How the Human Body Works & Stories Your Doctor Won’t Tell You

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Today on Something You Should Know, how did the Easter Bunny become part of the Easter celebration? Then a fascinating tour of the human body where you'll hear things you probably never knew. For instance, the salt levels in the bloodstream, the sodium and chloride are high, the potassium is low, and that balance happens to match the concentration of salts in the ocean.

And I sort of love that because the kidneys, by making urine, carry around the ocean inside of

each of us. Also, why worrying is a waste of time, most of the time, and a doctor who has collected

stories from other doctors about miracles and other strange medical happenings. When I tell

these stories to my patients, they will frequently say, I've had that experience too, and I was afraid to tell anyone about it. That's been my experience, that people and doctors both are afraid to tell about these experiences because they're so unusual.
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Fascinating intel. The world's top experts.
And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

I don't know if you can still hear it, but I still have that.

I've had a cold and then haven't talked about it a lot,

but we were right in the middle of the California wildfires, the Eaton fire.

We had to evacuate for several days and the fire came very close to our house.

But ever since then, there's been this like ash in the air that gets in your lungs and it's really, it makes it hard to breathe and hard to talk. Anyway, hi, welcome to Something You Should Know.
We're going to start today talking about your IQ. Do you know your IQ? I don't think I know my IQ.
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By the age of five, your IQ is pretty much set and it's hard to raise. People who are taller or had a larger than normal birth weight tend to have a higher IQ.
Husbands and wives tend to have similar IQs. If you're taking an intelligence test and you want to temporarily bump up your IQ, one study showed that people who chewed on a piece of gum for a few minutes before a test showed a measurable spike in their IQ test results.
And that is something you should know. So how about we take a tour together, a tour of the human body and how it works.
You must have questions or wondered how it is that all the parts of the human body work and work together to get you through the day, through your life. Today, you'll come to understand how some of it all works.
Let me introduce you to your tour guide today, Dr. Jonathan Reisman.
He's a doctor of internal medicine and pediatrics who has practiced medicine in the world's most remote places. He's author of a book called The Unseen Body, a Doctor's Journey Through the Hidden Wonders of Human

Anatomy. Hey, doctor, welcome to Something You Should Know.
It's a pleasure to be here.

So why don't we start the tour, if you don't mind, with the throat? A lot of people wouldn't

consider the throat a body part, but I guess it is. And so what is it about the throat that

you find interesting? The thing I like to focus on in the throat is how kind of unnervingly close the food

tube, the esophagus is to the air tube, the trachea.

You know, in our throats, the job of our throats is kind of to deal with everything that we

inhale, that we swallow, that everything that comes in our nose and mouth sort of coalesces

in the throat.

And then our throat's job is to keep everything but air you know out of the airway everything we swallow must go down the food tube the esophagus to the stomach and only air should go down the windpipe to the lungs and the amazing thing is you know we swallow thousands of times a day whether we're eating food or we are subconsciously swallowing. And every time we swallow, whatever that is, food, drink, saliva is coming within millimeters of the opening to the windpipe.
And so one small slip up, if some of that goes in the windpipe, you could, you know, pretty much choke and die. And so when I take a drink of water and choke, and people often say it went down the wrong pipe.
Is that exactly what happened? Yeah, that's exactly what happened. Some of that water went down your windpipe or your trachea and ended up in the lungs.
And the body has evolved many ways of dealing with that, because it's sort of inevitable, given how close the two entrances to the tubes are, you know, sort of inevitable something's going to go down the wrong tube. And when you laugh or speak while trying to swallow, you're kind of opening up the airway.
And if you try to swallow, you're opening up the food tube. And so if you do those two things at the same time, both tubes are open, which is why things happen, like things going down the wrong pipe.
And coughing, which probably resulted after those instances, is one of the ways that we kind of clear out the lungs. Coughing is a mechanism for kind of clearing out whatever goes down the wrong tube, and it's quite effective at getting rid of it.
Can you talk about the liver? Because that's one of many internal organs that most of us don't know much about. We know we have one, and we know it probably does something.
So what does it do? Why is it there? So the liver is almost like 100 organs packed into one. The liver is one of our most complicated organs.
It's the biggest internal organ. The skin, which is also an organ, is actually bigger.
But as far as internal organs go, the liver is the largest, which is appropriate because it has a ton of jobs. It really, in a way, oversees all of digestion and all of metabolism.
So whenever you eat or drink anything, it comes into your intestines and then is absorbed into the bloodstream. And the first place it goes from there is to the liver, where the liver sort of checks out, you know, what is this thing? What did we just take into our body? Is it nutrition? Is it poison? And what do we do with it? So the liver from there will sort of sort and package.
It's almost like, you know, the Amazon sort of sorting and packaging center where it determines where everything's going to go. It packages up all the protein, all the fat, all the cholesterol, sends it to its appropriate organ somewhere else in the body.
And it also obviously detoxifies, you know, famously detoxifies poisons,

