Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: What'S worthwhile healing Mind, body and spirit. I'm Ramsey Zimmerman. I choose peace of mind, vitality of.
[00:00:18] Speaker C: Body, and joy of spirit over stress, exhaustion, or overwhelm.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: Together, let's explore and pursue the many ways to build holistic health and wellness.
[00:00:31] Speaker A: When you start to realize or become aware or accept this idea that perception is a choice and you can change your perception, then good things can happen, right? So then it's a matter of sitting down and saying, oh, hey, what is going on in your life? Right? You got headaches? Let's talk about the pattern of these headaches. When do these things occur? How are you going to sort of deal with this issue? How are you going to choose to perceive it differently?
[00:00:58] Speaker B: Hey there. It's Ramsay here. That was Dr. Julius Torelli. Dr. Torelli is a cardiologist with 32 years of medical experience.
His life was nearly cut short, however, when he had a massive heart attack after working more than 2,000 days in a row laying in the hospital bed. Instead of feeling distraught, he focused on feeling grateful for the caregivers, the technologies, for everything.
He recovered and he credits the power of gratefulness and the human ability to choose how we perceive things with supporting the body's ability to heal. Today he is forming an online educational and supportive community. And you have the opportunity to get in on the ground floor, listen in to learn not only about Dr. Trelli's experiences, but also some of his patients amazing stories and how to join the upcoming pilot program he is launching. Let's get started.
[00:01:50] Speaker C: Hello, Dr. Torelli. How are you doing today?
[00:01:52] Speaker A: I'm doing great, Ramsay. Great to be here. Thank you.
[00:01:56] Speaker C: Yes, thanks.
You are a cardiologist, an author, and leader of an online community.
I am grateful that you're here today and that, that is, that means something to you. You value highly the power of gratefulness. And what are you grateful for today?
[00:02:15] Speaker A: Yeah, gratitude turns out to be incredibly powerful. And so I'm grateful for one. I injured my leg about a month ago and had difficulty walking. They all swelled up.
In addition, had poison ivy. I had so much pain and it's all resolved. And I was out walking today and it was like I was just grateful that I didn't have any pain, I could walk. And these are things we take for granted. Simple things, right? Like.
Like that your legs that are carry you. And some people I hate my thighs are too fat. They're too this. I hate whatever, what. But we don't, you know, we take so many things for granted. And so one of the things I try to emphasize a lot is, you know, don't take anything for granted. These simple things are important.
[00:03:03] Speaker C: Yeah. You know, it's funny because being grateful for the absence of something, like the absence of something bad, like, you can always find something grateful. You know, I'm grateful that my arms are still connected to my body, that neither one of my arms have ever fallen off.
Yes.
[00:03:21] Speaker A: I. You, like, you get a sore throat, right? You know, it's like, so painful. Get strep throat, and it's so painful, you forget. And then when it's gone, like, you forget, like, oh, what it's like to be able to swallow without having pain.
Like, that's a big deal.
Yeah, right.
[00:03:36] Speaker C: Yeah. Well, you are. You're a cardiologist, which is a heart doctor. You're not practicing medicine anymore, but you did that for. For many years.
Ironically, you yourself suffered a major heart attack.
What led up to that? And. And what did you learn from that experience?
[00:03:57] Speaker A: Yeah, it was three weeks before my 43rd, 43rd birthday. And I really didn't have a lot of risk factors at that time, you know, so what. What had happened is I was in a group, a great group of guys in Greensboro, North Carolina, and treated me well, and the group was getting bought by the hospital, and there was a lot of stuff going on. I didn't want to be part of that. I left and I went solo, and I opened up the solo practice. But in order to do that, I borrowed a bunch of money, borrowed over a million dollars and to open this practice. And it seemed like it all made sense at the time, which I think it did.
But what happened over that time was, you know, I had a monthly overhead that was, you know, like $60,000 a month just in overhead without my salary.
And it. I developed this incredible amount of what, let's just call it stress, I like to call it emotional kind of overwhelm, but.
And I developed lupus.
And then I was on a bunch of medicine. I gained a bunch of weight. I was working seven days a week for three years. I worked seven days a week without a vacation.
And then all that eventually led to the heart attack.
And there was a lot of guilt associated with that because here I was out there trying to practice this wellness and prevention sort of cardiology practice, and I couldn't even talk the talk, you know, walk the talk. I wasn't practicing what I was preaching. I wasn't able to do that because I was working, like, all the time.
