Physician burnout, Suicide, & Intuition in Medicine with Dr. Rachel Reinhart Taylor

This week, Medical Doctor Rachel Reinhart Taylor shares her incredibly vulnerable story of confronting physician burnout, nearly committing suicide, and the tribal medicine that has healed her heart and soul.

Referenced in the Show

Dr. Rachel Reinhart Taylor M.D.’s bio

Rachel Reinhart Taylor M.D. is an intuitive health educator with a passion for serving underserved populations. Throughout her career, she has gathered extensive knowledge and experience in holistic care from working alongside Native Americans on reservations throughout the United States. While doing medical mission work, she realized that she wanted to help others have the chance to learn how to live healthier and happier lives. She went on to earn certifications for meditation teaching and acupuncture in order to gain a comprehensive understanding of health. Now, Dr. Taylor has made it her mission to teach others about the unification of the mind, body, and spirit as a means of healing, as well as provide health and wellness practices for a healthier life.

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Full Transcript

Sarah Marshall, ND: Welcome to HEAL. This week, Medical Doctor Rachel Reinhart Taylor shares her incredibly vulnerable story of confronting physician burnout, nearly committing suicide, and the tribal medicine that has healed her heart and soul. I’m your host, Dr. Sarah Marshall.

(music)

Sarah Marshall, ND: Okie dokie. Oh my God. I am so excited. I know. I just, I always, but really, like, I only pick the best people to be on Heal and you're one of the best people. So I'm just like, 

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: I'm so flattered. Thank you so much, Sarah, for choosing me to be on your podcast. 

Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. Yeah. So we've got Dr. Rachel Reinhart Taylor, and you are practicing currently in what state?

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: I, well, so now I'm telemedicine. So I have licenses. There's like emergency COVID licenses right now, but my, my full licenses are in Virginia, Arizona, and California with pending licenses in Maryland, New Jersey, Utah. 

Sarah Marshall, ND: So isn't that awesome that like, I mean, look, we got to find our silver linings to that heck of a year that we've had. And how awesome this has really pushed something forward in medicine that's mattered to me about accessibility and freedom for physicians to not be locked into certain locations and so that's really rad.

Like you've got, you know, you're physically outside of DC and then you have this ability to make a difference for people in so many different places in the country. And that's similarly how my practice is set up. And when I first did it, everyone was kind of like, what are you doing? Is that legal? How are you pulling that off?

And now they're like, how are you doing that? And can you teach me? 

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: So, yeah, well, yeah. That's how I do my that's how I set up on purpose my intuitive practice too, is so anyone, because for the intuitive practice I don't have to have, it's not medicine and it's students. Yeah. So I do it not live on purpose. Not in person on purpose so that anyone in the world could call me.

Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. That's awesome. Cool. So we've got a lot of different things we can explore today. You know what, where we got connected through a mutual dear friend of ours was that he knew both of us as women, that practice medicine, and also cultivate our intuition.

And we pull those pieces together where appropriate, and that was what our initial connection became about. And then we've just found, you know, there's this other sub conversation, whatever direction you want to go, that has been a commitment of mine. I've stood on the assertion that if doctors were completely free to practice medicine, true to their own hearts, we wouldn't even have to have this whole integrative conventional alternative conversation.

There would just be good medicine being practiced and very aware how often what a lot of people experience is like, Oh, the doctor did this and they totally sucked. Or this thing happened is like, yeah. And if you actually got to talk to them behind a closed door where they were free to speak their mind, they tell you they didn't even want to do it that way.

They would have wanted to have other options or ways to work through things. But we've built this machine of the industrial complex of medicine and insurance and hospitals and infrastructure that's got a lot of slow to change and antiquated knowledge systems, all of that, that is part of what holds us back from that practice.

And then there's this other piece of are our physicians, nurses, healthcare practitioners, all of the above healthy. Are they healthy? Are they full? Are they nourished? Are they taken care of? And why does that matter? 

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: Yeah, that, you know what, that's the perfect topic. I agree with you 100%. And I just spoke at the physician burnout symposium about that very topic and how really it's not, you know, it's not very healthy for our patients when our, when our providers are burned out, be it naturopath or Western medicine. It doesn't matter if our providers are burned out, patients are not getting a good experience. And one of my big, there was a big push in Western medicine. Well, a couple of things in Western medicine, just as you already touched on, right?

The integrative,  integrated, functional medicine, lifestyle medicine, preventative medicine, like they have all these titles now for Western medicine. People who want to practice medicine on a holistic basis. The problem is I think that, and I think that, I think that the strongest, the strongest way to be is, is a combination of naturopath  and Western medicine, you know what I mean? Like I loved your analogy when you told me you know, we use, we need to use a paint brush where a paint brush is do right. And hammer when we need that. And like a lot of Western medicine is very much a hammer, but I tried using a paint brush. Like they recently, I, you know, after I had this minor stroke, oddly, by the way, the doctor that connected us, he had a stroke around my same age.

So now he's, he's been really helping me coach. He's a coach now, too. So he's been coaching me through some of this, but anyway, Oh, after this, the stroke, you know, the depression that's expected after a stroke. And initially I was good. I have an integrative psychiatrist who, you know, we are doing St John's Wort and like all these different things and glutamate and probiotics and making sure that my health was optimized.

But you know, I just kinda got to a point where I was like, All like, it's just not, I guess it's not all working. I need a little bit of the hammer, like, you know, but I think because my body was, and it took me, I have a whole blog on breaking my pride about having a book called medication detox and needing an antidepressant, even in a small dose, you know? I think I'm lucky I get away with very small doses of things because I'm so sensitive to medication. But but yeah, anyway, so that's one problem is that we're using hammers and we're in a place where I think first medicine, well, I don't know the timeline, but we started making medicine into a business where now we have to make X amount to break even.

I mean, it's just. That's how any business model works. And I think that has really then started making it easy for, you know, the insurance companies to say, well, you're going to bill at a hundred dollars to see a patient for, let's say back in the day, when we got to actually see patients for like 30 minutes at a time or an hour at a time, right.

Let's say, okay, I'm going to bill $300 here, insurance for this visit. I mean, it sounds like a lot, your insurance, a lot of insurances will say, okay, I see your $300, but we're only allowing you to bill a hundred dollars for this code. And then we're only gonna pay you actually $50 of that, a hundred dollars.

So what happens is that now okay, and then, you know, as these reimbursements are going down, our medical malpractice, our you know, the cost to maintain an office malpractice insurances, Not, you know, the, the different supplies, like there are all these, these groups who, and then, you know, are different state licenses.

Each license is about $1,500 per state to maintain and you renew them. However, so, you know, the, and again, I, I actually do talk about this in my book too. Like, as you can see now physicians used to make a lot of, they didn't use to make a lot of money, but now reimbursement's going down and down and down.

We're barely like a lot of doctors closed their doors during COVID because they're barely keeping their head above water...

