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Robin Daly
Hello, welcome to the Yes to Life show, now available within the broadcast schedule, on listen on demand, as a podcast, and on YouTube. I’m Robin Daly, host for the weekly show and also founder of Yes to Life, the UK charity the show’s named after that supports people with cancer in accessing the benefits of integrative medicine. My guest on the show today is a doctor who’s dedicated to the cause of integration in medicine not just in cancer care but across the board. Dr. Elizabeth Thompson is based in the Bristol area and she’s speaking to me from there today over the internet. Hi Elizabeth, it’s always a pleasure to have you on the Yes to Life show.

Dr Elizabeth Thompson
Hi Robin, yes, a pleasure to be with you again. It’s lovely.

Robin Daly
So for the benefit of anyone who doesn’t know who you are, I’d like to start out by saying that you’re an absolutely dedicated advocate of integrative medicine tirelessly working for change and very importantly you’re the founder and the principal of the National Centre for Integrative Medicine. So talking of the NCIM, I thought we’d start out today with some news. I believe things are on the move.

Dr Elizabeth Thompson
Yes, we’re very excited because just before the pandemic, we were thinking that we’d got to a place of growth that we needed our own home and then the pandemic struck, everything went online. Two of us basically running the organization single office. So we’re really excited. So January 2023, we have now arrived in a lovely wing of the wonderful Penny Braun charity. So Ham Greenhouse is the big extended house, home, beautiful grounds, trees. We are a number of like-minded organizations who are now co-locating on this beautiful site. So we finally have a home for the National Center. We’ve got consulting rooms, we’ve got our education, our clinical team. Yeah, and we’ve got obviously access to amazing parts of this beautiful building.

Robin Daly
Well that’s such great news, obviously for you to have such a lovely place to operate from, to have all the facilities is great, also to be co-located with other organisations that are like-minded must be an important part of it, I imagine.

Dr Elizabeth Thompson
Yes. And for example, I’ve just had a lunchtime stroll with the director of the Natural Academy, now training people in eco-therapy and health from connecting to green spaces. And so all of that can happen now with these like-minded individuals. But what we were talking about is the feeling that the wave of change has become unstoppable as more and more people, young doctors, young healthcare professionals just want to work in a different way. So it does, it’s refreshing and exciting at the moment.

Robin Daly
Well change is what I want to talk about today. That’s great. Yeah, this wave of change, how it’s happening, why it’s happening, what we can do to accelerate it, all that kind of thing. So it’s the nature of your work. You spend quite a bit of time looking at and thinking about the biomedical model that’s become the preeminent form of health care around the world and how well this serves or doesn’t serve the needs of those facing all the challenges of chronic disease. So I just want to start off by checking in on one score see that we agree and therefore we can make clear where our discussion is directed today and that is that the problems we’re going to discuss today don’t really apply to anything like the same degree in the field of acute emergency care. I suspect we both agree that the wonders of eye surgery, hip replacements, heart bypass operations are just that. Wonders that the current generation are deriving huge benefit from and the health service excels at delivering given the funds and the staff which they’re a bit short on at the moment. Would that be fair?

Dr Elizabeth Thompson
It is fair and we are so grateful for technologies, but it just feels like if we could look after those technologies and use them appropriately, there would be enough to go around. And I think the problem is that we’re finding that those kind of interventions cannot be given at the pace that people are needing, what they think could be that intervention. But actually, if we understood health at a deeper place or more, if you like, where is this illness coming from, but also seeing things in whole system. So since you’ve started there, I want to pick it up that one of our diploma doctors who, you know, we set up this two year diploma in integrative health care. She is a pediatrician working in A&E and in comes a little child who has come in repeatedly with very difficult upper respiratory tract infection. And so being taught around systems, she interviews more carefully the mother and the father to find that they were traumatized in this little boy’s birth. And were on high alert the whole time. And so actually understanding that this little boy within the family system, everyone was on high alert, really listening and understanding their concerns, it meant that suddenly he wasn’t bouncing into A&E again. So yes, I agree with you. These technologies are amazing. But my feeling is that if we can apply a systems approach to all of medicine, we would also get fewer people bouncing into.

Robin Daly
that’s fair enough. Okay so the reason I said that was because I wanted to sort of make it clear that we’re largely focusing our attention on the tidal wave of chronic disease that’s the growing scourge of us in the Western world. So maybe we could start with a bit of a compare and contrast. Maybe you could broadly describe firstly the biomedical view of chronic disease and the approach to treatment and then follow it up with a model that you’d like to see in its place.

