Ep 575: The Spiritual Side of Chronic Illness: From Suffering to Sovereignty with Dr. Kelly McCann

In this episode of the Health Fix Podcast, Dr. Jannine Krause sits down with Dr. Kelly McCann, a board-certified physician in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics with advanced training in Functional, Integrative, and Environmental Medicine.

Dr. McCann is known worldwide for her expertise in mold illness, chronic infections, MCAS, and complex chronic conditions. But her approach goes far beyond labs and protocols—she integrates science, intuition, and spiritual psychology to help patients heal at the deepest levels.

Together, we explore:
🌿 The root causes of chronic illness — from environment to beliefs
🧠 The mind-body connection and how your thoughts shape health
💫 The role of spirituality, authenticity, and energy shifts in recovery
⚖️ Why balancing yin and yang is crucial in midlife health
💔 How trauma and relationships impact chronic illness
🌱 Healing journeys that turn suffering into profound transformation

Dr. McCann also shares the inspiration behind The Spring Center in Costa Mesa, CA, her integrative medical practice dedicated to helping people recover from complex illness. She introduces her upcoming transformational programs and The Unforgetting Project, which guide people back to their authentic selves and empower them to view illness as a portal to growth, healing, and sovereignty.

✨ If you’ve ever felt like your body was betraying you, this episode will help you see illness in a new light—one filled with hope, meaning, and the possibility of reclaiming your health and your life.

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Resources & Links:
🌸 Learn more about Dr. Kelly McCann: www.drkellymccann.com
🌸 The Spring Center, Costa Mesa, CA: www.thespringcenter.com

📖 Stay tuned for Dr. McCann’s upcoming book on how illness can be a portal to healing the whole self.

Our Partners

Podcast Transcript

Chapters

00:00 Exploring Root Causes of Chronic Illness
03:13 The Mind-Body Connection in Healing
06:02 Understanding the Role of Beliefs in Health
08:43 Navigating Patient Readiness for Deeper Conversations
11:52 Transformative Healing Journeys
14:52 The Impact of Relationships on Healing
17:43 Reframing Life’s Challenges as Opportunities
20:34 The Body as a Map for Healing
25:38 Connecting Emotions and Physical Health
27:55 The Spiritual Connection to Adrenal Health
32:37 Balancing Energies in Perimenopause and Menopause
38:34 Reframing Trauma and Chronic Illness
40:45 The Unforgetting Project: Rediscovering Authenticity
44:14 The Spring Center: A Hub for Healing
48:24 The Journey of Healing: Time and Progress

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Jannine Krause (00:01.311)
Dr. Kelly McCann, welcome to the Health Fix Podcast.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (00:04.578)
Thank you so much for having me, Janine. Really happy to be here.

Jannine Krause (00:08.363)
I’m looking forward to our conversation because just chatting before we hit record, we have a lot in common in terms of thinking about chronic illness and kind of, you lot of people are calling it root cause medicine and this and that, but really at the root, I think there’s many roots in chronic illness and I’m thinking you’re probably at the same thought process in that department.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (00:30.158)
Yeah, there are definitely big buckets, I see them, of root causes, and that can be mold, chronic infections, of course, up in Wisconsin, you see, I’m sure, a lot of Lyme disease and tick-borne illnesses. Environmental toxicants is a huge piece that I think conventional medicine has no clue about. EMF, et cetera. And then, you know, even deeper, though, underlying that is the

the beliefs that we have about ourselves, am I worthy, you know, for love, for being on the planet, all of these things, all these misperceptions and misbeliefs that we have, limiting beliefs that we have, our connection to ourselves and our spirit. I think at the root, that’s what leads us to be energetically more susceptible to mold, infections, and environmental toxic exposures.

Jannine Krause (01:28.939)
I couldn’t agree more. I couldn’t agree more. And I think you probably came to this conclusion after some years of looking at, how do I find the right protocol? And then you’re going through it and you’re like, these protocols aren’t working? People aren’t getting better. What am I doing wrong? I don’t know if this happened to you, but it definitely was a little bit of the trajectory I felt for the first probably decade of my career.

Wondering like what what’s wrong? What’s going on? Why am I not helping? Did you experience anything like that along the way?

Kelly K. McCann, MD (01:59.778)
You know what, yes and no. Fortunately for me, I actually got a master’s in spiritual psychology at the University of Santa Monica starting in 2008, 2010. That’s when I started my practice here in Southern California. And so my understanding of the mind-body spirit and how closely linked they were was really embedded in the beginning of my practice. And so it informed how I showed

up for patients and how I perceived patients. And for those patients who were willing to look at themselves, look at their lives, look at their beliefs a little bit differently, they were the ones that got better.

