and so many different aspects of genetic proliferation and ribosomal trans transcription, like all of these different entities are incredibly intelligent.

So it’s not about buying some pill or supplement that’s gonna open up chains or this, that, or the other, but there’s ways of creating a little bit more awareness of realignment. So I would say be intentional with everything and be aware of reestablishing regular function when it comes to something like detoxification.

Detoxification in the body. You need movement. You have to understand barriers. You have to understand how the body was created, how our environment was created our ecology, biology, and physiology, as I always say. So detoxification. When you’re standing at a desk all day long and you’re not moving your muscles aren’t pressing down on your lymphatics and your lymp isn’t moving.

And when your lymph isn’t moving, you’re basically not getting rid of your sewage. Your circulation goes down, your nervous system and communicating to your joints and communicating to other aspects of your body goes down because you don’t have as much stimulation. Things become stagnant. You know, when you have different barriers, you people need to understand that you have, like, your skin is the largest organ of the body.

It’s your integumentary system, and so your skin is a barrier. It allows, it’s a boundary to allow things in and out. It’s the same thing within your lungs. You have a barrier, you have a barrier within your gut, you have a barrier. You have multiple different barriers, that allow, that protect what from the outside world comes in, what can stay in and what needs to go out And through that process, detoxification plays a role of getting rid of the things that the body no longer needs.

And with that, there’s if you look at all the things that you can’t control, you’re gonna be sold a lot of things. But if you can look at all the things that you can control, like movement, like exercise, and knowing the difference between movement and exercise. And then dry brushing to help with lymph flow and moving that through the system. Looking at contrast showers where you can be able to help support circulation and help with constriction and help with transport and vagal toning. When you look at temperature these days, everything is regulated. That’s a whole another topic, right? Every aspect is controlled.

So when you take a step back, you’re sharpening your ax to understand how to support something like detoxification. And and that’s where nutrition plays a huge role.

You’re looking Sulforaphane and other things that can come in and help open up pathways of cruciferous vegetables. And same thing with exercise I’ve talked about with dry brushing. You have also stress, emotional stress physical stress. You have relationships and communication and multiple other things that will either block or hinder the body’s ability to methylate to express itself in a healthy way.

Talk about genetics, sustain all of those things. Play a role in a genetic expression, which could then alter methylation, which could then alter your ability to detoxify. So nothing’s off limits. So you really have to be able to focus on the things that you can control, and then that will really kind of hone in on such an organ system such as detoxification.

[00:17:15]  Ghazenfer: Thanks for all the, that’s a very thorough explanation. Yeah. So shortcuts is very common. Everybody look for one pill that can solve the problem. And while we’re on it. So obviously all of this also related to longevity and we’re all talking about is there technology, is that coming, is it improving?

Are we working on towards so that people can live 150 years or, or longer? So, and is the talk on the pill as well so that you can eat whatever you eat. And you still stay healthy. Obviously there’s a physical part that plays a role. You already talk about it, the eating part, all of that. So what are your thoughts on the longevity? What is your take on it?

[00:18:04] Dr. Dusty:  I love that.

[00:18:04] Ghazenfer: Are you, do you see that the world is moving in that direction? Are how far are we, are is the research far enough. 

[00:18:15] Dr. Dusty: Don’t think that I’ve ever been asked that question that way, which I think is really helpful. Because most people are looking for, you know, what, what are ways to establish longevity instead of, what do you think of the word longevity?

Um, and I know that I could answer both of those, but looking at the word itself, honestly, quite honestly as a Christian I don’t really like the word longevity as much as I like the word stewardship. In stewardship, you know, I mean, the good Lord could take us tomorrow.

You know, we don’t really have control over what that looks like. I mean, we can get hit by a bus tomorrow, you know? But if we steward our bodies well, and we understand all the different aspects of our environmental behavior and lifestyle factors and what we show up to and what we give value to. Because of our belief subset would lead to the establishment of prioritization of certain actions, of certain relationships, of certain things.