Dr Elizabeth Thompson
Hmm. Well, big question, but it’s very interesting to see some of the figures showing that our children, meaning, you know, globally, are going to be less healthy than their parents. So this is the first time that this has happened that actually are our general health and potentially our longevity, although we’re not seeing that quite yet, is deteriorating.

Dr Elizabeth Thompson
And we’re really aware that our modern lifestyles, particularly stress, nutrition, exercise, we’re just losing our place of health and wellbeing. We’re eating processed foods that just really aren’t good for us. We’re not moving enough. And actually we’re very stressed. We’re overwhelmed a lot of the time. There’s too much stuff coming in. Now that would be kind of three elements of why we’re getting sicker potentially. But we’re also understanding that those three elements really impact on our metabolism. So the idea of metabolic health, which is a relatively new phrase, we’re realizing that there are lots of steroids circulating because of stress, that we’re not detoxifying because of lack of exercise. So I guess the biomedical model can’t keep up really with the pace of what we’re doing that is encouraging illness. I think that the biomedical model, as you say at the beginning, was so clever at rescuing us from an infection with antibiotics, from wear and tear with a hip replacement. But it kind of lost sight of prevention. And that as we lived longer, if we don’t look after this amazing body of ours, then it will deteriorate quicker. And you probably know I’ve got really interested in the longevity diet and fasting. And what we also realize is that we’re eating too much too regularly. And that is impacting negatively on our cells and our metabolism.

Robin Daly
So a sort of victim of our success in some ways and I feel that those sort of successes that the biomedical approach has had, a large part of why it’s managed to gain the position it has in the world, and it’s so powerful, but it seems like the problems that it was addressing are now different to the ones it was initially successful with, and it hasn’t really been able to respond to the change in the problems that it’s having to deal with. So yeah, do you want to just say how you feel the approach to healthcare needs to change? What is the direction of travel for the way that healthcare is viewed and the strategies that are employed to maintain people’s health?

Dr Elizabeth Thompson
Yes, so I think that, as you know, I’m passionate about the integrative medicine model, because within it, combining conventional and holistic and lifestyle approaches, but with a wellness model at its heart, and a prevention model, but also encompassing the mind body or whole person care approach, we start to evolve a model that can really meet the needs of an increasingly complex society. So levels of complexity have got really high now.

Dr Elizabeth Thompson
And we’re not able to solve things in a simple one plus one equals two kind of way anymore. Because we’re all interacting, you know, when you think of the turn of the last century, before antibiotics, children were dying of chest infections, there was very little international travel, people’s lives were quite active on the land or walking to work or all of those things that we took for granted. And I would honestly say that life was simpler. And we just watched complexity grow and grow and grow. So we know that when we’re dealing with complexity, we need diversity. So within the integrative medicine model, we’ve also got a whole range of approaches. That might suit people, but also used in combination, might allow us to have those high impact, high cost interventions left towards the end of our choice menu. And looking at some of those other lifestyle and holistic approaches that can really support health and wellbeing. Just one other thing, which I mentioned earlier, but just as well as seeing the body as a mind-body connected interface, I think the idea of the system, the body as a system, rather than seeing the body as parts.

Dr Elizabeth Thompson
because the body is a complex system interacting in a complex relational space with others, family, society, global health. So why I think the time now is for integrative medicine is the COVID-19 pandemic really, really highlighted the fact that we could be impacted globally. So actually we might be just going along with our lives and then suddenly an external virus that hits so many of the population suddenly then triggers a whole range of stressors that we were all subject to. And so solving that, you could see governments bewildered. How do we solve such a complex problem? And again, what a lot of governments did was they applied like a singular solution that everybody should get vaccinated. Now, obviously the vaccines, amazing technology, particularly for the vulnerable, but we stopped talking about, how can we boost the immune system? How can we develop resilience? What can we do to actually help us fight off the infection? So I felt it really brought into perspective, what’s needed now, which is a range of conventional lifestyle and holistic approaches all applied to a particular condition.

