Ep 559: Why Health Creation is a Life Long Skill with Mel Hopper Koppelman

In a world where chronic illness is skyrocketing and people are spending thousands on supplements and labs with little relief, what if we’ve been focusing on the wrong thing?

In this episode, Dr. Jannine Krause sits down with Mel Hopper Koppelman, Program Director at Synthesis Health Lab, to talk about a radically different — and incredibly effective — approach to healing. Instead of chasing symptoms or optimizing labs, Mel focuses on repairing the foundation of the nervous system and working with the first principles of health. The result? A 50%+ reduction in symptoms for many chronic illness sufferers without endless supplements or constant testing.

Mel blends ancient healing wisdom with modern neuroscience and has helped thousands recover from chronic fatigue, autoimmunity, fibromyalgia, and more — especially those who felt like they had “tried everything.”

🧠 Whether you’re a patient or practitioner, this episode will widen your lens and give you actionable insights to rethink what healing really means.

📘 RESOURCES & LINKS:
→ Learn more about Mel and the Synthesis Health Solutions & Support Group: https://synthesishealth.co/
→ Apply for free to get guidance and ask questions
→ Connect with Dr. Jannine Krause: @drjanninekrause

🎧 Listen now and discover how real healing starts by going deeper — not just doing more.

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Podcast Transcript

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Health Creation
06:17 Shifting Perspectives on Health
09:15 Navigating Chronic Illness
12:19 Understanding Internal Family Systems
15:09 The Role of Personality Parts
18:07 Dissociation and Its Impact
21:13 The Complexity of Mental Health
24:09 Integrating Body and Mind
27:08 Tools for Healing
30:07 Organizing Health Approaches
35:14 Understanding Cold and Heat in Health
36:12 The Five Stages of Healing
38:06 Navigating Deficiencies and Methylation
39:43 The Importance of Order in Treatment
41:10 Exercise Intolerance and Cumulative Load
44:36 The Role of the Nervous System in Health
50:10 Neurodevelopment and Chronic Illness
54:29 Balance and Brain Function
59:24 Identifying the Right Clients for Healing
01:03:14 Training Practitioners for Better Health Outcomes
01:09:16 Outro

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Dr. Jannine Krause (03:17)
Hello, Mel, welcome to the Health Fix Podcast.

Mel (03:22)
Thanks for having me, I’m excited to be here.

Dr. Jannine Krause (03:24)
my goodness. When just our couple minutes of chatting and just looking through all of my research I did for this podcast to chat with you, was like, wow, okay, we, definitely have some similarities in terms of practices working on folks who are just long-term illness, been in multiple doctors, not finding answers and just helping to shed some, some hope out there and

The big thing that you had mentioned just a couple seconds ago, and I had to quote it because it’s just too good, is health creation as a lifelong skill. And so folks, I want you to be thinking about this because I think a lot of people, and correct me if I’m wrong, a lot of people feel like they fixed something, they’re gonna go to a healthcare provider, they’re gonna fix it, they’re done, they never have to deal with it again, and life is just gonna go on in pure bliss for the rest of the days. Help me explain how health creation is.

is a little bit more than just a set it and forget it kind of situation. And I know that’s a huge loaded question, but give us like your foray into diving into coming up with that particular statement.

Mel (04:27)
Sure, well, I actually kind of came up with it just now, but the idea is a know, a faithful one. And so it’s a helpful frame for a variety of reasons. for many people, depending on where they are in their health journey, then they may have a specific symptom or they may have gotten as far as getting a diagnosis or they may have a number of issues, a problem they want to solve. And depending on…

how they go about that, they’re gonna find different types of answers and different types of frames. If you go to an industrial medicine doctor, they’re gonna look at you in a certain way, and if you go somewhere else, they’re gonna look at you a little bit differently, and then you do your own research and you find actually something else is really important to you. And so…

So one thing is that we want to kind of move our thinking from the short term to the long term, especially if we’re not dealing with an emergency, right? If you have an emergency, you should go to the emergency room, but we’re talking about ongoing chronic health issues. So we really need to widen our lens. But the other frame shift is that we’re not talking about, you know, getting rid of your disease or getting rid of your symptoms. Health creation is actually a bit different.

⁓ And so using that lens, it, I don’t know, I think it’s more accurate for what’s involved, like especially if you’re unlucky enough to have a complex chronic illness, you know that the things you’ve already tried aren’t gonna work, that those lenses aren’t most of the time doing what you need them to do. And so you’re already, a lot of these people, not everyone, but a lot of people in this boat, are already spending a lot of time.

trying to create their health. So it’s not like this is a new thing for them to do. It’s more just a shift how they’re approaching it and learning how to cultivate health, which ends up meaning that the body no longer needs to produce these symptoms.

Dr. Jannine Krause (06:17)
So, so true, so true. And I think one of the biggest things I run into, and I’m sure you’ve seen as well, is that folks have their list of their symptoms, and there’s this overt anxiety to check them off the boxing and erase them. And we forget about, well, what behaviors led us to this point? What things set us off the rails to get to this point? What are some of the things that you find in terms of looking at?

chronic illness, complex illness. What do think that folks should be starting to think about first when we’re looking at restoring health versus taking off, getting rid of all the symptoms?

Mel (06:54)
Mm.

That’s a good question. I work with people who maybe are a little bit different than average because a lot of them have already been just working so hard at it. I don’t want to give this impression that people come in already with perfect lifestyles and that’s it, but these are people who tend to be more aware than let’s say the average person. So they’ve already tried a lot of things. If I’m gonna give a blanket statement, it’s really about thinking about what can we get?

Dr. Jannine Krause (07:02)
Mm-hmm.

Mel (07:23)
What can we get rid of? What can we move away from? What less can we be doing? So we tend to have this idea, which is kind of handed to us from our consumers culture, that we’re missing things and that we need more, more of everything. So more nutrients and more gadgets and more practices and, you know, more, more, more, more. And so then it becomes a stress in itself. So if we can become aware first, especially, you know, if people have issues like fatigue or…

cognitive fog, you know, then if we can look at what less we could be doing or like the 80-20 of our practices, what’s the 20 % that’s really helping us the most and the 80 % that we heard we maybe should be doing but we’re not really sure if it’s helping. And if we can kind of remove that, then we just create more space and maybe even like a little more of like kind of a relaxed vibe around the whole exercise and that gives us more room to navigate.

Dr. Jannine Krause (08:20)
That makes sense, that makes sense. Because yeah, I mean, if you look at Instagram or TikTok, for example, and you see an influencer, let’s call it someone in a space where functional medicine space or something in that case, you will see everyone’s like my eight-step morning routine and then my 20-step nighttime routine. And you gotta have the blue light blocking glasses and you gotta stand on your head before, just kidding guys, that’s not true. But stand on your head and do this and that. And next thing you know, you’re like,

Health is a full-time job and I have no joy because I’m spending all the time doing the health things. Do you find that to be like the deal?

