Episode 14 - "The Father of Functional Medicine" - Dr. Jeff Bland's Eight-Decade Journey

Erik In today's podcast for the root cause, business and medicine, our special guest, Dr. Jeff Bland, is somebody that's well known within the functional medicine and integrative medicine world. And it's really fun to have him on today. He's published over 120 peer-reviewed uh research articles on nutrition.

Uh he's written over a dozen books, uh both geared towards clinicians as well as the public on nutrition and how we can improve our overall lifestyles and health based upon our nutritional approach. So it was really a joy to have him today. And in fact, he recently just published the paradigm shifting future of healthcare in the IMCG, which is the Integrative Medicine Journal. And we'll have a link for that in our post today.

But Davin, what were some of the key takeaways that you got from today's interview or conversation? Davin Well, I mean I'm just in awe of this man. You know, he's contributed so much to the field. Not just functional medicine, but medicine in general, and hearing his story and how he got started.

It's so inspirational Um and you know, it's like the who's who of of who laid the foundation for for the for the for the world that we're in. And um it's really amazing that he had the foresight and the the I don't know the wherewithal to sort of pursue that against, you know, sort of the collective thinking of the time. Erik Yeah, I know I love that. And I think one of the key things that he that came up for me today too was this element of resiliency that thing you know things can repair and heal despite what they've been exposed to, uh and and you'll you'll find that part of his story really fascinating, as well as the fact that, like all of us, he had a turning point, and I want you to listen for that, uh, when he decided, okay, Time to shift gears and really go after who I really am and what I what I have to offer the world of medicine and the world in general Any other thoughts on that?

Davin No, I couldn't agree more. I don't want to steal any more of his thunder. I'll just um say that I've attended the thought leader uh consortium which is the conference that uh PM PLMI um hosts you know each year and it's amazing. And both those organizations um are a great way, you know, for someone like me, um, to to get into self-learning.

You know, there's tons of, you know, online courses and videos as well as those conferences if you're Wanting to learn more about functional and integrative medicine, those are two places where you'll get a lot of a lot of information Erik Yeah, I love that. And if you're interested in learning more about Jeff Bland, you can go to uh Jeffrey Bland, drjefferybland dot com and learn about all the amazing things that he is involved with and we hope you enjoy today's podcast. Welcome to the Root Cause Business of Medicine podcast, where we explore what's broken in healthcare And what we can do about it.

I'm Dr. Erik Lundquist, and I've been practicing functional medicine for the past 15 to 20 years. I'm excited to co-host this podcast with my brother. Dr.

Davin Davin Lunquist, who's just beginning his journey into functional medicine. We come from different points on the path But we do share a common goal. We want to rethink how medicine is practiced and help others do the same. Erik The US healthcare system is in crisis, rising costs, declining outcomes.

And physician burnout at an all-time high. But you know we found a different way. Another way. A better way Davin On this podcast, we dive into real stories from medical professionals who've stepped away from the traditional model, kind of like me, and have found a new purpose in integrative, functional, and alternative approaches to care.

Erik These are authentic conversations with practitioners and friends who've redefined success not just for themselves but for their patients and communities. Davin Whether you're a clinician feeling stuck, a student seeking direction, or just curious about what is possible, you're in the right place. Erik This is the Root Cause Business of Medicine Podcast. Welcome to another episode of the Root Cause Business of Medicine podcast, where today we have a special guest Dr.

Jeff Bland, who a lot of us call the father of functional medicine. And I I thought it would be great to have Jeff on and give his perspective, his story. of uh uh the the long perspective of this. Um when you're when you're the at the beginning stages of a revolution, uh sometimes you you don't really have the foresight to see where this is going.

Um I think you you did have some of that, Jeff, but but I think as you're looking back on it now you can see probably there were Amazing steps, amazing people, uh, amazing circumstances that led you to where you've arrived at today. And and I thought it would be really, really helpful for a lot of our listeners who have heard you at conferences. um read articles that you've published, uh, to really get a sense for how did how did that happen for you from the beginning? um to evolve into a place where you were able to influence so many um uh significantly in this in this in this direction.

So Thanks for being on the podcast today, Jeff. And we'd love to hear kind of your story from the beginning and just kind of tell us how how you got into the functional medicine field and and how this awoke in you, this amazing um persona and uh educator and mentor uh that we all have appreciated so much. Jeff Bland Well, Erik and Devon, thank you both. And I'm you know, uh uh I try to uh condense this because a a lot of what is my life is probably very boring.

But I think there are some things that are at least uh interesting as it relates to tr this uh trajectory I'm coming up to my 80th birthday here in a couple of months, so I look back at eight decades and I think, you know, how do how did this all uh unfold? So I'll try to to summarize. Um I think if my mother were still living and you asked her the question, you know, what was I like as a young person, she would say I was always in search of an answer. I I was uh very curious And I really wanted to know uh from early on why people got sick.

And you know, you first you study infectious disease and you learn something about microbes and And then you start to say, well, look, there are people that get sick that don't have infectious disease. You know, what causes their sickness? And and back in the early days of my life, going back now into the fifties and and early sixties, um, the dominant thought was it's all in your genes, right? You you you have genetics that kind of somehow transforms itself into these disease entities later in life.

So we don't know exactly how it happened, but somehow it was in your genes. That was the the model. And uh that never really seemed very satisfying to me, quite honestly, and when I was in college and I I was um Uh started off at UCLA, ended up at uh a new uh California campus, UC Irvine. I was in the first graduating class there in uh 1967.