including our favorite poison, alcohol. And so really the liver just does a tremendous amount

every day to keep us alive. And, you know, the best illustration of how important it is,

is when it fails in people with cirrhosis of the liver, really everything kind of goes wrong with

the body in those cases. Well, that's one of the things it's always, there's so many things like

what you just described about the liver, and then there's all these other organs. It's a wonder things don't go wrong more often.
I mean, things do go wrong, but there's so much to us that you would think we would break down more than we do. You're right.
And that in many specific instances, I got that same feeling while learning about the body. You know, for instance, there's bacteria right all over us, even in us, in our throats, our noses, throughout our intestines.
Many of those bacteria could kill us if they got into our bloodstream and perhaps landed in the right organ, you know, landed, let's say, in our central nervous system causing meningitis. I mean, there's bacteria that could kill us if it got to the right part inside our body.
And yet here it is sort of millimeters,

you know, it's on us or even inside our gut, perhaps. Yet it's sort of only millimeters away and kept at bay by, you know, various parts of the immune system, white blood cells, also just membranes that sort of prevent it from invading.
And so sort of like I always of the body as sort of the barbarians are right at the gate and any moment they can sort of slip in. Not only can you aspirate, choke and die with any swallow, but, you know, if your guard is let down for a moment, these virulent bacteria can invade and kill you.
And yet we go about our day sort of happily for decades at a time, perhaps suffering no ill consequences from these things. So since the skin is the largest organ in the body or of the body, I guess we have to talk about that.
So what is it you find so fascinating about the skin? There's kind of the social aspect of skin where we, you know, skin is what we see in other people. When we look at someone's face that we recognize, you know, mostly what we're seeing is skin.
And that's how you know people. But on a biological level, the skin is really amazing.
It doesn't get credit for being a very intelligent organ, almost predicting the future. When sun rays bombard your skin, the skin is smart enough to want to become tan.
And tanning involves producing a dark pigment and putting that pigment right in front of the nucleus of every cell in the skin because the nucleus where the dna is and that's where the harmful sun rays the uv radiation can disrupt the dna and result in the skin cancer so it produces these little plugs of dark pigment right in front of the dna almost like putting sunglasses over you know your In the same way, it's building this wall in front of all of its DNA, knowing that more sun might be coming in the future, and it will want to protect its DNA from that harmful radiation. And the same kind of amazing ability when the skin creates a callus.
So, if you get a repetitive friction on your skin, the skin thickens and hardens into a callus almost to anticipate future friction in a way, you know, and sort of will be better protected against that future friction. So, and not to mention when people get cuts or lacerations, when they come to the ER, you know, I usually will repair them with sutures or stitches, but skin really has an amazing ability to repair itself, you know, any wound almost, as long as the person's healthy and well-nourished, will, you know, the skin cells will invade from all sides of the wound and fill that defect and just kind of fix the hole in the body that shouldn't be there.
So, skin is really amazing for all those reasons. Talk about the eyes.
The eyes are a really peculiar organ. I mean, their function is incredible.
Obviously, everybody knows that the fact that they can allow us to see the world around us. Another aspect of the eye that I really enjoyed while learning to become a doctor was how I use it a lot in emergency medicine.
It's often the most important thing I look at in certain cases. So, if someone comes in, let's say comes into my ER completely comatose, unresponsive, even when I push hard with my knuckles and rub their breastbone called a sternal rub, if they don't respond to that, you know, something's really something terrible is going on.
Like why are they comatose? And actually, the first thing I'll do in those cases is look in their eyes. So, I won't grab my stethoscope.
I won't grab anything else. I'll grab a light off the wall behind their bed, and I'll peel open their eyelids and shine it into their eye.
And in a way, the eyes are telling me what's going on in the brain. So, you know, there's this old saying, the eyes are the window to the soul.
In the practice of medicine, the eyes are actually a very useful window to the brain and can tell me what's going on. So if I peel back their eyelids and for instance, see that one of their pupils, not both, but just one is really large, wide open.
And when I shine a light into it, it does not shrink as it should in response to the light. We call that a blown pupil.
And that can tell you that there's high pressure inside the skull. If, on the other hand, as often happens, a patient comes in, I peel open their eyelids, and I see that each of their pupils are very, very tiny black dots, almost like a little black poppy seed on both pupils, that actually suggests that they've had opioid overdose, like heroin or fentanyl.
Certainly, if we're going to talk about the human body, we have to talk about the heart because that's probably one of the organs people think of the most and the blood, you know, since that's what the heart is doing. So why, and heart disease, I think is the number one killer in this country.
So what's so special about the heart to you that that you find so fascinating? Its main function, obviously, is to push blood.

