The Seven Laws of Healing with Dr. Ben Reebs, ND
On today's episode, we have a real treat where I get to interview one of my heroes, Dr. Ben Reebs, a fellow naturopathic physician, and author of "The Seven Laws of Healing." Together we dive deep into the core principles of healing and the historical roots of naturopathic medicine.
Referenced in the Show:
Dr. Reebs’s Bio:
Naturopathic doctor. Nutrition geek. Cook. Nature lover.
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Full Transcript:
Sarah Marshall, ND: Welcome to HEAL. On today's episode, we have a real treat where I get to interview one of my heroes, dr. Ben Reebs, a fellow naturopathic physician, and author of "The Seven Laws of Healing." Together we dive deep into the core principles of healing and the historical roots of naturopathic medicine. I'm your host, Dr. Sarah Marshall.
(music)
I just really want to thank you for being here with Heal podcast and taking time out of your busy schedule and making a difference for all your patients to spend and shed a little light and love for us. And it's just a privilege to have a fellow vitalist fellow naturopath fellow hippie kid to come be here with us.
So thank you for being here.
Ben Reeb: Thanks so much for having me.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. Cool. So, you know, Heal is all about that healing. Like what does it take to heal? What does it look like to heal? And one of the things I've been saying is it's my hypothesis that there's like a blueprint or there's underlying truths that we, that don't have to be mysterious.
And then I come across your book and it's The Seven Laws of Healing, The Serpent and the Butterfly? Butterfly and the Serpent? Serpent and the Butterfly? Okay, good. And I'm like, Oh, he wrote them all down. So how did that come about for you? Like how did you end up there distilling down what you call the seven laws of healing?
Ben Reeb: Yeah. Well, let's see, where do I start with that? I, I read pretty much all of the old literature and read through that, the founding fathers and mothers, all the, all the healers who originated integrative medicine, nature, pathic medicine, which is really where integrative medicine came from, in my opinion.
And of course those names weren't even around. Naturopathic didn't exist until 1900 when Benedict (inaudible) purchased it from another person. But, I, I went ahead and just read through for years and, and then I sought out people who know and I spent time with them. And then of course, went and got my doctorate in naturopathic medicine and it just came together and then I realized, okay, there's seven and I kept testing it and I couldn't come up with less or more. And, and then it just, it was like, okay. Seven laws of healing. Here we go.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Okay. Yeah. And you know, I mean, from your perspective, it's kind of like, Oh, I read all the great literature, but that's actually kind of a feat and those aren't easy books to get ahold of. I mean, you and I know that our naturopathic medical school, the Natural University of Natural Medicine, I get used to saying it that way cause it was the Natural College of Naturopathic or Natural Medicine when I was there.
But, you know, we happen to have a library of books, some of which are a hundred plus years old of the original writings from Germany and from Belgium and from France and a lot of the, and they were, they were MDs. They were physicians of the typical schooling of that day, but then the philosophy that they distilled down.
So I got to like a million dollar question. What do you think happened? How come that's not our. Standard of care now?
Ben Reeb: Right... that's a great question. And yeah. The thing is these laws have been used for centuries, for millennia, and there's nothing new under the sun, you know, Ecclesiastes. And so I take no credit for any of these laws.
These have literally been passed down and I believe they came from men and women and I particularly believe that women were the first integrated medicine practitioners just by virtue of their, the responsibility of their biology. Now, no one can ever prove that, but that's not a story that anyone tells.
And I think it's really interesting and it makes sense. And, A lot of these laws, they've had different names and a lot of people just use them. They don't even have a name for them. And then the pioneers kind of came along and particularly like Dr. Henry Lindlahr MD,ND, he in his book, "Nature Cure" published in 1913, I think that's sort of the. Probably the most important work we have other than like Hahnemann and his book that came out in the 1700s. I think doctor,--
Sarah Marshall, ND: Dr. Hahnemann being the father of homeopathy is like our listening audience doesn't necessarily have a whole lot of familiarity with the, the history of naturopathic medicine.
So yeah. Yeah, but we had Hahnemann's texts from the 1700s and then, Lindlahr was a huge move forward in distilling it down. So we'll get back to the question of what, what happened. How did we end up where we are right now? Which you very eloquently in the book create. A storyline of this challenge that we have, that some people don't even know is possible, but hopefully through this podcast, more people are getting connected to, which is... you have a choice in how you want to take care of your body and how you want to heal.
And there was like two paths kind of, but we'll call it that. And there's one that abides by the laws of nature. And there's one that works against the laws of nature. I wouldn't be on the planet without conventional medicine. So this isn't a right wrong conversation.
This isn't a they're bad, we're good. We're bad, they're good. It's like, there's this world of possibilities that are out there because there have been times in my life that suppressive medicine saved my life. And then once my life was saved, the thing that made the difference was working with the laws of nature to rebuild, restore, detoxify, eliminate, strengthen, you know, like that.