You know, the people who are stuck in a victim mentality, who were not open to the possibility that the mind and the body are linked, and they came in and like, fix my body, my will, my spirit, you know, my brain, well, not my brain, but you know, my will and my spirit, my drive is good, but my body is failing me. Those people who have this deep schism between the mind and the body,

They continue to struggle because we are not mechanics. We’re not robots. We are flesh and blood that is imbued with energy and life force in every single cell in the body. And so the idea that these two things are separate is crazy and I blame Plato and Descartes and unfortunately Christianity because

Jannine Krause (03:38.827)
you

Kelly K. McCann, MD (03:43.532)
they don’t think the body is terrible, least the early forefathers did. So when we start to think about…

the human being having a spiritual experience or spiritual beings having a human experience. And I’m not talking about religion or anything like that. I most people know when you look at somebody who’s alive, when you look at somebody who’s deceased, they’re different, right? There’s fundamental differences between something that’s alive and something that’s not. Whether you believe in God or not doesn’t really matter. We know that there is something that elivens us, right?

Jannine Krause (04:10.591)
Mm-hmm.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (04:22.544)
And that thing that alivens us is our spirit, our intuition, our soul. And we have to pay attention to that in healthcare, in our lives. We can’t separate them.

I bring up Descartes. Descartes said, I think therefore I am. And so we put the mind and the will as supreme and the body is like, you know, this vehicle that you move around in the world with, but it’s just, it’s just dust, right? That may be the case, but it’s still what we’ve got right now.

Jannine Krause (04:42.539)
That’s it.

Jannine Krause (04:59.051)
You

Jannine Krause (05:04.405)
Yeah, yeah. What, I mean, there’s so many different things I can kind of ping off of there, because I’m like, yes, the early forefathers, there’s definitely, you know, we’ve kind of been, dare I say, brainwashed into thinking that, yeah, there is that disconnect. And then there’s the coping mechanism of disconnect that goes even further. And I think for many women that,

Kelly K. McCann, MD (05:09.828)
I know.

Jannine Krause (05:29.599)
have felt like their bodies are betraying them. I’m gonna say that for references because I hear it a lot.

especially in midlife when things really do start to shift. But it’s also, and I’d love to get your idea here, it’s also an incredible spiritual time because we’re kind of really getting to the point where we’re awakening, where, you know, maybe the kids are out of the house, maybe we’re getting to a point where we’re starting to figure out like, who am I? What is going on? So it’s a very fascinating time in life where I feel like energetically we’re almost set to have this.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (06:02.926)
Mm-hmm.

Jannine Krause (06:02.973)
And at the same time, we’re not acknowledging as much as we could in the medical system as to how these things happen.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (06:09.632)
Absolutely. I really appreciate that you bring this up because I think, you know, in the world of complex chronic illness, it’s sometimes easier to see, but the truth is we all have stuff, you know, that we have come to believe about ourselves. Some of it starts in childhood, some of it gets piled on later through our life experience is, and you know, what I’m really proposing is,

body isn’t against you. It’s not betraying you. In fact, it had your back this whole time, right? And what’s happening is, is it’s giving you messages. And I know that sounds very cliche, but let me explain.

So imagine that our bodies are a little bit like a driver assist car, right? And I know I just said we’re not robots, but just go with me here. So you’re in a driver assist car. If you’ve ever been in one, you start to veer off the lane. Like, I don’t know, in my Lexus, just, the wheel shifts, right? okay. That’s just feedback.

Jannine Krause (07:07.211)
you

Jannine Krause (07:11.242)
Okay.

Jannine Krause (07:15.913)
Good point.

Yeah.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (07:24.384)
It’s just feedback. And you do it enough, my little thing would come up with a coffee cup and say, time to take a break. I love that. was like, that is so cute. I love that. So what if the messages that we get, the symptoms that we experience, it’s just feedback?

Jannine Krause (07:27.787)
Thank

Jannine Krause (07:35.016)
Right.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (07:49.14)
It’s just your spirit, your intuition, your body, all working in synchronicity to give you feedback. Hey, going off course, you’re not living in alignment with who you’re meant to be on the planet and how you’re meant to show up because you have these beliefs that you have to be superwoman, that you have to do everything for your kids, or you have to take care of your aging parents.

or you have to be a certain way or do a certain thing, show up a certain way, and one of that belief is not true.

Right? So if we could just start with the possibility of maybe your body isn’t against you.

Jannine Krause (08:40.523)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (08:43.329)
and see where that takes you.

Jannine Krause (08:46.685)
Absolutely, absolutely. And I like the comment you made about, you your thoughts. Because for my entire life, till I started studying spirituality, I kind of thought exactly that, which many people do. What I come up with in my brain, think therefore this is what’s reality for me. And I think for a lot of people coming to that conclusion, like, wait, I think things that aren’t even real?

What?

Are you serious? How do you work with folks on that level? Because, you know, one of the biggest things I find in chronic illness and also perimenopause, menopause, a lot of, I’ll call them women’s issues, women are often told like it’s in their head. And so then we go, how do I tease out this concept? is, it’s, in my head, but it’s, but it isn’t, but it is. But how, how do, how do we tease that out? How do you help folks to, kind of think that through? Because I’m sure you get folks that have seen 20 plus

doctors coming into seeing you and they’ve been gaslit. They’ve been, you know, all those things. Yeah. How do you think of it? What do you, what do you do?