You know, in one way, the heart is sort of a simple mechanical pump, which, you know, maybe is much simpler than, let's say, the liver, which has sort of all these millions of metabolic biochemical reactions going on all the time. The heart is sort of, in a way, that it just squeezes and pushes literally blood up into the aorta and then into the rest of the branching vascular tree of blood vessels.
And what the heart and the blood do together really is just deliver nutrition and oxygen in the blood to the kind of the doorstep of every cell in our body. You know, we have something like a trillion or more cells.
And so each one, every moment must be receiving oxygen primarily, but also nutrition of various kinds. And also the blood has to then take away the waste from those cells.
So in a way, when, you know, our ancestors in the distant past started as single cell organisms, that was sort of easy. The fluid of life was sort of surrounding them all at all times.
And so it could, you know, it was, they were surrounded by it and it didn't need to get delivered to them. But once you start getting multicellular organisms, especially a trillion cells like us, you know, getting that nutrition, that fluid containing all the things you need to live, getting it to every cell requires this kind of infinitely branched cardiovascular tree, pushing blood to each cell and then bringing away the waste.
And so that's kind of the job that the heart and blood do every moment. In a way, when we, you know, in cardiac arrest, for instance, when the heart stops beating and stops pushing any blood forward, it's almost, you know, the whole body is sort of dead at that moment.
We often note the time of death when the heart stops in particular. You know, people, your liver can fail, you might have weeks to live, your kidneys might fail, you might have days to live.
But when the heart stops, you're dead. We are taking a tour of the human body with Dr.
Jonathan Reisman. He's a doctor of internal medicine and author of the book, The Unseen Body, a doctor's journey through the hidden wonders of human anatomy.
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Shopify.com slash sysk. so doctor often when you go to a doctor visit, they want you to pee in a cup and they want a stool sample.
So what is it that you can tell from that? That's a great question. So I often say, you know, the bodily fluids are kind of the medium of a doctor's craft.
Most of the time, what I'm doing as a doctor is getting a patient's bodily fluid, whether it's urine or stool or blood, and sending it to the lab or testing it myself in some bedside manner, where you're kind of, in a way, reading messages from these bodily fluids. You know, urine is a language and blood is a language and it's talking to your provider, your healthcare provider, your doctor, telling you what's wrong.

And so as a doctor, you know, learning about disease meant learning about those bodily fluids and what the messages mean. So when urine turns red, for instance, depending on the clinical context, you know, if I see red urine coming out of the patient or in the cup that they then deliver to me from the bathroom, I could think they have a kidney stone.

I could think they have a bladder cancer or a kidney cancer or some other injury. You know, maybe they were just got punched in the kidney by someone.
So it's kind of depends on the context, of course. But those colors are telling me something and I have to interpret them and figure out what's going on with the patient.
And every bodily fluid has its own kind of messages, you know, whether it's color, consistency, smell, you know, and then obviously beyond that, things you can measure under the microscope, see under the microscope or measure, you know, electrolytes or blood cell amounts and other things. There's sort of a million messages contained in these fluids.
And so reading them is a really important part of figuring out what's wrong with the patient, which is sort of the first step to alleviating it. Yeah, I remember hearing someone talking about this, that it's pretty seldom that if you go to the doctor, you know, for your physical, and I think this was in a discussion about how necessary is an annual physical, that very rarely does somebody go to the doctor feeling fine and find out that there's something horribly wrong with them and they had no idea.
That if you've got some condition that's fairly serious, you probably have some inkling that something's wrong. In most cases, I do think that is correct.
Not all cases, you know, for instance, high blood pressure is sort of considered the silent killer. But you're right, you're right, there's been a lot of appropriate questioning of the annual physical.
You know, a lot of the times, to be honest, a doctor puts a stethoscope on a patient's chest to hear the heart or the lungs. Honestly, most of the time, it's unnecessary to be honest.
I'm not talking about an ER where someone's coming in with chest pain, but,

you know, in the general doctor's office, like you're very unlikely to find something new.

And then there's also the question of, you know, if someone goes to their doctor and they don't

listen with a stethoscope, they might feel like, well, what kind of doctor is this? Are you supposed

to listen to my heart? Are you ignoring my internal organs? You know, I didn't get my