Sarah Marshall, ND: And to actually maintain the facility was so costly that that didn't even make sense to maintain, you know, staying open under that time. And like, and it's so tricky because you know that, you know, I'm, I'm in a unique position where I come from, you know, straight business. My clients pay me directly out of their pocket and they purchase supplements. And there is a markup to the supplements and it's X, Y, and Z, but it's you ask me, I can give you the transparency on all of it. And you know, and then when I have a client who comes to me where we're working things out from a budget, the first thing I'll do is drop as much of a discount on supplements as I can get away with where they're still paying my fees, but I'm giving them as much of a break.

You know, like I try and work with people when, you know, something happens in their life or whatever that is, and to keep myself competitive. And even that, I just have my own cost of running my business and how to actually manage that, to work it out in mostly I am around $300 an hour, which is interesting you pulled that number out, you know, but that's only accessible to certain people that, that they can even invest. Now, one of the things, and I'm not. Like we can get into, you know, there's an ethics conversation. There's so many pieces of this for me, where I've stood in my personal ethics is at least it's as transparent as I can get it.

We're crystal clear where the dollars are flowing and that's one of the things that's also happened as medicine has grown over the last 150 years from literally being your net, you know, neighborhood physician that you went to their doorstep, that you had an office in their own home. They had a little apothecary right there and they just, 

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: they came to your house 

Sarah Marshall, ND: or they came to your house, a little black bag and actually like delivered the medicine, you know?

And I am such a sucker for like, All those old time shows and I just watched Outlander. And the main character is a physician from the future who goes back in the past, cooky crazy. But I just loved watching her, like do the medical science and then try and backtrack as a physician to use the herbs that were available in the local area.

Like it just kind of tickled me on that integrative side. But what I'm aware of with all of this is like, we have these multiple competing systems around medicine that are each their own business, and they're working to make as much money as possible, but they're working against each other. The insurance company is trying to make the money.

And then the actual doctor's office slash don't even get started about the complexity of a hospital. Right. And everything they have to deal with.

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: I was in the hospital for one night for my stroke, and I think I got eight different bills and it's like $5,000 for one night. And then it is complex, It's so complex.

Sarah Marshall, ND: I mean, I had a client who had a incident of syncope, he fainted and the way that it happened, he actually hit his chest on the way down. And then everyone thought he had a heart attack because he had chest pain and it took him a while. So they did this huge, massive workup for him, fainting, which is actually something that he had had in his history anyways.

And at the end for this whole thing, they said, nothing's wrong with you and we don't know what caused it and it was $15,000. Yeah. And it was just like it ballooned so quickly. 

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: Yeah. And I think you're right. You know, going back to all of these competing and even competition, like it, it, it hurts. It hurts my heart and soul a little bit.

When I see people who hate Western, I hate Western medicine, it's toxic, or I hate the naturopaths. They don't know what they're doing. They mess the, and it's like, Whoa. Like I remember like if we could just take a step back and we could all just. Get along a little bit, that would be optimal. That would be the optimal care, you know?

And, and so, yeah, I mean, it is tough and I, you know, as you talk about, okay, yours is a transparent this much flat fee while, however, then it does become unaccessible. You know, I, I, I would. I would love to help my, I have a big, I'm a big softy for an underserved population. There's, you know, I did emergency medicine with the native Americans.

I've done several medical missions and I'm actually, I didn't tell you this yet. I'm applying for a grant, hopefully from the there's a, the NIH, the national Institute of health has in branch that's for research in alternative and complimentary therapies. And I'm applying for a grant to research free ways that people can have an actual, like, like does this type of meditation actually cause your hemoglobin A1C or your diabetes numbers to go down?

What free ways can we help? Not three ways, like the car, like

Can we help these populations that don't have access to, to not to naturopaths, which I think should be the first step as a Western medicine doctor. I truly think naturopaths should be the first step to everything. Unless you like got in a car accident then. Okay. Or like….

Sarah Marshall, ND:  there’s specific, but generally, you know...

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: But then how healthy can we get these people to optimize? Can we get them by just educating them? Yeah. You know, a lot of the studies they say in the book I wrote is on purpose. Like the publisher wouldn't let me put like three ways to be healthy because they're like that won’t sell any books…

Like if it's through you, I don't have to buy a book. So I fine. Okay. Put something else. But that's the idea. That's the idea is like here, look, look at how healthy you can be for free for, for optimize. You can be free. Yeah. And, the science isn't people don't know. I actually used to think like whatever, natural past shamatha, but then when I started working at the native Americans, my eyes were open like, Oh my God, there's so much amazing healing that is available 

Sarah Marshall, ND: and literally in your kitchen cabinets and, or just down the street at a grocery store or drugstore like hydro hydroperoxide, castor oil, baking soda...Like there's so many things that actually, you know, go a long way and even coming from being in naturopathic school, which like seriously, when I was 24 years old and I applied, I didn't know, naturopathic physicians existed. I grew up in upstate New York. Naturopathic medicine was not a thing in New York because it was legally completely banned.

It's now exists, which is interesting. Cause I'm moving to New York is going, gonna be my first time living in a state that doesn't acknowledge naturopathic physicians as physicians now I'll have my other licenses and I'll be working, you know, in those States as well. So I'm going to be able to work with that.

And with my local population in New York, I have to abide by those restrictions. Now the kind of cool thing is my actual practice is I do a lot of the coaching people around water, food, sunlight, air movement, and then a lot of the remedies I would recommend for them are things that they can get accessible from a natural food store locally.

So I'm going to be able to still fully practice, but like this whole thing around it is, you know, when I was in naturopathic school, I really thought I was going to the hogs wort of like alternative medicine. I was like, we're going to learn all this crazy awesome, intuitive and like cosmic. So no, actually, I mean, it is good in the long run, as I've gotten older and wiser, I've discovered that, you know, As much as naturopathic universities and colleges, you know, from some people in the conventional world, look at our training and they're like, they're not trained and they don't have enough actually, when they talk to us and they ask the questions, they're like, Holy shit, you did all that in four years because I actually had to do a complete MV.

Now we don't do residencies the same way that conventional doctors do. So like residencies and fellowships and all the work after, but your medical school and my medical school were the same. And I had to do four years of nutrition, three years of herbs, three years of homeopathy, physical manipulation, like all these other components that bring in the naturopathic part.

When I was in school, I was pissed because it was like, what do you mean I gotta learn pharmacology. I hate drugs. It was so bad. You know there was like this whole part of it. I would, I mean, like, literally I was like mad, but I'm super grateful for that foundation. And. I remember, even when I left school, I didn't trust the basic remedies.

I didn't think they'd really make that big of a difference. Like really castor oil packs. Like you rub some castor oil on your stomach and you put this little cloth on and you sit there for 45 minutes. Like, what's that going to do? And what's crazy. Like recently have a client who, through our relationship, she actually did a routine colonoscopy and they found a significant cancer.