Mostly in my case, by sheer trial and error and happened in to having parents who were very open to looking at things from other angles. So like we would do fever therapy in my, I actually happened to have a pediatrician who was just kind of old school in some of his work cause he he's an MD and traditionally trained, but it was the 1980s and asthma was on the rise.
And he'd say, take her out into the cold, wrap her up in a blanket and, you know, let the fresh air make a difference in her lungs and then take her inside and get a really, really, really warm and let the fever run. Happened to be like, I don't know how that, I mean, it was like chance I ended up with him that he kind of had some of that, those laws of nature underneath.
So like. What are some of the laws like, can you kind of point to what they are? Cause I think when people hear them, it almost is like, I never have heard that before, but I know that's true. So like what, what are some of the ones that you highlight in the book or all seven,
Ben Reeb: Right. Yeah. So it all starts with the law of vitality. And I mean, it says that this is the vital force, the idea that the body is always working to heal itself. And I think that we, you know, we've, we have this new term homeostasis, which came out several decades ago and it doesn't quite explain, the vital force at all.
But it is kind of a piece of it it's connected. but it all starts with this, this, this fact, or this clinical observation of this life experience that our body is always working to heal itself. And we see this, you know, you know, you cut your hair and then it heals after a few days. You can study inflammation, how the cascade of inflammatory cytokines moves through the body.
And we all, we know this from medical school, we know this from science, the, the other laws, some of them are very common sense in a way, and then others are a little bit more esoteric. And so, but it all starts with this idea of the body's always working to heal itself and there's this vital force.
And then that kind of moves into what I call the law of disease, which comes directly from Henry Lindlahr. He said that all disease is caused by three things, the abnormal composition of the blood and lymph; the accumulation of waste matters, morbid toxins and poisons; and a devitalized vital force or weak vital force.
And so if we translate that into modern language, that basically means the body doesn't have what it needs is deficient, the body's toxic, it's chock full of toxins that accumulate in the blood. And the person doesn't have energy. There's not enough mitochondrial energy or oomph, call it whatever you want.
Those three things even goes so far as to say those three things are equivalent with disease. And so, the law of vitality moves to directly into the law of disease. And I think that's where it all starts.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. Yeah. I've been, I use this really, highly technically advanced analogy that our bodies are like a bathtub and you've got a faucet and you've got a drain and actually we have four drains.
We have four organs of elimination that allow our body to process and release waste products and toxins. And for sure there's a, a wild world of toxicity. One of my good friends is a PhD and he's been studying some of the antifungals, the fungicides that we use in vegetables and fruit, you know, and, and keeps, keeps fungus at Bay for molds and fungus is accumulating on our food.
Turns out there's one in particular that he's done a lot of research on that directly impacts mitochondrial function and could be underneath a huge, I mean, we're now looking at cancer through the lens of, we used to say it was all carcinogens and that was the toxins would come in and they would disrupt DNA transcription and then the DNA would transcribe improperly.
And that would cause the genetic defect that led to cancer. But now we're starting to discover that only happens. The carcinogens only impact on already weak cell. And then the weak cell comes from a lack of sufficient mitochondrial function and mitochondria being like the little tiny powerhouse of the cell.
And so now we're looking at what impacts mitochondrial function and we're finding, you know, these 25,000 chemicals we're exposed to in a lifetime have a little bit of an impact, but there's also just cellular waste products. Just day to day cellular respiration turnover. I mean, it's always, I always like love to ask the question. My clients were like, I want to lose weight.
Great. When you lose weight, where does the weight go? Like, does it evaporate? Like where does it go, right? No, your body actually has to like break those cells down, take apart all of the fat and do something with it. It's got to go through the liver. It's got to go through all kinds of circulatory things and like come out of these four drains that we have in the body.
So it's the lungs, the skin, the colon, and the kidneys. So it's like we have those four drains in our bathtub and we've got this faucet and some of the stuff in the faucet we have control over. And some of it, we don't have a lot like air pollution. Yes you can choose where you live. But for most of us, you've got to kind of deal with the city you're in.
And like, I do a lot to mitigate toxins in my life, but by no means like the level I would have to live in a bubble, just doesn't actually work for who I'm committed to. Right? So like that, that right there of looking at bringing, you know, paying attention to what we're bringing into our body and paying attention to how it's getting released, the toxins getting released and that just to finish it, it's like if we don't.
If the drains are clogged. And some of us like me, I came in a little bit with genetic clogging, right? Like there's a history of asthma in my family. There's a history of heart disease and, and, some GI track disturbances. And so there was already things going on in my organs of elimination when I was born such that I even had an asthma attack at nine months old.
Like there had to be things set up for that, but then we can also look at my mom's pregnancy and my mom's genetic health and what she had dealt with. Right. That all factored into it. And then you, if you have clogged drains, what happens to the water in the bathtub? Right? It fills up and we get symptoms mostly in the mucus membranes as our warning signs, which are all the itises, all the inflammation, like sinusitis, chronic sinus problems, allergies, and rhinitis, and, you know, cystitis with bladder infections and like arthritis with joint and back.