And um I real was very fortunate uh in being at that new new Cal campus that they didn't have a lot of graduate students in postdocs, so we undergraduates got a lot of uh uh attention by the faculty that probably would have been paid on their postdocs. So I it stimulated I I got involved with research. I I worked with Dr. Akshur with Roland.

uh who was noted and ul ultimately won an oil-up rise in chemistry for his discovery of how free on gases were depleting ozone layer it. And um so it it opened up broader questions for me. And, you know, here's a guy that was a physical chemist that ultimately became a person who changed the whole course of atmospheric uh science basically and and the way people live and and the use of refrigerants. And so um I I it broadened my view as to, you know, what kind of questions could you ask and where would you go to find answers and staying out of silos, trying to to think about uh people with different disciplines and have perspectives.

So that didn't led me ultimately to medical school and Medical school really uh I turns out as I look back probably both because of my age, I got out of this college fairly early, so I was uh only six what was I? I was only eighteen when I got of college. So I was fairly young to get into medical school and um I think I probably wasn't uh mature enough to really accept um, you know, what you had to do and I I would um I would push back pretty hard on the educational curriculum, which was a lot of memorization, and I kept asking questions why.

And uh eventually my advisor, you know, in my in my second year said, you know, you You're kind of disruptive asking all these questions. Um and you know, maybe it'd be better for you to be in a PhD program because you could ask any of the questions you want over there. And so I I made that uh transition in in into my third year to go into a PhD program, which was the right, I think, decision for me and my personality 'cause it opened up the opportunity to connect with my medical interests into the into a different level of inquiry.

Erik Right. Jeff Bland Um then ultimately then um in nineteen seventy got my first academic position uh at the University of Pisa Sound in Tacoma, Washington, where I was a joint uh professor of chemistry and environmental science. They were just starting an environmental science program. That was the first year of Earth Day Um, and it was there were a lot of universities were putting environmental science uh programs into their curriculum.

So that was a really great opportunity for me again to be uh stretched because now I was uh teaching all sorts of chemistry classes and I was also building an environmental science program from the ground up. And it turned out in the state of Washington at the time, this is against nineteen seventy Uh it just formed a new department in the state called the Department of Ecology. And so it was becoming this our state of Washington was becoming more sensitive to environmental issues and air, water, and land use and so forth And so I was able to kind of build into that with the development of the environmental science program at the university a connection into state government and the policies and programs and and get some um research projects going, particularly related to in Tacoma, Washington, the largest copper smelter in the in the western United States uh which was um a major the the major source of sulfur oxide pollution in the whole Pacific Northwest.

Erik Wow. Jeff Bland And um the uh Tacoma smelter as it was called was a sarco American smelting and refining had a history of sixty years on this facility, uh on the water that uh uh ultimately became a superfund site 'cause of all the arsenic pollution and all the tailings from the smelter that had gone into the water. And so we started measuring um atmospheric uh pollution. Um and at first it was kind of a fugitive operation because they didn't want us on the property Uh and so we had to kind of stealth in at night and put our measuring equipment out and and then run back before it got too light and we were found out.

But ultimately we were able to identify that there was very, very high arsenic uh levels of pollutants in the air and th they would only uh turn on the on this part of the plant, the arsenic oxide production part of the plant, when it was dark. And um 'cause it would produce a bunch of uh gases that they didn't want people to know about. And and it would they actually had a relationship with the community there, this the small mining community was a suburb of Tacoma, Washington, such that if there was an inversion layer and the the pollution at night got close to the ground, it would kill the lawns.

And they ended up uh having a deal with the people that lived there, they replaced the lawns if the if the lawns were all dead. Uh people weren't asking the question about their lungs. They were asking the question about their lawns. And so um ultimately we met a uh um in the Department of Ecology, the uh medical director, uh I still rem remember him very well, Sam Milhan was his name.

And um he got very concerned about uh kids' health because there were two elementary schools that were right down uh well an el elementary school and a middle school. Ragged down from the stack, the tall stack, was the largest uh smokestack in the in the western United States because they felt this was the uh The solution to pollution is dilution, right? Was their thought. You just build a stall a taller stack and spread it wider.

And um What what they what he worried about was were the kids in the elementary school that was just across the block actually from the from the smokestack were were being imp impaired. Um, so we he started getting urine samples and we started analyzing them and we found a very, very high level of arsenic in the in the urine of these kids. And so we then formed a group called the Group Against Smog and Pollution, GASP, G A S P, with the Washington Lung Association and started to uh collaborate with Sam Milham and the Department of Ecology uh in trying to get the smelter to recognize its responsibility to clean it clean up its act.

This became a sixty minutes uh uh story in which they traced around in the plant with all the arsenic oxide um the white powder all around. and um and interviewing some of the workers in the plant that had nasal perforations and had uh had uh various kinds of cancers So it became quite a national issue. This was in the early 1970s. And um ultimately there was a big trial.

uh of which we were representing the plaintiffs and the smelter was the defending itself. They brought all their attorneys in, I think they had sixteen attorneys for these hearings that were uh down there on the on the smelter property actually. And the long and short of it is eventually the the smelter recognized it was going to be more expensive then they could justify to clean up the plant. And um they would have to do electrolytic electrolytic refining and it was just more costly than they were willing to do, 'cause they could move the plant to the Philippines and do it there So they shut down the plant and became a super fun site and it took um what is it now?

Uh well the better part of twenty-five, maybe thirty years to clean it up. Now it's become a beautiful park of Tacoma. It's it's it's the longest uh shoreside park, I think, of any city in the western United States. It connects to uh Point Defiance Park all the way downtown.

It's a beautiful now kind of regraded, but they had to take everything out and and redo it. Um, so that was a real education for me across the area of health, of the broad kind of because it goes from public health to individual health when you're starting to talk to these people. And um and then you see how people rationalize it. The the the historical people were saying, their medical people were saying the reason these kids had high urinary arsenic was that on Friday they were given fish in the cafeteria.