We would have never, we caught it in stage two would have never happened otherwise, if we hadn't been like, look, we got it. And she actually got pushback from some of her MDs about getting more lab tests done, which I don't really understand why, but we stood and stood and stood and she got done what she needed to.

And then here we go. Right. So now she's in, she's doing combination radiation and chemotherapy. She has an allergic reaction to the chemo. So she calls me and I'm like, I'm probably going to get in trouble for saying this too late. So she calls me and I'm like, look, here's what I know. Vitamin C calms down mass cells and hives, and can actually reduce an immediate, acute allergic reaction, check it out with your oncologist, but here's what I'd have you do.

And I prescribed.. recommended vitamin C for, you know, the first trial and within 24 hours, her hives had completely stopped and calmed down. And here's a very simple remedy that you can find anywhere, which I still, you know, giant disclaimer to this entire episode, nothing we say here is medical treatment.

Nothing we say here is medical recommendations. You and I are shooting the shit and talking about what we see. But if we don't have these conversations, if we're not willing to challenge it, We don't learn, we don't grow. And then go to your physicians, go to your doctors and have these conversations. And if you don't have a doctor, that's going to talk to you about these things, find another doctor to work with.

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: Oh, I say that so much. I always tell people, they're like, Oh, well, how am I going to find, like, when I left my last job, how many depends on the doctor? Like you I'm like, you will find one. And if they don't, you know, if they do give you pushback or if they don't want to do whatever, then another one, one thing, one thing that may, as you're talking about why they give her pushback, I, I'm going to tell you this.

Sometimes when I talk to patients and I'm like, listen, because you don't fit in X or Y guideline, Y you're gonna pay a lot for this lab tests. Yeah. But I'll order it for you. So maybe that, but anyway, that's off. 

Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. And that's where that the insurance piece comes in, where they're making as many of the medical determinations of what care is needed or what things need to happen. And like I'm all for, I actually do think we overspend on medicine in the United States. At least if you look at the statistics dollar for dollar and then health outcomes, something is not working in the system because there's other countries that spend less and they have better health outcomes than we do.

So there's some things which could come down to like, if we were freed up more, physicians were able to say… and like antibiotics, this has started to become part of the conversation. We've recognized the threat of over prescribing antibiotics and that actually A: we can't create antibiotic resistant strains and B: you know, childhood fevers and exanthems and illnesses is exercise for the immune system. You're priming yourself. You're learning about it. Now, this is again a case by case scenario per kiddo, but like kids are supposed to get their hands and fingers and noses and toes into everything and get sick. And then they're, they're training their immune system.

And if you don't allow that process to go all the way to completion, you truncate that immunological response. And sometimes that's when you get the imbalances where you have too much, th two response that causes more allergies and inflammation, the body actually gets habituated to cause an allergic reaction to things where it should be learning the B-cell T-cell differentiation.

It should be learning about how to actually specifically attack this virus or this protein and you get other complications from it. So we figured that out there's more docs that are far more willing to say, actually, no, go home and let it run its course or if it gets too feverish, you know, use some Tylenol, which that's a whole nother thing I have about, we jumped to suppressing fevers too quickly.

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: These are all I girl, you're totally preaching to the choir. You know how many times I'm counseling and I'm just like, listen, a fever means your body is doing what it's supposed to do. They may get so uncomfortable that you cannot tolerate it. Okay. Then take a dose of an anti-inflammatory, but don't be afraid of a fever.

You don't need to be treating a number. And then again, preaching the choir about the antibiotic resistance. My undergraduate degree is microbiology and I know, but here's something funny. I failed microbiology in medical school and then. Okay. I was a single mom in an abusive relationship. Okay. So it's not like that, but but, but then they had me take a remediation test and I got like a 96% on it… So clearly 

Sarah Marshall, ND: I failed my anatomy boards between my second and third year by one question. One question. And so then I had to study the whole next year and go back in. And fortunately I was in the cutoff where they actually were allowing us to still take one section of the board exams. And you didn't have to take all five of your basic sciences over again, which is what happened the next year.

So I snuck in under that, but I had to spend six months. So I actually now damn solid in anatomy because I 

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: going back to, we were talking about 

Sarah Marshall, ND: antibiotic esistance in microbiome. 

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: I think I, yeah, we were talking about all of that. I wanted to bring it into, you were talking about how you wished it was like an intuitive school, things like that. Can we go to that? Yeah. So for me, I started getting into intuition. I know you do medical intuition.

Mine started when I started working at the native Americans before that I did not even believe in, I didn't believe in it, but as there were some medicine men that were like, you have like, like you have this skill and it's hard for you to handle it because you don't know what's going on, you know? And I call it a skill.

I like how, I don't know if you know, Carolyn, Myss how she says. It's not a, it's not a gift. It's, it's a skill. Anyone can do it. It's like playing the piano. If you're interested, you gotta learn, but anyone can do it. And so so I started getting into it because it started making my life easier because when I got that gut feeling, I knew I could trust.

This patient, one of the big things about what I did emergency medicine with the native Americans, one of the big things about that is they say the hardest thing isn't intubating, you know, in debating for those of you don't know that is when you put the tube down someone's throat, when they can't breathe, it's not, I mean, it's it's… you have to learn how to do it obviously, it's a skill. But the hardest part is learning when to pull the trigger and do it. Cause if you do it too late, you're, you're fighting against an airway that's closing and, and you're, you know, it's going to be real hard if not impossible, if you do it too early the patient might've pulled through and without an intubation.

So that's one way in which I use started really tapping into my intuition. Does this patient need a tube down their throat? Are they imminently about to die. If I don't do this like that, that is something, some people will call like a doctor's intuition or something, or they're cops have the same cops intuition.

And I think, I think we all just kind of say like, Oh, let's just kind of whatever, blow it off to experience, but it's not, I mean, it's a feeling in your body, it's your gut reaction. It's a knowing, you know, and, and I think, I think it's really important, not only in the medical field, but in everyday life to say, okay, what am I learning here?

And then, you know, and that's kind of, it does involve, there's a lot of, excuse me, the science behind intuition. Right. So I think one of the big things I talked about if I could go into my story about my burnout, do you want me to ask? Is that okay? So, Oh, I'd had a lot of kind of off and on depression, but it hadn't started settle in or until I started medical school and was in the kind of a abusive relationship. And then, and then it got to a point in 2018 where I was flying around the country to different reservations doing ER, and I loved, I felt honored to work with the native Americans.

I learned so much. But something about it just, just more and why I was asked to kind of suppress my feelings, seeing, seeing children die, see, you know, seeing horrible domestic violence or, or, you know, rapes coming into the ER, you know, suicidal patients, things like this. Then I got to a point where I was so overworked.

I was so exhausted. I just, I just wanted to give up and then it just kept, I just kept ignoring it. And then it got to the point where I wanted, I felt. Okay. I had a plan. I'm going to kill myself after this shift. And people might be shocked to hear that one plus doctor a day kills themselves. So physician burnout and suicide, it is the highest rate of suicide of any profession we're encouraged to not get help because then they go, they ask on your license, have you ever had, had help for this kind of thing?