And so I would change, me personally, I would change longevity to stewardship. But when it comes to, and then also you look at longevity too. Depending on what culture you’re coming from, you’re gonna prioritize different things. Right. So some people might come in and spend a hundred thousand dollars on longevity and they’ll have stem cells and they’ll have mesenchymal stem cells coming in and being injected into them.

They’ll, they’ll freeze down different aspects of their cellular biology to be able to allow for, as their body ages, they’ll have more stimulation and, and more cellular reproduction as they age, so that as their cells start to drop, that they can be able to replenish. Even though their physiology is starting to die, they can be able to intervene from the outside in with their own physiology the overall stimulation of circulation and helping with other deteriorating systems that will as they age, that you can come in and manipulate from the outside in.

And I’m sure, I mean, you’ll have people like that, that will come in like, it’s very much the, you know, the individual on Netflix that is, you know, don’t die or whatever it is. I think that that’s asking a lot of questions.

This is where the future of healthcare is, is it’s culturally driven really. Because not everybody is going to value living the longest. What people really want is to make impact, to be able to serve their families, to be able to serve their grandkids, to be able to have a healthier next generation and live sacrificially for the next, or what does that look like? Is it more selfish?

Is it more inclusive? And when we take a word like longevity and all the tools that we could be able to manipulate from the outside in to create a longer life, what are we gonna do with it? And I think that there is a moral implication. There is a cultural implication. And there’s boundaries in certain areas that would ultimately stifle innovation.

When it gets down to certain levels of longevity, and I think that people in multiple different culture groups need to start asking questions and figuring out where their boundaries are to determine where they wanna invest and where they wanna show up to be able to serve their families and their culture in a more morally way.

[00:21:24]  Ghazenfer: So,. AI is showing up everywhere in healthcare. Where do you see it helping functional medicine the most? 

[00:21:33] Dr. Dusty: Oh, I mean, it’s hands down. It’s going to, it’s, it changes everything. What functional medicine really is thousands and thousands of research articles thousands of textbooks you know, and never ending endless amounts of information on experience from client’s perspectives to try to show up for one and serve one. Functional medicine isn’t about, it’s not acute care at all. So it’s one thing to show up as a you know, let’s say a doctor of medicine that’s trained in acute care, allopathic care. There’s no comparison between that doctor and a functional medicine doctor. They’re totally different, totally different fields, totally different direction. Totally. They serve their, the patient totally different.

So when it comes to AI in those different spheres, it serves a totally different purpose. AI within the medical sphere is going to serve in helping people keep them alive, making quick decisions, being able to take a lot of different data and being able to boil it down to. Also communicate within systems, within operations, within robots, within a lot of different things within the acute space, within functional medicine.

It doesn’t evaluate a large group of people to figure out what’s good. When you look at acute healthcare, the evaluation of a lot of data from a lot of different people into how you would establish one, like let’s say a pill. Right. And you have a cohort and it’s like, okay, this has shown with the, with a placebo and you know, you have the gold standard of research, right? And it applies to a mass body of people.

Well, for functional medicine, you see one person in front of you. That’s it. You, that one person is unique in every single way. So you can’t just say, oh, well, like this treatment worked for 30,000 people at like a 30% rate of success, and then 70% of the population that you’re gonna work with is not gonna get it recently. It doesn’t work that way. You have to be able to adapt and personalize to the person that’s right in front of you. So what AI does is it comes in and you could be able to help with serving that one individual with thousands of documents of information to ensure that in every category, in every area that they will help get realignment and establishment of health from the inside out.

[00:24:10]  Ghazenfer: Cool. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for sharing. So with the, a lot of this lab data, the variable, the health tracking available, we’re getting data from all those different sources and now obviously AI can also help you get more prediction on that. So, but how should families use that data wisely rather than just becoming anxious or obsessive?

[00:24:32] Dr. Dusty: Yeah, that’s very important because the, when you take a personalized approach, you have to look at a personality. There are some personalities that I take data away from them. I literally tell them to take their Apple watch off or I tell them to take off their ora ring. It’s not serving them.

Sometimes you have data paralysis, you know, people will see it and they’ll get more anxiety, they’ll get more stress. They’ll hone in on certain metrics and, and it’s actually hindering their health. You know, it’s, if you’re looking at and track tracking, you know, arrhythmias of the heart and you’re looking at it from an acute perspective, that data is rather not personal.