Kelly K. McCann, MD (09:49.555)
yeah.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (09:54.016)
Yeah, you know, it’s often not where I start, right? That’s where we jumped in today because I’m kind of excited about this concept and I think it needs to get out there more. But it’s not where I start. I…

Jannine Krause (09:59.979)
Yes.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (10:10.99)
I’m present and with the person where they’re at. they’re still very much, many of my patients have mast cell activation, have mold exposure, all the same things that you’re seeing too, I’m sure, Janine. And we gotta get them to feel a little bit better, right? If you feel like crap 24 seven, there’s no bandwidth for dialogue about spirit, right? It would just be almost a fetus.

because that’s not where somebody is. So it’s really about the timing and understanding the other person’s capacity for hearing what we’re talking about. You know, I’ve had patients that, I have this one patient I just remember, she came in, she’s in her 30s, not menstruating at all, right? She’s got an eight-year-old daughter, not menstruating at all.

Oxalate issues all sorts of issues just you know, no sense of joy. No happiness She you know every review of systems was checked. She felt terrible all the time couldn’t really tolerate much in the latest supplements and It was probably a year and a half almost two years before finally I was like, oh You’re ready Let’s talk. Let’s have a conversation, right? It was just this

Jannine Krause (11:22.101)
Thank

Kelly K. McCann, MD (11:41.984)
recognition that she was ready for this kind of conversation. And I have to tell you, I saw her last week and barely recognizable. This woman was glowing, absolutely glowing. She’s now…

Jannine Krause (11:45.867)
Thank

Kelly K. McCann, MD (11:59.092)
studying to be a medical intuitive. She has so much joy in her life and it’s amazing to witness absolutely amazing the transformation unrecognizable and

And I think it’s in part because she was willing to go there. In fact, she was more than willing. As soon as we had this conversation, she went out and got a book that I recommended. I love Amy Scherr’s book, How to Heal Yourself When No One Else Can. Amazing book. I highly recommend it. Amy Scherr is a delight. And she’s awesome. And this patient used it as a workbook.

Amy writes out different sections and she’s asking questions and encouraging you to ask yourself similar questions and do muscle testing to figure out like what are the answers? What are the root causes for you? What are the issues? What are the beliefs that you’re stumbling against, you’re hitting up against? And then she gives you tools of how to like process those misbeliefs and clear them using emotional freedom technique and of her

of other techniques and then this woman went on and she did a little bit of the Gupta program and she took some stuff from that. She did the Amy Apigion’s biology of trauma work and then she started working with other healers and other medical intuitives and just went on and on and on and taking bits and pieces of the things that worked for her. And that’s the other thing too. I find a lot of times people are like, I did the Gupta program and it didn’t work.

Like, that is not how it works. You gotta do the work. The program won’t fix you. Right?

Jannine Krause (13:42.569)
Yeah, I heard that often.

Jannine Krause (13:51.179)
Right.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (13:52.084)
So a lot of this is about a conversation from the practitioner side. When is this person ready to have these conversations? And oftentimes it’s a nudge here. It’s a suggestion there. It’s a, you know, would you consider, what about the possibility? Let’s reframe this. These kinds of ideas within the context of just general follow-ups. So we’re talking about mold and we’re talking about these different

protocols and the supplements and doing the testing and things like that. you know, it’s paying attention to the opportunity of when people speak and say, you know, they may say something with a real negative bent to it.

and hearing that, really listening and offering, well, what if you thought about it this way? What if you thought about it this way? One of my other patients with mast cell and POTS, the first time she came in, it had taken her two weeks to fill out my paperwork to come in. And then she had to rest for like two weeks afterwards because it was so exhausting just to fill out the paperwork. And she had to lay down the entire

Jannine Krause (14:58.795)
you

Kelly K. McCann, MD (15:07.624)
appointment because whenever she set up her heart rate was in the 120s 140s and she couldn’t profuse her brain and participate in the conversation.

And you know, fast forward a year and a half, two years, she’s really starting to get better. She’s, you know, she’s able to walk around and function. And her husband decides he wants a divorce. And she’s absolutely devastated. She’s like, this is what we’ve been working for for years. They’ve been together for 15 years before that, right? And now she’s finally getting better. And she was…

Jannine Krause (15:32.629)
Yeah.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (15:46.676)
saying, you know, he’s been my rock. He’s the only person who’s been there for me. And I said, no, that’s not true. You’re the constant.

And just that simple reframe of like…

Yeah, her body seemed to be against her. She definitely felt it at one point. But when she was able to reframe the fact that no, her body was actually doing the best that it could and it kept her going this entire time. And not only that, she was the one constant that she could rely on. And how beautiful was that to be able to like look at a divorce and be sad, of course, right. But then to recognize that she

had all the tools and all the skills and all the capacity to be there for herself and to find a practitioner to partner with and to get better.

Jannine Krause (16:50.687)
Huge so huge, you know, it’s interesting how this does seem to happen the divorces will show up in the midst of someone working on their their health and

I don’t know, spiritually I always think like, is it the energy shifting things? you know, what’s happening? So I’d love for you to kind of share a little bit too on what other types of resources you might recommend for folks when this happens because I mean, gosh, I wish it wasn’t so, but I would say in probably 50 % of the cases, this does seem to show up or at least marital issues will show up for the folks.

how much of it’s your spiritual, you your energy changing compared to your partner and your partner being like, whoa, who’s this now?