You know, if you can go through the whole list, those are the warning signs that we, as a culture tend to say, Oh, that's no big deal. Just take a pill for that. You know, even insomnia. It's amazing to me how much we don't treat insomnia, like a severe illness, but it's up there because it's going to decrease your vital force.
Ben Reeb: Yeah.
Sarah Marshall, ND: So like what's the practical, like what do you see as a practical way to start to apply these laws of healing for people? Or what are your favorites?
Ben Reeb: I don't particularly have a favorite. Well, perhaps it's the law of intention. I think the law of intention may be the most important and that's the final law. It says a lot of what, you know, what we do, what we believe, what we think actually impacts the expression of our DNA.
It impacts the the expression of healing in our patients and our clients in ourselves. And if we don't want to get well, or if we don't really believe we can get help, well, it's really hard to get it well. And so I think that's probably the single most important one for me. And then it goes to the law of vitality, because if I can help to enhance the vital force with my patients, if I can work with the body, as opposed to against it. Like you mentioned, supporting a fever. If we can support a fever as opposed to suppress it, then you know, the patient's going to be moving in the direction of health. Most likely.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. One of the things I love about the law of vitality is it can come in the tiniest ways.
You know, like a lot of people come to me, I'm sure you deal with this too where like, their initial is like, they don't want it to be about food, but at the same time they expect I'm just going to change their diet. Like that's, that's part of the expectation, right? Like I'm not going to be able to eat any of these foods I don't want to eat anymore. Right. And that's a whole thing. I had a client who was dealing with breast cancer. She was the sole caretaker of her mother and living in her mother's house. So she didn't even like really have her life organized for herself. And, you know, she had been a very successful professional at one point in her life and highly independent and like all these circumstances that led her to basically living in the spare bedroom of her mom's house and dealing with, independently on her own, going to chemo, dealing with her treatment, still working, taking care of her elderly mother. Like it was nuts. Right. And we worked on detox pathways and I had her juicing and we were working and I was working with her oncologist at the time to kind of do adjunctive care. You know, what the single best treatment was? It like was a turning point for her. She got a kitten. And it like lit up her life. It was like this little being who counted on her and brought joy and comfort and love. And she was taking care of it. And like, I mean, it was like, and she even asked me, she was like, am I nuts to get a cat right now? Like, I have so much going on.
And I was like, you gotta follow your heart. And she, and I actually think she ended up adopting its brother too. And like, I think somehow she ended up with two of them and she did, and it was like, it was like she was a different person. So that for me, that's the law of vitality. That was like bringing in some life force energy and some vitality into her life, you know, in that unexpected way.
And yes, we did the diet and yes, we did supplements and, you know, homeopathy, but it was pretty awesome to see it show up that way.
Ben Reeb: That's awesome.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. How about for you? Like, what's your journey been like?
Ben Reeb: Yeah. my journey it's been a long journey and when I was born, I had pretty severe IBS and, ended up having childhood polyps, pretty severe, a lot of bleeding and just, it was terrible. And I had to have surgery and, it was a pretty traumatic time in my life at the age of six or seven. And now looking back, I understand what was going on. Having kind of gone through my healing journey. I realized what was causing that and I've healed that.
but if I hadn't gone through that severe IBS as a kid with polyps, I wouldn't be where I'm at today. And, so that's one place it started. I was also raised in the woods off the grid, homeschooled in the great Pacific Northwest. And so I was really close to nature from the age of 13 to 20, actually from 7 to 20, so 13 years we just lived off the grid. I would pump all my water by hand, you know, make, make food, with a propane tank. And, so literally my whole life was like that. No electricity, so turn the generator on if you want to watch a movie. And so nature is kind of like, it's my second language.
I know how to be quiet in the forest. The forest is really my home. That's kind of where I come from so when I found naturopathic medicine around the age of 27/28, I just was like, Oh my God, this is what I've been looking for my whole life. I, and I, and I just knew I wanted to become a naturopathic physician within a year of finding out about it.
I just, I knew. And then I, then I went through a further healing journey just on that path of going through med school, becoming a doctor, just lots of ups and downs. And as we know, I mean, healing is not a straight line.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Not one bit. Yeah.
Ben Reeb: Not one bit.
Yeah. Totally.
Sarah Marshall, ND: And I, you know, I actually have seen a couple of really great graphics where it's like this giant squiggly line going all over the place and they're like my healing journey, you know, but I do say to my clients, like it's actually really normal that it looks like we're taking steps backwards, but it's not backwards. And if you look at the general slope, if you could take the average of the slope of the line rise over run, you know, you'll actually see that we're headed in a particular trajectory. And we, we can always see where we've taken ground to comparing, you know, looking back further, but it's yeah. I mean, and often the setback that we're in, or one of the things that I've been sharing more on these episodes is like, we have a tendency to look at it like as soon as we have a symptom something's wrong and broken. But symptoms, our experience of disease, is what I call the body's way of talking to us. It's like a communication that's coming to us. And if we suppress it or ignore it, you're going to get a certain result, which is probably going to be more of the same, or it's going to shift to something different and more severe eventually, you know, which is, is like in there with the law of disease, right.