If you do you want to do it, you know, pay cash for a therapist. So they can't request these records. And a lot of people, you know, we have 300- $400,000 in  debt and with the reimbursement rates so low, we're going out of business. I mean, we thought we were giving our lives to help these help people, which is what we all wanted.

So I think most doctors are very sensitive. So then anyway, there was a, it was an act of God that I didn't kill myself truly. In 2018, it was. People are like, wow, you saved a lot of lives on the native American reservation to an ER. And I'm like, no, they saved my life basically because they saw in me and understood why this was so hard for me to tolerate in ways that Western medicine didn't.

Because at the time I was talking to a therapist weekly, even when I wasn't in town, you know, we had tele visits. I was on the right medications. I was following with this psychiatrist. I was, you know, everything that, it, it just, it, Western medicine didn't have the explanation. Right. And so, you know, I, I got to a point where I thought I was going to go home from the shift on one of the reservations and kill myself and something God, or whatever you believe in had other plans.

I didn't even attempt, I reached out for help right away. And so I think part of it was knowing my daughter. I have a daughter, you know, and I thought she doesn't care anymore about me. I'm gone so much. I'm always working. And I think, you know, that that's a big thing too, Physicians don't really, we don't see our families a lot.

We're asked to work 80 plus hours a week. There's no work hour restrictions. You take call you're sleeping during the day. You never interact with your kids. And when you're awake, you feel so tired that you, you feel like a zombie. You're not making any connections with people. And then to push patients through the way that they want us to, to make this more money in the hospital or whatever, you know, you lose that personal touch.

And so, so anyway, I came back, I lived in Phoenix at the time I came back from South Dakota to Phoenix. And started to get help. I ran into, I think, non coincidentally I was going to this like cold pressed juice bar that was in this little fancy apartment complex I was living in. And they were like, Dr. Taylor about it really early. Like what happens? Like usually you kind of, you know, you're gone more and I'm like, yeah. And I don't know why there's just like diarrhea of the mouth. I was like, yeah, I guys, I became suicidal. I needed to come back and get help. They were like, what? And was like, yeah, I don't know why I told them these people, you know, like why.  It just so happened there was a girl there who was not supposed to be working in that juice place. And she was like, she's she was doing inventory. She came from a different one and she was like, you should check out Kambo. You should, you should talk to these people. And they happened to also be built what this guy was trained as a physician assistant at Yale.

Also native American actually he's indigenous, but not native Americans. Wife is native American. And he had quit P being a PA to go back to naturopath, become a naturopath. And it just was, I was like, you know, I think I had to be in this place of nothing's working because as I told you, I didn't believe in any of it until I got to this point of desperation.

Like none of the Western medicine shit is working kind of doing what I like, every quote, unquote, everything. Right. And there's none of this is working and So you know, a little hesitantly, I did go, I called this guy I went and met with him and that's when I got really introduced to the intuition and, and some of the science of intuition, some of the, I don't, I'm sure, you know, the heart math Institute research, where they show, you know, our, our, our EKG, which we use in Western medicine.

The variability of our heart rate, meaning like you well, so when we take a breath, our heart rate will change usually. We used to think that this was like a weaker heart for our heart rate to change like that when you think of breath, but now we know it's a better heart to adjust when you're taking deep breaths and it's called heart rate variability.

And those I can put two people in the same room eighteen inches apart you can see a change. In someone else's heart rate variability, you can seep someone's mood from their heart rate variability. You can see, are they in a coherent, loving state? Are they having this? Certainly it's called like a sinusoidal wave pattern as called coherence is what they call a HeartMath Institute, calls it, or is it, you know, this kind of all over the place, angry, depressed type of heart rate pattern, and they have now proven over and over you can tell. They've also proven that your heart rate electromagnetic fields, you know, from your heart overlaps with people's brains, electro magnetic fields. So think of how many suicidal patients I was seeing a day three or four, because the ER is the first place they go, which is great. I'm happy to keep people safe in the ER, until we get a better place for them to go as an emergency basis.

But you know, I didn't, no one is taught, Hey, maybe you're kind of picking up what they're putting down, you know, maybe cause this guy, okay. George is his name. He's amazing. He's like, maybe it's not yours. I'm like, what are you talking about? The suicidal is not mine. How could this not be mine? You know, like I feel so deeply, you know? And you know, so then I started doing more deep dives. I mean, he taught me about like PTSD and the methylation of your DNA, your DNA changes just from seeing like traumatic things or experiencing traumatic things. And so then I, I started to do a deep dive, you know, and to kind of, wow.

You know, what about like, you know, facial mimicry. Well, there's a lot of you know, studies where you facial mimicry, you know, they say you can recognize what someone else is feeling by their facial expression, but there are studies that go even deeper to say, and then we feel those emotions. 

Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. And like the mirror neurons now where literally our nervous system mirrors back what's around us.

And like there's and there's, and then this is like, we've kind of put this under this heading about intuition, which that sort of is its own. There's a lot here, you know, there's, there's where. You know, cause some of the books I've read too, like, you know, Malcolm Gladwell talked about this a lot in link, and then I'm currently reading David Kahneman's thinking fast and slow, which a huge part of that book is about what he calls intuition is just our fast Twitch muscle, you know, response in our brain that, yes, if you're a physician or you're a lawyer or you're a musician or whatever, you've built a big skill that there is this ability that your brain has to come to very quick conclusions that are usually accurate.

And we deem that intuition, but that's really just your expertise in the, in the part of your brain and the way that works. Now, my caveat is, yeah, there's that. And there's something else. Like there's also something that's kind of super up to that. That is what I experience is a connection to something that's more bigger.

Cause sometimes the stuff that I would innately say is not what I'm hearing in my head, somebody wiser, smarter, more responsible for their emotions has higher integrity is talking to me inside my head, giving me information that is not the level that I'm operating in and whether that's spiritual guidance or, and you know, there's a whole world of then energy medicine, energy healing, which there is a lot of science to and we have actually quite a bit of pretty sensitive machinery that can actually take photographs of any electromagnetic fields and you can see how things change and you can do that with, they've done double blind, placebo controlled, where they will literally have a person in a room who has no idea what the experiment is actually about.

And then they can watch these things alter and change in their electromagnetic fields because somebody else's intention on that person. 

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: Yeah. Oh, did you? So I this is really funny. I'm such a nerd, but I got, I had the great opportunity to be in touch with Roland.  who's the head of research at heart math Institute.

And he has emailed me a couple of power points that were just presented about distance cam and, and how you can, like, what, like, you have to have two people that have met and have had a positive experience in person. And it's kind of like Einstein's He called it spooky spooky action at a distance or something like that.

Like this is a funny name and it's quantum, quantum physics, where you can take two electrons that were near each other, send them to completely separate them to any distance, thousands of miles stop one electron. And the other one stops in exactly the same time. There's no lag. There's no. So, so I think that's kind of where this research idea came from, but, but they talk, they talk, this research is like basically they husband and wife, for example, they have their little heart monitors or whatever.