Kelly K. McCann, MD (17:41.964)
Yeah, I do think it’s a lot of that. Gosh, I remember probably in early 2000s, there was a book called The Dance of Intimacy.

and she wrote a lot of books, similar type books, Harriet Lerner I think. And it was about exactly that. When you change the steps of the dance, that forces the partners to either change with you or step back, right? There are only kind of two possibilities there. If you’re gonna stay in partnership, they’re gonna keep up with you or they’re not.

Jannine Krause (18:14.411)
Okay.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (18:24.162)
and

would say that…

We love to believe that our marriages are forever, right? Nobody goes into a marriage with the expectation that they’re gonna get divorced, hopefully. And yet people grow and people change. And sometimes that’s like, I don’t

I mean, personally, I believe in karma, whatever people believe, but I think that there’s a season for things. Just like we may not have the same friends that we did when we were five, right? It doesn’t really work that way. People come in and out of our lives and they’re there for a reason. We’re in each other’s lives for a reason and then sometimes it’s time to move on and then we need different people, different energy. And…

Jannine Krause (19:06.133)
Bye.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (19:24.11)
You know, I really, I’m really trying to take the perspective as much as possible that nothing is bad, right? I think this dichotomy of good and bad, it really is very harming in the broad sense of things. I mean, I definitely believe that there are evil people in the world. That’s pretty clear. But I think when we’re talking about, you know, the general population living your life,

Jannine Krause (19:43.125)
you

Kelly K. McCann, MD (19:53.046)
I want to see the good. I want to believe that things have purpose and meaning and significance and even if something hurts, like we have this perception that pain is bad, feeling bad is bad, you know, I don’t want that. So there’s a lot of judgment about experience that is more harmful than useful.

Jannine Krause (20:06.229)
Yeah.

Jannine Krause (20:20.117)
Mm-hmm.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (20:21.184)
What if life is just a school? And what we’re here to do on the planet is to grow, evolve, change, understand ourselves better, live our purpose. When we are being ourselves and we’re living our purpose, we feel joy, we’re in flow, we feel love, we feel happy.

And those are the most magical things in the world. And yet we have these perceptions that we have to be a different way, right? We have to make money, we have to be a good mom, be a good wife. And yeah, those things are true, but you can still do it in your own way.

Jannine Krause (21:12.715)
you

Kelly K. McCann, MD (21:12.916)
we should be showing up in our own lives the most authentic versions of ourselves. And when we do that, everything gets better. Everything is in flow. And when we have hard times, that’s opportunity. It’s opportunity for growth and change. You know what? We learn best through adversity.

Jannine Krause (21:39.542)
Yeah. I think that’s a fascinating way to reframe chronic illness in particular as, know,

what is the lesson the body’s trying to tell you? What’s the story here? Obviously, you’re mentioning before the symptoms, they’re just messages like, hey, I didn’t like this. Hey, I like this better. And the good and bad, mean, my gosh, if we go deep into that, and I don’t necessarily want to go down this rabbit hole, but it’s the food stuff. And I think for many women, good food, bad food, good behavior, bad behavior. And this can get so deeply rooted.

And I can see how many women in particular would have such deep connection to, I a good girl? Was I good today? Kind of a thing. And it seems very rudimentary, but at the same time, I can see how these things could really tie in and move into, don’t know, but at the end of the day, if we flip it and look, like you said, at like, what is the story? What is our body evolving, you know, and trying to

explain, you know, it takes a little bit of the pressure off of the chronic…

Kelly K. McCann, MD (22:53.314)
Yeah, yeah, it takes the pressure off. takes the victimhood off. takes, know, what I tell my patients who are in it, right? They definitely don’t feel well. They’re struggling. And if we’re having these kind of deeper meaning conversations, I say, know what? I think you’re…

being, soul, whatever you want to call it, came and said, I want to learn this as fast as I can and evolve as quickly as I can to show up as my authentic self as fast as I can, right? They’re on the bullet train to getting to that objective. Because you can’t ignore stuff when you feel like crap.

Jannine Krause (23:44.684)
Absolutely, Especially when you’re saying, you know, if we go into MCAS for a second, because I mean, I joke lovingly with some of my patients, like, okay, we’ve got to put you in a bubble. But why do we put you in a bubble? To help the body figure out what’s up. You know, it’s almost like the protective bubble so that you can work on figuring out what your body really wants and needs.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (24:10.318)
Right.

Yeah, it gives you the bandwidth. going back to more medical stuff, it’s calming down the MCAS, calming down the symptoms, working with the nervous system, the vagus nerve, the limbic system, calming all that stuff down so you have more bandwidth to start to investigate, okay, what are these symptoms trying to show me? What is the message? And the other piece that I love about the body

Jannine Krause (24:16.682)
Yes.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (24:41.392)
is that it’s a map. It’s a map we have.