It’s just data, right and it’s lifesaving, but when you’re trying to actually establish health from the inside out, anxiety plays a role. Stress plays a role. Lack of sleep plays a role. All of these things play a role. And so if you take data to a certain personality subtype that, is a super type A personality, and if they’re not meeting up with their metrics or they’re seeing that their REM sleep is down or, or they’re, they are going to try whatever is in their power to work harder to try and then life does not become realistic. It gets way out of control.

So what I would say here Ghazenfer is leadership is everything. AI is simply a tool of gathering a lot of information. As of right now, that’s probably the best aspect of it is, is gathering a lot of information, being able to pivot and being able to have it you could get it to do what you wanted to do in different applications and self-regulate.

But when it comes to healthcare. It’s a leadership tool, so it only knows the philosophy that it’s taught. So if we were to ask Ghazenfer, if we were to ask a group of people define healthcare, you know, how many answers we’d get? People don’t even know the difference between an acute doctor and a chronic doctor.

The people don’t even realize that there’s different types of doctors. They look at a medical doctor with their curriculum going through school with basically zero nutrition, zero exercise physiology. Zero, you know, understanding of how the application of emotional health and wellness or, or how to actually coach somebody to get them better sleep.

It’s not healing. Focused on the healing. It’s focusing on the intervention. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just defining, not demonizing. It’s a totally different field. And so when we educate from that perspective of diversifying and coming together and working together as a team. And then bringing the individual to the center of healthcare, we can help define healthcare in a way that the individual can define it.

And when that happens, and AI is established to be able to help solve that individual’s expectations. We talked about longevity. Not everybody’s gonna have the same relationship with longevity. Right now it’s new and people are excited about different things, but they don’t realize the future of longevity, where it’s gonna be culturally driven.

And there’s gonna be limitation. And people have to figure out, hey, is there going to be a doctor or a leader or somebody in my co my, a coach in my life that’s gonna help me navigate this in a morally ethical way so that I can lead my family in healthcare? And that’s where these tools come together with the right philosophy, the right leadership alongside it.

That leverage the data and the information to give a personalized experience that is not siloed within PT, chiropractic, acupuncture, MD, ND, DO, NP, DC you name it. All these different doctors, all these different professions, psychotherapy. I mean, all of that of a nutritionist, a functional nutritionist and you know, Ayurvedic, I mean, you go down the road, you’re gonna have so many different things.

You get to paralysis and people don’t know where to start and dunno where to go. The future of of healthcare in that situation is going to be culturally driven, getting the right coach to alongside the, the AI driven tools to leverage it to the best of their ability. 

[00:28:58]  Ghazenfer: Cool. So, yeah. So as part of our business one of the things we are seeing, a lot of people are coming up with okay, personalized health data, and then creating predictions off of that, whether it’s your blood work, your DEXA scan, the chronometer, the Apple watch your sleep data, all the different data, doing the deep research with Ai and creating different types of analysis.

Now, obviously that brings a different challenge. That means now everybody is relying on Ai. AI is giving recommendation. Yes. Those are not the doctor’s advices. Those are still the human. Yes and there are cases where you can have a human loop where doctors actually review it. Change it, but then you can also mold those modifications based on of what you want to recommend. Where do you see, uh, like in your view, where do you think AI should never replace human relationship between doctor and a patient?

Because with all this technology, people are taking a lot of those things in their hand and they’re making those, I would say weird decisions. As you said earlier as well, like they’re creating anxiety and other things for themselves. 

[00:30:12] Dr. Dusty: Yeah, I think that there’s a, you know, we have to grow alongside technology. We can’t allow for technology to really grow us. You know, we, it’s not simultaneously. So, , we can leverage tools for sure, but they should never, we should never allow them to be above our morals and our ethics. We should never allow them to make decisions in certain categories of our lives or our families of our healthcare.

We should always be the end. We need to take a, if we, if we value health, then we have to make space and time for it. We have to prioritize it, right? And so what is it if in this type of healthcare it’s really simple. Sometimes we’re, so we see all this new technology and we want to play with it all.