Mel (09:01)
Oh, a hundred percent. And that’s more, that’s the messaging we’re getting and that’s more common of the people who are coming in. They’re like, I’m taking 40 supplements. I meditate or try to meditate like an hour a day and I’m doing this and I’m doing that. like, are people who are sick not for lack of trying. And again, that’s not everyone, but that’s the people where I kind of tend to connect with on their health journey. But you’re absolutely right. And yeah, it’s hard. don’t, because we want, I think it’s nice to have our vitality in service of something.

Dr. Jannine Krause (09:15)
Right. Right.

Mel (09:29)
Right? So that we’re not spending all of our time just becoming well, that we’re able to go out and express, you know, our creativity or our love or our passion in the world. And when we become ill, then that becomes the focus, understandably, right? Because you can’t, you know, depending on what’s going on for you, it’s hard to do the life things that you want or need to do when, you know, your brain’s not working or when you’re in pain or when your digestion is all over the place or when you’re inflamed. And so…

we do need to get there. And so there’s also this bit of navigating balance and also a huge aspect of navigating psychology so that people, know, most of us have ⁓ aspects of our psyche that are unconscious and sometimes are kind of working against ourselves. You know, that we’re doing things that we know we shouldn’t be doing. Actually, I’ll call this one out. I say call this out. And this used to be me as well. People who are very intensely achieving on health, but are also, let’s say, drinking.

you know, a lot as well, or, you know, have these kind of shadow activities. And that’s a really common pattern that I see in modern times. So it’s like these personality parts aren’t quite synced up. And again, because there’s so much pressure in the system that we need to release valves. And being able to talk openly about those things is, I would suggest, as important as having a really good treatment plan.

Dr. Jannine Krause (10:46)
It’s huge, it’s huge because yes, sometimes as a doc we’ll be talking through all the things and then someone will say like, you know, I have a couple glasses of wine each night or you know, it’ll be like other things like smoking. Like I’m a closet smoker, you know? And it’s like, ⁓ shoot, you’ve got everything else dialed in but we’ve got this thing, what is it about?

So I’m guessing since you guys, she’s worked with Dr. Milo, who’s been on my podcast before, you know, I’m guessing you’re diving into the nervous system, the subconscious mind and the psyche behind all of this. So of course, a lot of people are aware that we have this programming that we sometimes have trouble breaking up with and it’s hard to change it and whatnot. But I think for a lot of people when they hear like,

it’s all your head, but it’s not really all in your head. It’s sometimes like wall up. Tell me a little bit about your experience in that case and how, you you’ve taken what you learned from Dr. Melillo and made it your own in terms of your own work with folks.

Mel (11:48)
Sure. Well, so it’s interesting. Dr. Maloos…

that I’ve done with him informs a lot of my work with patients, although that’s more on the developmental nervous system side. And of course that gives rise to our psyche. These are not separate things. But what I will say is that actually when talking about unconscious drivers and inner conflict, I actually use another model that I’ve trained in called internal family systems. ⁓ So, and I’ve just, I love that. So I definitely want get back to how I’m using Dr. Maloe’s work in my work, but. ⁓

The internal family systems, it’s a model of psychology. for me, it’s just like an accurate way of giving handles to the parts of the psyche so that you can talk about them, you can work with them. I don’t really see it as a specific technique, although there are techniques that come off of it. But what I have found across the board is even before I was running a group and I was doing one-to-ones, when I would speak with people and say, look, they actually have found that we all have multiple personality parts.

and that they might have different developmental ages, they might have different motivators and values, and a lot of the struggle that we have is when they have different ways of trying to help us meet our needs or to keep us safe. Just people learning about that seems to be healing in and of itself. Because when you’re raised in a culture, whether that’s the dominant secular culture or the religious culture, whatever it is, that tells you there’s only one of you.

Well, if we actually have different parts, then first of all, it makes us all crazy. So we better not talk about how we have these different facets. And we also really hope that that one of us is good, you know? And so there’s just a lot of like tension there to hold, you know? And so if you realize like we’re, you know, we all do behaviors that we’re like, that was not good. I wish I hadn’t done that. So we understand where that’s coming from. That doesn’t mean that we have to be perfect, but it’s really just giving us a roadmap for navigation.

And I actually find it’s almost like a modern and I would say more practical way of working with a lot of concepts from Buddhism, because in Buddhism, at least from my understanding, different things I’ve read, they’ll talk about the different emotions and it’s really mainly from this perspective of watching them float by like clouds, right? But if we talk about compassion, if you were to come across a child on the road who was crying and needed comforting, would it be like Buddhist or compassionate just to watch them and like?

act like they were a cloud and just not, you know, not engage, right? So with internal family systems where we see these not just as emotions but as personality parts and that many of the ones that cause us the most problems come from our childhood, then we can maybe work with them in a more compassionate and more effective way. But also we can talk about things like without judgment but just with awareness, like, okay, so, you know, you…

You take 40 supplements and you meditate and you go to the gym and you’re drinking a bottle of wine at night. So like, how can we make sense of that in a way where you’re in control, right? That we’re not trying to create shame. We’re not trying to create rebounds. I’m not gonna take the side of the part of you that’s doing the healthy stuff and villainize the side that’s having the bottle of wine. That’s really not helpful to anyone, but let’s try to understand our system and see, you know, if you’re recognizing that you’re working against yourself.

Why is that? And is there another way where you can meet your needs where you’re not working against yourself?

Dr. Jannine Krause (15:15)
Huge, huge. And with internal family systems, I mean, think a lot of people have probably heard about it, but a lot of people are probably still going like, okay, right, my own family, myself, how might I relate to myself? Let’s dive into a little bit of like the internal family systems and how someone can relate it to themselves and like what kind of resources could someone go for if they’re like looking at it and going, I wanna learn a little bit more. Where would you direct them on that? Just on the basics here to give like a little background.

Mel (15:43)
Yeah,

sure. the so internally, internal family systems is an entire model. There’s training. There’s wonderful books. ⁓ There’s a book that came out a few years ago called No Bad Parts. But there are many books. So there are places that if you have this term, and it sounds interesting, you can go forth and there’s even a few years ago came out an AI, like therapist bot, who you can do internal family systems with. And it’s like very effective, you know.

So that was interesting too, yeah, there’s a few of them now. And so basically the overall idea is that the internal family that it’s talking about are the personality parts inside of you. ⁓ And they can be influenced by your caregivers, but they are not your caregivers, they are parts of you. And there are a number of categories of parts. So we have what are called ⁓ exiles. These tend to be, not always, but usually are childhood parts, young parts that often

when the system is a little bit out of balance, they carry these burdens, these beliefs about themselves through life that like I’m, you know, shame and I’m not no good and I’m unlovable, et cetera. These really, and these, you know, overwhelming emotions that can feel like death, you know? And then as we get older and our cortex develops, then we have ways of managing that. And so there’s these two other.

categories of parts that are both considered protectors. They are protecting the children. One category is called managers and the other category is called firefighters. And I tell people not to worry about the words so much. It’s just we’re using words so that we can talk about something. But it’s more the concepts that they’re describing. So the managers, their strategy is to control the external and internal environment to basically get along in the world. And we tend to live in a culture that very much rewards managers. So being on time,

overworking, being likable, being super mom, and the one who’s driving all of the health activities, right? Like I’m on all the supplements. meditate for an hour in front of my red light with this up my butt and all this stuff, and I’m drinking 18 glasses of water. That’s your manager who’s ticking all those boxes and controlling you and your environment into health. ⁓ And then when that doesn’t work, ⁓ because…

you know, these are strategies, but then you get stuck in traffic and you’re, you know, the thing happens or like your kid’s sick and you have to miss the meeting. Like life will life you that strategy. And then that’s when the kind of type A person is a little bit too wound up, freaks out. firefighters, their strategy is in the short term to take you out so you don’t feel those overwhelming emotions of shame and unlovable and being out of control.

and those types of things. so those will tend to be short-term things. These tend to be like addictive behaviors. They tend to not have long-term great outcomes. I, know, aside from systemic failures, almost everyone is in jail because of firefighter activity. they’re, you know, it’s like they’re firefighters, let them down. And so these would be things like, we don’t want to feel these emotions. So we might binge watch Netflix. We might have the glass or bottle of wine. We might binge eat the cookies.