And so they were having fish related arsenic in their urine had nothing to do with the air they were breathing. Yeah, and I went to the body. Erik And where did the fish get the arsenic, right? Jeff Bland Yeah exact exactly right.

Yeah. So um that ultimately then led me into I'm doing quite a bit of work in the area of nutrition that I never ever thought that I would be pulled into, and that was a consequence of uh my first graduate student who wanted to do work on vitamin E, which took us into the whole field of antioxidants and oxidative stress. We wrote articles in the early, well, the mid-70s actually on oxidative stress. And and free radical oxidation and, you know, uh uh free radical aging.

Um and so that got me under the lecture circuit, uh started talking with physicians about this, and I found out in the seventies that You start talking about these areas and it was like a blank st uh stare. I mean, docs didn't have any idea about these things at all. And um So I took that on as a challenge. And so we started to to do more work and different types of nutrition research and publishing, including essential fatty acids in the late 70s, omega-3s.

And um That ultimately got me to uh be appointed um to the as the president of the Northwest Academy of Preventive Medicine in Seattle. Which was my first real job of organizing physicians around educational programs. And we started bringing speakers in. We had Linus Pauling as our keynote speaker for the first meeting.

And um That got me into uh inviting different people to come speak that had all sorts of interesting different perspectives than certainly than I had been educated about. And uh at one of those meetings I met uh what who is now my lifelong friend and and absorged brother, David Jones. uh and we were both sitting next to one another. We we didn't know one another at all.

He was a medical director of uh uh medical doctor from National Oregon, about the same age as as I was at the time. We were young Turks at that time. And um At the break, we were just informally introducing one another to each other, and uh one of us said, you know, this conference, uh I think it could be done a lot better. I think we can do it, we could make, we could make a better conference.

And so he and I talked throughout the two days of the conference and eventually we made the decision, okay, then let's do that. Let's let's kind of take over the Northwest Academy of Preventive Medicine. He formed the Southern Academy of Preventive Medicine in Ashland, and we started doing our own programs, basically. And that was a really a tremendous step for me because uh David Jones is one of the most thoughtful, engaged, committed family docs that I've ever met.

I mean, his relationship with his patients was superb and he was always um Well, he was a young Turk. He was he was a uh a thrown in the saddle of the uh the local medical people because he was thinking differently and doing different things. And um so he and I I think really had a valued uh collaboration because he could bring his medical thoughts about being a doc to my biochemical kind of science geekism to form this kind of new thought process. And then the third part of it, of course, was the fortune I had to be married to a woman who was um uh had her master's degree in management, uh Susan Bland And who said, you know, Jeff, you're traveling a whole bunch and you're meeting all these interesting people and you know you keep talking about what this system could be like.

Maybe we ought to host a meeting. This is 1989. uh in which you bring some of these people in, invite them if they want to come in and we'll have a whiteboard discussion about uh what would the ideal healthcare system look like if you took licensure and reimbursement out. You just talked about what would be the attributes.

And so that was uh Uh 1989 was the first meeting she uh she put together in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada on Vancouver Island. We had about 45 people come in from different disciplines, people that I'd met around the world. And it turned out to be a really successful discussion. So successful people said, let's do it again next year.

So in nineteen ninety we did it uh again. And it was then that I I came up with the concept that what we've been talking about was function. And I said, maybe we should call this functional medicine. And uh the group pretty much pushed back on that because they said, well, I could see why you picked that word, but you know, if you think of the way um Function was considered in 1990 in medicine.

It was either geriatric rehabilitative medicine or it was psychosomatic medicine. It's all in your mind, functional. So it doesn't have a really great reputation But I said, you know, I've been watching the literature and I'm seeing s articles now are that are talking about functional endocrinology, functional radiology, functional cardiology. So maybe it's going to change its its um definition based on new science.

And so you know, maybe because we hosted the meeting, people kind of gave in and said, okay, let's give it a whirl. We're going to call it functional medicine. So we had our first international meeting then uh in 1991. uh uh of the institute for functional medicine that my my wife and I put together to kind of bring this together, thinking that maybe we would get A few people come and hang out with us.

Now it w it was very useful because Susan, being the meeting planner that she was, was able to get the Wilea Four Seasons Resort on Maui at a hundred and sixty dollar room rate. Wow. So we ended up with a really good group of attendees that were looking for a nice vacation. So we had about three hundred people come to the original meeting.

But But that kind of spawned then the start of of functional medicine in in in the early nineties. Erik Wow, that's an amazing uh story. Um Yeah, but I could I can see your your you have your minds turning. Go for it.

Davin Yeah, well, um so many questions. Um I think this idea of genetic sort of destiny um and and how you know to some extent we're still emerging from that I think and and if you think about kind of the Western medicine approach It was, well, let's find lots of pharmaceutical ways to sort of mitigate that destiny, right? In a way, right? Like as these symptoms show up.

We'll try to treat it, we'll try to prolong your life, but you know, ultimately, you know, it's sort of us against that. And it's interesting that you say in, you know, your environmental sort of a pro you know, you got started in environmental science, you know, an environment is a very different approach to health, right? To to the genetic sort of dogma destiny. Do you think that had a an impact on sort of helping you break free of that I mean you had a sense that it wasn't correct.

But how did you really double down on that and and have the courage to go against the um I think Bruce Lipton and others have talked about like how hard it was to change that thinking. Jeff Bland Well I I and and David, I think you're you're right on target that this was an interesting transition for me because um Uh first of all, I was not like your usual and customary chemistry professor. So that kind of ticked off some of my department. Remember seeing your members in my department?

who wanted me to behave like a traditional chemistry professor, whatever that stereotype is. Um I was very fortunate because the president of the university, it's a private college, University of Pujam. the the um the president of the university who was new when i came um for whatever reason liked me uh and So he was kind of my defender against some of my department members, the tenured members that uh probably felt that I was breaking the mold and they didn't like it. Now I had very high student evaluations and that really uh I think students liked my classes because they were always I I threw away my notes every year would start from scratch and we'd all s talk about topical things.