But sometimes the more effective way is sitting down and sharpening your ax by taking a look around and being like, is this, is this really where I want to be? Like what are my priorities? Like, do I value family? Do I value faith? Do do I value health? Do I value finances? Like, do I need to steward those things?

Do I value my occupation? Do I value you know, my reputation? Do I value longevity in a way that I, you know, I wanna live as long as possible. Do you value kids? Do you value certain hobbies? Do you value. What is it that you value? Do you want to make impact in, in, um, do you wanna just show up at your job and then put your other time here or there?

Or, you know, what is it? I would say that would be the first step in establishing where you allocate your time and in seasons are gonna look different. In certain seasons of life, you’re going to want to reallocate those times to have a little bit more time in certain different categories to reorganize and come back together.

And the reason why I say all this to come back into when you’re dealing with the chronometer and you’re dealing with, you know, all these different applications and data subsets, this, that, and the other is sometimes people will get a lot of information. They’ll plug a, a plug into their car and they’ll get a lot of analytics on their engine, their exhaust, their internal temperature the productivity of everything.

But they’re not evaluating the streets the weather, the overall auto mechanics that are working on that vehicle or even. What is that vehicle being placed into? Is it a Honda Civic being put on an F1 race course and expected to perform? You really have to be able to step back, see what you’re trying to cultivate, and then prioritize those times and leverage the data and the tools to be able to complement that mission instead of coming in and allowing for.

Your workspace to be off your family, to be off your finances, to be off your morals and ethics to be off. But what you’re trying to do is just really dial in your sleep. And that’s usually kind of where I don’t, I don’t, I, it breaks my heart because people are being misled. Into trying to solve something that the, that they’ve actually created for themselves, but they don’t have somebody to help them step out to see it. Right. 

[00:33:36]  Ghazenfer: Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. So I’m gonna switch gears a little bit. And this is something that I have a personal question that I wanna, does the blood type makes a difference in terms of people I would say the food that is good for them, for their better health. Does that have anything to do with it? I mean, these are all simple layman question. 

[00:34:01] Dr. Dusty: Yeah. Yeah. You’re talking about like, eat for your, eat by your blood type or whatnot? No, it can, it can for sure. I mean, when you understand the ecosystem inside us, we are designed in ways that what, the more we get to know our ecosystem, the more we can better support it.

So it’s always good to be able to get to know you better from the inside out. And I think these data points and looking at your blood type, looking at different aspects of everything that makes you, you in the personalization process is important. Now, this is a great point. What I found to be a huge issue within healthcare, and the reason why I created the platform and the design of it totally different than anything else, is that what I was seeing is people would come in and they would market themselves at providing a service.

They’d write a book and they’d be an expert on something like blood type, for example, or genetics or whatever. It’s like we are being trained to market and be an expert in this niche field and do this specific thing. The problem with that is us as humans are not served well by micromanaging specific little things like that.

Do genetics matter? Absolutely. Does your blood type matter? Absolutely. Does. Do does your neurological system matter? Absolutely. Does. Do your relationships matter? All of these different things. Do they, do they all matter? Absolutely. But do, are we gonna isolate that and say that that’s the everything and that you have to base all of your philosophy and all of your foundation of what you’re going to eat, sleep, drink, relates to everything based off of your blood type?

Absolutely not. So the realistic way of looking at something is, is seeing everything in its parts and not siloing it. So if there’s a physical therapist they can be great at coming alongside and working on things. Same thing with a chiropractor, same thing with an acupuncturist. Same thing with a myriad of different doctors that can come together to be able to support that individual.

But it’s gotta be around that individual and personalized to them. This is when it becomes unrealistic within the healthcare system. Because the healthcare system isn’t built that way, it, the acute healthcare system, obviously needs to be fragmented because when you have a brain tumor, you don’t want a gastroenterologist cutting open your skull, right?

When you have a problem, a specific problem, you have to bring it down to that system and you have to be, have an expert in a specialist on that system, be take, be able to take care of that acute issue. But when you’re dealing with a chronic issue, it’s multi-systemic. So if you have diabetes and you try to treat it acutely, you’re in a mass amount of trouble.

