Denise (00:07):
Myth, Magic, Medicine and everything in between, two doctors talking...
Denise (00:15):
Hi, welcome to Myth, Magic, Medicine. I'm here today with Dr. Myrdalis Díaz-Ramírez who is a, I don't even know what you specialize in. Are you family practice or what?
Denise (00:27):
Actually, I graduated from anesthesiology and interventional pain management and these days we have an innovative medicine wellness center
Denise (00:38):
And you don't practice, you don't have standard... that's what you do now, or is this an additional thing to your practice of anesthesia?
Denise (00:46):
So I stopped practicing anesthesia many years ago. I just, closed down. We just, stopped doing interventional pain management and we have now what we call an innovative medicine practice, where we combine lifestyle medicine, functional medicine, regenerative medicine. We try to keep the patients as healthy as we, as we can identify the root cause of whatever it is that they have and making them stay healthier for longer with the least medication that we can.
Denise (01:13):
Okay. And, people are referred to you from the area, or this is
Denise (01:18):
So we're opening in August and yes, people should want a more holistic approach. It's a more complete and a more, I'd say scientific approach. We can go to a cellular level to, you know, through the use of peptides, for example, molecular level. And, it's, it's, it's different than usually treating symptoms, which is what we see commonly in many, offices.
Denise (01:42):
Unfortunately that's usually what the patients come in thinking they want yeah. It's, it's a whole education piece. What do you do, from an education point of view, for your patients? Or what will you be doing? Because obviously this is a new venture.
Denise (01:57):
Yeah. So we're gonna start opening in August and we are first going to do a whole evaluation of the patient where we are going to do the best physical exam, like from head to toe, mental exam questionnaires. We're gonna go and do also, have different parameters that we're going to be able to measure, inside [the clinic]. So they don't have to go to different places like trying to do the bone density, their body mass index, their, a lot of, the blood work and urinary work right inside, and then send a lot of that outside for micronutrients, genetics, hormones. So we try to define their current health state. And then from there develop like this is your book of your life, right now this is where you are, this is where you could be. And these are the things that we can do to get there, to change your story. So we want you to be the owner of your health story, and we are gonna give you the most information that we can. Organize, digest that for you, and then try to make a plan for that.
Denise (03:00):
Good, that however does not sound like it's something that most insurance companies are going to be thrilled by.
Denise (03:07):
It's going to be membership-based. It's a membership based practice. So no insurance, we don't take any insurance.
Denise (03:16):
What do you do to get the message out to people who can't come up and pay you that kind of cash do, are you doing any outreach within the community?
Denise (03:25):
So we're going to have
Denise (03:26):
Other doctors more interested in this holistic approach.
Denise (03:29):
So we're going to call it more innovative medicine, and we have different things that we're going to have. We're gonna have a YouTube channel to educate the community, educate the patients all over, because these are many of these things they can try to do on their own, along with their physicians And for people who cannot come here, we're going to have educational opportunities for physicians to come and learn from our model so that they can come and then maybe practice that or take that to their patients later. So we're working right now, intentionally on ways of bringing that to the practice, to the medical, regular medical practices.
Denise (04:09):
Can you talk a little bit about how you, how you made that journey yourself? What was it that drew you to that? What was, what didn't hold you in anesthesia? I mean, it's not a short, presumably some blood, sweat and tears
Denise (04:23):
To, well, from anesthesiology, I was drawn to pain management, intervention, pain management, because at heart, I was always seeing myself as, as you know, I really like doing procedures. So I saw myself a little bit more in the surgical area. I love the flexibility of anesthesiology itself, but pain drew me to pain. I developed a hand injury and for a period of time, I couldn't practice as anesthesiologist. So then I was doing my residency, like dumped in the pain center. So I could at least do something I learned to write.
Denise (04:52):
that happened in residency!
Myrdalis (04:54):
Left hand Yeah. I learned to write with my left hand and then I was able to see how the patients would come for follow ups and then how we were impacting not only the patients life, but the quality of life of a whole family by improving their pain and their quality of life.
Myrdalis (05:12):
And they were back again, contributing to the family. So that's how I got into pain management. And once I got into pain management, which I've been doing for over 20 years now, then seeing patient after patient having them come with many times, many conditions that can be just prevented with simple things. The, the things that the doctors talk about about good nutrition, sleep, exercise, all these things are real. They're true. And then we see them in our practices, but the patients were not coming to that practice necessarily to get that they might have coming for a pill to be, you know, just fixed like that. And we want to focus more on things that you can do the simplest way, because they are the longest lasting for you.