But a really common one that we really need to look at more and more is we might dissociate. And a lot of what people are talking about like, oh, I’m in my 40s and I was just diagnosed with ADHD. Well, maybe. Maybe you’ve been chronically ill and you have a pain condition and you’re dissociating because you have this chronic thing that almost nobody understands. whether it’s pain or fatigue or anxiety, depression, these are all…

Dr. Jannine Krause (19:10)
Thank you.

Right.

Mel (19:32)
outputs of the brain that are designed to change your behavior. But if it’s chronic and it’s not working, and so no amount of sleep or rest or holiday is taking care of the fatigue, then at some point you’re like, okay, well, I’m just gonna disable that ⁓ emergency light. Changing my behavior is not working, therefore I’m gonna dissociate from the fatigue. ⁓ So yeah, so these are the common categories of parts.

In the center, there’s a part that internal family systems call the self with a capital S and many different spiritual traditions describe this. It’s ⁓ like the soul or it’s Buddha nature. It’s a part that does not seem to develop over time, that is kind of born intact. And the key idea, which is really interesting, is that it’s the natural leader of our system. So…

⁓ in a society where our limbic system, which is where our exiles are, is constantly being triggered, our managers are rewarded, ⁓ and then our firefighters are kind of medicating us through so we can handle it, really what probably feels like being yourself and being a sane person, which very few people can find ways to really handle this, being ⁓ led from self, and then your other parts that are still there, they take on less extreme roles, right?

So like your manager part would probably be good at helping you organize a long-term project that you want to do rather than control like your fun because it was probably not very good at that, you know.

Dr. Jannine Krause (21:13)
Absolutely, you know, that was like the best description of internal family systems I have ever heard and we’ve not talked about it on the podcast. So the this my gosh, it’s so good because I don’t think a lot of people realize how much different personalities we have within ourselves. And of course, it’s scary because the DSM whatever number we’re at now, you know, for diagnosis, tells us like multiple personalities is a bad thing. But the firefighter personality, mean,

Just listening to you say that, like, I can see so many different areas in my world where, yeah, I’ve got a little bit of binge eating on certain areas to cope with things and then just, I mean, so many people will disassociate, I can never say that word, from things, especially when it comes to finances, money, things of that nature, and then sometimes we’ll end up with a ball of stuff in that department. Have you seen that for folks? Is money a big disassociation?

Mel (22:10)
Well, it’s different for different people. just, it’s where, it’s like that kind of combination of nature and nurture where someone’s under-resourced, you and it’s usually a skill thing, right? So that we come out of our school system, being able to, I don’t know, do trigonometry, but not compare our tax return and all this stuff. We’re not provided with practical skills for adulting in our education. So depending on what that looks like for you.

Dr. Jannine Krause (22:10)
Fire.

Mm-hmm.

Mel (22:40)
If you’re under-resourced, then you might ⁓ have dissociation as a strategy to protect you when you feel like you don’t have the resources to handle what’s in front of you. And I do want to speak to what you just said about the DSM, that dissociative identity disorder or multiple personality disorder, which are diagnoses. ⁓ So all of us are not as ⁓ different from that as we have been led to believe. The difference there is that those personality parts have been blown out.

way more usually due to trauma. So when it becomes a diagnosable disorder, it’s usually because personality parts are not aware of each other. And there is not a congruence happening, but this is a trauma thing. it’s so what’s the from my perspective, the problem is not having the personality parts because we all have those. ⁓ The problem for that person will a to be in a system that doesn’t understand them. But also just that that they have parts that are not speaking to each other.

And so that can be difficult to navigate life.

Dr. Jannine Krause (23:43)
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I think for a lot of people, the communication internally within the body back to talking back and forth and this personality, talking to that personality, it’s almost like one forgets, when we’re in one, we forget the other kind of a thing. Is that how you see it? We have no recollection and then can switch back.

Mel (24:02)
Yes.

100%. So if we, and I want to kind of layer in the health aspects to this because one is that we will be kind of ping ponging through using our stress response to get through our day and then be like fatigued and crashed. And so it’s an energy management issue. And then the other aspect, I, cause I have my own complex chronic health background that informs a lot of what I ended up having to learn to really get better. And it’s like,

everything, when resources are abundant, there tends to be more harmony. And when resources are scarce, there tends to be more fragmentation. when you have a complex chronic health issue that includes ⁓ energy deficits, then what I see is that people tend to have more fracturing of the psyche. Because it’s really, because again, these are different parts of your personality. You can even call them different brain body networks if you want, because that’s not wrong either. ⁓ They are…

competing with each other to try to help you. So one is saying, you’re unwell, you need to work harder to figure this out or you’re gonna die. And the other one’s saying, you’re unwell, you need to rest and stop or you’re gonna die. And so a lot of, and then of course people have responsibilities on top of this. They need to work, they maybe have kids, have whatever it is. So it’s not just going on retreat for six months to figure it out. And so there is this,

ping-ponging back and forth. again, a lot, I’ll just say it, because I think this is a reasonably informed perspective and I’m welcome for people to chat with me about it. But I see a lot of adult ADHD diagnoses. Some of them I think are accurate and some of them I think are this, that is not necessarily a neurodevelopmental issue. is what I’m talking about here. And not that those are mutually exclusive either.

But just that we have not been taught about how our mind works. We’ve not been taught how to manage our energy. We’ve not taught the skills that we need to be adults, many of us. ⁓ And then we’re like kind of just zooming back and forth between being hyper organized and then trying to keep our emotions intact.

Dr. Jannine Krause (26:19)
Yeah, yeah. Well, and on that same line, like even us docs who’ve been through school have not been taught how the psyche works. And I’ve even found a lot of psychologists and folks, unless they’ve taken extra training, have not been taught how things really work. know? It’s hard.

Mel (26:27)
Mm.

