Your Body Isn't Broken — It's Been Trying to Get Your Attention
Dr. Karyn Shanks
(YouTube Transcript)
Aneta (00:03): Doctor Karyn Shanks, thank you for joining me today. So excited to have you on the show.
Dr. Shanks (00:08): Thanks for having me. I'm really happy to be here.
Aneta (00:11): Yes. And should I call you Karyn?
Dr. Shanks (00:13): Yes, please.
Aneta (00:17): Yes. Okay. Wonderful. I wanted to give you the respect, of course. I am so excited because you've spent over 40 years in medicine. And you were kind enough to send me your book, which is amazing. And I'm curious. What made you write your book now?
Dr. Shanks (00:34): I couldn't help myself. It just bubbled up, and it sort of emerged during one of the most complicated times of my life. So it was really inconvenient, but it's like I just had to write it. There are so many unmet needs amongst humans on this planet. I mean, that's a very obvious statement, but I work with people with Chronic complex illness every day who have slipped through the cracks of the types of health care that we have to offer them. And their needs aren't rocket science. They're basic, and they're understandable, and the treatments are accessible. So I felt this, I guess, just this anxiousness to put the information about how humans operate, how we're made, what affects us.
What are the conditions that cause our bodies to organize around suffering and chronic illness? Because it's all stuff people can understand. And I think once they understand it, it gives them kind of a sense of empowerment and agency over what they can personally do to make their lives better, as opposed to relying on a system of medicine that really doesn't know how to see them the way they are and help them in the way they really need to be helped. And I'm not bashing our system of medicine. I think it's absolutely brilliant at what it does, which is save lives, acute medicine, catastrophic care. We need that. It's brilliant. It isn't what helps people with chronic illness and chronic problems.
Aneta (02:11): Yeah, or even to prevent the chronic illness.
Dr. Shanks (02:14): Huge part of it. Absolutely. That's right.
Aneta (02:17): So when I started reading your book, it was interesting because you said you remember very early on, I think when you were in medical school, where you already started to have a sense that what you were learning was not either maybe the way you perceived the world or what you understood about the body, like something internally was telling you there's something off here. Can you just talk a little bit more about that? Because that was so curious to me so early on. It wasn't like you were saying, after decades of practicing, you knew early on that something was amiss.
Dr. Shanks (02:51): I've always felt like I have this really good alignment radar inside my body. So here I am, a young medical student, between my first and second years. The first year of medical school was very hard, but it was kind of magical because we're learning all the science of being a human: the biochemistry, cell biology, and it's complex, and it's beautiful, and I'm like, I can't wait till we start applying this to people. Like, this is a huge part of how we can help people heal. But as soon as we started the second year of medical school, we immediately moved from all that beautiful science to something very different.
Now we're going to learn what goes wrong with people. So it's basically pathology courses. Here's the disease, here's what it looks like under the microscope, and here's the medications that have been developed to treat that disease. So pharmacology was part of that. And we never look back. We never like framed it in that science. We never started with a person's problem.
And thought about it in the context of all that beautiful science. It was now memorizing the disease boxes, and all that went with them. And it was kind of shocking, and it was deeply, deeply disappointing. I didn't understand it. I just didn't have the sophistication, I guess, to really understand why I was so disappointed and why I felt such a strong sense of grief.
And continued to feel that way throughout my training. And into my early days of my practice as well, when I was hit with, my gosh, I really didn't learn anything to help these people. The person who walks in the clinic and says, I've been really fatigued for five years. I don't know anything about fatigue. It's not a disease.
Aneta (04:42): That is so crazy. And it's so true. And also I'm sure you weren't given that much time to be able to ask a lot of questions to go deep anyway. And I think right now, just from what I understand, doctors have, on average, what, six minutes, less than ten minutes to try to see per patient. Was it like that when you first started practicing as well?
Dr. Shanks (05:02): No, and actually I really lucked out with the first internal medicine group that I started working with. I wasn't given time limits. So I wasn't paid based on time.
Aneta (05:10): Wow.
Dr. Shanks (05:11): So I insisted on an hour with each new patient. Now I spend a lot more time than that with my new clients, but at the time that was unheard of. But I needed it, and they needed it. And then pretty soon my partners are referring their complex patients to me because they don't have the time and don't want to go there. They don't want to delve into complex issues. So yeah, but that's how it is today. There's no way around it because of insurance constraints and what have.