Jannine Krause (24:45.419)
Mm-hmm.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (24:48.366)
the traditional Chinese medicine, meridian system, we have the chakra system, we have metaphor. We talk about metaphor in English, right? I have butterflies in my stomach because I’m anxious. Well, what’s that chakra, right? That is how we, that’s our third chakra. That’s like our, you know, soul centers, how we present ourselves to the world and…

Jannine Krause (25:05.579)
Bye.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (25:15.106)
There are many experts in this and many resources in this that can start to provide ideas for entry. For example, so many women have thyroid issues, right? Let’s see, let’s look at the thyroid. Where is it? Right here over the voice box. Hmm, between the head and the heart. Hmm.

Jannine Krause (25:27.669)
Thanks.

Jannine Krause (25:37.449)
Okay.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (25:44.958)
Are you speaking your truth? Are you living in alignment with your head and your heart? Not the truth that you think that somebody else wants to hear. The truth of who you are, connecting your heart and your head in coherence and speaking that out in the world.

Jannine Krause (25:57.099)
you

Jannine Krause (26:07.787)
you

Gosh, what comes to mind is Louis T, right?

Kelly K. McCann, MD (26:13.42)
Yes, yes.

Jannine Krause (26:14.057)
You’re genius for all of those connections to emotions and organs. And you have the thyroid of Biggie, the heart too. The heart with palpitations. We have a lot of folks with AFib and PVC, so premature ventricular contractions for those of who go, what is a PVC? But those kind of things, the heart center. You mentioned coherence. One of the things that I’ve found, and I’d love to kind of bring in a little bit of what I find and I want to hear.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (26:24.001)
too.

Jannine Krause (26:44.041)
what you’ll do often with those. But before I see patients, I’ll often put my hands on my heart and just kind of breathe for a little bit before podcasts will do that too. Just to kind of feel things because I don’t think for probably at least 40 years of my life that I even connected in. And I went to naturopathic medicine school and we think, you know, all kinds of little stuff’s going on there. But the truth was they were trying to be so Western that they forgot about a lot of our roots. And a lot of us came out of there not having this connection.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (27:04.622)
I know.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (27:12.974)
Yeah, more allopathic than MDs.

Jannine Krause (27:14.024)
Thank

Exactly, like almost now I’m like, it’s shameful because I love how you went to school. I love how you went to school. You you had the training of the spirituality background, you know, right off the bat. I feel like dang, I’m jealous. I would have done that right off the bat, right? You know, I could have helped a lot more folks in the beginning, but at the same time, you know, we’re all on our own journey. So I’m not gonna guilt myself.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (27:42.1)
Exactly. Don’t do that. Don’t do that. Who knows? This podcast may like change your trajectory completely.

Jannine Krause (27:50.188)
It definitely, you know, and that’s what I’m hoping for folks listening to is because it is something that, you know, I’ve gently been knocking on doors with the podcast mentioning these kinds of things, but, you know, looking at the heart, looking at the thyroid so huge, the adrenal glands in the kidneys. I would love to hear how you talk about the spiritual connection there with those adrenals in the kidneys and all of that stuff. Give us your insight of it.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (28:15.99)
Yeah, so in traditional Chinese medicine, I was trained as a medical acupuncturist. So I did the Joe Helms course and all that. I don’t practice acupuncture now, but I really appreciate, because who’s got time with complex chronic illness to do acupuncture? I send them to an acupuncturist. They’re better served that way. But in traditional Chinese medicine, is no adrenal gland. It’s the kidneys. And so those energetically are one in the same.

And you know, I do believe that we all come into this world with a certain

bank of constitutional energy, which is kidney chi, right? And that’s just kind of where we are. It’s from our parents, it’s our genetics, it’s our epigenetics, it may be our karma. And then we have the capacity to spend it and spend it unwisely or conserve it and spend it…

Jannine Krause (28:59.199)
Thank

Kelly K. McCann, MD (29:23.502)
not frugally, with a conscience, I guess. one of the things that I’ve really realized is that it’s exhausting to not be yourself.

Jannine Krause (29:29.259)
you

Kelly K. McCann, MD (29:41.362)
And how hard is it to continually not be yourself and put on a mask for your husband, for your kids, for your friends, for everyone in your life, because you don’t think that you deserve to show up, right? And how depleting is that going to be to your adrenal and your kidney G?

You know, I mean, I don’t always explain it this way with the spiritual piece. And certainly, I think my evolution as a functional medicine doctor has been that, you know, 10 years ago, was all about the adrenals. Now I understand that, you know, adrenals and leaky gut. And now I understand that, well, if you don’t address the mold and the chronic infections and, you know, all of those things, those things are,

Jannine Krause (30:25.855)
Thank

Kelly K. McCann, MD (30:39.754)
surreptitiously going behind your back and depleting your adrenals. So, but ultimately, as we started out the conversation, it’s who you are at the core and whether or not you’re allowing your true self to show out and be and be shared with the world. That is the most depleting because energetically, if we don’t have good boundaries, if we’re not really good at saying, okay, this is my

Jannine Krause (30:44.843)
down.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (31:09.698)
stuff and this is everybody else’s stuff. If we’re not good at that, that’s the signal that we’re sending to our immune system. Of course our immune systems are not going to work right because we don’t have good psychological, emotional, and energetic boundaries. How is our immune system going to follow our lead?