And again, I did. I sort of knew this was going on at the beginning. But it really kind of came to light, you know, for me after, when I started looking back at all of this. And so it was, it was a, when I think of it now, it was a very meaningful time. And, and I use that to it all that overflowed into the practice and into the evolution of how I ended up practicing.
[00:06:02] Speaker C: Yeah.
And so you, you struck out on your own.
You had your own practice, you were building that, and you were sort of building it all completely on your own.
You, what did you, did you say seven years, wait, did you say three years or seven years of working seven days a week?
[00:06:20] Speaker A: Three. From, from 2000, 1999 to 2003, I worked seven days a week without, without a, without a day off because I was again, had this huge overhead. And so I was working at the practice Monday through Friday, leaving early. I had an hour drive also. So I was leaving like at 6, 6:30 in the morning. I wasn't getting home. I was giving talks and things like that. So I wouldn't get home till 8, 8:30.
Then weekends I was working at this regional local community hospital.
Yeah. So I didn't have three years that I didn't have a, a break.
[00:06:54] Speaker C: Well, that may be the longest week I've ever heard. So that would be three times seven. So that's like what, 20, 100, 20, 200 day long week, if you look at that in terms of one long string of days.
Um, so clearly that was insanely difficult and took its toll. And that resulted in a heart attack. Tell us about that. How did that happen? When did that happen? What was that like?
[00:07:26] Speaker A: Uh, so it's, it's a long story because it, and it's an interesting story of the way it sort of happened and what subsequently happened. But it was, As I said, three weeks before my 43rd birthday when I developed this sudden onset of knifelike chest pain. Now when patients are usually having heart attacks, they don't describe it as sharp, knifelike pain. It's almost always described as pressure, heaviness, burning, tightness.
Rarely is it described as, as knifelike. This felt like a knife in, in the middle of my chest. And, and I thought I had had some reflux and I, I had esophageal erosion. And I thought it was like spasm of the esophagus, which can be very much like sharp pain.
So I really thought it was that until my left arm started hurting.
And then, then I started to get worried.
And when I went in, this wasn't sort of your normal heart attack this was a massive, massive mi, as we call it, myocardial infarction, massive heart attack, had a blockage called the widowmaker's blockage.
And I was very fortunate that, you know, I, I got in early, but things lined up, things went incredibly well.
But, you know, the, the amount of damage that was going on was usually something that people don't even survive from. So I was very fortunate to survive, very fortunate to survive, very fortunate to get wonderful treatment from the, from the group that, you know, I had been with.
And, but it was, but in, in that whole thing, the sort of, the long part of that story is that I practice, I, I found that I was practicing gratitude during the heart attack, and I had to do that in order to change my physiology. But it was, it, it wasn't something that I would have thought of doing except some things that had happened, you know, before that that sort of enlightened me to do that. But, but it was an incredible experience that I really need to write about. I just haven't had a chance to do that.
[00:09:32] Speaker C: So you said that you practiced gratefulness and it changed your physiology. What, what do you mean by that? How is that possible?
[00:09:41] Speaker A: So one of the things I think that we don't talk about in Western medicine nearly enough is the power of thoughts, the power of beliefs, or what I like to think of, you know, as, as mindset.
We, we think in terms of. 99.9% of what we think in terms of is the physical, right? So if you have headaches or belly pain or chest pain or back pain, we look for physical causes. So you just take headaches as an example, right?
Migraine headaches.
The first thing you think, oh, do I have a brain tumor or a bleed in my head or something like that? Well, that's pretty rare compared to all of, you know, percentage wise, of all the headaches that exist. Most headaches are not due to brain tumors.
But, but so they are what, what we would term in, in our society as stress, again I like to use the term more emotionally related as opposed to stress. Um, and so I started, and then I started realizing over time that most of the doctor visits were for these, these, these complaints, these symptoms, let's call them even illnesses, if you want to call them, that were what are now termed medically unexplained symptoms, which means we just don't find a physical cause for it. Doesn't mean the patients aren't having pain, doesn't mean the pain can be very debilitating and sometimes even disabling.
But we don't. We don't find anything medically, but we still treat these with medication because we don't know really what else to do. And so when you start, you say, well, what is that really about?