Robin Daly
Interesting. Well, just in the news today struck me, they come out with another vast raft of people that they’re going to be recommending to go on statins, people who are not sick yet. And, you know, as an approach, this is something which is actually going to deliver side effects to a large number of those people, which over the long term are inevitably going to be damaging. And it’s based on science, which I think a lot of people would agree is well out of date, the idea that lowering cholesterol actually does improve your chances of not having a heart attack. So we have this delivery happening and it said in the news at the same time, as a sort of afterthought, it said at the end, of course, this recommendation is being made alongside lifestyle improvements. And in a way, that was a bit of a first that it’s not just the statins on their own, you know, they were actually mentioning the lifestyle improvements. But of course, interesting enough, if you look at nice recommendations for things, lifestyle improvements is at the top of the list. It’s actually before the the drugs come in, but it never gets presented in that way ever. I was quite shocked when I found that out. I thought, really? Nice recommends lifestyle changes first. How often does a doctor actually recommend that first and actually mean it? You know, not given the drugs immediately and say, I would be good if you did some lifestyle changes on the side. So, you know, I recognise there’s a move there to accommodate the fact that lifestyle changes are something to do with it. But as yet, it’s still like it’s not news along with the statins, the statins of the news.

Dr Elizabeth Thompson
I think that’s right. And I think we’ve got we’ve got to be wise to vested interest, you know, that you’re quite right. Nice guidance lifestyle in a vast range of conditions. Yet somehow there’s a disconnect between what we might do in practice as a doctor, and what we’re actually being advised to do. But somehow the message has got through to us, that we should apply a statin. And as you know, some of the research that’s emerging, I don’t think it’s confirmed yet, but is lowering cholesterol over time good for brain health, for example. So what we’ve got is a fantastic opportunity now. And we have got, you know, doctors really leading the way in the British Society of lifestyle medicine, we’ve, you know, got David Unwin reversing type two diabetes, that the move is there. But we have got these companies, drug companies that know that if everyone on the planet has a statin, that’s a hell of a lot of money. And so I just don’t think we can have this conversation without acknowledging that. But it’s something deeper than that, that I’ve struggled with, which is also about putting the power back to the individual. And the responsibility, you know, that sometimes we want the quick fix or we’ve been frightened, you know, so we find our cholesterol going up. And we know that that’s a risk factor for stroke and, you know, heart attack and a whole range of things, we get frightened, we jump on a statin. Sometimes we get side effects, although there was an interesting piece of research that showed that people who thought they would get side effects got more side effects in terms of placebo study. But my feeling is that how do we change medicine, so that the healthcare professionals have the time to really take on health activation, you know, where like, for example, my husband who’s a professor of medicine has introduced a question now into the case histories for medical student training. Just a simple question, which is, what have you done this week or in the past month that supports your health and well being? This was regarded as radical when it was put in, but it is changing the nature of the conversation to I want to learn what you’re doing so that I can support it, rather than hey, I’m a really clever doctor, I can tell you what to do. So actually, this empowerment model is part of what I believe could be the transformational element into change. But it’s actually quite tricky. Because when you train a doctor to intervene, and then you attach the intervention to drugs or surgery, it’s very hard for the doctor not to do that without feeling he’s he or she is not delivering. And it might be a pharmacist or a practice nurses, not necessarily about doctors, but certainly doctors feel attached at the moment to their drugs. And somehow, this movement for change has got to help doctors get reassured that they’re that their job is not to fix people, their job is to support someone to fix themselves.

Robin Daly
Interesting. Well I mean it’s quite striking that you know doctors go to medical school and they learn about drugs. Yet number one on the list of nice recommendations recommended by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence right this is what you clinicians should be doing is recommending lifestyle change but they’re not trained in what lifestyle changing looks like. So how can they deliver number one on the list the top priority.

Dr Elizabeth Thompson
So that’s changing in a patchy way, it needs to really change quickly now, but for example Nutritank, a group of medical students led by Ian Broadly, Ali Jaffee, you know they now are lobbying for more training in nutrition and it’s coming in. My husband in Bristol University, they have set up lifestyle hubs so that they’re getting taught and this is happening around the country. And interestingly again, along with NICE recommending lifestyle, the GMC, the General Medical Council recommends that doctors become knowledgeable in lifestyle and complementary therapies. So they’re still acknowledging that doctors need to know about these things, but somehow the paradigm, there’s a sticky bit, this paradigm shift is sticking a bit in terms of really moving into mainstream lifestyle, lifestyle first where possible.