Jannine Krause (31:19.723)
.

Jannine Krause (31:33.803)
Yeah.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (31:34.718)
It can’t, right? It’s gonna say, well, but you know, this might be foreign, it might be good for me, it might not be good for me, I don’t really know, because I don’t have a good blueprint. So I think all of these things are very depleting to the adrenal glands and the kidneys.

Jannine Krause (31:46.943)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jannine Krause (31:56.332)
I think that was a fabulous description of Kid Nietzsche. Because I see it quite often. It’s kind of the mask of put on the good wife face, put on the whatever it may be. And also with friends, also with coworkers, careers. I think that’s a big one for a lot of people. And what I love about what you’re saying is that

Kelly K. McCann, MD (32:16.558)
Yeah.

Jannine Krause (32:25.355)
connection to depletion and and if we go even further to perimenopause menopause our kidney Chi and the grounding with our heart energy yin and yang since kidney so yin you know for those of you who are like what in the heck is she talking about right now guys I’m talking about the balance in Chinese medicine yin and yang um but we’ll see this come up very often in midlife where it seems that this is the time where we are hitting our walls with like the battery’s been depleted as

as far as it can go and then you really start to tip that scale. Do you see, do you tend to see that kind of happening for women as well?

Kelly K. McCann, MD (33:05.462)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it’s a variety of different things and it might be, there might be a couple of different classes of how we show up with perimenopause and menopause. definitely see sort of, yeah, yin and yang, masculine and feminine energy imbalances. If somebody is a go, go, go, very masculine energy, like entrepreneur, business person, et cetera,

Jannine Krause (33:13.653)
Mm-hmm.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (33:35.398)
they might have more difficulties because the body is really calling you back to your feminine side to try and balance those energies. I mean, I really think we are here not only to be like our most authentic selves, we’re here to be as balanced as possible. You know, that’s why the symbol of yin and yang is a perfect balance of masculine and feminine. And, and so, you know, that might be

Jannine Krause (33:58.047)
Okay.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (34:05.232)
one group of women’s experience that they’re too masculine and then they’re fighting that battle of like of that feminine energy not having enough of it. On the converse, the opposite side then it can be that same sort of thing where there’s too much feminine energy not enough masculine energy or beliefs about ourselves like you know the crone is not valuable

in society getting older is a terrible thing and there’s a lot of resistance about getting older and know beliefs that you’re no longer valuable if you’re not this beautiful person or this younger woman so I think there’s a lot of

stuff potentially to unpack and you’re right the body is saying okay time out you can’t get to ignore this stuff anymore we’re no longer sweeping it under the rug you gotta face you gotta face some things and if we bring in this idea of the body as a map

And the map provides the clues of where you need to do the work internally. That’s what I mean by a map. And we can use things like Louis He, we can use things like traditional Chinese medicine and the chakra system and any kind of metaphor that you can come up with. mean, the thing that’s beautiful is that there are systems of ideas about these metaphors, but ultimately it comes down to, you know,

How is it that you are showing up with yourself in this situation? At the University of Santa Monica we say how you are with the issue is the issue.

Jannine Krause (36:00.044)
You go a lot of directions on that one. You know, and especially like the way I look at it, see it in terms of the manifestations of the different, you know, illnesses. You know, how you are with the issue is how things will show up. Quite frankly is how I see it. It seems, you know. No. Go ahead.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (36:07.779)
I know.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (36:25.27)
Yeah, I guess I was gonna say one more thing. I also think that many of my mast cell patients have a history of trauma.

in their life. And it doesn’t have to be sexual abuse, although many times it is. It doesn’t have to be physical abuse. It can be neglect. Neglect is a huge driver for feelings of inadequacy. Last year we lost Beth O’Hara, who was a real light.

in the world. I never really got her full story, even though we worked together on a virtual summit for Massive Activation, but I got the sense that her upbringing was much more about neglect, that she just didn’t feel that love from her parents. so…

Jannine Krause (37:29.461)
Mm-hmm.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (37:39.32)
that the illnesses themselves are calling us forward to really look at and heal not just the physical body, but the emotional, psychological, and spiritual issues that…

and misbeliefs that we have developed because of our experiences, whether they’re big T traumas or little T traumas. And I talk about trauma because I think it’s important, if we are able to reframe even the way that we think about trauma as…

Yes, it was a terrible experience, but it’s all for your growth and learning so that you can become that person. And I’m not saying that sexual abuse is good or any kind of abuse is good, but if we can pull back from that judgment, which clouds our ability to

see the silver lining or gain wisdom from that experience, I think we’ll get a lot further. You know, it’s kind of like with cancer patients. When you get that diagnosis of cancer, the way that society thinks about it is,

Bam, all of a sudden your life is potentially finite as if it wasn’t before. it’s like nobody gets out of here alive. But, you we have this perception. Bam, you get this diagnosis of cancer. Okay, I gotta change my life. I gotta do whatever it takes, right? And many people will take cancer as a wake up call and oftentimes afterwards they’ll say, that was the best thing that ever happened to me was to get cancer. With complex chronic illness, all we have is

Jannine Krause (39:12.715)
Right. Right.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (39:37.796)
this like slide into feeling terrible and we don’t really know how to stop the slide and we don’t really know how to fight the slide because we don’t have that BAM you got to do something about this.