So if I If I taught organic chemistry was from the organic chemistry of that year. He tried to bring things into it to to make it more relevant. And I think that Um, I had tremendous students during those years that went on to do great things and and and now many of them were retired obviously, but um they became really great professionals in their own light. And I think the prison university liked whatever the way I was thinking, because it was it split into a liberal arts college.

So I taught in the philosophy department, I taught in the business school, I taught the history of science. I had relationships with all sorts of different faculty And that was really good for my education, because it kept broadening my perspective and kept challenging me to think a little bit out of the box all along. Now the point for me uh personally that was really the Fisher cut bait uh to use that uh allegory. Um I took a sabbatical uh In nineteen eighty-one to eighty-three, uh upon invitation by Linus Pauling to come and to run a research uh lab in his Institute for Science and Medicine in Palo Alto.

Well that was a life-changing experience on every level for me because I got to know he and his wife, uh Iva Helen, um very well. His office was actually right next to mine, so I had a lot of informal conversations with him over the two years And when I finished up that two-year experience, as I was packing up my boxes to go back to the car, my family is all waiting to drive back to Washington State from Palo Alto. Um, I was holding my I still remember this vividly. I was holding uh my boxes of books and stuff and so uh Dr.

Pauling was saying, Well, Jeff, it's been great to have you here and I hope we'll continue to collaborate and you know you've got a great future ahead of you and Um, I I was thanking him. And then his last question to me was, so Jeff, I just wondered, do you think as you head back to your faculty position that your classroom is big enough And so I got in the car and I had eleven hundred miles to drive home. And I it was just going through my head the whole time. What what was this message, Jimmy?

And Here is the point. I tell the story, and I don't think people actually they believe I'm exaggerating, but I'm actually not exaggerating. On that drive back, with my kids in the car and my wife, I made the decision that I was going to give up my tenure faculty position, where I had the largest research group. I had been voted the top professor in the university for two years.

I could teach any anything I wanted, basically. And um and I was going to start this business to teach doctors how to do nutrition medicine in their practice. That was my business plan. Well my father, who was retired at the time, uh aerospace engineer, couldn't believe that I was being so s so foolish.

But after he got the uh the the vision that, you know, I was pretty committed to wanting to do this, he said, Okay, I guess I'm gonna come out of retirement. Because I started off uh with a degree in finance and accounting. So at least you you know I know something about business, you know nothing about it. So I'll be your business manager, which he did for the first six years.

My wife became the uh corporate development person. My mother became our editor. And um away I went uh to see if I could I could follow this passion. So and the the story worked out.

It wasn't a linear path, but it was it was certainly You know what do they say? Burning the boats. That was definitely burning the boats. Davin Oh my gosh, this is amazing.

So many pe I mean For you to be who you are in this space and yet have a pretty common story to I think a lot of people that will be listening to this podcast of like As as Erik, you know, the phrase Erik uh has coined of this like the first step is the hardest, right? And for you, even harder. I mean, at least those of us that are making the step We're we're stepping into something that's pretty well developed now, but at at your stage, selling nutrition to doctors, that's That sounds crazy, you know, back then I'm sure.

Erik So I'm I'm curious to I'm I'm curious for you well let me let me make a comment and 'cause I want to recap and then I I'm I I'm gonna ask you a question. But I so I think there's some really interesting kind of things that happen along the way. Right? One one was you you realized early on that you Who you were as a person was not fitting in the mold that had been created, right?

And for you to be authentic to yourself, and I'm I I'm stealing thunder from Davin because he's usually the one that brings this up, but You I and this is a theme we've seen across the board in all of all of our colleagues that we've had on is that this sense of This is not who I am. Therefore, I need to change the environment around me to match more of who I am so that I can flourish in that environment. Right. And it took you a little while to kind of figure out exactly what that but you had a sense of that right from the beginning.

And I think that was really important. And your life experiences guided you and prepared you, right? Being in environmental science, having gone to medical school, had that found you had the first two years, foundational principles of medicine. kind of bored into you and then you get into the environmental science world and see what was happening to the life of the planet And and I think it's really interesting talking about a resiliency aspect of how resilient that area of Puget Sound was that allowed it to re I mean, it was Trashed by that arsenic in that plant, but yet it has been become revitalized.

And I think that's just an important underpinning to what we're talking about here in terms of what happens when we allow the body and nature to actually have the influence of just being able to restore itself, the power of of recreation within destruction, right? And um so I think that those are just some points that I wanted to make. I'm curious to get your thoughts on what you think Linus Pauling would say if he was alive today and now could look and see what you've accomplished and uh where things are in terms of functional medicine and the way we're approaching medicine from a and a foundational approach, a bi uh a systems biology approach.

What do you think you would say if you were alive today? Jeff Bland Uh I think he would be very pleased that I took his question seriously. that that uh you know he and his wife were both extraordinary advocates for people uh uh achieving their potential. And, you know, that wasn't just in science.

That was in all the activities they did. Uh, you know, the second Nobel Prize was in peace. And he felt that it should have been awarded to his wife because she was the one that really in fact there's an anecdote that I'll quickly share with you that um I think symbolizes their relationship and and it's a been a model that I've thought about in my own life. Um so he was lecturing at Caltech uh to a group of uh you know that was a Like an enclave, Caltech, in the middle of Pasadena, and there was a lot of their board members that were in the defense industry, because the defense industry was very big in Southern California.