And it's. It takes. You know, I've had to. Well, for me personally, I had to think of it in different ways and then to get to the place where I could explain it, Right. But the. I think the simplest thing is if you break it down and think about, you know, if you're laying down at night and you're falling asleep and your whole family's asleep and you hear a noise as you're falling asleep, you hear a noise downstairs, and it's an unfamiliar noise, and you have. So your heart racing, you're startled, right? So your heart rate is racing a little bit.
And then you start to have a thought. Maybe someone broke in. Maybe two people broke in. Maybe they're going to come upstairs and do these horrible things to me and my family all of a sudden. Well, now, at this point, if you're having those thoughts, your heart's pounding out of your chest, your palms are sweaty, your. If you measured your blood pressure, blood pressure's up, your heart rate's up, your cholesterol, your cortisol is up, and all of these bad things are happening. So then you. You get up the nerve. You go downstairs and you find, you know, something happened. A broom fell, knocked over some empty boxes, and that was the sound, that was the noise, and you, oh, okay, no one broke in. So you go and you relax and, you know, things sort of calm back down.
So what happened there?
No one broke in.
But the physiology that was going on in your body was exactly the same as if someone had broken in. So it's not the breaking in that you're responding to, it's the thought of the breaking in. As an example, right? Another good example, I think, is the idea of a lemon, right? If you relax and you sort of get into a relaxed state and you picture a lemon and you picture cutting the lemon and you picture. Bite it into the lemon, you'll salivate.
There's no lemon.
So these thoughts are. We don't think about how powerfully thoughts affect physiology. And you can take that all the way out to the placebo effect or the nocebo effect, which if people aren't familiar, that's the sugar pill effect, which is very well recognized in Western medicine and Western society. Pharmaceutical companies hate it because it's a nuisance to them. Then that that effect Is that when you give someone a sugar pill, about a third of the time, somewhere between a quarter or 20 to 30% of the time, people will get better.
But it's an inner substance, it's a sugar, it's a sugar pill. It doesn't have any, any supposedly physiologic properties. What's that about? We understand that that exists. It's a known thing.
It can be very powerful.
[00:14:04] Speaker C: So it's that idea of perception is reality in the sense that.
In the sense that when you hear the noise downstairs, you are responding to the noise because of what you believe it might represent.
And then also when you take that pillow, you're like, okay, this pill is going to help me. And therefore it does, at least to some extent. That's the placebo effect, right? Because just the act of having that thing happen, whether that's really the answer or really the problem is secondary to what you sort of believe is the problem or is the solution.
[00:14:48] Speaker A: You got it. I mean, as you described it. Well, and I think that the key word there is perception. And, and I think the important thing, and this is a big part of gratefully. Well, is that perception is a choice.
And that's what people tend not to do. And we think. And again, we can sort of get into this. But when you start to realize or become aware or accept this idea that perception is a choice and you can change your perception, then like good things can happen, right? So when you had. The truth is, when you were laying in bed and you heard that noise, you started to project into the future because of something you maybe experienced in the past or heard about in the past. Oh, I've heard someone else, you know, had a break in. And so you, you take that past and then you project it out into the future. Oh, now there might be two guys that broke in and they're going to come up here and do all these horrible things to my family. Because again, you saw some horror movies or who knows what that you're projecting as opposed to the reality of living in the now, as we like to say, which is the reality is there was a noise downstairs.
[00:15:56] Speaker C: So how is, how is perception a choice? Because I always think of perception like a, like a measurement, like something that influences.
And this is how, you know, I perceive it. This is how I see it. So how is, how is perception a choice?
[00:16:12] Speaker A: So the reason, the way I would learn this was 30 plus years ago.
I became aware of this, I should say, when I had a friend who had gone and they had adopted him. His Wife had adopted a child and the child was two years old and from a foreign country they brought the child back and they had taken time off to spend with the child and the mother had taken like six or eight weeks off and. But she was going to go back to work. And so a couple of weeks before she was getting ready to go back to work, they started to bring the kid to, to daycare, to, to get him, you know, used to the daycare. So they brought him one day and they sat there and the kid played and everything was great. And then the next day the teacher said, well, why don't you just step out for like one minute and just, you know, come back in. And so they went to step out and as they did that, the kid had a temper tantrum, just, it just fell on the ground and just sort of a snot slinging tantrum as I like to call it. And mom had sort of the normal reaction that we would all have, which is, oh, this is terrible, forget it, I'm gonna quit my job, I'm not going back to work, I'm just gonna stay home and take care of him. And that's it, that's just the way it is.