Well, in

the field of psychology has over 400 different models, which is suggestive of me, to me of a field that does not understand its subject. And what I would add to that is that, you know, my background is in Chinese medicine. I did a lot of functional medicine, which I’m kind of like recovered from. can talk about that if you like. ⁓ And then I’ve done a pretty deep dive into developmental and functional neurology, because I realized that that was a

really big missing piece. Now, we are embodied. don’t believe that we’re just kind of brains. We are embodied, but the brain is pretty central to your psyche. Like, it’s important, you know? If we, with a head injury, we could change your personality, you know? So you’re talking about a field that does not know how to examine or describe the organ which it’s supposed to be specializing in. So if you, I mean, that’s crazy. If you look at the DSM, you see…

Dr. Jannine Krause (27:17)
Mm-hmm.

Mel (27:35)
You can choose anything in there, but let’s take ADHD, which is like a really popular one. It doesn’t mention the brain once. How is that possible? Imagine being a pulmonologist and not examining the lungs. So it’s a big problem. So I would say there’s a lot of really promising stuff. I don’t want to sound all critical. That’s like my soapbox, but there’s a lot of really promising stuff that’s more trauma-informed, that’s more accurate. What I see now in that field is that

Dr. Jannine Krause (27:47)
You

Mel (28:04)
And this kind of goes to a greater theme of there being tools and techniques that are promising and that are more effective than what they had before. most people or the clinicians and the patients don’t know when to use them and when not to use them. They don’t have a big enough map. So something like EMDR or something like ketamine guided psychotherapy or whatever it is or psilocybin. It’s like, this is promising. This is exciting.

We have people who’ve been ⁓ just traumatized for decades that are now better. so now they’re kind of putting, I’m not gonna say everyone, but a lot of people through it, but they don’t have a model that would allow them to know when to do it and whom to do it with. So we’re still kind of in these like the early frontiers of a more trauma informed ⁓ psychological practice. But what I discovered, especially when I came back to the States, I trained in the UK, is the patients I would see had been in therapy.

I mean, they’re coming for anything, but they’ve been in therapy for a decade or two decades and they are just so articulate about their problems, about the dysfunctions of their family of origin, about their psyche, but they don’t have any much like tools or resources or way out. They can just describe the problem really, really well, you know, and when we go back to bring back to what we were just talking about in terms of childhood development, a lot of this is subcortical, precortical, not the part that’s talking and not the part that actually, you know, can answer you. So we need to use tools.

that are more fit for what we’re dealing with. Now something like EMDR, which is eye movement desensitization, wrap it up, moving the eyes to clear energetic charge of trauma, which works sometimes. Sometimes people get re-traumatized because there’s not, from what I’ve seen, there isn’t this like, this is what we’re doing. This is who this is for. This is when we don’t use this type of understanding, but at least it has the benefit.

of accessing subcortical networks, which is usually where the trauma is living.

Dr. Jannine Krause (30:07)
That brings up so many questions in my head. So let me see if I can bring myself in here because let’s face it, even I as my, working with chronic ill patients, I get to a point where I’m like, I don’t know what to do next, right? And it does seem like in this world of social media that there’s a one size, we’re gonna fix it with this. EMDR is the answer, hypnosis is the answer, EFT tapping is the answer. And I think for a lot of people,

people are looking at this going like, okay, you know, and especially, and I’m sure you’ve seen this especially in your case as well, in the chronic health industry, I mean, we’re grabbing for straws and unfortunately, I think a lot of marketing is targeted to pull on the heartstrings of folks in this industry. And so it’s going like, okay, clearly we need to get into the cortical parts of the brain, the subcortical parts of the brain, but the idea for like,

folks to think about it, they’re like, okay, does that mean I need to work on my vagus nerve? Does that mean, you know, I need a device that’s a vagus nerve stimulator? that’s, you know, that’s what we’re at. That’s what I get in my office. And for me, I’m always like, no, I want to help create neural connections between things and break other ones. I come to a point where my training, I’m low resourced on that department. And so this is what I’m hoping you can kind of help us today on the podcast to be like, okay.

If your doc hits a point like me and is like, I know what you need, kind of, but I can’t do it for you, Mel, help us.

Mel (31:41)
Yeah. Okay, so we were

talking briefly before we hopped on about kind of, know, like training this medicine, which is wonderful, right? Like, I, you know, I feel like I had a head start, right? I trained in Chinese medicine, trained in functional medicine. There were really cool things that we could do with it. There’s, you know, with the lab testing, you can be very precise. You can really help people that were not being helped by industrial medicine. But then I got to a point, partly in my own health, where it wasn’t working the way that it was supposed to. And also,

⁓ I did a lot of extra, I did two master’s degrees and then a lot of extra training. And there were questions that weren’t being answered satisfactorily, I mean like basic, for me like foundational questions. ⁓ And also it wasn’t working as reliably as I felt it should. So one of the questions that I had for many years was when someone has a complex chronic illness, almost by definition, they have multiple systems that are not working well. Like that’s part of it. So their digestion isn’t working.

their hormones are weird, they are inflamed, they have infections and their brain’s not working. Like that’s normal for this group, right? So where do we start? And so I got, in one training I did, I got one set of answers and I felt like I was successful with that about 30 % of the time and I did not think that was okay. These are 30 % people who were not being helped by industrial medicine so it’s still like there was good there. But I was like, I don’t like that batting average. I feel like if I have someone’s…

attention and trust and focus, I need to be able to get them better more reliably than that. And so I went to different teachers looking at different things. then I finally, around, I don’t know, kind of 2018, 2019, I’d been struggling with my own health for long enough and I was getting just disillusioned with my training and I just declared intellectual bankruptcy. And so I went back and retrained. And one of the fruits of that

was hooking up with some teachers, including a really great mentor of mine, Jeremy Cornish, ⁓ who trained me in a particular, but like reality-based biological order of operations for working with complex chronic health issues. And what I will say is if your presentation is not that complicated, then often it does not matter where you start, which is a good thing. We want you to not be complicated. We want you to get better. So if you’re…

kind of a little bit unwell and you clean up your diet and you feel great, great. If you are a little bit unwell and you like do something with your hormones, like great. But for people who’ve been struggling for years who have these systems, then it matters what order you go in. And if you go out of order, things that you feel like should work don’t work. And part of what you’re talking about a little bit is like, we have these different tools and we have these different approaches and we have these different body systems. How do we organize them? And that’s the meta skill. the order that I…

was trained in and now I’ve taken like hundreds of people through and it makes all the difference ⁓ is first that we start with the immune system. There’s nuances there. I’m not looking at the inflammation as one thing that is fire that just needs to be cooled and turned down. We can go into this but…

The inflammatory response is a three-step process that all cells go through in order to heal. This is outlined by Bob Navio’s work with the cell danger response and is basically perfectly articulating Chinese medicine’s concepts of hot and cold. I just had a really cool, this is a little segue, but a really cool discussion in my group yesterday. Someone was talking about what to take for seasonal allergies and there’s a really popular supplement called Dehist.

And when I looked at all the ingredients, they’re all cooling or cold ingredients. it’s this idea, well, histamines causing heat, inflammation, hot, redness, we must cool it. Sometimes, but most modern people are actually cold and the symptoms are coming from cold. And when I say cold, I mean ⁓ like too many antibiotics, whether your diet’s unhealthy or healthy, it’s too cold. So even the healthy people are having these green smoothies all the time, ⁓ or your ice cream or your…

I don’t know if we can swear on here. Again, you’re fucking iced coffees. Why are you having iced coffee in December? Who put out that memo? I see it everywhere and I’m like, my God. So this is actual literal cold or the air conditioning that’s blowing in your neck ⁓ that is leading to your, in many cases, not all cases, but the point being that we need ⁓ a slightly bigger model so that we know what you need for your seasonal allergies.