Robin Daly
Hmm, all right, well we want to look into those a little bit. So obviously I’m a devotee of integrative medicine myself for cancer in particular obviously but you know somebody comes along and they ask you well come on why are you banging on about this integrative medicine we’ve got this great system we can deliver all these wonderful things why is what you’re promoting so much better what do you what do you say that it will actually deliver that current systems aren’t delivering

Dr Elizabeth Thompson
So the research isn’t there yet, but it’s emerging that actually an integrative medicine approach, say applied to cancer, may actually improve outcomes and post-treatment quality of life. Because the powerful treatments we need to use for cancer are often damaging to the body. So if you’re combining treatments that care for the body and care for its deeper recovery, then you’re going to create more quality of life. But the other thing is that in terms of integrative medicine, mind-body spirit, when our lives are threatened, actually what happens is that we are in existential pain. We’re in the pain of, oh my God, I might not actually live for much longer. And so part of the journey that needs support into either living with cancer and perhaps dying younger than you might want to, for me there’s something here around meaning-making, around stories, around our own personal identity. And a lot of the cancer treatments just don’t have time for the individual. Whereas I think integrative medicine really honours the individual as kind of, that’s the way you relate to someone, and everything else follows that. So you know this conference that we set up last year, integrative and personalised medicine conference, over 900 delegates, hugely popular, again reflecting the movement for change. But I think that integrative and personalised, when you are dealing with any illness, it’s much, much more than any drug or treatment that you get that supports the ability to deal with it, build resilience, maintain hope and find a fuller recovery. So I just think there’s so much more in integrative medicine, and I think the challenge is that it’s potentially more expensive because you might need a range of approaches. The only thing is I think that you could save on other expensive conventional treatments that you don’t need because your quality of life is better.

Robin Daly
Yeah, I think there’s this thing about the walking wounded. You were talking about the fact that we’ve got a longer lifespan, but it has been seen that obviously in recent decades, many people have spent that extended lifespan in pain, discomfort, or with degenerative brain disease or whatever. It really has not been quality life and it’s been hugely costly. There’s been all this polypharmacy going on with people on 10, 12 drugs all the time needing full time care. It’s enormously expensive actually. And that’s the result of a system of treating people, which maybe is not thorough enough in getting to the root of the problem and just dealing with the symptoms.

Dr Elizabeth Thompson
And also, I think coming into a sense of being in order of things, you know, like one of the things integrative medicine really has within it is this idea of, for example, our circadian rhythms, waking with the sun and sleeping without light. And, you know, all of these things that tell us that we’re connected to nature, we’re part of nature, and actually, we die. So we do have a huge bill for people who maybe are not even aware of their own existence, but are being kept alive with technologies. And this is a difficult conversation. But if death was more acceptable, then more of us might have the chance to what’s called, you know, this kind of way of living and then dying quickly, a square wave death, as it’s called, living living there, and then dying quickly.

Robin Daly
Correctly, right.

Dr Elizabeth Thompson
So, so, so, but again, for me, that’s part of the, of the spirituality, the philosophy, the meaning making the psychology, all of these things that allow us to make sense of our lives.

Robin Daly
So you’re saying that apart from impacting on our quality of life and maybe our length of life that integrated medicine is actually addressing areas which are not addressed at all by conventional medicine.

Dr Elizabeth Thompson
Yes, and I think the other thing that’s really coming into the fore now is the idea of because we’re connected, we need community. And we’re realizing that, you know, communities can support each other into recovery. And I think, you know, that is really being taken on in the world of lifestyle medicine, you know, in other words, having groups of people that are seen with health care professionals, gaining knowledge, gaining insight, sharing stories. I’m just reading James Maskell’s book, Community Cure, where, you know, he’s pulling those things together. And, you know, he’s combining ideas around functional medicine, where you get to the root of an illness, I see that as very much part of an integrative health care model, but where then you connect people into their communities. So, and, you know, we’re talking about potentially, no expense when a group of people get together and decide to love each other and support each other. So I guess that’s the other thing about this idea of systems medicine, is you can start to apply an intervention, you know, within a relational space, you know, having counseling, but within a community space where you start to resource communities in ways that they value.