And then one is like doing dishes in the other room, in another house and the husband's wherever. This person has meant that like on purpose distracted, so she's doing dishes and the husband stands there and he will intentionally send love to this person and it shows this person's heart go in and out of coherence based on him sending love and I’m like Holy shit.

Like, yeah. So as you can imagine, if we are, as physicians are having a bad day, our patients are mad at us are, you know, we're still human. My, you know, my daughter screamed at me or my ex has to take me to court or whatever things that have happened to me in the last actual, you know, year I had a stroke.

Like if someone's mad at me, you know, my heart rate is running out of coherence. It's running them out and coherence, but, and, and the thing about the coherence too, is. This affects your physical health. I mean please showing yeah. Cortisol levels. Higher risk for heart attack and stroke. You know, diabetes, like you're talking out the stress hormones with, especially with cortisol, insomnia.

I mean, some. 

Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah, I'm seeing a ton of with my clients is like, we may even identify adrenal dysregulation and that they've got, you know, hypo, pituitary, adrenal axis, dysfunction. They've got endocrine disruption. They even have like, you know, gut microbiome, like, yeah. Okay. There's real legit physiologic imbalances in their body.

But there's this kind of overarching thing of like, how do we get their nervous system to actually come back into that parasympathetic dominant, coherent state, where the body is experiencing, I'm safe. The world is safe. Like I'm loved. The world is loving like that experience of life. That if we don't shift that you can throw all the remedies at them in the world.

And it's really hard. It's like, it's like that actually is a key piece to being able to open that up, which is one of the beautiful things. We're talking a lot about heart math. There are other access points, but it's a really good one, you know, to be able to start to retrain yourself how to get into that coherence in that resonance and then how it actually causes the opposite where you get positive feedback and you start to calm certain cytokines down, it shifts your immune system function 

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: well, and in that same vein, when I was saying like, I'm doing everything, quote unquote, right according to Western medicine with a therapist and I'm taking the antidepressant and I'm doing the blog and I'm following up with people.

So then George, like, I wasn't quite ready for this Kambo experience, which is tell us what Kambo is. So Kambo is a legal non hallucinogenic secretion from a frog. I know some of you have seen that Simpsons where that he like licks the frog and he's like, yeah, that's something else. And they, you know, they use it as a, kind of in a, in a healing ceremony.

I'll only go that far because. Well, if I describe it too much in depth, without people experiencing it, I think that freaks them out or they, they form opinions and, and really each person should decide on their own if that’s okay.

Sarah Marshall, ND: well then what we can see is it's a purge productive, it helps the body excrete toxins and it liberates withheld emotions and toxins and it, you know, it can I don't know a lot about the biochemistry, but I have a dear friend who's actually going to be on the podcast and talk about it. She's a Kambo practitioner and you know, it, it does solicit an inflammatory response, but in that process helps detox and heal and purge a lot of things out of our system.

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: Yeah. Right. And, and this should be said too, that I had to wean off of my antidepressant medications and stuff, because, because Kambo does cause a large surge in serotonin and dopamine. Yeah. For sure. 

Sarah Marshall, ND: There’s contraindications,you want to work with the practitioner, the whole world.

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: Yeah. Yes. Look them up.

There's an international association of common practitioners website. You can look them up on. And my, my practitioners or I look for a certified practitioners anyway, so I'm there and he's telling me about being an empath and how maybe this isn't yours. And I'm like, I don't know about all this kind of crazy shit you're talking, man.

But because he had was a trail, Yale trained PA, he was able to take me through that science store. You know what I mean, where it was like, okay, I can get on board with this. And I think I was at such a. I mean, I literally was like, this has to work or I'm going to kill myself. Like, you know what I mean?

Like it's this or death because I'd given up because the thing I thought would make me over the moon happy, which was basically my job was like a full time medical mission. Like I love that stuff. It was not, and I was so run down and I just had no understanding. So anyway, here's the, what we're talking about.

All I could have had all the medications in the world, but what he, what stopped the suicidal thinking that day was he looks at me he's like, how about, how about... Dean is his wife.. How about Edina? And I do Pranic healing. I'm like, what is that? He's like, it's like an energy healing on you. And I'm like, I literally was crossing my arms with this look of like, whatever.

I mean, I didn't have to say it. I was like, okay. And then, you know, and then he goes like, you don't have to believe in it for it to work. Okay. Yeah. I was like, is it that? And then they do it and never again had, I felt suicidal life has gotten hard and shitty and really hard things. I may have a stroke, but okay.

Wait, let me take that back. I did have a hard time after the stroke, just recently where I was like, I don't understand the meaning of this. Why did I survive this? But it wasn't like suicide's an option. Yeah. You know what I mean? Killing myself was no longer an option. I just never occurred to me again.

There were times where I was like, I just want to give up life is hard. I think everyone has that experience. 

Sarah Marshall, ND: And that was from the healing. You hadn't even actually done a Kambo treatment yet, correct?

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: Yep. No. Cause like I was still on medication. So being the Western medicine trained and Kambo practitioner certified, he was, was smart enough to say we can't just throw a Kambo this is going to be dangerous for you. So I created this long relationship with them over months while I was kind of leaning off of medications. I also went to a naturopath. Well, sorry. She practiced traditional Chinese medicine. So she did that. I did some acupuncture, stuff like that. It was weird though.

She ordered like American herbs. I don't know. I don't know what, whatever she did, it was fine. It worked. And I came on. I had that's one other thing, I think, as a population, but I think especially as a doctor trusting a non MDs judgment was a huge letting go experience for me, because I think truly if I had found out, if I knew what a naturopath was before I went to medical school, I probably would have chosen that. Honestly, but same as you, I didn't know what it was. My dad's a doctor, my mom's and nurse practitioner. My step mom's a nurse 

Sarah Marshall, ND: So you come big time from that conversation. My mom was a Hippie. So that helped

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: Not at all for me, like hardcore Western medicine, anything hurts. You take ibuprofen and Benadryl. And like, it just was, although I did have also, my mom was a single mom of four, so Like bless her, bless her soul.

So you know, until, until she got remarried when I was 11, but I think, I think because of that, I don't want to say she was like neglectful. She wasn't, but I got to get in the dirt. I got to get in the mud. She, even though she was a nurse practitioner, she didn't have time to coddle me. She's like, I gotta be somewhere as your fever over a hundred and one? No, you're, you're going to cry. 

Sarah Marshall, ND: Right? Yeah, So you had a little extra support there from that standpoint. Yeah, totally.

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: Yeah. So, and that's what I, you know, and that's why I counsel my patients the same as ways what you're saying. Like, even with COVID like, okay, this is, this is a very hot topic. So I don't know if I should bring it up, but even, even with COVID you don't have to take whatever is the newest medication that they think might help, like listen to your body, take a breath.