Aneta (05:45): So, what have you noticed during your time? You said four decades plus of practicing. You mentioned chronic illness, and I know in the book you talk a lot about burnout as well. What have you started to see in terms of trends in terms of people's health? Because I feel like in one way, people are becoming more sick, but then also more educated because there's so much information out there, which can be very confusing. So,
Dr. Shanks (06:08): Yes, yes.
Aneta (06:11): What are you noticing or what have you seen in terms of what is happening, especially here in the States?
Dr. Shanks (06:17): Yes, so I don't have statistics to necessarily back this up. Of course, so we do have statistics about the known common chronic illnesses, diabetes and heart disease, and cancer; all the incidences of those are increasing, skyrocketing. We're on a sick planet; we're sick people. I try not to be sick, but my practice is all people with what I'll call chronic complex illness because they'll have a variety of things going on.
They've slipped through the cracks, maybe they have something that most physicians aren't well versed in treating, like they'll have a persistent Lyme disease type of picture that is very poorly understood and not treated very well in conventional practice, or they'll have some environmental illness or toxicities combined with the chronic infections or just an array of things with nutritional deficiencies and I think we're seeing more and more of how stress and that's sounds like such a benign word, but I mean the types of distress and trauma that people are experiencing today is just devastating in terms of how people feel and their health.
I think yeah, it's a growing problem, yet at the same time there is so much more information. There's a lot of really good information. People are listening to podcasts on functional medicine. They're reading about it. They're starting to take things, situations into their own hands. They're visiting people with sort of that functional medicine or something similar, an integrative medicine background, and they're more getting their needs met.
And people are learning how to optimize their health so you don't get sick in the first place. So that's growing at the same time. But it's hard. I have to say I think it's very difficult for a lot of our population to access that. It's kind of an elite medicine right now. You have to pay. That's right.
Aneta (08:07): Right. 'Cause you have to pay out of pocket. Yeah.
Dr. Shanks (08:11): That's right. So it's something that needs to grow, and we have to get creative about how to improve the accessibility to that kind of medical care.
Aneta (08:19): When did you start to work in the functional medicine or integrative medicine space? And hopefully those are the correct terms to use. Yeah.
Dr. Shanks (08:26): Yeah, that's great. I would say shortly after I began practice, after finishing residency, I knew I was woefully deficient in what I needed to know. And so that's when I kind of began what I would call my integrative medicine journey. I did courses in nutrition and herbology. I found the Holistic Medical Association and started going to their conferences and started learning about women's health and hormone, hormone therapy.
And then the Institute for Functional Medicine came to be somewhere in the late 1990s, and I discovered them and started training with them, and they were a huge part of my kind of re-education and learning to look at human beings in a completely different way. That was very, very helpful.
Aneta (09:11): In your practice, were you able to integrate those things?
Dr. Shanks (09:16): For a while. And then I knew I needed to leave. I needed to open my own practice. So I did that around two thousand, somewhere in that neighborhood, and I opened my own practice.
Aneta (09:28): Okay, wonderful.
Dr. Shanks (09:29): Yeah. Yeah.
Aneta (09:30): One of the concepts that I love in your book is that you talk about the fact that we are not broken, that we do not need to be fixed, that our bodies are so intelligent, and that we have the capacity to heal. Can you just talk a little bit more about that? Because I think that the way we are marketed to, the way the information that comes through on drug commercials and telling you to ask your doctor for medicine, to what comes into your social media feed, is really overwhelming. And so it can be so confusing. So what do you want people to know about just the power of our own bodies?
Dr. Shanks (10:10): The way medicine is practiced and has throughout its history, a few hundred years, our version of biomedicine-based medicine really looks at people as parts and problems. So there's kind of a historical basis for this, but at around the time when biomedicine was getting started. It was during a time called the scientific revolution, and the body went to science, and the mind and the spirit, and all the human intangibles went to the church.
And there's a lot of history there that I'm not an expert on; that part, but there is this really interesting history where those things were kind of split. And the body was looked at as a machine, like beholden to the laws of physics, which it is. But not the physics of that time, Newtonian physics, not mechanical-based physics, but it's much more interesting the way we think about physics today.
But we're looked at as then parts and problems. And so if something goes wrong, some part of us is broken. And if you think about how anyone who has chronic illnesses, chronic issues, and is going into the clinics and the hospitals, and you work with a specialist for each, you go to your GI doctor for your gut problems, and you go to your heart doctor to fix your heart. And you've got all these different players focusing on an individual part, and it gives people the impression that we are parts. We're many parts, many problems, I like to say, which is not how it is.