We're like headed down that spiral, but that one could actually take on like as a, as an intention that my symptoms are actually my body's way of, communicating to me, there's not something wrong. There's just something I needed to pay attention to. You know, there's something I'm not on, you know, and I've noticed from when I started really dealing with my health about age 24, like up until that point was a lot of survival and there wasn't a whole lot of conversation about root-cause healing. It was like, there were some things in there as I got into high school and I knew I needed to manage my rest and, you know, things like that in order to kind of prevent the asthma attacks and the other issues I had. But mostly it wasn't really about that there was a possibility of healing this. I think actually it came from a spiritual world. Like when I was 22, somebody put Neale Donald Walsch's books, "Conversations with God" in my hands and I started pursuing a lot more of what now has become my medical intuition side of my practice. And I met my first teacher and I started doing work with like Chakra balancing and energy healing and that was actually the doorway that opened me to even see other capacities of the body to heal. Cause I hadn't heard of naturopathic medicine yet either. And then it came later and then around age 24 was when I hired my first naturopath and got a glimpse. And then he actually wrote one of my letters of recommendation to get into school, you know?
And, and then I started school when I was 25 and I immediately started working with a naturopath who also practiced apply kinesiology. And it was like, I was off to the races at that point, you know, figuring out what my body was communicating, but now I look at stuff I do. And I'm like, really? There's still stuff left? Like, come on. Right? It's been like 16 years, but are we ever done?
Ben Reeb: Yeah. I mean, you just kind of inspired me because healing really begins now. It starts now and it even starts before I get to where I'm trying to go. And, when I was about 20 or 21, I, I promised myself I would move to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur.
And I actually hitchhiked there on my 22nd birthday from Monterey down to Big Sur. And I ended up staying there for a couple of days and I had read all of these amazing writers, you know, for years. That's all I did was read. So. Alan Watts and Joseph Campbell and Aldous Huxley and Gabriella Roth and Fritz Perls and Ida Rolf, and all these people.
And then I ended up at this place and I ended up meeting people who know the people that I idealized. And then I, I said, I promised myself to move back there. So at the age of 23, I moved to Esalen and I lived there for about a year and a half. And I became a head cook, a head Baker. And all I did was study music and healing.
And I had, I kinda was on my healing journey then, but I didn't even really know it. I just needed to experience this. And, but it actually began before I even got there. I was just a checker at Whole Foods in Seattle, and I was writing a novel and my first love was literature. So I was writing a novella while I was a checker at full foods in 2001.
So then 9/11 hits. And you know, I'm this 20 year old checker, writing my novel. I'm telling all these people, you know, I'm moving to Esalen. Yeah. And, so at that time, I said, you know, I don't need to go to Esalen to experience Esalen.
I'm going to create my own private Esalen now. And so I turned 21 and I set up like these classes for me, that was my version of what Esalen meant to me. And so I studied music. I studied vocal, you know, vocal workouts, guitar. I studied chess because I love chess and I studied literature and poetry and all these things.
And I just set up my own classes and I just graduated from, you know, University of Washington. I got my degree in Linguistics. So my first love was language. I studied French, German, Chinese, Spanish, Greek, Latin, and I didn't speak any of them fluently, but I, you know, I've taken each one for a year or two.
So then I moved to Esalen and it just blew my mind. And then I had all of these incredibly magical experiences, just synchronicity after synchronicity. I mean, Abraham Maslow lived at Esalen. He coined the expression peak experience, you know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs. So he lived there in the 1970s and he said, Esalen is the only place in the world that you can have seven peak experiences in one day.
Now, I don't know if that's true or not, but I, I can tell you that I did experience seven peak experiences in one day when I was living in Esalen. It's a magical place, but kind of bringing it back to healing. Our healing journey begins now, it begins with stepping on our own path, stepping into the dark wood where no one else has gone, listening to our own body, listening to the language of our vital force, mind, body, spirit, all of the pieces, and then taking that step. And it's not easy.
Sarah Marshall, ND: No, there's a lot of inertia and there's a lot of resistance around us to what a lot of my. It's I love that you started with linguistics.
Cause this came a little later for me after I graduated from naturopathic school, I started, just on my own journey, I did a bunch of transformational educational seminars and workshops and, you know, specifically transformational education is defined as causing breakthroughs versus linear education, where you build and accumulate knowledge.
And so there's a particular, the Socratic method, certain, practices of inquiry, where you can just be with a question and inquire into something. And many, many geniuses and scientists, they actually operate in this realm most of the time. And then we learn their stuff through the linear education, even though they got to it through transformational education, that's how they had the breakthroughs.