Robin Daly
Interesting. Yeah. Well, I love all this exploration into the kind of, well, what it means to be human and one of the things that really support our wellbeing, you know, and they go much further than you think on the face of it, don’t they? The element of connectedness you’re talking about of us all being one is actually, it impacts on our health and wellbeing day to day, as we’re finding out and our connection with nature and everything. So, yeah, fascinating area. And, I mean, I’ve often looked back at, like, my parents’ generation and I’ve seen them as being under immense stress because of, well, they’ve been through a lot of, you know, they’ve been through a war, for a start. But they’ve also been part of a society which was extremely abusive, really, in terms of hierarchies and all this kind of thing. People really had to grit their teeth and carry on, you know, they had to be very stoic in the face of all that. But there were lifestyle aspects which countered that on a day-to-day basis, one of them, an obvious one, being hard work. You know, you could have an immense amount of rage, if you like, at your situation, which is completely unjust, for example. But if you’re working hard each day, that somehow it’s getting work through your body, it’s not just building up and building up. And I think that’s true about stress, generally, that, you know, the ways people live enabled them to deal with them better in some way than we are now, when we have lack of activity, lack of connection, all these things that are now missing.

Dr Elizabeth Thompson
Yeah, I love our allotment, you know, just getting down digging. And, you know, the effort of digging, but also just pulling food out of the ground and cleaning it and, you know, and I can just feel, you know, all those concerns just ebbing away because I’m just focusing, you know, on on on something fairly energetic. So I, and I think that we we are really starting to get this again. But it’s just how to support people who might not easily be able, you know, to either have the time or to, you know, have a green space close by

Robin Daly
Well I have to say I’m very glad this stuff’s being talked about there. I mean this is another of the sort of silver linings of the pandemic is that it came into being on the news basically that relationship to nature matters you know that wasn’t really a thing that was talked about except in certain circles up until then. So yeah it’s good.

Dr Elizabeth Thompson
even tree hugging, I think is allowed now.

Robin Daly
So I want to come back to talk about money now. You were talking a bit earlier about this. So we in the UK we’ve got a particular health care model which in theory is nothing to do with money. You and I probably would say actually it’s a lot to do with money because that’s driving the whole thing. But on the face of it we have this free delivery of health care here which they don’t have in other countries. But at the same time we have a great disparity in the amount of integrative medicine that’s available to people. The development of integrative medicine has been far slower in the UK than some other countries. And to me this is very closely tied to the fact that whereas in society as a whole we find that when we deal with anybody who offers us services nowadays we don’t expect to be told what we’re going to get and like it. We’re the customer. They ask us what we want and we tell them and we hope they deliver good service. In health care not really hasn’t happened. I feel we’re more like the beneficiaries of charities than we are as customers and we’re lucky to get it kind of attitude. But you know another country with a health care model that we don’t like as much like a business based one they get better integrated medicine. Why? Because they got customers who like this stuff. So it’s a bit of a conundrum. What do we do about this in Britain?

Dr Elizabeth Thompson
I think this is a really huge question. I think, I think we might need to move towards a two tier system, because it’s already happened really, that lots of people are paying for care they can’t get at the moment. But it doesn’t offer equity, because at the moment, if you’ve got money, you can get even an x ray, you know, so one of our colleagues fell quite badly, has she got a fractured arm, she’s been told she’ll wait two days in A&E. So if it doesn’t settle down, she’s going to pay for an x ray. So I think, I think it, it’s really difficult at the moment, but I think we need, we need to acknowledge this, the system is in crisis. I know we’re hearing that, but I’m not sure we’re acknowledging that, you know, we’re at a point where we need a new model. And I know that America and France and lots of other countries that are that everyone is in a pickle at the moment in, in America, where integrative medicine has grown, actual provision of, of medical care, it has the worst mortality rate for child mortality rate, you know, compared to many other countries that are like, what’s happening here?

Robin Daly
That model isn’t working in that way, is it?

Dr Elizabeth Thompson
It’s not working. And so what’s really difficult, and we know this for ourselves, when our bodies get broken, it’s really hard to start a new era, isn’t it? What happens is we start to attend to increasingly crisis-driven symptoms and problems. So my feeling is that’s where we are in the UK. But if we could just bite the bullet and say, look, I mean, like to hear that everyone’s going to go on a statin, using that money.