Like that person is gonna have really poor quality of life when they get older. If they treat it with an acute model, if you’re looking at insulin, insulin is affected by everything that I’ve mentioned so far. I don’t have to re-say it every time, everything, but you look at anything that touches insulin, there is a bucket load of things that affect insulin. Right? And you, and you have to look at the individual in the season of their life that they’re in, what they prioritize to be able to change their environmental behavior, lifestyle factors, their ecology, biology, physiology, all the different things to personalize to that individual.

It’s never fragmented yet. We try to take a fragmented ideology of an acute kind of healthcare system we’re used to and apply it into chronic disease. And it’s dangerous at best. So that’s my thoughts on blood typing. 

[00:37:35]  Ghazenfer: Due to time, so I’m gonna combine my, next question. And this is the topic where I don’t have those questions written. I mean, these are all coming from my own experiences that I’m learning, like, 

[00:37:46] Dr. Dusty: yeah. 

[00:37:46]  Ghazenfer: Can you give like, just, a quick, perspective on seed based diet? IVs and multivitamins. These are obvious. Again, when we talk about these things, non allopathic, a lot of those things do come recommended. So yeah, any perspective on any of these three things? Obviously non-processed, seed based, IVs and multivitamin. 

[00:38:10] Dr. Dusty: Yeah. Yeah. So first off, diets the relationship that we have with diets is very, very unhealthy. When we look at food we have to look at what if our body physiology and its intelligence and our design and the balance of all the different organ systems working together is nourished by, um, it cannot be nourished by our environment of what’s created, then we wouldn’t be sustainable.

The human race would be gone. So we have to be able to trust that what is in our soil, what is in our food, what is in our environment, is sustainable for us to exist now when we manufacture food. We strip it of fiber and we strip it of these different things and we refine it down to things that are more palatable and flavorful and pleasurable.

Along other things that are cheaper to produce and have longer shelf life and a lot of other ways to be able to make more money or have a better bottom end, which I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. From a business perspective, but from a human perspective, there’s a lot of consequences.

And so, we have to start having a relationship with diets that have nothing to do with an acute model of like, I want you skinnier because skinnier is healthier. I want you to lose weight. And in order for you to lose weight, you go on a diet. Diet this is, this is when I talked about Ghazenfer when I talked about if we were to ask, you know, a hundred people define healthcare, we’d get a hundred different answers.

If we were to ask a hundred people what a diet is, they’d say, oh, to lose weight, you know, but quite honestly, a diet is simply what we consume. We have to redefine these simple words. We have to redefine health. We have to redefine diet. We have to redefine exercise. We have to redefine these things to be able to establish a normal design for what we were supposed to do in the first place.

Because if we take the world that we live in and then we apply a diet to it to get an outcome. We’re still living in these temperature controlled rooms in these environments. That the, the jobs that we’ve created for us the social economic stress, the financial strain, the families that are fractionated, the kids that are in five different sports, and there’s just no connection within families because everybody’s so busy.

We’ve created this world for ourselves and we have dual income and all this other stuff that, that just creates fractionation of the design of family in the first place. And then we ask ourselves, you know, okay, how do we, how do we keep doing what we’re doing, but then change X, Y, Z? So diets we have to pull out to be able to come back in a diet just means what we’re consuming.

And that can change when we look at the food that’s in our environment. It’s for us because we have to believe that we’re sustainable with it. And then we have to see it from a perspective of. Food can be ordered and designed in a way and put together in a certain way that can be therapeutic, right?

That is and when it comes to weight loss diet is that’s just like insulin and diabetes. You want weight loss, you gotta look at insulin. You gotta look at environmental, behavioral, psychological, all of those different things go into weight loss. So when you think about diet and exercise for weight loss, don’t even go there because it’s not even scratching the surface for weight loss.

That’s why everybody fails. But diet has to have a different, we have to have a different relationship, a different definition, a different understanding, that we can be able to come into the the food that we have in our environment and create something that is just whole foods. Just the sustainable nature of what actually allowed us to be sustainable in the first place.