So I actually went searching for myself. It was, it was more, I'd done a lot of work on my physical body through med school. And I got to say that I was one of the rare students who came out healthier than she went in. Cause that wasn't always the case. but it took a lot of work to do that. And there was, I woke up into chronic anxiety every morning for like hours.
Like I'd wake up into fear and it would take me hours to work through it. I was gripped inside of survivalism and particularly in the fear and the threat of starting a practice and like launching myself into the world and, and, you know, it's, it's getting to be a different place but for most of us, we graduate naturopathic school, it's not like there's a job waiting at a hospital or a clinic most of the time, you know, you're going to go hang your shingle at some point. And so. Me being me, I just cut to the chase and did it right away out of school. And those first couple of years were pretty terrifying. Meanwhile, I have to be pretending on the outside, like yes, I'm a perfectly calm, cool and collected very, very well knowledged doctor with all this experience and I've been out for six months. Right? And it's like, it was terrifying. And so I started searching for some other modalities to help work on my mental health and I, this one made a big difference for me.
And it's all about language. In transformational education basically, it's all about language. It's like the words we use and how carefully we started to do. I do exercises where we would actually look up in the deaf dictionary, every single word in a sentence and get the true meaning of what we're saying and how important actual, small word changes can be to alter.
You know, one of my favorites is the difference between but and and. And we have such a tendency to tie two things together with a "but" you know, I really want to travel, but Coronavirus and lockdown won't allow me. Right? And it's completely logical. And we say these things, we probably say dozens of these in a day.
In reality, though. The laws of coronavirus, actually. I mean, this is going to sound kind of weird cause it's like, well, no, they do. They do have to do with each other, but there's that, and there's a want for travel. And actually, if you just change the word, you get a different perspective of like, I want to travel and we're currently, you know, restricted in our movements based on the Coronavirus.
And what happens is you get left in a place of possibility versus left in a place of nothing's possible. So like these tiny little word changes and, and like that in and of itself is healing and, and gives us access to things we wouldn't have. So like, it's funny. Cause people. Like I was going to ask you about like what your favorite modalities are.
Right. And I do love that question, but I also hate that question because we get like really caught up in, well, are you into intermittent fasting or the paleo diet, or what do you think about keto or, or the anti-inflammatory or is it, you know, I mean, there's like all these different things which have their place, but yet I find so much roots in our language.
And then when we get responsible for what's coming out of our mouth, we can shift things and yes, we do need to take the actions physically as well. It's not just necessarily purely, like I changed my intention, you know, the cancer is going to just go away. But so when you look from there, there's the language.
And then there's the modalities. What would you say some of your favorite or what you see the most effective modalities are inside these seven laws of healing?
Ben Reeb: Well, obviously the most important thing is the way we think or the way I think about a case. And it doesn't really matter what modalities I use.
and it's going to be a little different for each person. And sometimes less is more,
Sarah Marshall, ND: yeah,
Ben Reeb: like my background in cooking. I mean, you take a nice filet of fish and sometimes you just want to just use a little bit of sea salt, tiny bit of really nice olive oil. Have the right heat, get the hell out of the way.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Don't mess it up. (inaudible) But this speaks to itself. Yeah.
Ben Reeb: There are times I layer on all these things and so, you know, do the MTHFR thing and do a little comprehensive stool analysis and, you know, do a constitutional homeopathic and do a Carroll food intolerance method evaluation, and then maybe do a little constitutional hydrotherapy and do a little STEM cell treatment or do a little PRP.
I mean, I can jump around, but it doesn't really matter. As long as I'm using the laws of healing. We can use anything.
And so it frees me up. I have my favorites, definitely. Homeopathy is one of my favorites. I'd probably give a homeopathic remedy to almost every patient. I like to give it in an office and see what happens.
And that's, that's how my teachers did it.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. Awesome. And you're a pretty big fan of hydrotherapy, which is also one of my loves. you know, one of my favorite things about hydrotherapy and it's foreign to most people. So we'll, we'll have lots of show notes for this one, lots of things that we can expand for people, but you know, the simplest form of hydrotherapy is alternating the temperature of your shower.
You know, you, most of us have hot showers and there's a practice of ending your shower with a cool to cold spray, you know, starting out. I start my clients out at 30 seconds cool. And work them up to a minute cold. And if you're, you know, follow any of Wim Hof's work, you're getting up to two minutes of as cold as you can stand, you know, which I've actually been practicing that recently.
And it's been an interesting meditation. The first minute I can like, just struggle through it and I'm fine. And then when I'm still there in the cold water for the second minute, I realized like, Oh, now would be the time to just be present and breathe. So, but that actually does something, it creates this changing your circulation and your lymphatics and it, and with the temperature change, it forces, all your circulation to go deep into the organs and the lymphatics kind of get squeezed out.