Dr Elizabeth Thompson
to really educate in lifestyle around nutrition and exercise and stress management. You would, you would start to, I believe you would start to drop your costs because people are, are basically the cost of the health services because we’re running an interventionist model. You’re asking me about about, about do, do we allow, in a way, the idea that a lot of people have insurance and are using insurance? Like, do we have a two tier system? I mean, I don’t know the answer to this Robin, all all I know is that if we could start from the grassroots upwards to really emphasize prevention, we’ve got to start somewhere and pull out of this intervention back into prevention, then we might see the rate of spend slow down. But we’ve got to invest in it.

Robin Daly
Right. Well, I mean, governments have talked about that stuff for a very long time about making, you know, care in the community. People actually learn how to look after themselves, they become independent, educational, all that kind of thing. And so that would all fit with government ideas, but it’s I don’t think it’s really been happening. And we just have this increasing burden on the hospital system all the time. And

Dr Elizabeth Thompson
Could I also put it back to you, Robin, like what would you do?

Robin Daly
Well the thing is that the UK public love the NHS system of free at the point of delivery. It’s got massive support but because of that we have this problem where basically the lack of input by the public into the system because they’re not customers means that we’re told what we’re going to get. So this is the problem we’ve got to overcome. I don’t think it’s that we need another financial model it’s just that there are problems with the one we’ve got. It may not be the finances that need to change but some it’s more of a societal and cultural change that needs to happen whereby we are customers at last. We become customers. The fact that we actually pay for the health service gets recognized and we don’t get treated as beneficiaries and you know there should be much higher patient representation in decision making as to what is delivered as health care. Well you know at present do we have any say really? I mean there’s this massive industry of complementary alternative medicine has built up over the last few decades huge and all of it is we have to pay for out of our pockets. It doesn’t go anywhere near the hospital yet it’s what we want because we’re paying for it. So you know how can we translate that into change within the health care system?

Dr Elizabeth Thompson
Yeah. And I think that the, you know, the UK is has had this incredible tribe of general practitioners who’ve been gate keeping. They’ve been kind of often protecting people from over intervention, you know, from diagnostics, you know, so and they are very, very expensive things, because a lot of the time, you know, people on the front line in general practice know that stress is impacting a lot of people. But the problem for me is, is that tribe of general practitioners is now telling people what they can’t use. So like, you know, that decision to stop any GP prescribing homeopathic or herbal products and paracetamol, you know, three of the cheapest things you could prescribe. And so I agree, it’s not only the patients, it’s actually the doctors being told, you can’t do this, you can’t do that. And because you know, we’re so heavily regulated as doctors, we go through our annual appraisal every year, we are afraid of getting things wrong. You know, we tend to stick within the lines.

Dr Elizabeth Thompson
So I think I’m really with you on this, you know, I had a recent thing of ringing my GP practice, and I was imagining, you know, going to Waitrose and, you know, saying, I’d, you know, I’d like a cauliflower. No, you don’t want a cauliflower. You know, you want a jar of peanut butter, you know, and then fighting me, you know, like, so I’m totally with you. And I’m, I’m wondering, you know, again, what could be the shift that would, we talk about evidence based medicine, but of course, we know that that is such a variable feast in the real world of medicine. That how how do we kind of relax this gate keeping so that general practitioners can recommend things that particularly that the person’s already using, you know, and found benefit.

Robin Daly
Yeah well I say as far as I’m concerned until the customers are more involved in that it won’t happen because if we’re not having any say in it then somebody else is and we know who that is, it’s commerce basically, is all the time working to exclude any competition that’s inevitable. That’s what the homeopathy and the herbs are, they’re competition for drugs and so let’s get them out and so I mean you know the only other place that pressure could come from is from government and of course commerce places pressure on government as well. So as if you don’t do what we like then we’ll go and move our business to another country. So you know it’s big enough the business of healthcare in order to push around government so I feel like the only force that stands any chance of delivering better healthcare in the style that people want is the one that’s got us this far in integrated medicine so far which is the public. It’s a public movement integrative care and it hasn’t come from within medicine and so you know that’s the force that’s going to drive this change. We need more access to our own healthcare.

Dr Elizabeth Thompson
I do think, though, that the force for change has come from the public and within the healthcare system. And when those two things meet, you know, because remember that the healthcare professionals are also patients. And, you know, I think that that was the pivot point for me when I got ill. But I thought, Oh, I get it now, I can’t just rely on my GP. You know, I need my acupuncturist and my homeopath. And I, you know, I need to meditate, and I need to eat good food. And, and so I kind of, I kind of got it. And, and there are lots of healthcare professionals really getting it now. And so I believe that that could overcome commerce. And I agree that those are such strong forces. But I’m looking at where things are coming together. And I think where things are really coming together in healthcare at the moment is in lifestyle.