money's worth. Well, I think people feel that a lot because nowadays you go to your physical and the doctor spends a lot more time on his keyboard than he does touching you.
And it's like, well, wait, what about me? Wait. That is a huge problem.
And I've had that experience myself. I've been the patient actually when I was in medical school, which is funny because I was sort of, you know, supposed to be learning how to be a doctor, how to be a good doctor.
And the doctor I saw for a kind of a general checkup, I don't think he looked me in the eye once. He was a very slow typer, which I sympathize with, though.
I'm a fast typer. But, you know, there is so much the burden of documentation on doctors, especially primary care doctors kind of grows every year.
So I understand the, you know, the need to look at their computer and type while they're talking to the patient, especially as the number of minutes you have with each patient gets lower and lower as reimbursements are cut back, you know, needing to kind of finish your notes before you go home and have dinner with your family is a, is a big a bigger and bigger burden. But still, I think, you know, it definitely, I mean, it's dehumanizing, you know, it makes you sort of wonder, do they know I'm here? Do they care that I'm here? Is the opinion on the diagnosis and treatment actually going to be worth anything given how little they're sort of looking at me? And it also points to the fact of how important eye contact is and just sort of basic human to human interaction.
A huge part of medicine is just kind of being a human and having a sort of a normal social interaction between the doctor and the patient where you're hearing their story, they are feeling heard, you're making eye contact and sort of, you know, not touching them too much, not touching them too little. It's kind of this fine balancing act where you're in this sort of very bizarre social interaction where you just met each other.
And yet I'm asking you about the color of your stool, how often you have sex, what the color of your snot. I mean, everything.
It's sort of the most intimate conversation you could imagine with someone you just met. From all your experience as a doctor and you've had an interesting career, is there anything or any set of things that you wish people would do that would really help? Yeah, well, I guess that, you know, I think a lot of time is spent in ER is sort of wondering why, why did the patient come? Why didn't they just stay home? You know, you know, and I don't blame the public for this.
I feel like sort of the basic medical education for the public is not great. And I wonder if there should be sort of basic courses in high school, you know, instructing people how to deal with their sort of basic, you know, colds and other things like that.
People just don't know. So, for instance, we see a ton of children, let's say, coming into the ER with a fever.
And the overwhelming majority of those fevers are, you know, a viral illness that might get better, that will most likely get better on its own.

Doesn't need any antibiotics or any even x-rays or blood work, just need some Tylenol or ibuprofen

and just make sure the kid's hydrated and that's it.

But I think people, you know, understandably don't know that they, you know, most viruses,

thankfully are kind of can be ignored.

90% of what I do for children in the ER is giving them over-the-counter medications like Tylenol, ibuprofen, and sometimes Benadryl for hives and other rashes. Well, I imagine that a big part of a doctor's job, and perhaps one of the more enjoyable parts of your job, is to let people know there's nothing wrong.
That, yeah, maybe you have a symptom, but it'll go away, or that you'll be fine. I think that you're right.
That is a big part of every doctor's job, but it's especially

the case with pediatricians, partly because usually nothing is wrong with the children.

Not always, obviously, you know, sometimes things are wrong, but for the large part,

for the most part, when children, let's say, come to the ER with a fever,

the large, large, large majority are just viral illnesses

that will go away on their own, need no workup, need no testing and need no specific treatment. And, you know, I get a lot of, I'm an internist and a pediatrician.
So I see both adults and children and work in the ER. A lot of internists who only treat adults will often say to me, you know, I don't know how you do pediatrics.
The parents just must be so difficult to deal with. And I don't find that at all.

I find parents, for the most part, you know, I don't know how you do pediatrics. The parents just must be so difficult to deal with.
And I don't find that at all. I find parents, for the most part, you know, yes, some worry too much.
I mean, I'm a parent too. I've worried too much about things that ended up being nothing myself, even though I'm a pediatrician, it happens.
But I find parents are very reasonable and understand your reasoning and the reassurance really works. That was almost one of the most shocking things was when I became a doctor and I could tell people, oh, it's, you know, for reasons X, Y, and Z, this is not a serious illness and you don't need antibiotics and just keep an eye on them and they'll get better.
They really responded to that. Like it was sort of this message coming from the mountaintop of the like sort of universal truth.
And I sort of was surprised that they trusted me or believed me, but they do. And they're just looking for someone who has experience evaluating trail drone with fever, which I've done thousands of times, you know, to tell them, you know, I've seen, I've seen tons of deadly infections.
I've seen tons of mild infections. This one's mild and they're reassured and they go about their life.
What's one thing about the human body that you find so interesting that might surprise me? You know, I could say one thing I particularly enjoyed learning in medical school was about urine as a bodily fluid. I can mention that it is my favorite bodily fluid of all.
And while most people never thought of having a favorite bodily fluid, you know, as a doctor, I mentioned bodily fluids are kind of the medium of our craft. It's what we spend a lot of time analyzing and interpreting to make a diagnosis.
But urine in particular, I find really fascinating, not only because as a doctor, it tells me so many messages about the body. It tells me about the urinary tract through which it flows from the kidneys to the bladder, tells me about diseases in those organs, but also tells me about body parts that are distant from the kidneys and seemingly completely unrelated to the urinary tract.
But one thing that I really love about urine is how the salt levels in the bloodstream, the sodium and chloride are high, the potassium is low, and the kidneys are responsible for keeping those salts, those electrolytes in just the right balance. And that balance happens to match the concentration of salts in the ocean.
And I sort of love that because, you know, our ancestors sort of evolved first in the ocean. And so the only reason that we were able to sort of crawl out onto the land and live as, you know, air breathing animals with lungs.
The main reason is because the kidneys, by making urine, carry around the ocean inside of each of us. So in a way, we're each sort of still have that ocean inside of us and our cells, which are fed blood and fed the nutrients and electrolytes in blood, almost don't know we ever left the ocean at all.
Because