And so he was lecturing about nuclear power and nuclear chemistry to the wives and family of people in the community. It was a night lecture for the community. And one of the questions of a woman in the audience after he finished his lecture was, Dr. Pauline, you know, you're obviously an expert in this field of nuclear science and nuclear chemistry.

Um, what's your feeling about nuclear weapons and atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons? And uh He responded to her saying, Well, that's an important question, but I wouldn't be the one who really answered that because uh you know, I'm I'm a scientist and and you know, if you asked me about the science of nuclear energy and so forth, I'd be able to a I think adequately answer that, but that's really out of my area of expertise, so I don't feel comfortable in answering that. When he got off the ch uh the stage, as the story is told to me by him His wife, Eva Helen, was livid and said, Linus, what are you doing?

When you answered that question, what are you doing? And he said, what do you mean? She said, you have strong opinions about this, and we talk about it all the time. And you kind of didn't express your thoughtful feelings about this and if you're not willing to do that, you know more about this than ninety nine percent of the people on the planet Then what are you going to expect other people to do if you're not saying what's on your mind?

And she said, you know, I think until you kind of get clarity on this There's gonna be no more meals prepared by me at home. Which then I guess happened for some period of time until he s r recognized, yeah, that he really couldn't keep that pos position concealed. He had a responsibility. And then from then on, now we see pictures of him picketing around the White House back then in the 50s with with placards say stop nuclear testing.

I one of my most privileged um gifts that he gave me was a fo uh a reproduction of a photograph that was made by his wife at Schweitzer's compound in Africa of Schweitzer, Einstein and he at the table talking about how they were going to get thirty thousand scientists. to sign this proclamation of of prohibiting nuclear atmospheric testing, which eventually was achieved. So There was a lot of advocacy that I learned from that experience that I had with him about how you start and stay true.

to a concept and the responsibility you have to it to maintain clarity. Davin You know, um one of my favorite authors is Dr. David Hawkins. Oh yeah.

Um and he references a book that he and Linus Pauling co-authored called Orthomolecular Psychiatry in the early 70s talking about you know, nutrition as a potential cure for psychiatric conditions. Jeff Bland With Abram Hoffer. And I had dinner with the with the three of them. Um and that was the start of the uh orthomolecular medical association.

which still exists today. And um Dick uh Humer, uh Richard Humer, who is um a hugely successful psychiatrist in San Francisco uh who was a very science-minded guy, was a principal. He he was um I don't know the whole history, but he uh was very he and his family were very financially successful. So they were able to fund a lot of the early development of the uh Orthomolecular Medical Association.

And so there was uh there was actually a tribute in um In nineteen eighty four, I think it was, or three, uh of in which Pauling Hawkins Hoffer, Humer, and others were all present and a book was put together. I'm in that book actually. There's a photograph of the people attending that meeting. It was at the um one of the major hotels in San Francisco.

And here's this this young guy embedded within people actually uh also we had the uh one of the peop uh individuals who was responsible for a smallpox vaccination Um, because that was the year that the last person was vaccinated for against uh smallpox. And so uh it's uh there's a lot of interesting history here that's all woven together. Davin Yeah, that's amazing. I'm I'm in awe right now.

This is so cool. And um I mean just a side note, so I did my residency in the Navy in Bremerton, Washington. Oh boy. Um and I rotated through the army hospital in Tacoma.

Jeff Bland So I know it well recorded. Yeah. Davin Yeah. Jeff Bland And you were you were officer and a gentleman out there in Brimerton.

That was the movie. Davin Yes, yes. Uh hopefully hopefully I was summon both of those. Um But yeah, love that area is so beautiful, but that's really interesting that you were there at one point as well.

Jeff Bland Well, I've done quite a bit of work at it uh at McCord and uh at the uh at the Air Force Hospital out as well. Uh And it's, you know, we did quite a bit of work back in in uh Desert Storm because there were a variety of um service people that were really impaired coming back from Desert Storm. um neurologically. And we we actually published a research paper on a number of them and I actually presented to Congress.

uh the results of that uh that research trial. That's a whole nother interesting story in in my my background. Uh I was invited to attend this meeting with a variety of government officials from NIH and and um other dep departments in involved with healthcare and the and veterans administration. And uh One of the people from Harvard Med School, who is kind of a principal in Turner's buddy, is a principal investigator in chronic fatigue syndrome, published quite a few papers on CFS.

So we had this long discussion as to whether there was such thing as as desert storm syndrome as a consequence of exposure to burn piles and and toxins and so forth. And I thought there was a very, very strong we had evidence from these uh patients that had been seen, many of them were high-ranking officers that were totally disabled after Desert Storm who came into the into the situation as, you know, high performing ultra athletes and they were just totally disabled afterward.

And we presented this a small cohort of individuals. I think we had sixteen people in our study. And um at the end of that meeting, it was in Boston. Oh man, I still remember this.

Uh we walked out of the hotel, and it was rush hour. I had to get to Logan Airport to fly home. and there was a another person standing at the street corner trying to get a camp to get to the airport, who as it turned out was the um the executive director of the um environmental institute for environmental health for the government and um He said, hey, uh if we get a cab, can we share it? Because we're not gonna get a separate cab.

It's too crazy. So we ended up sharing this cab and it was traffic jammed, so we spent a lot of time in the cab getting to the uh to the airport and oh man to distill down the conversation the takeaway was he s he a he said to me, he said, So Jeff, I I think you know that the evidence that was provided at this meeting we had today was irrefutably strongly in support of the fact that there was something that happened in exposure that created a toxic events to the nervous system in these individuals.

We don't know exactly what it is, but there's no doubt that that is the case. However, it is equally the case that this will never be known, because the the the political economic implications of making this known to a a field that doesn't know how to diagnose or treat it would only end up creating a greater problem. So yes You were right, but no, it's not going to go anywhere. That was my takeaway.