Dr Elizabeth Thompson
lifestyle medicine just if we keep going with all of those things you can do that you know like you’re quite right that the patient wants the doctor to say well actually let’s look at your food because we were just talking about statins but you know an anti-inflammatory diet you know I I must say this to every patient I meet just I say to them in a nutshell you know you want to move to a mainly plant-based diet keeping good quality animal products to a minimum and having plenty of herbs and spices so you know I’ve just got a book Alan Desmond I think a gastroenterologist has just written a book called you know with lots of recipes plant-based medicine you know so you know that is unusual that’s not something that would have happened ten years ago mainstream gastroenterologist publishing a book about plant-based diet to improve gut health so I I really do believe the movement is occurring within both systems and when they can both meet it will be unstoppable

Robin Daly
I think that’s absolutely correct. The only question I’ve got about it is, I suppose, is to do with the rate of change. To me, in the UK, it’s not so different, the rate of change to the old Max Planck adage about science advancing one funeral at a time. It’s actually is advancing at about the rate at which the old guys are dying off or retiring, you know? And we haven’t got time for that anymore. We actually need to move science forward a lot faster than that because things are going downhill. To me, I think one of the exciting things I feel is driving change within healthcare, coming from professionals, is to do with the fact that a lot of key figures these days are not kind of white Brits. They’re people who they may have been born in Britain but their cultural heritage is different and they actually embrace lifestyle advice, if you like, and lifestyle medicine in a way that we’ve been taught not to in Britain. And to them, it’s much more natural. And so they speak about it much more freely. They accept it much more freely. They see it as an essential part of being well and they don’t mind saying so. And that, I feel, is great. Some of the great leaders in, you know, speaking out within medicine about lifestyle change, they’ve got another heritage. They, you know, they’re quite clearly an Indian background or whatever, you know? And they’re sort of bringing all of that sort of Ayurvedic stuff and the meditation and things that are so much part of the culture to us, which is blooming brilliant.

Dr Elizabeth Thompson
And we’ve been holding on, haven’t we, in Britain, you know, to our colonial past, you know, somehow being superior in our.

Dr Elizabeth Thompson
And, and I, I see that rapidly changing, you know, so the, the idea of being, you know, stiff upper lip, and we don’t attend to emotional health, let alone the idea that we’re mind, body, spirit, and then along comes a whole community of doctors who are really supportive of Aruveda, you know, which is an ancient Indian practice of, of mind, body, spirit, yoga is part of Aruveda. And I’m finding young doctors, you know, training in yoga, getting excited about Aruveda, even though Aruveda, I, I experienced it as stranger than homeopathy. The idea of the doshas, this idea that, you know, we’ve got constitutional elements, but I’m finding young doctors, you know, getting really interested in, in that. So I think, again, because we’re going from local to global,

Dr Elizabeth Thompson
things are opening up and influences are coming to bear. And I agree with you. I think that it’s, that is part of what’s shifting now is that we can’t hold on, you know, to this place where we know everything, we don’t.

Robin Daly
Right, well, we’re out of time. Really interesting. Thanks so much. I mean, just a personal thanks for all your brilliant work that you do. In fact, you care so much about this area and you’re working tirelessly to bring change about, which we all desperately need, even if we don’t know it. I certainly know it and I truly appreciate what you do. So thanks for that and thanks for coming on today to talk about it.

Dr Elizabeth Thompson
Thank you so much. And I’m sure those people that are listening will have ideas. But if this was easy, these changes, we’d have done it. And it’s not easy. It’s very easy. But thank you, Robin. Great to talk to you.

Robin Daly
Well, as Dr. Thompson said, the change we want to see is far from easy or straightforward, but at least it is happening. It’s just a question of how quickly. Is it fast enough to meet the rapidly changing health care needs of our times? Well, I’d say no, not yet, so we need to continue to build on success as achieved to increase the momentum, which Dr. Thompson is clearly intent on. Thanks for listening to this week’s show. Please do make a point of tuning in again next week, and I’ll be hosting another expert from the world of integrative medicine for cancer on the next Yes To Life show.