Dad had a completely different response. Dad was like, he said to me, I was elated, I was so filled with joy.
I was like, what?
I was like, my first thought was, what is wrong with you? Like, how could you have that reaction? He goes, no, no, no, you don't understand.
He said, my biggest fear was that he was, we adopted this two year old and that he would never bond with us.
And when he had that tantrum, I realized he had bonded with us. And I was overcome with joy.
And at that moment I became like totally confused. And I said, wait a minute, this is the exact, these two people experienced the exact same situation and their perception was 180 degrees opposite.
How is that possible?
And I, and I sort of, as I started thinking about it and I started looking at it and then I started looking at the literature on perception and you know, if you, if you showed 10 people, 10 different one event, they all will tell you the story differently.
They all perceive differently. And a lot of that perception is based on their experiences. And it's based on, you know, conjectures and things that they, that they sort of came up with. And so then one of the things that I sort of use is from a, from a. Just a reframing technique. It's that perception. So let's just say you're sitting in traffic, you're going you're supposed to be at a meeting and you're going to be late because there's, it's bumper to bumper traffic, right? So you can perceive this traffic that's there as, oh, I can't believe this traffic. Why is there always traffic? You know what, it's probably an accident. Why don't people drive more carefully? You know, why do I always leave late? You know, I left late. I should have left earlier. I should have known. This is an important reading and you're, you're just all having all these negative thoughts, these self deprecating thoughts, these beating yourself up sort of thoughts.
When you have those thoughts, what's going on in your body?
Your body's, your physiology is changing. Just like when you had the thought about someone breaking in. You're secreting adrenaline, noradrenaline, epinephrine, and, and these are causing your blood vessels to constrict, your heart rate, to increase your blood pressure, to increase your sugar, to increase cortisol levels go up and things like that. So all of those, all of these bad things are happening to you and you're blaming the traffic. You're saying, what's because of the traffic, right? But it's not the traffic, it's your perception of traffic. Because you could also sit there.
This is, this is, you know, using the gratitude as an example, right? You could say, okay, take a second, take a breath.
And I like to tell this, doing gratitude on the fly.
And you say, okay, I can't do anything about this traffic right now. But it's 97 degrees outside and I've got air conditioning here.
You do that, you start to switch your autonomic nervous system from sympathetic to parasympathetic. The sympathetic is the activation of the, you know, the fight or flight that we just talked about. The parasympathetic is more that calm, peaceful activation from the vagus nerve.
And then you might say, you know, I have this, I have a radio, I can sit there. And there's a great podcast that Ramsey puts on I want to listen to.
I'm going to, I have a minute to listen to this, to this podcast. And you can put that on.
You're not changing the traffic at all. Although it wouldn't surprise me if all of a sudden the traffic starts moving. But even if not, you can't change the traffic, but you can change the way you're perce receiving the traffic and not beating yourself up about it. And that changes your physiology. That has health benefits or Detroit, it's detrimental if you don't got it.
[00:21:26] Speaker C: So. So then we're sort of perceiving a situation, and then really it's about our mindset. It's about how we think about the situation. It's about how we frame it within ourselves and then bringing it back around to.
So maybe the phrase, well, it could be worse is sort of a companion to your.
Your gratefulness, which you're describing. It's sort of a shortcut or a tool to getting to the ideas of things to be grateful in a situation that on its face really look, you know, miserable to us at. And in that moment.
So then.
So that's significant. Right. So basically what I'm hearing is that mindset can impact things of.
We were talking about situations in the moment where you're either, you know, you're having a stress response or you're not, you know, the sympathetic and parasympathetic.
But does. But does that extend more broadly to.
To health and healing and recovering from, you know, difficulties or illnesses and all of that, too, in sort of a much more sort of longer kind of time frame?
[00:22:51] Speaker A: I believe so. So the. The story before my heart attack is that that same day of the heart attack, I saw a patient who.
So this was. This was March 10th of 2003, and.
[00:23:08] Speaker C: A day that you're living in for me.
[00:23:10] Speaker A: That's right. And I went to see this. Get this patient from the lobby. I used to get my own patients and bring them back because I used to like to watch how they got up out of chairs. I used to like, I had to watch how they walked and all that kind of stuff.
Anyway, and so when I went to introduce myself, it was a new patient. And she said, you know, something like, you don't remember me or whatever. And I was like, you're a new patient. Do I know you from somewhere? Turned out that she had called the office back in October, so that's, what, about five, six months before, and had a long story. But it was basically, she was on. She had a very weak heart. She was on the cardiac transplant list.