And then when you get out of the shower, it floods back out to your skin. And so you're basically causing this deep circulation pattern to happen. And one of my mentors says, as long as you have circulation, you can have healing. Anywhere you can increase in and get more circulation, cause circulation brings in nutrition and takes out toxins.
And there's a whole field of hydrotherapy, which is during this current pandemic, there's more getting highlighted about it because it's one of the best treatments for getting an immune system response to actually fight infection. And, I don't know if you had the privilege to learn under Dr. Blake in the clinic in Portland, but he was our hydrotherapy professor.
And, you know, he runs a clinic that they get MRSA patients and antibiotic-resistant pneumonia, and all kinds of things from the hospital in Oregon. And they're able to make a difference with these patients that there's no conventional medical treatment for, so for me, I just always love the simple, like the simple genius.
And it's like, yeah, water. Alternating water. And you can create this whole new world for, you know, how your body feels and what actually, and we've got science on white blood cell circulation and how it actually stimulates certain parts of the immune system and makes that difference. Yeah,
Ben Reeb: absolutely.
Sarah Marshall, ND: So what else have we not talked about that you want to talk about?
Like what what's there for you.
Ben Reeb: Well, I really wanted to write this book, because I saw a need for it. I saw a need. I, I, it began with writing it for myself. Cause if you would have given this book to me when I was 20 or 21, it would've changed my life. And. And so I wanted to, it was my way of kind of giving back.
And this book is not about me. I mean, these laws, I didn't invent these laws. I just did the research and put it together and I wanted to also make it accessible, are met-- at what we do. I want it to make it accessible and understandable to millennials so that they could take it, read it on an airplane and an hour, hour or two, and actually have a sense of like, Oh yeah, I nature pathic medicine.
That's really cool. Oh my gosh. And so I, I that's one of my, my, purposes is just to, to promote our profession, promote what we do and to make it easily understandable to the lay person. Cause people are really smart and they'll get, they get it fast and then they're not gonna be like, what is naturopathic medicine again? They're like, Oh yeah, like naturopathic medicine. That's really cool stuff.
Sarah Marshall, ND: I love that. Cause I think that's a big missing, I mean, even still, most of the time, people who are good friends of mine will still be like you're homeopath. Right. And I am, but it's underneath, that's a modality underneath the umbrella of being a naturopath.
And, and I know that there's. There have been legal legally. And in terms of our, the education system out there, there's naturopathic doctors, there's naturopathic physicians. There's these differences in, in the way that each state chose to license us as primary care or not primary care. And so there is a bit of confusion that comes up for people, but, you know, I want our listeners to know that naturopathic physicans in the schools we went to were trained as medical doctors with the additional information of naturopathic medicine and philosophy. We go through the same rigorous education for the four years of med school, because we're licensed as general health care practitioners.
We have to have that comparable education. It's almost like getting a dual degree, really. You know, like a degree in this and that, and then the differences were not required wired to do the residencies. I actually didn't do a residency. I just dove in the deep end of the pool and started working it out.
So I didn't do any post-doctoral education directly in like a clinic. but many, many of our, our colleagues have, they've done that as well and gotten a lot of, you know, on-the-court experience. And, and there's a wide range of us, you know, which actually there's a wide range of medical doctors as well.
You know, you're starting to actually see, with the popularity of functional medicine, how diverse the perspective of, you know, a physician can be. And one of, I probably have said this I'm sure already, but one of my favorite things to give people as a tip is finding a doctor should be like dating. You want good communication and good chemistry.
Don't be afraid to interview your physicians and ask them and then choose somebody else. Like you're not. I think, we think we're stuck with whoever's on our insurance and to some degree, sometimes that's the case, but like there is still more you can do to really make sure you've got that resonance.
'Cause I think that's part of the law of intention. When you have that relationship resonance with your physician. Oh my gosh. It makes everything move in a much more beneficial way.
Ben Reeb: Do you take, or do you take insurance at all?
Sarah Marshall, ND: I actually don't.
Ben Reeb: Yeah.
Sarah Marshall, ND: And, but I will allow like, I'll do superbills and I'll, I'll help people utilize their insurance as much as possible.
And a lot of that has to do with the fact that I actually run a consulting practice nationally. So I'm working as a consultant with a lot of my clients versus working as a doctor on a patient relationship, you know, having to do with how I've got my licenses set up. And so. But I did do it one year and it was man, I would need to hire somebody who's an expert in billing. And I know that's something that a lot of our colleagues and physicians in general run into.
Well, it, it dawns on me that another conversation you may actually be able to shed some light on is the history of naturopathic medicine. This is one that, you know, I've always, I want to spend more time with and I've just kind of now re-engaged in, but, you know, would you kind of tell your version of the story of like where naturopathic medicine came from, what you've learned from reading all these books?