Then the second thing is if we’re in a situation that we can be able to help lower inflammation or help with detoxification like you were talking about, or help with other aspects of supporting the body from the outside and we can take what we have in our environment and make that, bring those foods into a another style of diet that can be therapeutic.

It’s not controlling our macros or it’s not controlling our overall cap caloric intake in a way that’s like restrictive and trying to like, manipulate different things, this, that and the other. It’s really looking at food as energy and nutrient dense and where you have micro macronutrients that are supportive and nourishing to ourselves and our organ tissues and we want to be able to replenish and we don’t.

We know in that natural format with fiber and everything else, that our body will consume that totally different than if we have processed foods that don’t have the built-in mechanisms within our environment to regulate out our insulin, to regulate out our peptides, to regulate out our hormones, and come into a reestablishment of normal design of physiological design. Because we are manipulating our diets, doesn’t mean that we can’t be on a specific diet for a therapeutic purpose for a point in time. But outside of that, as far as a diet for weight loss, that’s it’s pretty dangerous.

The second thing you mentioned was IVs, right? So IVs, when you look at intervention in certain situations when I think of IVs, it can be a. It can be an application similar as like a pharmaceutical drug or a high dose supplement or even a certain elimination style diet, right? In a practical, functional setting. But what we also have to establish though is where are we at? Are we in an upstream model or a downstream model with whatever that person’s dealing with?

Right. And if somebody is, let’s say they have severe adrenal fatigue and they have poor detoxification, they have poor gut health, a lot of different things going on, and they’re trying to do an IV of like high potent glutathione with some vitamins and other things to be able to help kind of get them out of that state.

Well, if they’re doing an IV drip that is helping with metabolic health and reestablishing better energy and systemic health from the inside out. It can be packaged in a beautiful little envelope that looks very appealing to a lot of people. But I find it surprising that in this sphere of actually trying to get somebody healthy and calling that a root cause that.

They’re not talking about their sleep as much or they’re not talking about their, like I said before, childhood traumas or you, when you really get to know somebody, like you get to know a lot of people, Ghazenfer. You sit down and you have a lot of great conversations with people. No one’s ever the same, and everybody has a different story.

And there’s no difference between your podcast and interviewing people than the people that I meet on a daily basis. In healthcare especially, everybody has their own story. Everybody has their traumas. Everybody has their difficulties in all different aspects of life. Everything needs to be on the table.

And we gotta be careful when we use something like a vitamin drip or something to give them better energy and make them feel better. It can be used therapeutically, like a therapeutic diet, but it has to be on a hierarchical scale of doing a lot of other things alongside in order to try to get the outcome that you’re trying to get.

Because if people are, are gravitating towards IV drips because it makes them feel better and gives them more energy, like I was walking in in Vegas not too long ago, I think it was. Just last year and I was at the MGM Grand. You know, you’re walking down, you’re right by the comedy center right there, the brick wall right there, factory or whatever it’s called.

And right on the other side is an IV drip place like that. You can literally walk in, get hooked up to an IV and get more you know, energy and people will feel great, you know. They’ll also go out and then they’ll, that, they’ll give them energy to be able to go out and party all night long and drink and do all different things that is pleasurable and enjoyable.

And they’ll then, at the end in the morning, they’ll call another service that will come and a phlebotomist will hook them up to another IV drip to help with their hangover. You know, so I think establishing an understanding of what, what we’re trying to leverage to the IV drip for and how we’re trying to get to know the individual to figure out where this is on the upstream downstream model to actually reestablish in a morally and ethical way health from the inside out. Third thing you talked about, what was the third thing? Ghazenfer 

[00:46:29]  Ghazenfer: Multivitamins. 

[00:46:30] Dr. Dusty: Multivitamins. Yeah, you, I mean, well, I mean, going back to whether or not we actually believe that our environment has what it needs to be able to sustain the human race, I think that is a rather important distinction if we believe that what we have in our environment isn’t up to snuff to be able to provide what it needs to be able to support us.