Sure, we have arms and legs and a head, but our biology is this beautiful, just completely integrated, dynamic, interconnected. You can't separate any of it. And one part affects the other; I mean, everything just is. We don't have a word for it. So that's why it's hard to find words. We only have words for parts. We don't have a word that captures how integrated, how whole we actually are.
And so that's what's in our heads then. We’re parts and problems: a thing breaks, we get diabetes, something's broken, we take the drug, and that fixes our diabetes. Or we think it's a genetic problem, and genes can play into what we can get have a genetic predisposition for all kinds of things, but how our genes are ultimately expressed depends on everything about our lives.
That's called epigenetics, where gene expression depends on the environment. So we're most of us aren't setups for what we think will come based on what our genes are saying or what happened to our parents and grandparents. So yeah, we're just looked at all wrong, and we're treated all wrong. It all has to do with the convenience of having specialists take care of a single doc, although if you watch TV you would you'll learn something very different. I remember, like, how the house, the physician in that show.
He would do brain surgery one afternoon, and the next day he's doing somebody's gut, he's doing a colonoscopy. You have to specialize. There's a certain convenience and practicality to having all those specialists, but then there's no one looking at the whole person and sort of pulling everything together.
Aneta (13:27): And that's where I think so many mistakes can get made. I won't get into the details, but I did have a very close I live in Cleveland, so Cleveland Clinic is right here, world-renowned, and had a friend's son in there, and it was one of those things where you observe where many different specialists are part of a team working to fix something that was happening. And I remember just saying, but who's his doctor?
And they're like, no, it's a team, and we switch every two weeks. And I was like, wait, what? Like every two weeks, new people are in charge of this body, and you're all just responsible for like an organ. And you hope that somehow this all comes together. It's exactly what you were talking about. And I thought that that was the craziest thing I'd ever heard. But I think they thought I was crazy for asking who their doctor was. Because they were like, well, we all are. And I'm like, this is where you could see how it could get really you can
Yes. And it happens. And that is one reason why people slip through the cracks. Is because no one's really looking. And then that team, like you were describing the team, they're off, then there's a new team on, and they maybe haven't gone through all the notes, or yeah, and a lot can get lost.
Aneta (14:42): Yeah, it can get lost. And my daughter's in the medical field, and she always says, Mom, she's like, you have to be your own advocate. She said, I tell my patients this. And I tell everybody and all of us, like, you have to ask questions, you have to be informed, if something doesn't feel right. It's all within your rights to be able to go talk to somebody else. And so do you think that people are starting to be more empowered when it comes to their own health?
Dr. Shanks (15:08): Think they are. And a lot of the people who come to me are clearly very empowered. And they come in with a lot of really good questions and insights about what hasn't worked and what their needs might be going forward. They challenge me. I love that, but not all doctors do. But when I see that, I'm like, this person's gonna do really well. So I think that's changing, but for a lot of folks, when you're sick. Especially if you're really sick and you're unexpectedly sick. Let's say post-COVID.
First, COVID was a crisis, just in general, and then you get sick, and then you develop post-COVID syndrome scenario, and your life is suddenly disrupted. It's shocking. You feel incredibly vulnerable. It's really hard to then go in feeling empowered. But still your point is
And what your daughter is preaching is exactly right. We do need to go in with more agency into all these encounters and be willing to fire our doctors if we need to.
Aneta (16:06): Right. So if someone's listening in, maybe they have only experience with Western medicine, with their traditional doctors, the insurance, but they're curious about what a functional medicine or integrative medicine physician does. Can you just explain a little bit about maybe what is different, what they could expect from a visit with you?
Karyn Shanks (16:28): Sure, sure. So there are physicians who call themselves functional medicine, and there are other physicians who will call themselves integrative. They're a little different, but there's a ton of overlap. When I think of an integrative physician, I think of someone who is seeing their patient as a whole person, and they're integrating not just aspects of traditional medicine, but they're also bringing in other types of therapies. They're thinking about the person's stress levels and maybe their past trauma, and they know that that needs to be addressed.
So it's a much wider scope of seeing the person and identifying different types of therapies that could help them, from nutrition to chiropractic to the whole gamut. And in functional medicine, physicians have actually typically been through some kind of training. And it has more of a philosophy behind it, and it's a philosophy of organization that we are organized in this very particular way, and we have a systems biology that is very meaningful and intelligent. And rather than seeing people through the lens of a disease.