Jannine Krause (39:53.216)
Yeah. Yeah. So it’s so true. I totally see that slide where it goes slow and, we can easily push it off and be like, I got to keep, you know, for an entrepreneur is typically what I’ll see often is like, I got to keep going. My business needs me. My kids need me. You know, I got to keep going. Push it to the side. Push it to the side. Whereas, yeah, cancer’s a little different.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (40:17.868)
Yeah, yeah, for some reason it gets a different weight in our society. I’m hoping that these kinds of conversations can change that because we all deserve to be happy. We all deserve to be in love with our lives, right? That’s the goal. That’s the purpose to live the life that you want. Right?

And yet we have these beliefs that keep us stuck. I should do this, I should do that. I should be this, I should be that.

Jannine Krause (40:54.239)
Okay.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (40:56.686)
Let’s throw that out and see who you are and where you want to be.

Jannine Krause (41:03.381)
Absolutely, absolutely. I think that needs to be kind of the mantra for what we need to be putting out on social media. My personal opinion, yes, hormones can help, but I would love to see this much more than here’s your hormone replacement therapy for everything. will solve all your problems. And that’s part of one of the things that…

Kelly K. McCann, MD (41:20.067)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jannine Krause (41:27.179)
I think a lot of people in the chronic illness space when you see the back side, you start grasping for straws. You’re looking for that miracle. You’re desperate to get an answer. You’re desperate to have some relief. And understandably so. But also looking at that, hey, you are free to be who you want to be. So, you know, your message is so on point with how I see it too.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (41:55.736)
Thank you. So I finally came up with a name. I’ve been struggling for the past six months trying to figure out what to call this. It’s the Unforgetting Project.

Jannine Krause (41:56.811)
It’s just so good.

Jannine Krause (42:13.109)
for getting back.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (42:15.04)
And here’s why. I told my mom this like a month ago and she’s like, why not just remembering? What’s the difference between unforgetting and remembering? I’m like, well, remembering is kind of like you remember a fact. You remember a date. You know, you remember, I have to go pick up milk before I come home. Well, hopefully it’s not real milk, but anyway, sorry. You guys are from Wisconsin. We don’t drink milk in California.

Jannine Krause (42:41.061)
It’s okay. I’m probably the weirdo within Wisconsin here, know, to an extent. But yeah.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (42:46.446)
Anyway, I digress, I’m sorry. okay, remembering is facts, Unforgetting is more about removing the very thin veil of the distance between ourselves and the truth of who we are. We just forgot, you know, we forgot when somebody…

scolded us when we little kids that we shouldn’t be so loud or we shouldn’t do this or we should be this good little boys do this good little girls do this. We’ve forgotten who we truly are because of the stuff of the world right and our objective is to un-forget.

And when we unforgettable that, because it’s right there, it’s so close, it’s always accessible to us, then we can really flourish.

Jannine Krause (43:53.164)
Absolutely. So moving into the Unforgetting Project, we got to talk about the Spring Center. And I’m super curious why, because you’ve got the Unforgetting Project, what’s the meaning behind the Spring Center? I’m wondering what that’ll mean.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (44:06.146)
Yes.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (44:13.518)
So, yeah, I started the Spring Center in 2000 and…

10, I think, 2009, 2010. And I really loved the idea of like growth and rebirth and, you know, an adjective of moving forward. So it’s got a lot of beautiful connotations and my favorite colors are blue and green. so it’s just really playing on this whole theme of, of rebirth and growth. So yeah.

That’s where that came from. And the Spring Center is our brick and mortar practice in Southern California. I do have medical licenses in 12 other states and have the capacity to do telehealth elsewhere. Although we do ask all patients to come to California to be seen in person. And I have a medical team who works with me who are fantastic. They’ve been with me for a while now and they’re able to navigate.

and manage the complex chronic illnesses of the people who show up. And then you can find me on social media at dr. Kelly McCann, Dr. Kelly McCann. And I also have a website where I have blogs and webinars and more resources. And then we’re in the process of…

building out a website, designing a logo, building out a website for the Unforgetting Project, and I anticipate having a course at the beginning of the year. So eventually there’ll be a wait list for people who are interested.

Jannine Krause (45:58.462)
Awesome, awesome. We’ll make sure we get that in our notes at drjcarlsond.com. I’m fascinated by what you guys are doing. And of course guys, for those of you wondering where in California, Costa Mesa, California is where she is located. You’re bringing folks in. is it like a VIP day where they spend a couple hours with their PAs? How does it work? I’m very curious. Just to give a little scoop of what happens.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (46:21.282)
cough cough cough

So people will fill out paperwork ahead of time. We’re transitioning to a new electron medical record, so we actually have a wait list while we’re tweaking it. It’s AI-based, so it helps us with the transcription and the medical dictation. And then, you know.

helping the providers be more efficient. People can spend longer periods of time, oftentimes they don’t, but it might be more helpful. Usually it’s just an hour.

loss. And then if people are coming from a long way away and they’re interested in doing like IVs or seeing the practitioners a couple days in a row, if that’s a possibility, we do recommend that. have a couple patients when they do come in to see us annually, they’ll stay for two or three days. At this moment in time, we are still billing insurance. And so for insurance purposes, you know, there’s a certain

amount of for reimbursement. So it’s an hour for a new patient and 30 minutes for follow-ups, but if you have you know three 30-minute appointments after your initial that can be very valuable and we can go deeper and deeper each time. So that’s how it’s structured right now.