Dr. Jannine Krause (35:45)
Okay, fine.

Mel (36:12)
⁓ So immune system, then digestive. ⁓ I have plenty of people who come into the group who’ve already been on exclusion diets and they have almost excluded everything. There’s nothing left to exclude. And we need to help them to regain tolerance to real food. So that’s why we start with the immune system. And then we work in the digestive system. Then we work with the neuroendocrine system. ⁓ There we may touch on trauma issues. By that time, people have more bandwidth.

It’s really hard to engage neuroplasticity in an inflamed brain, you know, it doesn’t like to learn when it’s full of lime. And so with neuroendocrine, we’re looking at the brain and the nervous system. We’re also mainly looking at hormonal regulation rather than this other thing like, know, so box off everyone being given hormones, you know, if they have two legs, you know, do not pass go. ⁓ So and then we look at what’s called tissue repair, which is like if you have

old injuries, if you have concussions, right? Because in each step, we’re basically going in the order where we’re less likely to make someone worse. That’s how we’re deciding, okay? So you may have an old concussion or something, and we could give you herbs that are blood moving herbs, you know, and you would probably feel amazing for a few months, but if you also have gunk in your system, if you have, you know, chronic latent infections, if you have mold, all that, when you increase blood flow too early on, you give…

those ⁓ toxins and those ⁓ infections of free pass inside and then you crash. And this is how a lot of people are currently practicing. But what I’m explaining now is something that I want all the individuals to learn. So this is not privileged information. Not only do you not have to have a medical degree to know this, but we’re not learning this when we get our medical degrees, right? You need to learn health creation as a lifelong skill. ⁓ And what’s beautiful about this, and then in stage five, excuse me.

In stage five, if there are deficiencies that still need to be boosting up, then that’s where we approach them. Why? Because your pathogenic and dysbiotic gut bacteria, they love the supplements you’re taking. When you take iron and you have a gut over, mean, there’s a paper that says that ⁓ iron is literally like chocolate for the bathyl species. It’s like your B vitamins, all of your methyl boosters. Let me just…

finish that little rant. Okay, so everyone’s boosting it, methylation. It’s like this new tick that it’s like, your problem is low methylation, we are going to boost that for you. Here’s your methylated B vitamins and your folate and all this. So the first step of the immune system in the cell danger response, we intentionally lower our methylation so that an invading virus cannot use our methylation machinery to replicate. So…

maybe we should not be starting there. And again, that sounds like a specific example, but it’s like speaking to a wider problem of so many people not understanding the fundamentals of the system that they’re working with, they all have a piece of the elephant, but we need to be able to put it together where we can move people through safely and effectively and everything that ⁓ someone does, every step someone uses, we can learn based on their feedback. So even if not…

everything that we do is a home run or a slam dunk, we’ve learned something really specific so we know what to do next.

Dr. Jannine Krause (39:43)
you have just highlighted so many things that I have definitely seen along the way because we’ll do all this functional medicine testing, right? And for a lot of docs, their theory on it is we have to correct what’s deficient. And if you’re not doing it in the order that you described, yeah, things can break. I’ve broken lots of systems over the years. It’s just what you learn. And you go, ⁓ crap. And at the same time,

One of the other things that happens, and you had even alluded to that, you’ll feel good for a little bit, and then it doesn’t work. And that is probably one of the biggest hallmarks that I can nail down in someone who’s had a chronic illness and going, you haven’t treated the immune system, because, ⁓ I try things and they work for like two weeks and then they don’t. And it’s like, okay, immune neuro connection right there. And it’s like, boom, thank you for telling me that.

and you’re kind of helping me support what I’ve noticed over the years.

Mel (40:42)
Yeah, which is the whole idea. Once you see it, then it makes sense. And again, you’ve treated however many, like thousands of patients, but we weren’t taught this in our training. And there isn’t even, I don’t know, an obvious place to go to get it. once you start working with it, you’re like, oh, it’s like the code breaking. And it makes sense. So for example, someone with fibromyalgia.

goes for a massage and then the next day they wake up they feel like they’re hung over they have a massive flare well what our massage is bad you know no it’s out of order that’s you’re moving when you have an infection or ⁓ mold toxin or something like that your body’s trying to reduce blood flow in order to prevent it from going deeper and that doesn’t feel good by the way you know we feel good when we have good blood flow ⁓ so then you go for a massage and now we’re kind of going out of order and we’re spreading it all around and then we feel worse and so

⁓ a big aha for a lot of people I work with is realizing that because they had tried a lot of really smart things and they tried a lot of things that really should have worked and that they’d heard about on really, you know, great podcasts with a lot of research behind them. And then realizing like, ⁓ it was out of order and it makes it makes a lot of sense. Yeah.

Dr. Jannine Krause (41:56)
I mean the same thing as the massage I hear a lot and I’m guessing you probably have this too is exercise intolerance. So you try to work out and like each time either the histamines pop off or you know there’s some kind of intolerance there. Is this also like have you seen like this is also out of order? Don’t do the exercise please.

Mel (42:01)
Yes.

Yes.

So I’m going to give a twofold answer to that. Yes, it’s out of order. So that’s, you know, stage, you can call it stage four because it’s again, increasing circulation at a time when your body to try to protect you is trying to reduce circulation. And so then you’re kind of, you’re kind of kicking up all this, this dust. The other idea that I, you know, again, with each distinction, I’m surprised at how like recently I’m coming across it. ⁓ is this idea of our threat bucket, right? And, and

in this idea of cumulative load. ⁓ basically, you let’s say, I don’t know, you had your childhood, whatever that entailed, maybe there was an old car accident, maybe there was like, you know, emotionally distant parents, maybe there’s a Lyme infection, maybe, you know, you had bad medical treatment, whatever. And then you kind of get to a point, let’s say you’re in your 20s or your 30s or your 40s or whatever, and something like something happens, you get an infection or an injection or a bereavement or bad night’s sleep, and things kind of crash.

So with exercise intolerance, and there’s a few other symptoms as well, basically if the brain decides that it doesn’t feel like you are safe to be engaging movement, it’s gonna cut you off from your energy. So it creates fatigue, creates exercise intolerance, it creates dizziness, it creates pain, it adds behavior modification symptoms. And that’s the other thing that gets tricky and why we need

better frameworks because it isn’t one thing. It isn’t a cause, it is causes. It’s cumulative load and that’s the other reason why the five stage model works so well because even though people are different, so I’m taking people through a process. We individualize that process, it’s not a protocol, but the reason why it’s appropriate is that one person might have 80 % of their issue in stage one and they feel amazing really quickly and that’s nice. Someone else might have more of their issue in stage three or five, but.

with this accumulative load thing, we start in stage one because we know we’re very unlikely to make them worse, which is a really big bonus, and we’ve removed some load. then we move on to the digestion. So each stage we’re removing loads, then when we wanna go into your know, grizzly ass childhood trauma that you know needs to be resolved, you’re ready for it, and you have more ⁓ resources to do that processing. You know, yeah.