We see people through the lens of this complex systems biology and how that biology interrelates with the environment and all the person's life experiences. So that's more of a philosophy
Aneta (17:48): That's it. Okay.
Dr. Shanks (17:50): Yeah, it's beautiful.
Aneta (17:52): It's really interesting. So if someone were to come to you, what could they expect in like a first visit? What are the types of things that you are investigating or having conversations about? Because you mentioned it could be an hour, you might go longer with a new patient.
Dr. Shanks (18:07): Yeah. Since I've been in a dedicated functional medicine whole-person space, my new client visits will usually be two hours, which would be the minimum, and could go as long as four, though four hours is way too long. Everybody's exhausted. But I really want people to have the opportunity to tell their entire story from start to finish without interruption. And many of them have never been able to do that.
And their story is huge. So I want to make sure they can do that. And that we have a chance to, like, really connect, and then I have an opportunity to tell their story back to them to make sure I'm hearing it right, but also to help them feel like we're sharing this story now. We're partners. And then they'll be testing, usually some kind of testing, and the people who typically come to see me are chronic and complex.
They've been through the wringer. It's time now to throw a wide net out. I tend to do a lot of testing because they've been dinking around, and they've slipped through the cracks, and their life has been on hold, and we just need to get to the bottom of things. And sometimes it's pretty obvious to me what's going on. Sometimes it's not.
There's so much. We've got a lot of investigating to do. Yeah, and then we start this process of kind of helping them reorganize. What I want to know is how this person is organized biologically, psychologically, emotionally, because it's all connected.
How are they organized right now? That could mean, well, their nervous system is like really overwhelmed, and they're vigilant, and they're scared and can't sleep, and they're just really overly stimulated and their body's inflamed. So, they're organized in that kind of way. They're in this sort of hypervigilant, overwhelmed, and inflamed. So what could that be? I have to think through all those things: possible chronic infections, environmental exposures, nutrient deficiencies, all these things. And we slowly figure it out. We slowly teach them, and I try to do it in a way that doesn't overwhelm them.
Aneta (20:09): Yeah.
Dr. Shanks (20:11): Because that doesn't help; it's a lot. Sometimes it is a lot. And I ask a lot of people as we're working together. Just changing your diet can be a huge thing, and that's like one small piece of often what we're doing. So it takes time.
Aneta (20:25): Yeah. Yeah, it takes time. And I think, as you said, you're looking at the whole person and trying to understand because so much has happened up till the point when they come in to see you. That's just a moment in time, and there could be so many things that have happened. I love that you bring up the nervous system because it's something that I do a lot of work around as well. And so many of us are in a constant sympathetic state, which we're not supposed to be.
And of course, that can create all kinds of disease and illnesses. And so what have you learned? I know that in part of your book you talk about flow and energy and vitality and life force within us. Can you talk a little bit about maybe what it looks like to actually be optimally healthy? How should we be feeling? Because I think so many of us maybe are tired, we don't feel great, maybe there's some aches or pains, and we just are told, well, that's what happens when you age, or that's what happens. But what are we actually supposed to feel like, look like, sleep like when we are healthy? Because I don't know that, yeah.
Dr. Shanks (21:26): Yeah. Right. Good question. That's such a good question. Of course, nothing's static. And so you we when we talked about optimal wellness, we're not talking about this perfect little place up here. There's never perfection. There are always challenges. The key is that we're adaptable. So we can
Aneta (21:43): Sure.
Dr. Shanks (21:45): go through something. Maybe we get sick. I got Lyme disease in the spring. And things happen to all of us is what I'm saying. And it's about how can we be flexible and move through that? Move through the challenges, but come back, come out on the other side feeling great. Maybe we even learned a few things. So now we feel even better. We're more adaptable. So resilience, to me, is about adaptability being more than anything else.
We're like the old oaks in the Midwest. You probably have them in Cincinnati and a big storm in the summer. It's like, my God, are they all gonna like be on the ground after this storm? And they're not because they have resilience that's built into their structure. And they get stronger and grow deeper roots the more they are thrown about in the wind. But
I think we should all expect that we can sleep well at night. Maybe we wake up to go to the bathroom, but if we are getting enough hours and we're getting good quality sleep, we feel rested when we get up in the morning. I think that's a very reasonable expectation. And if we're not, something is going on that is worthy of our attention. I think there is a way to eat well such that our nutrient needs are met.