She lived about two hours away, and she had been on the transplant list for three years, and they hadn't found a match for her.
And she kept having heart failure, what we call decompensated heart failure, where she ended up in the hospital every couple of months for the past three years. And then they had been wanting to put this special kind of pacemaker in her. Well, she was really into just natural kind of things, and she didn't want anything artificial in her body. And that sort of stuff. She kept refusing and refusing over, you know, many months or maybe even years.
And. But finally she got really sick. She was in the icu, and she said, in a moment of weakness, she agreed to this pacemaker. Her family was on her, doctors were on her, and she finally agreed to this pacemaker. And so they put the pacemaker in. So this was March. They put the pacemaker in December. So it's been about three or four months.
And she says she's worse than ever. She said before, she was in the hospital every, you know, two months. Now she's in the hospital every two weeks. She used to be able to walk, like, a quarter of a mile. Now she can only walk 50 to 100ft.
She was sicker than she had been, and she just had all of this. She goes, I want this pacemaker out. Can they take it out? She just had so much angst and anger toward this pacemaker. And I think she was beating herself up a lot because she had agreed to this, and she called it a moment of weakness.
And so I told her, look, this was all over the phone. She was telling me the story. And I said, look, this is a. It's a complicated thing. You've got a really weak heart, you know, a transplant list, all this kind of stuff. I need to get. I need to see all your records. I need to see all your medications, get your records, you know, bring your medications in, make an appointment, and come and. Come and see me so we can. I can look at this and we can kind of go over. Let's, you know, sort of start there. I said, but while. While you're doing all that, said you got a. You have a lot of anger toward this pacemaker, and you need to, like, get over that anger. And she was like, get over it. I hate it. I can't stand. I could see she was just getting, like, enraged with this. I hate it. I want it out. Can they take it out? And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I said, yes, they can take it out. I said, but I didn't say you had to like the pacemaker. I said, you just had to be grateful for it and find it, be able to appreciate it. She goes, well, how can I be grateful for something I hated? And I said, well, so I told her, here's what you can do every morning.
Get a nice journal, get a nice pen, Sit down every morning and write in your journal.
One day, I won't need this pacemaker, and they can take it out.
But for right now, I appreciate this. Pacemaker. And then I taught her this, what I call the gratitude traceback method.
And I said, I appreciate this pacemaker. I appreciate the fact that this company invested tons, millions of research dollars into developing this pacemaker. I appreciate the engineers who thought about how to make this pacemaker. I appreciate the people who made the stainless steel to make the pacemaker and the people who make the wires for all the wires, and the people who make all the innards, the diodes and transistors that are also in the pacemaker. And I appreciate the truck drivers who drive the trucks to develop, to deliver all these parts to the manufacturer. And I appreciate the people who make the tires, and I appreciate the farmers who grew the food to feed them, engineers who thought about making these pacemakers and trace it all the way back on as far as you can. I said, and then you can write at the end, but one day, I hope they won't need this pacemaker.
She says, okay, so that was like, October of 2003, 2002. And so this is now five, six months later.
And so she's walking back. And I said, yeah, yeah, I remember. She told me the story. And I was, yeah, yeah, I remember the story. I said, well, how are you doing? She says, oh, I'm doing great. I was like, oh. So then I went, oh, wow, you're doing great. I said, she must have gotten the transplant, right? So it's been, you know, probably it takes three or four months to kind of recover from the transplant. So she probably got the transplant and she's feeling better, and that's probably what's going on. And I said, oh, so did you get the heart transplant? She says, no.
Said, oh, okay. Did. Did they change your medication? She said, no. And I said, okay. I said, well, what changed? And she says, well, I started doing that thing you talked about with the gratitude Journal. I said, well, okay, that's nice, but. But what changed?
Because.
Because, you know, gratitude is a wonderful thing, and there's a ton of literature on the benefits of gratitude, but this is severe, weak, severely weakened heart. This is transplant heart failure. What has gratitude got to do with that?
And she says, nothing else has changed. And I was like. She says, but I've done it religiously every day. She's. A matter of fact, since I've spoken with you, I have not been back in the hospital.
I was only able to walk 50 to 100ft. I'm now walking two miles a day.
I said, well, let's take a look at your heart.