Dr. Jannine Krause (44:36)
Yeah, no it where that’s coming right there it’s huge because I think where I’ll them and I’ve been kind of confused in the past like do I go back work nervous system first and not touch the immune system and I think a lot of people the message right now is like I need my neural programming I need to go work, you know, I need to work on the trauma first then I can get healthy But you’re you’re blowing the doors open on a lot of theories where it’s like no, need my immune system

and your five stage process, then go to the trauma, it’s going to kick

Mel (45:10)
Yeah. And

I want to make a distinction. know, there are people out there who started with their trauma and then they had resolution, they got better. Great. What I want to make the distinction for you though is if that was not you, this is why. So then it becomes a case of I have a person in front of me, let’s say they are not currently undergoing trauma treatment and they’ve got all of the symptoms and all of the things and it’s like, well, where do I start?

It’s a way of simplifying things and we’re gonna focus on this right now. Because there’s a lot of things you could be doing. There’s a lot of gadgets you could be buying, there’s a lot of stuff you could be taking, there’s a lot of diets you could be following. Where do we start? Okay, well this is where we’re gonna start. I’m not suggesting that you start with the ketamine induced, you know, whatever. Let’s start with the immune system. I do have people who come in the group who are already underway in some ⁓ approach like that. And I’m not here to tell anyone to stop or start anything, really. It’s… ⁓

If you are finding that it’s not working as well as you’d hoped, then you might want to prioritize this first and revisit it. If it is working well, or if you’re happy with it, or if you have a great relationship with it, great, continue with that. We’re not here to stop what’s working. We’re here to figure out what’s not working and try something different.

Dr. Jannine Krause (46:24)
I’m glad that you mentioned the twofold because yes, healing trauma first sometimes for lot of folks can be amazing. ⁓ Most people don’t come to me at that stage anyway. But one of the things that, you know, I’ve had other folks on the podcast, I’ve the cell danger response, like Dr. Navio stuff, like even there’s another gal, Veronique Mead talks a lot about it too. These kind of things to me have always resonated as why, you know, someone doesn’t tend to get.

better when we’ve done multiple different things. And at the same time, I’m looking at it going, wait, so immune system first protocol, immune system and neurological system are very highly connected. And I think for a lot of people that connection there isn’t really forefront. Can you explain a little bit about how, you know, because I think for a lot of people, can, they’re gonna get like, okay, immune system first, perfect, makes sense.

How does that actually help in the long run, the nerve side?

Mel (47:27)
Yeah,

there’s a number of ways that I can explain that so to answer the question the way you’ve asked it the Yeah, the immune system and the nervous system are highly symbiotic and we It’s kind of interesting. You know, we were made of trillions of cells Those cells are about three billion years old the ones that cause us infections are really kind of similar to the ones we have and so we actually had to as we got more organized and more complex and more bigger and we became not just one cell but

70 trillion cells, we need to have systems to understand who’s a part of us, who’s not, who needs to be paid attention to, you know, even the development of the gut and the gut immune system. That’s like a more recent thing because those are commensal bacteria, bacteria living inside of us that aren’t trying to kill us. Like, this is like kind of a weird idea from evolution. ⁓ So we have these like really intricate systems to manage all of this. And then in our brain, you know, it’s like…

very, very, very recently that industrial science discovered the brain’s immune system because before 2010, they thought it was sterile, which doesn’t make all that much sense. So we have neurons, but we also have something called glial cells, and that means glue, because they just assumed that they were just there to stick everything else together, not realizing that it was our brain’s immune system. And so that’s actually a big part of what is structurally important. It’s immunologically important, but also it’s

it’s important for our learning and our experience sensing, right? But one thing that’s baked into this, know, because I’m using words like immune system and digestive system and nervous system. ⁓ One thing that Chinese medicine has really wonderfully that’s really helpful is this three dimensional map of how the systems work, which is when we start looking at a lot of chemistry, it’s really disembodied, right? And so part of what’s baked into this ⁓ staged model is that we’re working from the outside in. And that’s the same thing with the…

it’s very analogous to the trauma work. We’re like, you’ve got a wounded child in there, I’m gonna go get it. And it’s like, wow, that’s scary. Maybe I don’t want you to do that yet, because the protector parts, ⁓ they’ve been protecting that part for like decades and they’ve kept you alive. that’s essentially what the ketamine is there for, is to cause a dissociation to allow you to access that. I’m not saying it never worked, I’m not saying it’s bad, I’m just saying it’s helpful to have distinctions.

But it’s the same thing with starting with the nervous system. I would say the nervous system is kind of the foundational system of the body. It’s foundational to or upstream possibly of your hormones, of your digestion, of your inflammation, and it does not follow that that’s where we need to start.

Dr. Jannine Krause (50:10)
Makes sense, makes sense. Now, of course my segue with this is to go into the development and neurodevelopment and all of that because that’s where I see kind of integrating all of this. So give us like, how do we segue? do we talk about next in this realm? Because I think this is a great way for folks to start to understand how this plays in from how we develop our nervous system and how things play out.

Mel (50:35)
100%,

right. So we need to, so the foundational system is the nervous system. The foundation of that is its development, right? And we can understand it by looking out into nature, because if you look outside and you see a tree, all of nature and life follows that same tree-like pattern. That’s ⁓ a universal feature, and the nervous system is no different. So our nervous system develops from bottom up, and then,

it has a right and left component. So the right side develops first for a few years, then it switches over to the left. And then the outer bits, the crown, becomes increasingly specialized, and then it’s meant to come together to make a functional whole. And so I just summarized the first few years of nervous system development for you. But what is, I would say now…

almost ubiquitous and I was born in early 80s. would say if I had to guess, know 25 % of us were a little bit weird. You know, and so it’s kind of increasing. But that developmental platform is not unfolding very smoothly anymore. I feel that nowadays we could not be doing more to harm healthy neurological development and that can be a separate segue if we want, but if we kind of keep it towards adult health and complex chronic illness, then

I really want to know if, excuse me, it’s like, how your nervous system development unfolded. Did everything go in an orderly fashion? Did you hit all the steps? they at the right time? And then can we do any kind of ⁓ doable assessments to see what’s going on there? Because I mentioned that we used to be a single cell and then we became like 70 trillion cells that walk around and do math and make jokes.

all this, that we have this evolutionary and developmental platform of increasing complexity. And one thing we need to understand about chronic health issues is that we become less complex when we are ill. That’s part of the reason why there’s brain fog, that’s part of the reason why it’s hard to stand up. That’s the most recent thing we do. We’re the only animals that do that. And so the brain’s like, are not complex enough for that, so I’m gonna tell you to lie down.