as far as they know, everything's still just as salty with the same proportion of electrolytes. So that makes me love urine even more.
The fact that as it flows, it's sort of keeping everything in balance and keeping this little bit of ocean inside of each of us. Well, in all my conversations, in all the interviews I've done, thousands of them, I've never spoken with anyone about their favorite bodily fluid.
So this was fun and unique. My guest has been Jonathan Reisman.
He is a doctor of internal medicine and pediatrics, and his book is called The Unseen Body, A Doctor's Journey Through the Hidden Wonders of Human Anatomy. There's a link to his book in the show notes.
Thanks, doctor. Awesome.
It's been an honor to chat with you, Mike. I really, really enjoyed it.
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They would seem less likely to believe in the unexplainable, things like miracles or supernatural events. But perhaps some doctors do experience these things.
They're just reluctant to share their stories for fear of people thinking they're a little strange. That's what Dr.
Scott Kolbaba thought. So he started talking with other doctors and asked them if they had ever encountered anything that they could not explain scientifically.
And he uncovered some rather amazing stories. Scott practices internal medicine in Illinois, and he wrote a book called Physicians Untold Stories, Miraculous Experiences Doctors Are Hesitant to Share with Their Patients or Anyone.
Hi, Scott. Welcome.
Thanks, Mike. Great to be here.
So explain why you, a doctor, decided to look into this and start asking other doctors about the unexplainable. What prompted this? I think it was a case of temporary insanity because this journey took me a long time, took me about four years to complete.
And it started with a story that one of my doctor friends told me, and it just blew me away. It led me to believe and to realize that doctors really have miracles that happen to them.
They don't talk about them. Doctors are very scientific.
They're very skeptical. And when I started to learn about some of the miracles that happened in doctors' lives, I was floored.
I couldn't believe it. So tell me one of the stories that really moved you.
One of the first things that I heard was Dr. Steve Heim, who's an orthopedic surgeon.
And Steve told me a story about skiing in the mountains of Colorado. And he and his wife and his wife's sister decided to go skiing on this mountain that they'd never skied on before.
And when they got to the top of the mountain, there was a blizzard that hit and the snow was coming down like crazy. The wind was blowing and it was very, very cold and they had to ski down.
They had no other way to get down. So they started skiing.
And Steve and the girls were skiing together and they came to a patch of trees and they had to go to the right or the left. And Steve went to the right and thought the girls were following him, a typical surgeon.
I hate to say that, but Steve went to the right. And as soon as he realized the girls weren't with him, he decided to ski through this, this grove of trees.
And as he was skiing through the grove of trees, he suddenly felt this really strange feeling inside, like something ominous was happening and that he was being called upon to do something that had life and death proportions. And he had no idea what he was doing.
And all of a sudden, he decided to stop skiing. He stopped skiing right in the middle of this grove of trees.
He knew the girls were probably waiting for him on the other side of the trees. But he stood there for a minute, not knowing what to do, and still having this very ominous feeling inside.
Did you ever have that feeling that something awful is going to happen or something really bizarre is happening to you? Uh-huh. Yeah.
So he took off his skis and stood there for a few seconds and then decided to walk up the mountain. Now, this was in the opposite direction from when the girls were waiting for him.
So he's walking, climbing, walking, had no idea what he was doing. And all of a sudden, he came to a big tree.
And you know how when there's a deep snow, there's a tree well, and the well goes down to the base of the tree. And he looked down and he knew exactly why he was there.
He found the shape of a body underneath the tree covered with snow.

Now, Steve's a trauma surgeon, so he knew exactly what to do.

He brushed off the snow, covered him with his jacket,

put him in a reverse Trendelenburg position to get some blood to his head,

and started yelling for help, help, help.

One of the last skiers coming down the mountain heard his cry for help,

came to him, said, what can I do?

And he said, get the ski patrol as soon as possible. This guy is almost dead.
He had a thready pulse. He just looked like he was gray and ashen.
And so the other skier went down the mountain. About 15 minutes later, the ski patrol was on the scene with a snowmobile and a gurney, and they loaded the half-dead guy onto the gurney and took him to the lodge where the ambulance was waiting and took him off to the hospital.
And the next day he called to the hospital to find out what was happening to this fellow that had hit the tree. He was almost dead.
And they said he'd recovered totally. He was doing well.
He had a broken leg that Steve had splinted with some of his garments. And they said they did a great job splinting his broken leg with his garments and the tree branch.
And he lived. And I said to Steve, what do you think about this, Steve? And he said, this was divine intervention.
There's nothing. If you don't believe in something higher than us after an experience like this, I don't know what you believe in.
And that got me to thinking, I wonder if any other docs have had experiences like this. So I hung out in the doctor's lounge, and I would ask doctors if they had any experiences that they couldn't explain scientifically.
And I was really, really surprised a large number of doctors had these incredible experiences. And they were really hesitant to tell me the stories because they were afraid that people would criticize them for revealing these incredible stories that had happened to them.
And so out of the 200 doctors, so you talked to 200 doctors, you got 30 stories. Are you saying that the other 170 didn't have any stories or there just wasn't room in the book or so or what? most had stories, but the stories I wanted to include in the book, I had a couple