So that supports energy production and all the systems of the body so we can feel well. I think it's really reasonable that we should be able to expect to, like, feel like, when my clients come to me, and I've paid a lot of attention to why they're coming, I ask them why, I ask them what their goals are.
They always say something like, I want my life back, or I want to be able to play in the backyard with my grandchildren. they it's things like that that I feel like have to do with life force, meaning, purpose type kind of things. So it's living a life that's filled with like purpose and enough energy to do the things that you love, but you're not gonna be able to push, push, push, push and maintain that sense of resilience and energy.
Aneta (23:44): I do. And one of the things that I know you also talk about that I love is that when we do, maybe if we don't feel well or we even have a disease or an illness that we've been diagnosed with, you say it's usually a signal. Like if we just think of this as a signal that something is wrong and we can do something about it. And so if we're not feeling great, many of us, I think, for too long have been taught to just push through.
Dr. Shanks (24:14): Yeah.
Aneta (24:14): Just ignore it. Just take the ibuprofen or take something stronger or mask it or just keep going, even though you're in pain or you're hurting. And so, what would you say to people that really have a hard time slowing down? Like they feel like somehow it's a sense of failure if we rest or pause or give ourselves more space.
Dr. Shanks (24:36): Well, first I'd say welcome to the club, because I think most of us, myself included, have been there.
Aneta (24:38): Yeah.
Dr. Shanks (24:42): It's still a challenge. That's because that's our culture.
Aneta (24:44): Yeah, culture.
Dr. Shanks (24:46): Our success is defined by how much we do. And imagine I trained in medicine. I mean, you just sacrifice everything for everybody at all times. It's very unhealthy. And women in general work, kids, family, everybody's needs before our own, that kind of thing. So that's part of our culture that we're all born into. And we need to learn to unwind that. One of my favorite authors recently,
Hersey is her last name; I can't remember her first name right now, but she has a book called Rest as Resistance, and she talks about rest as being a portal to the divine. You can't hear the divine when you're not quiet. I just love that, and part of what she means is a reverence for ourselves too and the divine within each of us. And we really deserve to rest. And we don't know how; we don't think we deserve it, we don't think that it's okay. Man, if people learn nothing else but that, that would go a long way to healing a whole lot. Yeah.
Aneta (25:50): Yeah. And in most spiritual practices, there is some element of rest or of restful practices that do allow you to rest for yourself, but to connect to the divine so that we can listen to the inner intelligence. And I do believe that when we do, we can hear the signals from our body. We have our intuition that says, go check that out, go talk to someone, so I love that. I love that you brought that up.
I want to go back to food because this is another area where nutrition and our food systems are involved, and every time I travel, I'm sure you hear this all the time. When I go to Europe and I eat there, I can eat whatever I want; the weight doesn't stay on, I'm not bloated, I don't have GI issues, I sleep really well and long, my body doesn't ache, all those things. And I am having wine, and I eat dessert if I want to, and I eat bread, and I do all the things that I don't do here. And typically the Europeans will say to me, You don't eat a lot. And I'm like, I don't think I do, but yet still as a woman who's fifty-four years old, I'm like, Okay, my body is changing. It doesn't feel great.
Now I know that our food supply is different and that we are aware of the chemicals we use and pesticides and all those things. But what do we do? If we live here in the States and we can't trust that organic is organic, not everyone has their own land to grow their own food. What do we do? How do we become better informed? Are there tips so that we are trying to get as many nutrients from whole foods as possible? And then the follow-up will be: are there some supplements that all of us probably need to be taking?
Dr. Shanks (27:38): Sure. Good question. I've heard that from so many people about traveling to Europe and how people who are gluten intolerant can go and eat the croissants in France. Yeah,
Aneta (27:45): Yes. yeah. Every day.
Dr. Shanks (27:49): I know. I think part of it is we're on vacation. We're not working, we're off, we're out of our ordinary lives, we're having fun. But I also agree the food supply is different.
The agriculture practices are different, et cetera, et cetera. What can we do here? Well, we do our best, and you're right, there is no perfect system. I trust that when I go to the store, especially if I go to my natural foods co-op or to Whole Foods, that I am getting organic. And I try to eat as much organic as possible. It is much more expensive to do that.