Ben Reeb: Yeah. So the story is that it kind of came from Germany and we have all these old German writers. However, if you study all of the different medical systems going on in the world throughout the last couple hundred years, it's clear that this was going on all over the world in every country. So to be really honest, I am actually still learning the story myself and I don't have my mind made up about what the story is.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. I think that. there's specific physicians that we attribute a lot of the origins of naturopathic medicine from predominantly Germany and then spreading into Belgium and France and eventually into the UK mostly. But I do think that, and you know, when I was in medical school, I actually participated in a research study under the heading of psycho neuro immunology, which is kind of a mouthful, but psycho for mind, neuro for brain and immunology for the immune system and how mind, body, medicine, immune, all kind of connected together. And we actually looked at... the hypothesis was, are all these ancient systems of medicine, essentially saying the same thing with different words, ayurvedic medicine and dosha is Chinese medicine and your five element chart, you know, even modern psychology and Myers Briggs and some of the ways that we look at our personality traits. And then modern medicine and then naturopathic medicine, and we did this massive dataset, it would take people like four hours to get through the survey. Cause we would, we would analyze their ayurvedic dosha, their Chinese chart, their medical history, Myers Briggs, Enneagram, and pull the whole thing together. And we were like looking at for, you know, there's so much to it. We never got all the way through the process, but we did initially find statistically like accurate, statistically relevant data that showed yup. Basically there's trends underneath all of this.
And that would, there could be a way to start to overlap. Like if you're Pitta Kapha from the ayurvedic system, which I'm just Pitta, Pitta, Pitta, Pitta. I'm like fire and strength and muscle, you know, but then in the Chinese medicine chart, I've got a lot of metal and I've got a lot of earth and I've got a good amount of water. And so like, what does that mean?
Right. And then there's the Tibetan system, which I don't really know very well, but a good friend of mine just started sharing about Tibetan medicine. And I was like, Oh my God. I want to learn about that too. And, and things that seem so like magical like pulse diagnosis and tongue reading and iridology.
But when you actually go back and look from a scientific standpoint, there's all this reproducibility to it. And you can actually correlate to the way that the body's functioning from lab tests and MRIs and scopes. And it's, it's quite accurate actually. And so it's really cool to actually see. So it's like, we call it naturopathic medicine, referring to a Western European origin, but like you said, there's themes that run deep that I think have been in human history... we've been doing this. We've been taking care of ourselves and healing ourselves for thousands of years. And I think some new ways of healing are actually old ways of healing that are getting rebirthed right now that we're starting to come in contact with.
Ben Reeb: At the same time, like our medicine really needs to be credited.
I think Naturopathic medicine really needs to have credit where credit is due. And I think that's another big reason I wrote this book is because I want to see naturopathic medicine on the map. I want to see everyone know, cause people are actively seeking out what we do. Millions and millions of people and this, this idea that we, that there's a lack of patients or that, I mean the abundance versus scarcity.
No, no, but people need to know about us and we need more books that explain what we do. Functional medicine has done a really great job of explaining what it does. And I mean, Dr. Jeffrey Bland PhD used to teach nutrition at our Alma Mater. National University of Natural Medicine in the 1980s. And he taught there for several years and then he went off and founded natu-- or Functional Medicine.
The thing is we are functional medicine and structural medicine. We are, we are naturopathic medicine, and that we are the roots of functional medicine. And so this, we need credit. We need to have credit. I think that at the same time, I, I have a lot of functional medicine doctor colleagues, you know, they're great. There's a lot of good ones.
Sarah Marshall, ND: It's just really an acknowledgement and I love the getting to stand up. You know, it's like, I often ask if you had 60 seconds to stand on a soap box and say something to the whole world, what would it be? And I think you might've just said it like, you know, and I love that it, and it's something good for me too to actually recognize is where I could be forwarding my leadership even more in, in not just this is Sarah Marshall, and this is what she's capable of, and this is what she's accomplished, but I'm a nature pathic physician. And what that means and why, where my training came from. And you know, my mentors of Dr. Tom and Dr. Paul Kalman's, were big influencers for me. And then also my mentor Liliana Barzola, who's an intuitive and, you know, I was doing all of her classes at the exact same time I was going through medical school. So I, you know, Tuesday nights I'd go over to Liliana's office and learn about Akashic records and past life regressions and, and all kinds of other more esoteric healing modalities.
But it all played a role in the work that I did. You know, dr. Sandberg Lewis was huge in my education and you know, who I now go to is Paul Anderson but these, these are great naturopathic physicians. And I will admit our profession and the people who are drawn to it sometimes, we can be a little bit of the red headed stepchild where we like will live inside of this conversation of we're outcasts or we don't belong.
And then we manifest more of that versus actually recognizing the professionalism and the leadership. I mean, it's, it's changing, but the number of times I meet somebody from a conventional medical training, when they meet me, they go. You're not at all what I expected from a naturopathic physician. And I'm like, what did you expect? They're like, I don't know, but, you know, and it's like, and I just think it's just unknown.
So standing up on our soap boxes and saying, Hey, here I am. And this is where the roots and the medicine comes from is super important.