of guiding principles that I wanted to use to put a story in the book. If it gave me goosebumps

when the person that the doctor told me, or it made me cheer up, those are the stories that I

included. So what's another story that gave you goosebumps? This is a story about a doctor that

actually delivered one of our kids. His name is John Heitzler, was married to Joan.
They had

Thank you. bumps.
This is a story about a doctor that actually delivered one of our kids. And his name is John Heitzler, was married to Joan.
They had eight children. And the birth of their fifth child, Joan was having some difficulties.
And let me go back a little bit and say that Joan was very, very close to her grandmother, Grandmother O'Hanlon. And the Grandmother O'Hanlon had come from Ireland, and she was a model, spiritual model for the family.
She would take care of people. She was a midwife.
So Joan was delivering the baby, and there were some problems after the delivery, and Joan had a lot of pain. And so they decided to give her a drug called Trilene, which is a drug that puts people to sleep, deep sleep.
And then they would complete the afterbirth and so forth. So Joan was about ready to get this trilene put on through a mask on her face.
And in walks Grandma Hanlon. And she stood at the head of the bed and shook her head that Joan should not put the trilene on.
So Joan pushed it away and didn't do that. And one of the things that happened then about about a minute later, is no one realized that Joan had eaten a large meal before she went into labor.
And about a minute after she would push the trilline away, she vomited the entire meal. Had she been unconscious, she would have aspirated and could have died from that.
And so Joan said that Grandma Hanlon, she made it to Grandma Hanlon's lab one last time, having transcended time and eternity because Grandma Hanlon had died 22 years before that. So when a doctor tells a story like that, when that doctor told that story, did he offer an explanation? Yeah.
You know, most of these stories, when the doctors told them and experienced them, they said to me, these have no scientific explanation. Doctors are pretty skeptical.
Doctors are pretty scientific. They want to have a scientific explanation for everything.
But the stories that I included are ones that doctors just said, I have no scientific explanation for this. This is just something that happened and I just can't explain it.
I like the story about Noemi Sigilov, who was a general surgeon. And just to make a long story short, she was taking care of a woman and her husband, Adele and Ron Ashton.
And they had been missionaries and were pretty spiritual people. So pick up the story when Ron and Adele Ashton were in Dr.
Noemi Sigilov's office?

Well, every time that they were in the office,

they would ask Noemi how her spiritual life was.

And then finally, Ron would say to her,

I'm going to show you someday that there is life after this life and that there is a God.

And Noemi said, that's fine.

She accepted that.

And they were kind enough and they weren't pushy so that it wasn't like someone was trying to push religion on her. So Noemi healed Adele and she went on her way and they had made contact for a long time.
And Noemi was getting a little bit burnt out from her practice. And so she decided to take a three or four day vacation to Tucson.
But naturally, many doctors, myself included, when you're ready to go on vacation, some disaster happens the night before. And she had to make rounds in the hospital really early in the morning before her flight.
And so she walked into the hospital. All of a sudden, she felt this puff of air and felt like she was transformed into a different sphere.
And she saw Ron, Ron Ashton, dressed all in white, smiling at her, and then he just disappeared. And she was a little bit surprised and taken aback, but then she went on her rounds and then went on her trip.
And on the way back, because she didn't look at her emails on the trip, she didn't want to be interrupted. On the way back at the airport, Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix, she looked at her email.
And there on her email was a note from the Vice President of Medical Affairs. We regret to inform you that Ron Ashton died suddenly the morning that Noemi was leaving for her trip.

And that's when she saw him.