And that is a problem for a lot of folks. And so, look at the most contaminated fruits and vegetables and just try to avoid those. Dairy products, I think, are really important to choose organic because that's sort of the top of the food chain, very, very concentrated. Then I think it's really important you choose meats that are not from feedlots that are pastured because they're eating grass, they're not eating grain. You've got a completely different animal, completely different nutrient profile. So that's huge to the extent that we're able to be selective about what we eat. And I understand that not everybody can.
And again, that's something we as a society need to figure out how to solve that problem. But you can do that, and you can keep a lot of toxins out of your home. That's those are just as important as what we eat: what we put on our skin, what we're cleaning our house with. And there are tons of resources now. And avoiding plastics, I think, is huge.
That's pretty straightforward. Instead of using single-use plastic, you have your water bottle and don't store food or heat, especially heating food in plastic containers, that kind of thing. So those are powerful practices, I think at this point. Over the years, as I've been able to kind of dial in a lot of those practices, I feel really good. Most of the time. So I don't feel like I have to go to Europe to get that feel-good, you know? exactly. And you asked about supplements. I think it's key.
Aneta (29:55): That's good. Yeah.
Dr. Shanks (30:00): I do nutrition testing on everybody. I think I've had one person test perfect in my entire practice. Everybody needs nutrients. Everyone needs some support. We live in an increasingly toxic environment. So the nutrients that our bodies are using to detoxify, we're blowing through those really fast. The soil is not as rich in nutrition and nutrients as it once was; therefore, our food supply is not as rich in nutrition. There are a lot of reasons why we can't get all of our nutrients from food.
We can try, but then I think it's smart to have someone like a functional medicine practitioner who can do that testing for you and help you with an individualized supplement program. But there are some basic supplements that I think, if we can't afford the testing, it's not accessible to us, whatever, I think there are some basic supplements that everybody could benefit from. And that would be a good multivitamin mineral with B vitamins that are already activated, and it'll indicate that on the label.
Because there are some genetic issues that a lot of people have where they can't take B vitamins and convert them into their biologically active form. Probiotic, vitamin D, everyone's vitamin D deficient unless they live in the south and are out in the sun all the time. I think glutathione, which is the master antioxidant and detoxifier in the body, is hugely important, is really smart to be on regularly. And if I were to stop to think, I'd probably add five more things to that, but that's not to overwhelm, not to overwhelm.
Aneta (31:35): How do you feel? No, no, no. How do you feel about omegas for brain health?
Dr. Shanks (31:39): Yeah, that goes on that top list, omegas. Unless you
Aneta (31:42): Okay. Yeah.
Dr. Shanks (31:43): Eat salmon every day. You know.
Aneta (31:45): Well, but then you look at the salmon, and you're like, is it far more wild? And yeah. Yeah. They are. Yeah.
Dr. Shanks (31:51): Needs to be wild caught. But even our oceans are polluted. I know. I know it. Yeah.
Aneta (31:56): It's interesting. So I'm so glad we talked a little bit about the supplements because I think that some people take a lot and we don't know the quality. And then some people maybe don't take anything. And so I always feel like I need a little extra support. And of course, being here in the Midwest, vitamin D is non-negotiable. Yeah.
Dr. Shanks (32:10): Yeah. Yes, yeah.
Aneta (32:13): Is there a common test that people can ask for in terms of the blood work that you do for nutrients just to see what they might be deficient in?
Dr. Shanks (32:22): I really like it's a functional test from a lab called Genova Diagnostics Lab, and they have
Aneta (32:27): Okay.
Dr. Shanks (32:28): What's called Nutra Eval, and they're looking not just at levels; like you can get a blood draw and just look at, say, your vitamin B12 level. Well, what is a normal level for each individual? There's a huge variation. So I want to look at markers from the blood or the urine. That tells me how much of the nutrient is there in enough quantity that it's doing its job correctly in the chemistry of your body. And that's what this lab, this test does from Genova Diagnostics Lab.
Aneta (33:01): That's interesting.
Dr. Shanks (33:03): Yeah, and we can look at all the major vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, fatty acids, some toxicity markers. It's a really excellent test.
Aneta (33:12): And is it expensive? Is it a flat rate?
Dr. Shanks (33:15): It's like three hundred, three hundred and sixty bucks, something like that, without insurance. Some people's insurance will cover it. For what it tells us, if you do it every couple of years, I think it's a good investment. Mm-hmm.