So we had the echo machine there. And we took a look at her heart, and her heart, which had had an ejection. So the ejection fraction is the amount of heart, of blood the heart pumps up. So it fills up with blood, squeezes out about normally 50 to 60% of the blood that's in there. That's not a hundred percent. You don't want 100%, but it's usually more than 50. Anything less than 50 is weak. Anything less than 30, getting started to be pretty severely weak. Hers was 20, so it was very. It was severely weakened.
So we did her echo, and her ejection fraction was about 30 or 35%.
Not normal, but a lot better than 20%.
And she had something called the left bundle branch block. And she needed that pacemaker. That was the right thing to do. By all means, it was the right thing to do. But she had, I believe, because as I think back, she had so much anger and resentment toward the space maker. She wasn't allowing it to do the things that it could do. And all of that anger and resentment, again, was causing her heart to work harder because, again, it was activating the sympathetic nervous system, which causes artery constriction.
All right, as you secrete things like adrenaline, artery constriction, so the heart has to pump against higher pressures. It has to work harder. So she wasn't allowing that. And basically, in this mindset technique we would call gratitude, that was. That was able to essentially allow the pacemaker to do its thing. Now, the reason why is that all important? Well, that night is the night I had the heart attack. And I'm laying in the emergency room, and I'm like, I'm upset. I'm 20, 43 years old, 42 years old, actually. Three weeks before my 43rd birthday. And so I'm think, I'm scared. I'm angry. Like, this is going on. I've got all this stuff to do at work. You know, I hadn't had a day off in. In three years, but, you know, the taxes were due. It was March 10th. Taxes were due March 15th. Anyway, there was all this kind of stuff going on, and.
And I thought about that. I thought about gratitude first. I was like, how do I do gratitude? There's nothing for me to grateful for here. This is. I'm. I'm screwed.
And I knew I was having a massive heart attack. I'd seen my EKG at that point, and I'm like, I'm 43 years old, and I'm having this massive heart. I'm. You know, if I survive it, I'm screwed if I don't survive it. My poor wife is going to have a million dollars in debt that she can't pay.
I had two kids that were 11, 12, 13 years old, and, you know, what are they going to do?
So I had all this sort of guilt. What do I have to be grateful for? And then I thought of this woman.
So I always say, if I hadn't seen that woman that day, I'm not sure I would have thought about this. And so I started to have to find a way to be. What do I find to be grateful for? Well, at that very second, that instant, the pharmacist was running from the pharmacy into the ER carrying this vial of this blood clot dissolving drug, which was a new drug that they were going to give me to dissolve this blood clot causing this. This massive heart attack.
And at that moment, I was grateful she was running. And I thought, you know, she had to deliver the medicine, but she didn't have to be running, but she was running for me. And I was grateful.
And then I was grateful for the medicine. And then the. The people who made the medicine and for the company that made the medicine and for the engineers and the chemical engineers who thought of how to make the medicine and the IV bag and the plastic in the IV bag and the tubing and the iv, the needles and the stainless steel and the needles and the people who developed the needles and the truck drivers who drew. You know, I went on it and I just kept going on and on and on. And, you know, I got that medicine. That medicine normally works about half the time in 90 minutes. You know, the longer it takes to open up the artery, the more damage is done.
That I got that medicine and the artery opened up in 13 minutes.
Now, I can't say that if I wasn't practicing gratitude, that that wouldn't have happened. So I can't say that. But what it did do for me is it put me in this frame of where, again, I was less, activating my sympathetic nervous system less, and maybe activating the parasympathetic system, more calming things down. And if I would have been more angry and more fearful, the heart would have had to work harder, and that would not have been a good thing.
[00:33:11] Speaker C: So how do you work with people these days to.
To help them, to get them into the right frame of mind, to get them into a. A mindset in a space that improves their health. How. How do you work with people?
[00:33:31] Speaker A: So the first and foremost is people have to understand that they have to be willing to take some responsibility for their own healthcare and health and healthcare.
In the United States, most people are not willing to do that. In the United States, most people put all of the responsibility on the health care provider, the physician or nurse practitioner or whatever. And so if you have migraine headaches, you expect the doctor to figure out what's going on, you got migraine headaches, and then expect you to fix it for him to fix it, him or her give you a medicine there. Diabetes isn't a great example, right? Like in diabetes, yes, you do have to be genetically predisposed to diabetes. However, diabetes is more of a lifestyle issue than it is anything. Type 2 diabetes, I'm talking about.