And she realized then that he had indeed accomplished the major goal of his life, to show her that something did exist after death. Well, you're a doctor.
Have you had any of these kind of experiences? I have. I have.
I've had a couple. And, you know, when you think about, when I talk with my patients, I like to tell patients some of these stories too, because they're just fun, interesting stories to tell.
I've also discovered that many patients, and I suspect you also, Mike, I'd be interested to see if you've had a story, something like this, where you can't explain something that's happened. I do.
If you want to go ahead and tell it, I'd love to hear it. Yeah hear yeah it wasn't me but i'm from a family of five kids and my youngest brother right after he was born my mother who was a nurse felt something was wrong and took him to the doctor and said the doctor said well he just he just has a cold or you know he just keep your eye on him.
He'll be okay. My mother took him home.
And later that night, fairly late, there was a knock at the door and it was the doctor. And he said, something's bothering me about this.
He made my mother and he drove to the hospital and he was diagnosed with pneumonia. And the doctor at the hospital said he probably would have died that night if the doctor hadn't done what he did.
Sure. That gives you goosebumps, doesn't it? Yeah.
When I tell these stories to my patients, they will frequently say, I've had that experience too. And I was afraid to tell anyone about it, but let me tell you.
And that's been my experience that people and doctors both are afraid to tell about these experiences because they're so unusual and so bizarre. So you said that you've had some of these experiences.
So share one of those stories. One of the ones that probably got me started in this journey, one of my good friends, Rich Jorgensen is a general surgeon.
And Rich had a friend, Michael Asso, who was a pellet judge in the state of Illinois. And they had a lot of fun together.
And Rich one morning was having a breakfast with a friend of his. And they were talking about dreams.
And Rich was saying, I just don't dream. I don't have any dreams anymore.
I used to as a kid, but don't have any dreams anymore. And the woman that he was talking to was kind of a hippie type.
and she was saying i don't i just don't dream i don't have any dreams anymore i used to as a kid but don't have any dreams anymore and the woman that he was talking to was kind of a hippie type and she was saying well the the spirit the earth spirit uh if you have a dream it's the earth spirit talking to you and and you're supposed to if you if you dream about someone you're supposed to tell them what your dream was and he thought that was kind of interesting and and then went about his way and a few months later he actually had a dream and he he dreamt that Mike Lasso, his good friend, died. And he saw them in a funeral home and people were very sad.
And this was such a moving dream that he decided to tell his friend, Mike Lasso, that he had a dream about him. And when he talked to Mike, Mike kind of left it off.
He said, okay, Rich, you know, I dreamt I was dead. That's a funny dream.
So, you know, what do you want me to do? And he said, you know, please just go get a physical. Just humor me, get a physical.
And after you get the physical, just let me know what they find. So he went to a good internist locally, got a physical.
Everything was fine. He did the EKG, the lab work, everything.
And so he told Rich and Rich said, well, did he do anything else? And Mike said, well, no, he did the complete physical. Now I'm done.
Yeah. Satisfied.
And Rich just had that feeling inside that there was something really wrong that he had to do something else. So he said, well, why don't you just see my cardiologist? Because in my dream, I dreamt that you had a heart attack and died from that.
So why don't you see my friend, the cardiologist? And Mike said, oh, come on, Rich, I did this already. And Rich was so insistent that he decided to do that.
So he went to see his cardiologist. Cardiologist did a stress test, failed it badly, went right into the hospital.
They did an angiogram. He had a multi-vessel disease that the life, including a left main coronary lesion, which gives a life expectancy of about 90 days.
So he had emergency bypass surgery, saved his life. So since you've talked to these doctors and since you've experienced this yourself, understanding that each thing, each story is very individual, but is there a big takeaway from this? How has it changed you and these people in some kind of general sweeping way, or is it just individual? I think there is a takeaway, Mike, and I think the takeaway is that there's something else out there.
You know, in the book, I just collected a bunch of stories, and I didn't want to push religion of any kind, but I just wanted to get people to realize that there's something out there, and it's higher than us. Most of the docs and myself call it God.
You can call it whatever you want. You can call it the Earth spirit or whatever, but there's something higher than us, and that's, I think, the general theme of what came out of all these stories, that there's something that loves us, that love is a powerful force in the universe, and that strange things happen to us.
And there are little things that happen to us every day. And I wanted people to realize that to look at little coincidences in their lives, there are little things that happen to us probably almost every day that you sometimes write off as a coincidence, but realize that some of these things may be something that's a little bit different, that maybe there is something out there that is looking out for us and helping us on a daily basis.
And remember those stories and write them down that have happened to you, like your story. Write that down so your kids and your grandkids can realize that you had a spiritual experience that really is worth paying attention to and look for those in your lives.
But skeptics would say there are plenty, maybe more stories of the people that died that didn't get saved, that were buried under the snow and froze to death that that if there was this guiding light how come those people didn't get it and you know i i i hear that a lot and i i i searched my my consciousness to to try to come up with an explanation for that and there was a bishop from england that had a good explanation and what you're asking is, why do bad things happen to good people? And why do some people get saved and why people don't? We don't know. Hopefully someday we will know, but I don't know.
So tell me another story that a doctor told you. John Mendenhall is an orthopedic surgeon.
He's a great orthopedic surgeon, very friendly. He got really, he was going through a divorce.
He got really depressed and he was considering suicide. And the morning that he was thinking about all this, someone showed up in his office with a plaque and the plaque was a family tree with all of his relatives on the tree and he at the bottom.
And he didn't know who dropped this off,

but they finally realized that it was a fellow by the name of Dave Adams anonymously dropped this plaque off. And he realized that he was at the bottom of this tree and all the relatives were counting on him to do something in the world.
And so he realized that maybe his life did have a And he decided not to go ahead with the suicide.