Ben Reeb: It is, and there's 8,000 of us in North America. Some people say 6,000, 8,000, probably only a half of those are actually practicing. But now is our time. And I mean, now is our time.
If just a few of us can align it's game over.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah, totally. I completely agree. And
Ben Reeb: not that there is a game.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Well, you know, and it's created, and I mean, again, you and I talked about this before this interview and I have, I. I dunno, I'm going to say it again. If you guys have heard this before, but my ultimate stand in the world, like, like my reason for existence and for doing this is the unification of medicine.
And for me, what that means is there is no alternative, complimentary and conventional medicine. It's just medicine. It's people get access to what is going to make the biggest difference for what they're dealing with now. They enter into a healthcare system and they come out healthy. That's it. That's what matters to me. Right? And that there's so much, it can be done through meeting of the minds. And maybe you and I should start a conference where we bring all the modalities together and we start our, you know, all the different professions. We start actually creating more communication between. Cause I think that's, what's going to make a big difference as well.
and for people who are curious, you know, there's. There's more and more naturopathic physicians that are recognizing that need, and they're discovering ways to offer their services in different... different. So it's not, it always used to be, you had to have a local doctor and generally speaking, mostly, you're still going to work with physicians in your local area or in your state, but we're starting to see through technology and through changes in conventional medicine that the lid is coming off of that.
And there's a lot of possibilities to work with people around the country in different capacities. You know, that's very safe and very legal. And I think Coronavirus has taught us a lot about the power of telemedicine. That's just like breaking through. I've been telemed for nine years. But that people can also look for, make sure I don't say this wrong, but the American Association of Naturopathic physicians.
So the AANP, which the nurses also have the AANP so you'll see the nurse association and then you gotta look for naturopaths or naturopathic, and you'll get us and there's. Lists of physicians that are registered into that association. Now, ironically, I'm not a member of the, AANP. Maybe I should be now, but I'm on the Utah page. So you can also look for a state association and you'll often find physicians in your local areas. And I do think we're getting better at being seen. And so we're much more Google-able than we used to be. So you can often just look for naturopathic physician in your area and start to see what comes up.
And the other thing to note is to look up your state, to see if nature paths are licensed in your state, because that will alter, you know, you'll still be able to find them. It just gives you a little more information and I can't, we'll put it in the show notes. I think it's like. It's the college, our college website that talks about accreditation.
I'll make sure that's in there too. It's like the AANC? Something letter, lette dot org. So I'll make sure that same, but there'll be resources for all of the listeners of how do you find a naturopath and how do you go about getting connected to that physician. Cool. Well this was an interesting exploration today.
Ben Reeb: Yeah this was fun.,
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah it was really, really, really great.
And it's just been, I. I can't thank you enough for writing the book. Like, honestly, writing's not my strength. So I'm just so grateful that you had the vision and the forethought to do it. And I'm like, seriously, I'm like, this is required reading for all of my clients. And so I I'm purchasing books for everyone and, and really excited to have them to have that as a resource and I love how readable it is. Like you, you know, you said like you could do it on an airplane. It's an hour and a half, you know, tops to read the whole thing, which just gives people such a great. Foundation and it's so accessible. So thank you for doing it that way.
Ben Reeb: Who has time to read anyway?
Sarah Marshall, ND: Exactly. Right. And do you have, I'm asking, do you have it on audible yet?
Ben Reeb: I had to put that on pause. I had it all set up, at the professional studio here in Portland. Yeah. So excited working with his team. Cause I'm an auditory learner myself.
So I love to.
Sarah Marshall, ND: And that book in particular would just be brilliant in that format as well. Like I read it, you know, but it, it, I can, I can hear it. I'd love to hear it, you know, that way as well, so. Wonderful. Awesome. Well, Ben, just thank you so much. And where can people find you? What's your clinic?
Ben Reeb: Yep.
Portland Clinic of Natural Health in Portland, Oregon. And you can just find me a DrReeves.com. That's a D, double R, double E, B as in boy, S as in sam, dot com.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Awesome. Great. And then the book again?
Ben Reeb: The book is "The Serpent and the Butterfly: The Seven Laws of Healing," and it's available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble.
It's available all over the world and on my website as well.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Awesome. Well, this was a little bit of a deviation from our usual format, but I think it was so important. And thank you for all of your wisdom and your knowledge and your experience that you shared with us to inject in this set of resources for people that are looking, looking to figure out what their next steps are. And this gives them a really, really great place for them to start.
Ben Reeb: Thank you so much for having me, Sarah
Sarah Marshall, ND: You bet, my dear. All right. Have a good one.
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Thanks to today's guest Ben Reebs for his generosity of mind and spirit. For a full transcript and all the resources for today's show, visit SarahMarshallND.com/podcast. You can learn more about finding your own healing by going to SarahMarshallND.com Or following me on Instagram @SarahMarshallND. Thanks to our music composer, Roddy Nikpour, and our editor Kendra Vicken. And we'll see you next time.