⁓ And it’s also relevant to people who are getting older who want to ⁓ age well, that aging is development in reverse. So maybe when you reach your peak, you add enough to function well, but how quickly are you gonna decline? So I find that this is a really important area. And I would say issues with how quickly or slowly left and right developed will give rise to a lot of different things. One is like immune issues, that the left hemisphere of the brain

increases the immune response, the right hemisphere calms it down. So even just through that like really blunt lens, we now can understand a lot more what’s possibly going on with patients that if you have someone who’s more left hemisphere dominant, they could be more prone to inflammation, but also they may be low in interoception, the ability to sense what their body’s doing. So these are patients, I mean, it’s been wild discovering these people because they tell you that they’re fine and you run their labs and they’re like crazy.

inflamed and infected and like the leaky scuts have ever seen and they’re like, oh yeah, no, I’m fine. And you know, I had one patient like that. His first symptom of any health issue was a heart attack because there’s no, there’s no interoception. They can’t feel that they’re inflamed. And then on the other hand, the really sensitive people tend to be more right hemisphere dominant. They have trouble separating from their environment, you know, and they will tend to have more suppressed immune systems. They get stuck with these like lingering infections. And again, you can’t take stuff to get out of that pattern.

You know, there’s roles for taking stuff, but we need to, you know, if you have one arm that’s strong and one arm that’s weak, you need to do push-ups on the weak side and there’s no pill I can take to achieve that.

Dr. Jannine Krause (54:28)
So important, so important, especially with neuro stuff. And I kind of think that where I’m at in my practice these days, I feel like everybody needs some kind of neuro training. I like to do balance things and basic stuff, but I feel like you can design protocols for folks when you find certain deficits as a whole.

Mel (54:44)
Thank

Yeah, 100%. And also it’s just, that’s, I just think it’s the most overlooked area. know, for example, at least from where I’m sitting, like one of the most explosive problems people are having are dysautonomias, you know? So they’re standing up in their hearts or racing, or they’re standing up in their blood pressure is crashing like mine was. And that’s a brainstem issue. I mean, there’s different parts, know, brainstem, cerebellum, insula, vestibular. I mean, I’m not trying to oversimplify it, but it’s not.

I don’t know, not those things, you know? And so we need to know how to do a proper bedside assessment. You know, this is something that people should be getting, but are not getting either at a ⁓ primary care or even at a neurologist, just like a basic bedside assessments. Like, let’s do like a brain scan on you. And if you don’t have a brain tumor, we’re not sure what to do with you. And yet these are things of looking at how someone’s eyes moving, you know, or what their balance, like you said balance is like one of the…

best biomarkers that you can be doing and what’s beautiful about it is that you can ⁓ help people get more of an understanding of what’s going on in their body, but it’s also a really important biomarker of brain function, you know? And it’s a good skill to have. You’re probably gonna have a better life if your balance is good. Your energy’s gonna be better, all these things. So ⁓ yeah, just understanding things like that, that we can help give people high leverage. ⁓

inroads into their system and how they can improve them when they could be focusing on anything, helping them focus on these things.

Dr. Jannine Krause (56:19)
So huge.

mean, I love fitness, right? I love, you know, strength, those kinds of things. But when we have it where there’s so much out of balance to begin with, the neurological system has just always been my jam to play with little things like the balance and whatnot. So I love that that’s part of it. I’m guessing that’s probably one of the foundations that you’ve got along with the immune system working through, you know, with folks. you know, I think right now a lot of folks might be thinking all of this and going like, oh my gosh, there’s a lot.

that I may not have discovered. How long is a first office visit, like first visit with you? Like, I’m just curious.

Mel (56:55)
⁓

So these days, the vast majority of my practice is online in a group where I’ve pre-recorded materials and that you can learn this stuff. know, most people coming in have brain fog, you know, they’re intelligent, they’re motivated, they have brain fog. I actually had brain fog when I started developing it myself, you know, so I get that, that’s a real thing. And that was why I really needed to move to this platform because I would have these conversations with people.

that were really interesting and then they leave, you know? And you can’t expect people to remember anyways. So this is the way the practice is now. It’s a year-long program. So people get meaningful results usually much quicker. It actually allows you to like get through some of your initial issues and then get like new better problems and solve those, you know? So that we can have a few rounds. ⁓ The brain area really is like, it’s like a whole nother program that I just placed within it and included in it. Just because I saw that the need was there that I first…

learned this order of operations and this process to guide people through, but it didn’t include assessments for retained primitive reflexes, which is like these developmental issues. And it didn’t include these balance assessments or anything like that, but this is a whole other program that people have as a standalone. I’m like, these are like essential life skills. So people are here. know, people ask me questions that need to be answered. We are doing whole new modules and whole new programs and that’s cool. it’s ⁓ membership is a year. And ⁓ so it gives you plenty of time.

To move through at your own pace, people come in with ⁓ preponderance of issues in different stages, like I alluded to before. And so it allows you to go at your own pace and to really learn these things so that when you are presented with new information, you have a framework for filtering it, which is like this meta skill that you are kind of like now impossible to market to or to sell random stuff or when you’re using something, you know exactly why and you know how to tell if it’s helping you or not.

Dr. Jannine Krause (58:51)
That’s the most important thing. I love teaching that to folks. Let’s show you how to use it. Assessment. Because at the end of the day, putting health back into someone’s hands and their control is what I’m all about. Now, in terms of, I have multiple coaches, trainers, folks that listen to this podcast. They might be thinking, what’s a good referral for you in terms of chronic illness? Because that’s a big bucket ⁓ of things. Who are like the, you’re.

best clients for you? Like who would be like a best place for you to have them?

Mel (59:21)
Yeah, I can answer

that in a couple of ways. The five stage model that I learned, the kind of avatar, the archetype for that was probably a woman in her mid 30s to mid 50s, overweight, fibromyalgia, ⁓ brain fog, depression. That is like a slam dunk, rheumatoid arthritis, no problem. But it’s very easy to expand out to other people. I have men in the group, I have women in the group, I have…

The youngest member is 18. The oldest was in her 80s, but now I’ve started to allow kids to add their, sorry, members to add their children to the membership as well. So we can do the neurodevelopment stuff. We can, you know, learn how for them to, how to use botanicals at home and to really map things so that you’re choosing the right things to help things with immune, like issues with immune problems. And so the clinical areas that I work with have expanded. So it’ll be chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, autoimmune, increasingly,

ADHD and like adult autism, but that always goes with physical issues, with digestive issues, with inflammation, with infection. So it’s really more about ⁓ the individual’s awareness of their own issue and how they’ve framed that. they may be someone with fibromyalgia who’s discovered that they have mold, whereas someone else might be someone who is a mold illness person who also has body pains. So it’s really, it’s different in how they frame it, but it needs to be.

The most important aspect is really the psychology. needs to be someone who is brave enough to want to take responsibility for their own health and to learn how to do it, which is not everyone, which is fine. Right. But for the person, the person who’s listening to all the podcasts and trying all this stuff out and needs a guide to teach them, then in a way it doesn’t really matter what the diagnosis is. I had one person whose main motivation was that her mom had Parkinson’s and she was seeing how devastating that was.

to watch and she was healthy but she noticed that she was getting these like little niggly symptoms that were not that big of a deal but they were exactly what her mom had had 30 years ago. And that was her motivation. And that’s like my favorite, know, like help someone before they’re actually sick. So as long as the motivation is high and that you’re, you know, happy to go and do the things and learn the skills of working the process, then I’m really happy to help different people.