And again, people would rather just go to the doctor, oh, you have diabetes, you need this medicine. Now you need a second medicine or a third medicine. It's very common to be on two or three medicine.
And those medicines, though they are helpful in lowering your sugar and preventing some of the complications from diabetes, they're not curative.
And so I'm not gonna say don't take the medicines, because the medicines are important by all means. However, it's easy for the doctor to just write a prescription. It's easy for the patient. I just take this. But then the patient is unwilling to do make the lifestyle changes that need to be made that are curative. And they don't need to be like drastic changes. They don't have to go out and start running marathons or anything like that.
They just have to become more active because activity is a big part of diabetes or inactivity. They have to lose weight. They have to learn how to, you know, what is it that they're eating? They have to. There's a stress component, you know, to that as well, and learn how to manage all of that. And so the first thing, by all means, is you have to be willing to take some responsibility, not a hundred percent, but some responsibility for your health and your healthcare. So that's first. The second thing is really you start to understand the power of, let's call it the power of beliefs or the power of thoughts that we just talked about.
How these thoughts, how these beliefs affect your physiology positively or negatively. In our society, it's mostly negatively. So we can put that under the term of mindset and try to get people to explain or understand how vitally important that is.
And then the third part is really this idea of reframing the perception, reframing how you look at your life and how you look at you know, whatever it is. And that helps change that physiology sometimes instantaneously. Like, if you're in a car with that thing with changing that gravitude, it, like, works instantly, you know. And so. So those are sort of the.
At least how I think about it is those. Those three kind of components.
[00:36:22] Speaker C: Okay, so.
So that describes sort of the prerequisites almost, of what people. People need to do and are willing to do.
And then in a more. In a. In a practical sense, how do you. How do you work with people? How do you interact with them? How do they interact with you?
What kind of services do you provide?
[00:36:45] Speaker A: So the first thing when I. Especially when I was seeing patients face to face, so the first thing, and this is important, is to make sure you get a medical evaluation, right? So if you're having some kind of symptoms, some kind of illness, headaches, belly pain, chest pain, I, as a cardiologist, obviously, I saw a lot of chest pain and palpitations. The first thing you got was not an evaluation about, you know, your emotional, you know, whatever. The first thing you got was a standard western evaluation. Make sure you weren't having a heart attack. Make sure you didn't have unstable angina. Make sure you didn't have some kind of heart disease that was causing your issue. So if you're having headaches, make sure that you don't have a brain tumor. Even though that's uncommon. It happens.
If you're having, you know, belly pain, make sure you don't have appendicitis or Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis or something.
So that's important. You don't. You don't. We're not throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. We're not saying that Western medicine is bad or what have you. We just don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. It's, you know, it focuses a lot on the physical.
If all that comes back, your chest pain, you don't have coronary disease. You're not having a heart attack. You're. You don't have a brain tumor, you don't have appendicitis or Crohn's disease, then you can start to look at these other sort of issues. So then it's a matter of sitting down and saying, oh, hey, what is going on in your life? Right? You got headaches. Let's talk about the pattern of these headaches. When do these things occur? And you start to think about, okay, it's when I, you know, more work Related. I've got this boss who's, you know, a jerk and he's really difficult. And you know, and so maybe you can't, you know, one option is leave the job. Well, maybe you can't leave the job. Maybe there's, you know, so that's fine. How are you going to sort of deal with this issue? How are you going to choose to perceive it differently and sort of start to work with that. And then, you know, and we had a mental health counselors, therapists in, in the office as well who also worked with these patients with me and taught them other techniques. So it wasn't really like psychoanalysis. It was more, you know, cognitive behavioral therapy and these other sort of therapies that, that exist today that are very, you know, powerful techniques to help with some of these reframing of the way you look at your life and then how again you're going to take some responsibility. So what are the changes you're going to start making? You know, so we didn't talk about things we, we used to not use the term like exercise. We use the term activity. So live an active life. You don't have to be out again running marathons, you know, and say, well, I don't have time, you know, with my kids or whatever. Well, maybe you could do something active with your kids. You guys can get bikes and you can go out and you know, ride. You don't again have to be doing, you know, sprinting or anything like that.
You know, when we talk about food, we talk about nutrition as opposed to diet. You use the term diet. People think about weight loss and all that kind of stuff. Weight loss may be important, but just think about eating more nutritiously, you know, better food, less processed foods, more natural foods and things like that.