So that was another lesson, right? All these kind of st stack on on one another. Erik Yeah, no, it's true. And and people come, you know, we come we come into contact with people all the time who will influence us and help shape the way that we we think and um perform.

And I want to go back a little bit to the people that were around you. And one of the things that I I realized early on in my career in terms of being entrepreneurial and establishing something that was more unique to me was sharing that vision with others. And then in doing so, it kind of attracted people, drew people to me that then could help me uh along that way. And, you know, how interesting would it have been if you had just kept your thoughts to yourself on your way back from Palo Alto to Tacoma and thought, wow, I wonder what he meant by that.

But then you just got back into the rhythm of life and just let things go and you didn't you didn't share what you were thinking, right? Clearly that stirred within you. something that was pulling you into your mission in this life, right? That you you felt like this was was drawing you out of where you were.

And as you started to have that conversation with Susan, that you she she already was kind of pushing you in that direction anyways. All it did was validate what she was already feeling about where you could go. Tell us a little bit about the influence then that your dad and Susan and others had in helping you be successful because there was certainly challenges that came along the way. It wasn't easy to get started.

Tell us about the influence of others and and the impact that had on you Jeff Bland Yeah, I I you know I was so fortunate because when we put this uh when Susan organized this meeting in nineteen eighty-nine in Victoria Uh the people we invited, uh people were like Leo Gallen and Sid Baker and Joe Pizzaro and Graham Reedy. And um, I mean it was it was really a a laundry list of extraordinarily thoughtful, insightful, creative, out-of-the-box thinkers. And but also very disciplined.

I mean not flighty, people that really did the heavy lifting. And when you put put those talents together, you did a mine mill over two uh years, it created a synthesis that was to me quite special when I look back. I I would call that maybe the seminal event in my life as in terms of creation. Because we started with We didn't start with any kind of expectation at all.

It was just whatever would happen, we'll find out. And I think it was that group of individuals uh that really I I was maybe the keeper of that information. I wasn't the person who disigned De novo right. And we we collaborated in And I had the advantage at that point, fortunately, because I'd been um by that time uh well more than ten years out of academics and and starting a uh a business, I had a uh an income stream that that my wife and I could dedicate to funding the startup of IFM.

And over the Over the first few years, uh, I think we probably we probably put two to three million dollars into getting IFM institutionalized. Now we could have never done that if I would have not had some the the world wouldn't have given me that money. I had to earn the the right to to do that. And so I think the whole thing is very organic when I think about it.

It was built out of a movement with an objective in mind as to what we were trying to do, not knowing where we were going really, but the objective where we wanted to go was very clear. Erik Oh that's awesome. I love that. So speaking of where we want to go, let's let's shift now to today and where functional medicine is.

and where you think it's going. Uh uh you you and Chris and Chris Magrida and I had the opportunity to just share some thoughts through email in regards to uh Really, something you initiated after having attended a gala for function health and kind of how they're disrupting the the medicine world right now, which is fantastic. Um and so why don't you just why don't you just lead us into a bit of a conversation there of about how w w where you think functional medicine is now and what some of these new technologies from AI to to biomarkers, uh to genetics, um a are are kind of pushing us in.

And, you know, in in our conversation you had mentioned We're at this pivot point where we're we're moving away from this reactive health care to more of a predictive health care, right? And we're we're moving away from diagnosis and now more into prognosis, really kind of looking at that perspective. So maybe maybe give us a few a few thoughts that you've had on that. Jeff Bland Yeah, thank you, Erik.

I think this uh this is a critical point in human history relative to not just medicine and healthcare, but the whole nature of how information transfers itself through culture to create change. And um I think that's a consequence of several intersecting revolutions that are all forming a mega revolution. So, first we have the concept of digital technology. And so digital technology can build itself into all source of tools, like wearable devices like informatics, like biometrics, like uh the things that we can measure you know in our like I I bought a $25, I think it was on sale for $25 kind of in-body scale that measures all sorts of things.

My body composition, my percent body fat, my percent water. I mean, here for twenty-five dollars is a algorithmically sophisticated instrument that we would call a scale that's actually a a biomonitor of my physical health. And um All of these things are becoming available now with the uh the convergence of these different technologies. Then we say, okay, that's great.

Now we have all this information. But what the heck do we do with it? Because it's like a tsunami. And so fortunately at the same time, we have the development of machine learning and artificial intelligence, which can Absorb and digest enormous amounts of data in unbelievably short periods of time And we also have now satellites and we can do cloud computing and we can beam anywhere on the world large amounts of data that have been interpolated so that you can do real-time understanding your physiology in a way that never any human being previously was able to.

You want to talk about empowering people Now a lot of people will say today, I really don't want to know that information. I like to just turn my body over to my doctor and they can just tell me what to do when I need to. That's that's a kind of a resident feeling. But these technologies, like the telephone, like the fax machine, like the TV, like they slip in.

At first people uh like the uh automobile replacing the buggy. Uh, you know, like who wants that smoky loud thing? I like my horse, you know, that's my friend. I don't want that stupid thing out there and making pollution.

But now we're seeing this technology shift shifting in across all classes, across all socioeconomic uh demographics. So then it will change. Person won't even know that their body is being uh monitored because it'll be just part of like life. It'll be part of the information that just travels with us.

It's almost like what's happened with the um transportable medical record. I mean that's a huge, huge paradigm shift in itself. And now people expect that. They expect to have their medical data available They expect to be able to take it to another physician if they want to.