Then, and we need to supplement, then that goes into a conversation of soil depletion of farming and agriculture and all the different aspects that goes into that. Right now, I’m actually in the Midwest on our family’s farm and we have an organic farm, but even the difference between an organic farm and, you know, dealing with, um a farm that’s, that’s self-sustainable. You know, that has livestock on it, that is turning over the soil that is stomping it in that, that, you know, you have regenerative farms, you have like all these different, when we manipulate our environment so much that we have to define like medicine with five, 10 different titles, right?

We have to define farming with 10 different measures or if we’re, if you’re gonna buy eggs in the supermarket, it’s not just an egg. It’s like, oh, is this cage free? Is this, is this free range? Is this blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s embarrassing at best. And when it comes to farming, it’s, it’s no different.

We have to establish a moral responsibility to our top soil, to our nutrient density, to our animals. To our environment of what those animals are eating, drinking, breathing, how they are moving, how they are and I know that this sounds silly to some people, but when they go to slaughter, are they stressed or are they not?

There are so many different aspects within a normal ecosystem that was designed for our bodies to consume and utilize and cultivate. And when we start to see it from that perspective, that will help us understand something as simple as a multivitamin, what we consume, how we consume it. When we get blood work, are we nutrient deficient in certain things?

If so, are we going to take a multivitamin or are we gonna try to change our diets? We’re gonna try to change our environment, our behavior, our lifestyle. To be able to accommodate that, and that’s where your morals and ethics are gonna come into what you prioritize when you look at that blood work as well as the leadership in leading you, oh, you’re low in X, Y, Z Ghazenfer, why don’t you just go on this multivitamin, it will cover you, and then get back to what you’re doing.

Or, hey, Ghazenfer notice that you’re low in X, y, z, you, you’re showing signs of, of inflammation. You’re showing signs of, you know, other systemic disfiguration. We’re gonna start here. We’re gonna, we’re gonna evaluate your diet. We’re gonna evaluate your movement. We’re gonna evaluate family, we’re gonna evaluate different things.

We’re gonna help support you in reestablishing normal baseline first. But for now, since we’re seeing. This extreme over here, and I’m a little bit concerned about where this system is going here, and you’re showing signs of symptoms. This we might place you on a multivitamin for a short period of time to make sure that your body has what it needs. Interim while you are establishing better diet, movement, exercise, sleep, stress, family, and so forth and so forth. 

[00:49:57]  Ghazenfer: Thank you. Thank you. We’re well way over. So I’ll just give you 30 seconds this time only. If someone listening, feeling discouraged about their health journey what truth would you want them to hear right now?

[00:50:14] Dr. Dusty: Find a coach or a leader that aligns with your values. Find somebody that is going to come alongside you that knows what you believe in, that knows what you prioritize, and then helps establish a direction with simple steps that will help realign your health back to God’s original design and establish simplicity that aligns with what you value.

If you take a step back and you realize that your buckets of what you value, you’re not putting the time in, then your health practitioner should be helping you realign that and then looking at enough evidence and data to give you leadership to go in a direction that when you take a step or you put energy or you sacrifice into something, that it’s actually gonna make a difference and get you healthier.

And then please. Teach your next generation. Teach your next generation, and have an ecosystem that has resources to be able to do that, that aligns with your values, so that you are not just living older, but you’re living older, so that the next generation can also live older and so forth and so forth. Pay it forward. 

[00:51:32]  Ghazenfer: Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Dusty. It was really insightful conversation today. Finally, where can our audience learn more about your work, connect with you or take their first step upstream? 

[00:51:45] Dr. Dusty: Yeah, so you could find us on social media platforms at Upstream Health Hub. You could also find us at upstreamhealth.com. That’s upstream health.com. And there you’ll see our magazine. You’ll see our membership. And you can follow us on all of our social channels. You’ll find all of those there as well. 

[00:52:04]  Ghazenfer: Okay, sounds good. Thanks Dr. Dusty. It was great conversation with you. I’m sure our audience have learned a lot about the functional health, functional medicine and probably a lot of those will reach out to you if they have any additional question.

Thanks again for your insight. It was a pleasure to have you on Lessons from the Leap podcast. 

[00:52:24] Dr. Dusty: Yes. Thank you so much for having me, Ghazenfer, really appreciate it. It was an honor.