Aneta (33:18): Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yep. Yeah. That's a great investment. And I do want to talk more about your book because I know that in your book, you've poured so much into it. And so can you just talk a little bit about maybe some of the practical things that you share in the book? I know that you've got a section that is devoted to resilience and some Tips and ways that we can continue. I think you call them nine core resilience stepping stones.
Dr. Shanks (33:50): Yeah, the vast content of the book is very practical. And there are practical things scattered throughout the book because life is all about practice. You don't need me to pontificate about a bunch of stuff. Trust that you are whole; you don't need to be fixed; you're not broken.
I offered these nine core resilience. I call them stepping stones. They're practices. I call them stepping stones because you kind of like decide which one you want to step on, and maybe you're gonna backpedal, and you're just stepping around and kind of choosing where you're gonna land. And I want people to use that, my book, as like a manual where they could just kind of zero in on what interests them or what they intuitively feel they need.
And so I start that whole section of the book with the first stepping stone, which is called be present. Because I really think that learning to notice and observe is key to everything else that you do for yourself. First, you have to notice how you feel. You have to notice what your body's telling you.
We need to be able to notice how we feel when we implement some kind of change. What transpired. And we're not really good at noticing. We're not good at being present for ourselves in our culture because we're not taught. Some of us are, or maybe we learn later in life. I learned later in life. And it's really key. It's also, I think, really key to being able to rest, to like stay in one place, to become more grounded, to learn sort of how to be still and listen and observe. So that's the first stepping stone. And I feel like if people do that one, they can just skim through the rest, so there's one on sleep rest, which includes sleep and the importance of rest and the importance of unwinding, and why rest is so hard for the reasons that we talked about; rest can feel dangerous.
We get into movement and food and nutrition, purpose, meaning.
Aneta (35:57): Yeah. I do a lot of resilience training with my clients, and there are usually pillars; there are about five pillars of resilience, many of which you are in these stepping stones. But then the other thing I noticed is just the connection to the Blue Zones and many of the studies of the Blue Zones and why people live over the age of 100, the higher concentrations. It's because they're doing these things. They have some sort of a presence practice, which could be spiritual in nature, or
Dr. Shanks (36:22): Yeah. Right.
Aneta (36:24): They find rest, they have community, they eat whole foods, they're naturally moving their bodies every day. They have different words for purpose, a reason to get up every single day. They have loving relationships. They live their
Dr. Shanks (36:36): Plus, right? Yeah.
Aneta (36:40): life so fully. So all of these things are, I think, they help us to be healthier, but then.
Dr. Shanks (36:45): Yes.
Aneta (36:45): They also help with the quality of life because we don't want to extend our life if you have to sit in a bed and you're not actually able to live. So I love that these actually allow people to not just improve the length, but maybe the quality of their life as well.
Dr. Shanks (37:02): Absolutely. 'Cause isn't that what we really want when we say longevity? Isn't that what we're really talking about? Yeah. I agree. Yeah, I agree.
Aneta (37:05): Yes. Yes. Yes. I think so. Yeah. Well, I can't wait for more people to read your book, Unbroken. I'm so excited for folks to get to know you, maybe through my community if they haven't already connected with you. And if they are curious about your books, about the services and ways they could work with you. What is the best way they can get in touch with you?
Dr. Shanks (37:33): My website is my hub, KarenShanksMD.com. That's Karen with a Y. KarenShanksMD.com. Yeah.
Aneta (37:38): Okay. Wonderful. And where can they purchase your book? Everywhere.
Dr. Shanks (37:44): Everywhere, including and it's in audio, which I narrated. That was a huge project, so please
Aneta (37:48): Wonderful. I love that. Yes. That's amazing. Karyn, I would love to ask you the final question, which is what does it mean to you to live the width of your life?
Dr. Shanks (38:02): Wow. Just every day connecting to where I am and who I authentically am and living in a way that's aligned with my purpose, which is what I contemplate on that every single morning in my meditation. Like, what do I need to learn today? What do I need to know today so that I can live as my whole, true, authentic self, and everything sort of stems from there. Yeah.
Aneta (38:31): I love it. Thank you so much for the amazing work that you do in the world. I wish you such continued success. And we'll include all the links in the show notes. And
Dr. Shanks (38:41): Right.
Aneta (38:42): I would love to connect with you at a later time. I'm thinking maybe I need that nutrient test. I think it sounds like it could be time.
Dr. Shanks (38:49): Thank you. It was great to talk to you.
Aneta (38:51): Thank you.