That is totally alien 15 years ago. And so these things happen you know, by tsunamis that ultimately when they pull back leave on the beach new uh new things. And so I think what's happening right now is the empowerment of the individual and the ability then for healthcare providers to be able to use their training and their background and their wisdom in ways to be what doctors are supposed to be teachers, guides, motivators, uh supporters, visionaries, people there to listen, to uh take away fear, to uh help um navigate the the trajectory of life that's more than just information.

And that's not been a major part of medical school education, but I think it's going to become. because it is the missing link that uh that separates a computer from a sentient person sitting there talking to somebody. And uh so I I'm I'm quite encouraged. I think however that we will go through some rough spots Because this is a huge major paradigm shift to to all institutions, insurance companies, Medicare, reimbursement, tracking, finance, uh institutions uh building large buildings, you know, uh all all stuff is influenced by this.

And then you tie that To the existential life-threatening risk we have now of ultra-processed diets, I want to impress that this isn't a Absolute risk to the human survival. If you look at what's happened in sperm counts in males and to ovarian disorders in females It is now projected that by 2050, we will have more births born by IVF than we will by normal. Mechanisms of fertility. Erik That's crazy.

Jeff Bland And so the construct that the human being could be wiping away its own fertility And where does that come from? Well, we'd say there's a variety of things, you know, toxins and stress, but our diet is a major determinant of feeding stuff that's dangerous to us. And the effects of this uncontrolled study of which there's no placebo blind, the results are coming in, and it's not that good. It's pretty scary.

And people are still looking any other way. And it starts with new agriculture. It starts with new methods of converting foods into final products and making them shelf stable. It c it comes into making health as an attribute for food, not just production and quantity and price Erik Well, and going back to your, you know, experience with the smelter, right?

Getting getting rid of that influence can then allow nature to to get back on course. and recreate something that's that is life sustaining, beautiful, um, healthy And so it's not the end of the world that we've been exposed to this. The the end of the world is that we continue being exposed to it, right? That's that's really kind of the trajectory that we're on.

Jeff Bland Yeah, let me give a a short personal anecdote to this. So I did what my wife didn't want me to do here about five years ago. I started another company, Big Bull Hill. And the reason I started is that I really wanted to focus on immune system function and the relationship to to diet and see if I could learn stuff about the immune system and what we were feeding the immune system.

Um that ultimately led me into two things I never thought in my life I would ever be doing, one of which is being part owners of uh regenerative agriculture farms in upstate New York that are growing as Crop that had been lost in America some 150 years ago called tartary buckwheat, a unique form of buckwheat, that has about a hundred times the level of immune active phytochemicals of normal buckwheat And the other was this unique fish oil family and that my I ran into a guy that owned a Alaskan fishing company w was housed in Seattle.

And we started to produce this fish oil by um the the boats he designed which catch fish on a line and hook one at a time and I they get frozen from live fish into frozen products on board the ship in like twenty minutes. And then we built a plant to never get that stuff above a hundred degrees Fahrenheit so it doesn't lose any of the of the natural ingredients and we ended up when we did the anal analysis of that oil it was different than other oils because it turns out that fissure oils that we're we're supplementing people today is is an ultra-processed food And it's, you know, if people are worried about sea oils, they should be worried about fish oils, because they are uh undergoing all sorts of processes that that the sea oils are going through And so what I learned through this process is I got down to farmers.

I got down to fishermen. I got down to villagers in Alaska. who work damn hard to try to eke out a living doing really good things. And wh I just uh we just got back from the farms um uh with one of our people uh visiting our farmers And she came back in tears.

She's saying, these people are so committed to the soil. They're so committed to survive to, you know, their families are raised around the ethos. of survivability, of uh sustainability. It's it's what they are driven by.

And these are family farms, not large, you know, mega farms. But that's why they're in farming, because they have this calling. They like all the uncertainties of the weather and all the dealings with nature. And the same it goes through for what I get.

I was in Dutch Upper Alaska uh three weeks ago and I saw the same thing with the people who work on our boats and the I came in with uh One of the crews from uh the uh Mariner Navigator, one of our boats that have been out for uh uh thirty-eight days fishing And these guys that were on that boat were so excited that they were producing a different kind of product, that they were sustaining, and they weren't throwing stuff away, they weren't making a mess. And uh so These value systems somehow have to be permeating everything we do.

You know, they are really important guides for us and how we behave. Davin That's that's beautiful. I I think um There is at a broader level since the pandemic, you know, like this um healthy skepticism of of sc status quo, right? And and I think, you know, um because of everything that happened there and and so many people were impacted by that event that um i it did i I feel like move people in more of this direction of hey I need to advocate for my own health because Um, I can't always completely trust, uh fair or unfair, you know, the system uh to take care of me Um and so I I love hearing s you know, stories like that.

Um do you feel like like there's a broader sort of population movement in this direction to to get these things corrected? Jeff Bland Yeah, David, I think what you just said is really important. I I I I really want to uh underscore, underline what you just said. I think it's very, very powerful lesson or message.

Um, I do believe that it's it's happening. You know, people are s are ki they're confronted with the realities of the the cost of food going up with uh not being able to afford a lot of things and being in debt and and I mean there's so much uh uncertainty and uncertainty builds fear. Fear is not a really great emotion to be living with because fear produces an alarm response. We become intolerant.

to our world. We become intolerant to our own bodies. And now we have the dysfunctions of intolerance, which is inflammation And we have more autoimmune disease, and we have more inflammatory conditions. All this kind of fits together into a social nexus, I think.

So I I I believe what you're saying is really, really important. It's probably the key before we start talking about, well, how do you treat the following condition? We need to go back to the social structure in which we're living. And say, how do we create something that allows us to be tolerant to the environment in which we find ourselves?

So that we don't feel at risk, so we don't feel unsafe. So we don't feel in alarm. And therefore we fight back with intolerance. And intolerance cuts across all sorts of different uses of that word, I believe.