Dr. Jannine Krause (1:01:43)
And I also saw like, it cracked me if I’m wrong, that there’s also a part for practitioners too, for folks.

Mel (1:01:48)
There is,

yeah. there are, yeah, I also train practitioners in a separate group. I have a lot of practitioners in the health group, but a lot of people wanted to learn how to do this in their own practice. And so that’s available as well. I like it most when the practitioners are up for going through the process themselves. Most practitioners need it, to be honest.

A lot of practitioners have health issues and that’s what brought them into medicine. Others may be okay, maybe you talk about burnout a lot or just maybe areas, but there’s really, and this was something that was so important for me and actually I’m so grateful to my group for it, is that where I had my own psychological blind spots, I’m like, I have to figure this out so I can help other people figure it out. None of us are above these human things, where we’re self-sabotaging or where we’re struggling with motivation or…

Or balance or whatever it is. It’s like well, I need to figure this out so I can teach people to figure it out So if you are a practitioner, it’s really good, you know people they’ve come in and said you know practitioners have come in and said, know, Didn’t you know, kind of I didn’t follow your advice research only add one thing at a time so I could track feedback I added like three things and now I don’t know what happened So now I understand why patients do that, you know And it’s like that’s more important for you to learn than for me to teach you like a thing, you know, so

I like that and I like that the practitioners themselves will be hopefully healthier and more robust at end of the process too.

Dr. Jannine Krause (1:03:14)
Well, you know, it’s all a learning process, right? And like you said, you know, in the beginning, I mean, it’s health creation. We’re working on health creation and there’s no one thing, there’s no one magic bullet. There’s just finding what works for you and rolling with it. And I think this is what my goal is to put out with the podcast, but also to have folks on like you that are educating folks on like, hey, you know, put the health back in your hands. Let’s help you, let’s see what you can do.

So let’s talk about SynthesisHealth.co. That’s where folks find you. Is there anywhere else folks can find you other than your website?

Mel (1:03:52)
Yeah, so that website is where you’d go if you wanna apply to be a free guest in the group and take a peek. You’re in the group with the actual members so you see how I work with them and solve problems in real time. People have setbacks because this is real life and things come up. And then you can ask me about your health and you get access to a lot of ⁓ lessons that hopefully expand your paradigm and help you think about things different ways. I retrained in Chinese medicine with a really wonderful ⁓

human named Dr. Ed Neal over at the Apricot Grove. He was a medical doctor who then trained in Chinese medicine and then he translated the Nei Jing and realized that it said all kinds of things that nobody realized it said. And so I study with him and I do a podcast with him over at the Apricot Grove. talk, I guess, you know, we talk about a lot of different things, but a lot of it is, you philosophical, also health related.

really great, just grounded philosophy for modern times if you’re feeling overwhelmed or confused or stressed. It’s a nice alternative to watching the news. ⁓ And then, you know, I’m on various social media, although I find that I am spending a little less time there, which is good. yeah, and I have a website called essays.synthesyself.co where once in a while I will go on a rant about something and write an essay. And you can see some of my writing there.

Dr. Jannine Krause (1:05:15)
love it. It’s all good stuff. I’ve definitely checked out quite a few things. Even the Nijing, I think I might have to pick it back up and look at it again. You know, it’s part of the training to read it and like, I think I’ve tried to read it. Like, I’m not even gonna be able to be honest, like probably so.

Mel (1:05:31)
Dr. Neal kind of decoded it in a way where he, and he’s not the only, I don’t want to pretend that this one person has a monopoly on all the valid perspectives of the Nei Jing, but when you listen to him, what he’s saying makes a lot of sense and you’re welcome to challenge it. It’s not like, it’s not a church or a cult, but he has made a lot of really valuable practical insights that when you put them into practice, you get better clinical results. So I’m all for that.

And also it makes sense and also the way he puts things has more ⁓ rigor to them than other things I had been taught where it was just sort of a vagary that was left unreferenced and it was like I heard one place that this is the thing versus this is the line where they say this, this is what I think it means, what do you think? know, a much more grounded discussion. So if you do have any interest in picking up the naejing again, I can definitely recommend training with Dr. Neal.

Dr. Jannine Krause (1:06:22)
I definitely want to take a look because yeah, for those of you guys who are like, what the heck is the nejing? It’s kind of like a Chinese medicine Bible of sorts. Like I’m not gonna say Bible. Let’s say it’s like a manual. ⁓ Many of them have been passed down. I don’t know how to… Yeah, help me with the words.

Mel (1:06:36)
You know what it is? It’s so yeah, well, it’s it’s, you

know, about 2200 years old, and it’s actually a book on how the universe works. But it also has quite a few chapters on health and a lot of acupunctures don’t realize that. So it explains the patterns of the universe in ways that are highly consistent with modern physics. And then it goes into how these universal patterns are a little bit different here on planet Earth. And then it goes into how these patterns of nature

appear inside of our systems. And this is also stuff that I teach in the group. And when you hear these descriptions of ⁓ things moving in your body, like river flow, or these are the directions, it’s interesting because it taps in on a certain level. like your body feels like it can relax. It feels the truth of it. As I say, it’s not a religion. It’s not like a take my word for it type of thing, or even I’m an expert type of thing. It’s like, I’m gonna explain this terrain to you based on this map. And it’s like your body feels like it makes sense.

Dr. Jannine Krause (1:07:35)
Yeah, it’s, mean, it’s in the times I’ve tried to read it, it’s like, it’s been, you know, just fascinating. And I think now that I’ve been in practice for almost 20 years, think now it’ll give me a little better perspective than a newbie. I think as a newbie, might be hard.

Mel (1:07:48)
For sure. I guess one bit of advice I can give as well, this is, you so there’s a kind of large and well-known translation and it was a really big step forward, really great work that was done by a synologist who does not have medical background. I find that to be somewhat unreadable and also very unpleasant to read and it really is divorced from the understanding that I get with Dr. Neal. So now Dr. Neal has a lot of

Translations, he’s done it in a way that’s much more readable, but what we’ve all found is that if you actually put the Ne Jing into AI, it does a really decent job. It’s not perfect. But you get like 80 % of the way there and it’s much more readable than Unchaled. And so you might find that it’s more relevant for you and less like torture if you have a better translation.

Dr. Jannine Krause (1:08:38)
Huh, you know, I’m learning new uses for AI every single day. I’m like, okay, okay. can see the good.

Mel (1:08:44)
This is my morning practice.

My morning scripture practice is ⁓ using AI to translate a chapter of the nation.

Dr. Jannine Krause (1:08:50)
Huh, I like that, I like that. All right, noted, noted. Well, now you guys know how Mel and I are prone to geek out on things. ⁓ Mel, thank you so much for coming on the Health Fix Podcast. I have learned so much today and I have no doubt that everyone else has as well. And we’ll make sure we get all of your details in the podcast notes at drjcrowsend.com. Thanks again, it’s been a pleasure.

Mel (1:09:13)
Thank you so much, I’ve really enjoyed it.