So just trying to look at this in a holistic way and in a complete lifestyles.
[00:39:38] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
And you're building an online presence, an online community.
Where is that? And, and what does that look like?
[00:39:50] Speaker A: So, so the, the whatever you want to call it, the, the online part of it is called Gratefully well comes from the gratitude and, and what I'm, the, I'm attempting to do with Gratefully well is transform what I did one on one with patients for the last three decades to a digital online educational space where basically share these experiences like I'm sharing here today and, and getting people to understand this.
I like to call it holistic approach to health and healthcare. So started a website called GratefullyWell.com. it's not much of a website now but there is a seven day gratitude challenge. You can sign up for there.
I started a newsletter that is hosted on substack.com that newsletter is called Gratefully well, it's free and I write about these things. So you can go and encourage people to go and subscribe to the newsletter for that. Eventually, as part of, part of the newsletter there will be workshops. So I have a workshop coming up at the end of this month of the end of August where it'll probably be several weeks, three or four weeks where we start to start to show people the whole Gratefully well process, what it looks like and how they can implement that. And that's really for, I think of the groups of people sort of in three different ways. It's kind of for everyone.
But holistic minded people who are, you know, want to stay well, they're into prevention, they don't have any illnesses. It's, there's, there's usefulness there. People with these medically unexplained symptoms where they've been evaluated and they're still having symptoms and they want to get a more holistic approach, they will gather something from it. And even people then with chronic, known chronic diseases like diabetes or heart disease or cancer, again, I think when, when they can start to look at this in a more holistic fashion, there's a lot for them as well.
[00:41:50] Speaker C: So are you looking now for folks to join that sort of initial launch group for that workshop? In that group?
[00:42:01] Speaker A: Yeah. So I'm thinking this first one is kind of like a pilot and we're looking for maybe 20 or maybe 25 people.
And what I'm doing, again, the challenge that I'm having is, you know, what does this look like in a group setting, in a virtual group setting and such. And so I need, you know, I'm looking for people who are willing to take responsibility for the healthcare but also willing to then give me feedback and participate in the workshop. So look for people that are willing to, you know, tell me what worked, what didn't work, what might work better, you know, other suggestions, what didn't work at all.
I'm pretty thick skinned, so you don't have to worry about insulted me or criticizing me because I really want this to be valuable. So I wanted to add value. I don't want it to be, you know, just something else that, you know, no one really finds useful and that one will be free that, that workshop.
[00:42:58] Speaker C: Well, that's terrific. So if this is resonating with you, if you're listening to this and you are, you know, willing to take on some responsibility for your own wellness and would like to explore the idea, the ideas of the, the power of, of mindset in making us feel good and feel better and to heal, then that's an open invitation to go to gratefullywell.com to get in touch and to sign up with Dr. Torelli and be a part of this pilot program to help him develop the workshop and the process and the protocol in a group setting and give lots of feedback so that you can share with him how it went and more importantly, perhaps to help him deliver that, you know, more in the future.
So, Dr. Trelli, I just really, really appreciate, I am grateful that you came to spend time, time with me and with us on what's worthwhile. I'm, I'm grateful and appreciative that you have invested your, your time, your effort, your energy into helping others to.
[00:44:30] Speaker A: You.
[00:44:30] Speaker C: Know, unlock the, the power of their own sort of positive mindset within their, their own health. So, you know, clearly you have dedicated yourself for many years.
You worked a 2000 plus day week back in the days, in your early days of cardiology, but now you are investing your time and energy in different ways to help people to be well. And I appreciate that. I'm grateful for you and thank you so much for coming on.
[00:45:04] Speaker A: Well, thank you and I'm honored and I'm grateful that you're doing this work as well because again, I know that putting on a podcast is not an easy thing and, and, and what you're doing is, I just think, incredibly important. So I appreciate the work you do.
[00:45:20] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:45:22] Speaker B: Looking for more? Visit whatsworthwhile.net to listen to podcast episodes, learn from books and articles, and live better by choosing healthy products and practices. I'm now offering services through worthwhile advisors for personal coaching, professional advising, speaking and group facilitation. If you or your team are ready to reduce stress and anxiety, build vitality and momentum and accomplish your goals with, without burning out, then please contact me, Ramsey Zimmerman, through the website or on social media like Instagram X or LinkedIn. Thanks.