And so he went that maybe his life did have a purpose and he decided not to go ahead with the suicide. And so he went on with his life.
And about a year or two later, he was on rounds, really, really tired because he'd been up the night before and was glad to have the weekend off. So he signed out to his partner, left the hospital, decided to get a pop at the doctor's lounge.
And when he's passing the doctor's lounge, he forgot to do that. And so then he decided to stop at the local gas station to get a pop.
And when he was driving by the gas station, he was thinking about somebody else and forgot to do that. And then he got to his turnoff and expressway to go to his home.
And for some reason, he was distracted and missed the turnoff. And then he decided, well, I know this hospital just down the street where I have privileges, but I never operate because I don't have all the right equipment.
They have a great doctor's lounge. I'll stop there and get a pop.
So he pulled in. And for some reason, he parked in the front of the hospital versus the back.
And as he walked in, someone came running up to him and said, Dr. Mendenhall, Dr.
Mendenhall, thank you for coming. I'm glad you got my message.
He never got any message at all. It was Kathy Staton, the daughter of Dave Adams, who had saved Dr.
Mendenhall's life a couple of years before. And she said, my daughter has just fallen off a zip line.
She fractured both forearms, both bones and both forearms were fractured terribly. They were deformed.
She wants to be a concert pianist. You're the only one I can think of that can really do the surgery that would help her and give her a chance of playing the piano again, because the emergency room doctor said she'll never play the piano again.
So he said, well, this is great, but I can't operate here because they don't have the right equipment.

And just as he was saying that, the head nurse came up to him and said, Dr. Mendenhall, thanks for coming.
I know that you've been hesitant to operate at our hospital because we don't have the right equipment. But it's very interesting.
A couple of weeks ago, we'd had a meeting of the surgical committee and we decided to order all the special equipment that you like.

Excuse me.

And I picked it up this morning.

And here it is.

So we went to see Judy, the daughter,

had fractured her wrist and arms.

And he decided to take her to surgery.

He was exhausted, but he did the surgery.

He finished it in record time.

He said the bones almost fell into place. They were so effective.
And he did the surgery. He finished it in record time.
He said the bones almost fell

into place. They were so effective.
And he finished the surgery. Dave Adams, who was there with his daughter, came out and hugged him and thanked him for what he had done.
And it took a long time for recovery, but Judy was able to finally play the piano. And Dr.
Menehall went to the concert, and he said she played like an angel. Quickly, tell the story of Dr.
Steve Graham. Steve is an ER doc.
And he was working one night when a guy came in with a diverticulitis. He had abdominal pain.
It was pretty easy kind of a thing. And he noticed when he was examining him that he had this tattoo on his arm and that the tattoo was a tattoo of a dime.
And he thought that was curious. Why would he have a tattoo of a dime? So, you know, he was a little afraid to ask him, but finally he got the curiosity, got the best of them.
And he said, why do you have that tattoo of the dime on your forearm? And the fellow said, well, you know, my son was a coin collector, and he loved to collect

dimes. And it seems like whenever we went to a special place, like we go to Wrigley Field,

he would find a dime under the seat, or we go to a special dinner, and there would be a dime under

his plate. And he started collecting these dimes.
And every time there was a special event, he seemed

to find a dime and he said my

son was was killed x you know in an accident on the expressway a few years ago and i wanted to

put this on my arm to remember to let him know that i remember him and and and he was very special

and and then he said the curious thing is that now i find dimes whenever i go to special places and i think it's my son robbie that is letting me know that he's he's okay and so

you Now I find dimes whenever I go to special places. And I think it's my son, Robbie, that is letting me know that he's okay.

And so Steve thought that was kind of a nice, interesting story.

But, you know, he's a little skeptical and didn't quite believe it very much.

And he let the guy go with antibiotics.

And he went back to his doctor's room to do the dictation, which only doctors can get into.

And he pulled the chair out to sit down, and they're on the floor. Time.
Well, what's great about these stories that you tell, you know, people can make of them what they want. You know, maybe it's all just coincidence.
Maybe there's something more, and you can decide for yourself, but they do make you think. My guest has been Dr.
Scott Kolbaba. He is an internist and author of the book Physicians Untold Stories, miraculous experiences doctors are hesitant to share with their patients or anyone.
There's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Scott.
Thanks for sharing your stories. Thanks, Mike.
Good interview. The things people worry about never, ever, ever come to pass.
In the 15% of the time when the things we do worry about do happen, 80% of people say they handled the problem better than they thought they would. Experts say that the best thing to do if you're worried is to write down what you're worried about and decide which things you can actually do something about and which you cannot.
Then create a plan to do something about the things you can actually impact. Doing something will usually lessen the worry.
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