You know, and it is very, very scary and I can understand, you know, am I going to die? I'm going to have these side effects. I mean, we there's so much, we don't know. But some of my patients are calling, like I had a fever of 100.5, like. And like just, you know, let's just watch, like, 

Sarah Marshall, ND: I wanna talk a little bit just to give people some specifics about that, you know, about fevers and just because, well, it is a bit of a hot topic that's right.

For my training and my understanding of immunology and as naturopath cause we're, we're big on fevers. Cause fevers are a massive healing mechanism that the body has to its ability. And what we actually run into is a lot of people whose systems are so suppressed with just generalized inflammation and nutrition, deprivation, and toxicity that they can't Mount a high fever.

They can't even get past a hundred hundred and one, and that's actually a sign of a suppressed system. And one of the ways we measure health and a lot of our clients is to even just do regular daily basal body temperature. And a lot of people come in at 96.8. 97, like they're not hitting 98.6 on a daily basis.

And that has to do with thyroid. And that has to do with toxicity and accumulation in the body. And when my clients get healthier, they start regularly having a normal body temperature of 98.6 and then you have the fever calibration and like, you know, a hundred hundred and one is hot. It's sucky. We get a hundred, one to 103.

You're starting to get weird dreams. Usually that's where body aches will kick in. And you might sort of have quasi hallucinations sort of, you can't really always tell when you're awake or asleep. And then right around 104 is like, Ooh, shit's getting real at 104. Now for most people that have a normal physiologic response, the body starts to shut the fever down at 104 hundred and five, like it won't go past that point. Then if you are getting 105 hundred six, it's climbing it, a definitely popped the Tylenol and the pyrogens, and being in communication with the physician, if not go to the ER or the urgent care, but that's actually, when we know it's running away from us, but the cytotoxicity that comes from a fever and what fevers do is they increase the metabolic rate of the body.

They give more energy to your enzymes, to work more efficiently for your immune system to do its job more completely because you've literally added energy. There's also a whole bunch of viruses and bugs that don't like it when it gets hot, we can make it cooler. The virus that causes colds is happiest at 95 degrees, which is why it's mostly in the upper respiratory cause it's cooler part of the body.

And so if the body gets too hot, it doesn't like it and it dies off. And yes, we always have Tylenol always go with whatever your physicians are telling you, but there's some really cool home tricks to bring a fever down by a degree and just be able to kind of watch it. And one is to just literally use cold wash cloths and just put them on the forehead or the back of the neck, because that's where the circulation is.. But the other 

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: that’s what they do in the hospital too, That's right.

Sarah Marshall, ND: It's awesome. And then you can also just go up a layer if you need to cool the body down more, get a pillowcase dip, the pillowcase in super cold water. Put it from the top of the shoulders, collarbone down to the top of the hips and then put warm blankets over the top of the kiddo or the person.

And ideally it's wool that comes from the old time heart hydrotherapy docs from like the 1930s, but still wool is the best but anything and just let them be. And their body will actually start working more efficiently and it'll like, bring the temperature down a little bit. If they're really up there and you want to bring it down some more, you wrap them in a wet sheet, you get a whole bath sheet and you wrap them up like a burrito and put warm things on them.

You could add a heating pad, you can add hot water bottles. That's actually part of a hydrotherapy treatment that actually really helps modify the body's ability to detoxify. And I had one client who apparently I had educated her about this beforehand and she had COVID and all by herself, she was like, there was one night I really felt horrible, so I just did a wet sheet wrap. I didn't even know that I had told her about that wrapped herself up. She said she felt amazing. Like an hour later it's super broke her fever. She didn't have to take Tylenol. She started to sweat. She moved herself through the body, aches calm down.

And so it's really, those are the kinds of things that like, did you ever have to take health class in high school? We had a program in high school that was called health and it was like really basic 

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: I think I had a health class in high school. I don't remember what, yeah, probably. 

Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. It's often part of a lot of like in New York state, it was part of our core curriculum.

And like, I should probably start a platform for this, but if I had my way, I would be able to put like three or four lectures into health class one is just the basic anatomy and physiology of how your body works. So I don't know the basic physiology. And then to be able to talk a bit about some really natural interventions to help balance hormones for girls in particular, because how many girls go on oral contraceptives when they could just be like using essential fatty acids and some dietary things to help calm all that down, which birth controls should be for controlling birth.

If that's what you're doing is preventing pregnancy, you know, make that choice. But if you're just trying to deal with acne or cramping, there's so many other remedies that are just as useful you can do. And then things like this, you know, like 

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: birth controls the hammer, birth controls, the hammer.

Sarah Marshall, ND: We got options around that. Totally. 

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: Well, and there are some studies now that the longer you're on birth control, especially if you start in your teenage year, the more likely you are to be depressed at all...

Sarah Marshall, ND: There’s a handful of, of definite like cost benefit analysis to all of that. But, so what, here's a question that came up for me when I was listening to your story, which was freaking stunning.

And thank you for just being so authentic and transparent sharing. Cause it's just, it's not a conversation we have very often. It's not a place that a lot of, especially when we're in these far, these professions, that kind of part of the profession is being like, I have answers. I'm confident, you know, like that's part of creating that trust, but it's also like the humanity.

I just love it. I am so honored that you shared and just how you shared and thank you for that. 

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: Thank you, Sarah. I I think I mentioned, I've mentioned before. I, I used to, I was taught in med school and everything be so professional. No one wants to hear about your own personal life. No one wants to hear that… 

Sarah Marshall, ND: No, to leave our emotions at the door 

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: and now, yeah. Okay. There you go. Yeah. And he professionally, but now I started dipping my toe in the water long before I learned about the intuition and everything way back in 2014, when I started my family medicine residency, I would get my toe in the water and be like, well, you know, patient be upset about whatever.

Say that they were like, Oh, I had some trauma when I was young. And they'd be like, really? I'm like, well, what kind? And then, you know, maybe they'd like allude to it a lot. Well, let me tell you about what happened to me. And this is how I worked through it, and this is what it happened. And then patients would just, they, they felt a safe zone.

It's a safe zone. And then they just would be sobbing and I would just be holding that, you know, and that I think is more healing than any medication or thing I can do. And now, you know, when I was working in person now, I'm not, I'm telemed only, but when I was working in person, they would joke, Oh, Dr. Taylor's making them cry. Yeah. 'cause, I'm S it's I try my best to make this as safe zone. So you're afraid to share your story. Let me tell you about the bullshit I've been through. Like, here's a, here's a snippet that is relevant to this appointment that, you know, and I think that, I think that creates healing.

I think that creates an open space where we can say, yeah, I've been there too. And this is how I felt. This is how you feel. Yeah. You know, and, 

Sarah Marshall, ND: and that, it's funny. Cause we talked about being an empath well, and then practicing empathy, you know, and having that in our conversations and we actually do have hardcore science and research that backs up how healing that is and how repairative that is.