From Cellular biology to social structure. Erik So kind of piggybacking on what Davin was saying in terms of I I think in general From a population standpoint, there does seem to be this craving, um, thirsting for more knowledge on how to become more healthy, right? And this shift from as we were just talking about this reactive state of medicine where now I've come in and I'm well down the path of disease process. Now I get an intervention versus, hey, let's can uh is there something I can find out early to know whether I'm going to develop Alzheimer's?

Or is there something going on with me that's going to prevent me? from or it's gonna predict me to having cancer or cardiovascular disease. Is there s is there something we can do to identify that now and and shift things so that I can actually have a a a better outcome than what may maybe my genes are telling me and what my doctors are telling me, right? And so it it I , I feel like there's been this kind of shift.

So how how do you how do you think we can because uh it at least it still feels like in the world of medicine, the dogma still seems to be stuck and not wanting to move forward. But do you think do you think the shift in medicine is going to come more from people saying, hey, this is what I'm demanding, this type of healthcare, so we're I'm just gonna go to doctors that are doing this? Or do you think it's gonna be more technology dis Driven where it's now we have access to all this information and we have AI kind of processing it.

And now if you're if you're not a doctor that's understanding this, you're gonna be left behind in the dust. Or do you think this is more of financial? Like there's now, you know, investors that are really wanting to get on that early stages of this and invest money into this uh so that they can continue to to to move this forward. Or is it all three?

What what what are your thoughts on that? Jeff Bland I I think it is all three, Erik. I think what you said is exactly you you you described the landscape in of change that we're working in right now. And nothing, you know, I I said to people, and I uh it sounds like an exaggeration, but I really don't think it is.

I said, whatever you believe yesterday, you might as well forget. Because we are creating tomorrow. And tomorrow is is only going to be partially built out of yesterday. This is one of those pinch points in human history, of which there are a few if you study human history.

There are these epic periods where there's there are seismic shifts in culture, world culture, and that's happening right now. Now, I don't have omniscience to know exactly how this is going to work out. But I do know without any question it is that time of which this change will take things that we considered truce and alienable institutionally fixed situations be it economics, stock market, businesses, politics, regulatory affairs, all of those are going to change. All of them.

And I think how they change will depend upon how people want this to change, because in the end, change always occurs from the outside in. I don't believe there are good examples ever in any culture of inside out change where it comes from the institution to try to change itself. Now, how that occurs, you know, is it uh Is it endorsed in such a way that is peaceful and and is benefit, you know, it has a uh an acknowledged value proposition, as they say? History progresses one funeral at a time.

So will it occur naturally or will it be imposed? I think that's always the battle with with human cultural changes As to if you look what's going on in Ukraine. I mean we can or you can choose so many hot spots in the world to say these are all where these battles are occurring. So I I think we stay tuned.

Now at eight years of age, will I be around long enough to fully see how this transitions? I I don't know. I'd like to think I could see some of this coming out to where people were treating one another differently, but I know it will change, regardless of me or not. Erik Yeah, well I think we're getting a sense of that already.

You know, I think that there is a a certain a feeling, a sentiment of a movement within society to try and overcome some of these fractionated hateful disruptive uh movements to try and control the world. I think we're there's this other movement that's fighting against that and And trying to protect against that. So I think it's it's gonna be interesting to see how it plays out, but I I feel optimistic and confident that uh things are continuing to get to get better. Jeff Bland Let me say one last thing to that area, because I think what you just said is really positive.

Uh for the for the healthcare practitioners of the world who are very worried about all these changes that are occurring. What I would say is that there is always going to be an extraordinary need for well-trained medical professionals. who are connected to patients in ways that deliver value to them and their outcome. There will always be need.

And that value will probably go up as we get more technology, not go down. And so if a person says, I don't know how I'm going to make a living, because I've been making a living on a certain set of ICDs and and DRGs and and you know filling out forms and Yeah, that's right. That's that's the start of the next thing where you say driving home to from Palo Alto that you're gonna do something different. And lo and behold, the world will protect you.

Because if you start with a high passion, you will find a way. I'm just absolutely convinced of that. Erik Yep, I totally, totally agree. Well, Davin, you want to bring us home here and uh we're coming up on an hour or finish finish this up with a a last comment and a question.

Davin Well, we often ask people around the future of kind of where they see things going, and I think we've already touched on that a little bit. So maybe I'll ask you a slightly different question, um, which is um for our maybe other, you know, people like me who are, you know, have taken that first step or are considering that first step of of moving into a more uh fun functional, holistic, integrative model. Um what advice or or inspiration could you you know share to maybe nudge them along the way Jeff Bland Well I think the the key is to hang out with the right people.

Uh because you need a you need a peer group. You need a you need a A safe harbor. And I was very fortunate when we started this, as I mentioned, to have a really great group of peers that made me better than I was. and and knock down some of the fear that I was gonna fail.

Um and so I think that finding the right peer group and grooming that peer group that you can trust and they and you can contribute to them and they contribute to you. is a really, really important because it's not going to come probably from your traditional medical society. It's going to come from some subset of individuals. that chair a different vision that are uncollegially changed what's going on.

Once you have that It builds your confidence and with confidence I think humans can do the unexpected. Erik So very, very true Well, thank you again, Doctor Bland. This has been an exceptional conversation and I'm I'm sure anyone who listens to this will be inspired, um educated, uplifted, and motivated to continue on in the world of medicine and in the world in general to make it a better place. So thank you very much.

Jeff Bland Well Erik and Devin, thank you. I think this is really been for me a a treat. And just um I feel um very privileged to be even able to tell this this story, which is just One life in the Sea of Mini, so thank you. Davin Thank you for all you've done.