Jannine Krause (47:57.142)
power to you for sticking with the insurance. It’s something. I know it’s helpful for a lot of people.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (48:03.502)
It is, yeah, it’s a membership-based model as well. So we do bill insurance and then have people pay extra for the membership and they do have to become a member of the practice and pick a membership level. And the membership level…

that you choose depends on your needs. you know, for people who do have complex chronic illness, oftentimes they need to be seen at least monthly in order to really get on top of things. And so they are encouraged to pick a higher level plan because financially that would be the best option for them. So that’s how that works.

Jannine Krause (48:40.235)
Nice. And last but not least, had mentioned, and this is something I’d love to hear from kind of your perspective, chronic illness and really working with the spiritual side of things takes time. And I heard you say you’ve worked with someone, you know, a year, two years, things of that nature. On average, just so folks get a little sense of how it works, what’s the average amount of time that you find that you work with folks?

Kelly K. McCann, MD (49:07.448)
Well, for the folks who are local, they become so ill they’ll never go away, but the frequency with which I’m seeing them obviously reduces substantially. And that’s really the goal. know, everybody’s a little bit different. It can be six months and they’re doing great. That’s really on the super fast, super bullet train side. Most people, I would say it’s like a year to two years.

Jannine Krause (49:12.735)
you

Jannine Krause (49:16.383)
Yeah.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (49:37.444)
before they feel solidly, I’m in a better place. But, you know, I saw a woman yesterday, she’s been with me for two months, and she sees substantial improvements just in those two months. You know, she’s got complex chronic pain. I’m not sure why she’s on narcotics, and, you know, trying to find a pain doctor to prescribe narcotics is really challenging these days.

And she was recently in a flare around her menstrual cycle, which is very common with a lot of folks. you know, rather than being in bed for a week afterwards, she was able to actually still kind of function, you know, still be able to go spend some time with her friends. And she didn’t feel great, but her level of functionality improved substantially just in a couple of months. you know, I…

Jannine Krause (50:22.667)
Okay.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (50:35.618)
My encouragement to people out there listening is to know that it’s gonna take time, but you’re not going to feel as terrible as you feel right now. You’re going to see slow incremental progress. And then at some point there’s a real turning of the corner and you kind of take off. And…

You know, it really does depend on the person. It depends on what they’re dealing with. I’ve been really honing my skills and using my intuition to really, as I’m sure you do too, Janine, as all good practitioners do, you hone your intuition. Like I’ve got 300 different supplements I can give this person. Which ones do I start with? Where do I start? And, and you know.

having that intuitive sense as to what’s going to be good for somebody. it’s everything is, everybody is different, but honing that sense and then figuring out what are the, what are the,

the order that I need to add things in, super important, and that has been really profoundly helpful. Many of my colleagues are like, okay, you have mass activation, you’re gonna start with H1 blockers, you’re gonna go through two weeks on each one to figure out which combination is the best for you. What? I feel terrible. I don’t wanna take 15 years to try every single thing that I could try. I wanna feel better yesterday.

Jannine Krause (52:06.123)
Mm-hmm.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (52:12.688)
And so I really feel like it’s on me as the practitioner to do the best that I can to give the recommendations. And I’m not perfect, right? Of course, it’s a work in progress. This is the art of medicine. But I do feel like the more that I practice that, the more that I tap into my intuition, the faster and smoother it goes.

Jannine Krause (52:25.653)
Yeah.

Jannine Krause (52:39.839)
Absolutely, absolutely. So huge, so huge. Love what you’re doing. Love to hear about the spiritual side of things. I hope those really, you know, a little bit of an eye opener here just to hear that it’s not another protocol. It’s not, you know, 85,000 supplements that are going to be the answer or one magic pill or hormones for that matter. It’s some work and we have the ability to regain. It’s not bad. It’s the ability to regain who we were and… Unforget.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (53:07.544)
Yeah, what’s a more beautiful thing than that? To forget who you are. Yes. Thank you so much.

Jannine Krause (53:09.515)
You

Jannine Krause (53:14.163)
I love it. Hey, my pleasure. Thanks for coming on Dr. McCann. Look forward to putting this one out and guys, we’ll make sure that we’ve got all of her websites, the springcenter.com, drkellymccann.com and even some of the books and folks she mentioned. We will make sure that is in our podcast notes at drjcrestind.com. Thanks again, Kelly or Dr. Kelly.

Kelly K. McCann, MD (53:35.15)
It’s okay. Thank you, Janine. Bye-bye, everyone.

Jannine Krause (53:40.812)
Alright.