And then also, you know, it's not done as a manipulation. It's done because it actually makes a difference for people. But when you have that bond with the patient, even in an emergency situation and you're with them for half an hour, 45 minutes or 20 minutes or whatever it is, the likelihood that they will actually follow your instructions to the letter, the likelihood that they'll do follow-up care, the likelihood that they'll actually like take the actions necessary to take care of themselves, goes up dramatically inside of that trust and that relationship that got created, 

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: Oh absolutely. A hundred percent I've had, even as a med student, I had patients request me. I'm like, they know I'm a student. Right. And it wasn't because. Yeah. Like, why would, why would you want me, I'm a, I'm a student. It was, I remember these parents had twin like two year olds.

And I think even my, my, before I knew what I was doing was like, you know, really empathy or ed feeling how these kids are feeling. I like, they were like, we've never seen our two year olds be so unafraid at an appointment. Like you just sailed through that. I'm like, really? They're not always, you know, and I think that it is really just that, that rapport.

It is that kind of, I'm going to let my wall down so I can feel what you're feeling a little bit. And I want to know because then we can, we can start where you're at and we can work together. And I think I agree with you. I, it's funny. You know, it, when you go through residency and medical school, you know that there it's very abusive.

They are very, very mean, you know, and, and there's actually a movie. I was asked to, after I spoke at the physician burnout symposium, there's a movie called do no harm. If anyone wants to see a documentary about how, how bad it is called, do no harm. And the director reached out to me and asked if I'd be on panels for her, because I was so honest in my story at the physician burnout symposium, but that's neither here nor there anyway.

So, you know, a lot of the physicians that did the training and things, or some of them are not very pleasant and they're not very willing to give good recommendations, but almost every one of my letters of recommendation would include she develops rapport so quickly. And I think that is so important for us to just.

Instead of putting up walls, like, Oh, I better look professional. I mean, you can't, I mean, I have shed tears with my patients. Because I, you know, and I, I think that 

Sarah Marshall, ND: mutually beneficial in here, cause like, you know, where we started this conversation is like, was that suicidal ideation yours or had you'd absorbed it from others.

Right. So then that begs the question, well, how do we not pathologically take on other people's shit and what I've discovered? Cause I assume similar path where like, so I knew I had a strong, well knew. Yeah, I did. I knew I had a strong, intuitive streak from the time I was little and I had parents that recognized it, saw it and cultivated it, talked about it.

So it was in my family. And then there was a point in my, kind of like late teenage, early college years where I like blahh kicked all that out and I tried to suppress it. Ha that didn't go well. And I ended up with actually my first teacher and I sat in a three-day retreat. And I started to cultivate the skill of my intuition and reading into people's energy and really quickly started to discover something.

Cause I have a lot of people call me and ask me about those people that consider themselves highly empathic or highly sensitive. There were books written about people who are called high sensitives. What happens when you're raising a high sensitive kid? There's like all kinds of different things around it.

And you know, in our, I'm going to use my word for this in the allopathic world, allopathic being a word, meaning to do the opposite of which in lifesaving hammer needed heroic situation. Sometimes that's exactly what's required. We have a tendency to be like, Oh, well my access to not taking on my patients' shit is wall.

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: Yeah, 

Sarah Marshall, ND: But you’re now trapped nside your own self for one, and you're still a human with a beating heart having responses and reactions. And then it becomes wall numb, suppress wall numb, suppress well-known, suppress heart attack, stroke, suicidal, ideations, depression, all those things that build up inside of us and what my access to being a healer and not taking on my people's shit was two things that I got taught.

Well, now three, actually these are tricks. One of them was to recognize that I'm a conduit. So it doesn't stick to me. It can go through me like through a pipe or a tunnel, but it literally just comes through me and goes out. And then I had one of my teachers who actually talked to me about a visualization and she's like, well, that's an option, but then you're still kind of like actually having to feel it, you're taking it into your own body, which if you do this work day in and day out can start to be a thing.

And she would actually talk about the difference between being an empath and empathy, which is often a felt experience. And it comes from your gut and in energy terms, they would talk about that being as reading from your gut reading from your third chakra, right? And moving it intentionally up to my sixth chakra or my visual space and reading as a clairvoyant where the reading would happen out on a screen out in front of me, like watching a movie.

And we practice that as a skill. We act like classes on how to shift from feeling the other person's pain or feeling into their body to being able to turn it into a visual landscape. And that was super helpful and protective for my body. And that I had one last teacher where she talked about putting yourself in a mirrored bubble and only things that could get through the mirrored bubble are at your frequency or higher.

So you're not driving down here. Yeah. So like these are, you know, at one level they're kind of like mental tricks, but then, you know, let's play the quantum physics game and the power of intention and see how that shifts things in our electromagnetic field. And I know other practitioners have talked about just having good practices, like, even, you know, say you're emergency medicine, pretty conventional. There's not like you're going to be sitting around and doing meditation sessions between patients. I've had some physicians tell me that when they go to wash their hands, they intentionally have the water, which is known as a cleansing healing agent be where it kind of washes that energy away out of their body.

And that every time they have to go wash their hands, which is a lot during the day that they're able to just let that go and release to take baths at the end of nights and then drain the bath water so that you're like literally giving it away to the water and letting it go. Yeah. 

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: Yeah. Yeah. I have to tell you, there was one day and an especially hard shift.

I got back to the place where I was staying. I literally went and laid like prone face down on the earth, like take this, you know, because then sometimes, I mean, I've done the mirror bubble that you told me about. I've done one, there was one guy that taught funny that one of the first courses I took was called duality, which was living, paying attention to how your body is healing while the outside world you're participating in the outside world, which was very hard to run a code and see how I'm feeling inside. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so, so that was it I think was, was probably actually the best place for me to start because I needed that. That's what I needed first. And, and then. He had this thing called a permission Rose where you like, imagine a Rose, you put, have you heard of that?

We will put between you and the person. And I actually, I hope my 13 year old doesn't listen to this, but I do this with my 13 year old. Some days when I pick her up from her dad, I'm putting permission roses between me and her, because I'm like, you're welcome to have your, you have permission to have that energy, but I don't want to take it.

I can, I can understand how you're feeling, but that vibration is not going anywhere near me, you know? And that, and then I think, I think we, now this is a, this is going to be a slow moving train, but you know, it gives me hope that we have things now, like the physician burnout symposium and these big conferences where we troubleshoot ideas about how can we stop these physicians from killing themselves?

What are we missing here basically? And I think. You know, I was happy. I was worried about how well received my kind of, you know, w the emotional contagion, the mirror neurons, the facial mimicry, that how well that would be received in a group of Western medicine physicians but they L you know, I was, I was happy to hear a few of them, like, wow, I never, like, I never thought of that.

I'm like, that's the biggest thing. I think we're missing people who ignore that, you know, for their health to, you know, to the detriment of their health or, or, you know, not giving physicians that kind of time and space, they need to check in with themselves in between a patient. 

Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. And then the grander scheme to be able to get in communication when they need to just be heard express emotions talk about a hard day, you know, and that doesn't help. I mean, therapy is an amazing way, but there's other levels of intervention that doesn't even have to be a full blown therapist that can be in the world of, you know, peer support groups and things. But there's so much still built around like never showing, never showing fault and especially with them in your own working groups. I mean, this is something that has gone through a lot of the professional world in organizations about like I went to and was a speaker at a conference called the compassionate leadership summit in Seattle two years ago. And I was the only medical doctor ish… like I'm not a medical doctor, but like in the medical world, there wasn't a lot of us that were at that. A lot of people were corporate. A lot of the people that spoke were just from inside of what they're doing in different companies. And we talked a lot about the stigma, these concerns that people who are in leadership positions like, Oh my God, if I tell my story, if I tell people that like I manic depressive, or I've got these, like what the hell that's going to ruin it?

What they've actually in the research in corporate environments have shown, you know, there's a degree of oversharing and trauma sharing. That's distinct, but to actually like with intention and compassionate leader yourself and others share your humanity. Those ended up being leaders, people would die for. People will stay in the company or they'll follow that person from company to company because of the bond and the emotional it's like being willing to get into a kind of relationship that's more like being family. I mean, Oh my God... In conventional or in the corporate world, you're with these people 40, 50 hours a week in medicine, you're with these people 80, 90 hours a week. Like these are  your family members. I mean your literally seeing them more than your family.

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: Yeah. Yeah. 

Sarah Marshall, ND: And opening up the permission for more of that, which I know is still very revolutionary idea in a very patriarchial hierarchy driven competition, Laden workplace.

Yeah. 

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: Yeah. You know, I think. I agree with that, but you know, I think with the younger generations coming along the fact that again, there was a physician burnout symposium. Yeah. One of my, one of my colleagues his name is  Kumar. He's an ER physician he's written a few books about, I think he has a it's called second mind or a third mind or something like, I'm sorry.

I can't remember exactly what it is. Certainly a couple of books. 

Sarah Marshall, ND: Kendra's an awesome producer. She'll look it up. We'll have it in the show notes. 

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: Thank you, Kendra. I met him the same time I met the talk show, bruh. And he, he just started a group that was for physicians who wanted to talk. I mean, And just via zoom and kind of anonymously.

I mean, this is sad that we live in that kind of environment where we have to kind of do it sneak around and do it, but it's kind of a beautiful thing, you know, there with that movie, do no harm with the physician burden on symposium. They, there is so much humanity. I feel like being brought back into that it's been, and I'm hoping 

Sarah Marshall, ND: It’s going to transform medicine itself.

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: Absolutely. And I'm hoping that in the future integrative medicine won't be a specialty, but it will be  but we do...

Sarah Marshall, ND: So one of my like impossible promises that I will probably never see in my lifetime. But if I would love to have happen is literally where there is no such thing as alternative and conventional medicine.

There's just medicine. It's just medicine. And there's this world of opportunity. 

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: And this fruit and the first medicine we use is our food or our lifestyle. That's our first medicine or our, you know, self-care or meditation. Like that's our first medicine and it's all medicine, right? Yeah. That would be beautiful.

Let's do that. How can we do that? Okay. 

Sarah Marshall, ND: Next podcast. We'll get working on it.

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: Let me live in DC. Let me just go over. They just let anyone knock on the white house store I think

Sarah Marshall, ND:  you  should just go down to your local representative and knock on it. Yeah, no, I love that. And, and it is it's and you know, my Aisha Clairborne was an MD that we had on heel and she, and I actually spoke at a conference eight years ago, literally about very this very thing of what does it look like to restore integrity to medicine and integrity being inside of like what medicine really is for the healing of people and taking care of humans and taking care of ourselves as doctors inside of it.

And that's something that it has yet to surface as like my core conversation, but it's one of those where like, especially if there's anywhere I can throw these ideas out to people who are listening and they want to jump on it, you know, like keep me posted because it's absolutely something that is near and dear to my heart.

And yeah, like dissolving the boundaries between it has to be this or that. What if we just looked at the patient and from the best of our expertise and we were able to refer out, like we refer out to other physicians when it's outside of our scope and say, you know, the best fit for you would be integrative psychology or the best fit for you would be working with a gastroenterologist that's gonna actually repair your microbiome, you know? Yeah. Yeah. We're  getting there. We're getting there.

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: I mean, I know, I know I talked, I think I had mentioned this to you. I think, I think one of my goals in this lifetime is to open MD, the slash ND clinics. ND clinics and then just have that be, have two people who know yeah.

Sarah Marshall, ND: I have friends that work in clinics like that and it's awesome. It's like the cross-referrals and the ability to work in tandem and, and the discovery about each other. Cause that's the other thing, like we see this in political situations that ha my lawn guys just got here. Isn't that fun. So we're going to wrap this up in just a second, but there's a little background noise, but is, is to literally be able to look at, you know, In political world, we often make the other wrong.

The one that's not like us, but what they found that makes the biggest difference is getting one side and the other side in the same room together and discover each other's humanity. And that's also part of it for me is like the, you know, I've actually had more medical doctors on Heal than I have naturopaths and I just realized that and I was like, well, that's funny, but it's because I really want to highlight this relationship that, you know, I mean, I love talking to my colleagues. We can sit around and like be right about our perspective on the world all day long, but I love having these discords and being able to, you know, and I'm sure you and I could go far enough we're going to come across stuff, disagreement about. Thats awesome. That's where we, yeah. And, and where we grow, where we get challenged. All of it. So, yes, we're going to have to do this again. I'm so stinking honored to have you here. You're brilliant. You're beautiful. You're awesome. You've just shared your heart with us and thank you for everything that you're up to and we're going to have You know, show notes, we'll have your bio.

And if people are resonate with your message and they want to get your book, we'll have the link to your book. All of that will be on the website. So, 

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: and you, same to you all the same compliments back to you. And I cannot wait for you to live in New York and you'll only be four short hours away. So then we'll have to meet up in person.

Sarah Marshall, ND: Absolutely. I've got a lot of friends in Philly and a few in DC, so I got reasons to come down there. 

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: That's right. Yep. I'm just 10 minutes outside of DC, so. Awesome. Thank you.  together. Yeah. We're not going to store together

Sarah Marshall, ND: until we get to this again. 

Rachel Reinhart Taylor: All right. Thank you, Sarah.

(music)

Sarah Marshall, ND: Inspired by our community of over 4,000 incredible listeners, we will be launching some courses and workshops in 2021. Be the first to know about them and other great tidbits of wisdom by joining our mailing list at SarahMarshallND.com. Thank to today’s guest, Dr. Rachel Reinhart Taylor for her open, honest love. For a full transcript and all the resources for today’s show, visit SarahMarshallND.com/podcast. Special thanks t our music composer, Roddy Nikpour, and our kick ass editor, Kendra Vicken. As always, thank YOU for being here. We’ll see you next time.

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