Denise (05:57):
Right.You say, you say simplest, but I'm not sure people understand, you know, I can take a pill that's easy. Yeah. Right.
Myrdalis (06:03):
Yeah. But the, but the complications of taking a pill, all that involves, because for example, if you take opioids nowadays here, it's not really that simple, you really have to come to your doctor almost, you know, between every one to three months to be monitored for that, you do get drug tested for that regularly. And then if you run out of those medications or the pharmacy doesn't have it, or something happens, you really don't have that access.
Denise (06:27):
Not treating the problem. It's just covering it up.
Myrdalis (06:31):
Yeah. And then you have their boom. Then suddenly you can go through withdrawal, which is not really a simple thing to go through So if patients realize that they can get these other habits into their daily living and many things that we can heal naturally, for example, we don't have deficiencies of antidepressants. We might have deficiencies of, hormones. So if we treat those, then we treat it more naturally, and then you don't get those other side effects, antidepressants, for example, they can decrease your libido. We have the hormones which can improve your libido if you're a candidate for them, for example. So just going to the more natural ways I saw that we have ways of healing ourselves from inside. And I decided to focus on that for long term, for maintenance, just looking to be healthier, and then doing those changes myself.
Myrdalis (07:23):
Even in terms of my diet, I had a scare where they told me, oh, you know, what, do you want to start on this medication, these statins? Right. And I say, no, don't don't, don't hit me with the statin. I'll just change my diet. And I have to tell you I've done that. And I've seen the changes myself, not only in, in the, the cholesterol levels, but also in the way that I feel that I project that I, that my body feels. And that had been significant for me. And because I've experienced those things myself, I've seen, my patients have changed. I want to really practice medicine that way. And I think that as physicians, that should be a priority, unfortunately our system, like we were talking about our system, the way that, that our medical system has evolved, doesn't allow us to necessarily concentrate on that, on those aspects. And it's very difficult to work on, on the patient's, first, mindset, because it's going to be a lot of work and coaching that we have to do to make them understand this. It's not really getting that feel.
Denise (08:22):
And also, of course, they're not, they're not static. They come to you and then they're back out in the world. That's still telling them, take this pill. This it, it's not, you're fighting against a fire hose of misinformation. That's coming at people.
Myrdalis (08:38):
So, yeah, but if you you'd be surprised, like right now, like many people really are craving this type of medicine that they're ready for a change. They've seen what taking that pill without taking care of the actual problem does to them, so we're getting that influx of questions, you know, how can I do this? And I was already referring many patients to this type of medicine. So I think there's, there's going to be a shift, you know, it's slow but we can, we can make a dent on that.
Denise (09:10):
Good. And hopefully there'll be lots of other people making dents. Do you reach out to other physicians in the area and, you know, let them know so that obviously you will be doing some marketing to them, but are you hoping that you will see other people's patients to manage
Denise (09:27):
That aspect
Denise (09:28):
Certainly of their care? Okay.
Denise (09:29):
Yeah. So I'm very fortunate because I've been in this community for 16 years now in a row. I was here even before for a short period of time. And every time I talk to any of my peers, they have been very excited about the concept and we're already, you know, sharing stuff. And they're already thinking about which of their patients can benefit from this model. So we are already building a list from them. And, we're very excited. We're very excited to what we're bringing to our community of Sarasota. And we want really to make this project not only a project for Sarasota it's for Sarasota, Florida, and beyond. So we are hoping to make it like a destination, where other, it can be a model of medicine for our community, for our physicians and patients, but also for people from other parts of the world.
Denise (10:18):
You mentioned that, you know, being able to do the radiological studies and, the blood tests, et cetera, do you offer other modalities?
Myrdalis (10:26):
So yes, it's a comprehensive team. I'm very fortunate. Once again, this is not something that I'm doing on my own. We have two other partners. One of them is Dr. Miranda Phillips., Dr. Miranda Phillips is an emergency physician, emergency medicine physician, who is also a lifestyle medicine physician. And she actually has acquired financial freedom through real estate, which has allowed her to do these other types of projects. And she's, one with us. The other one is Dr. Arun Rao, she's a bariatric surgeon. So with her background on weight loss management, all this stuff, she's gonna help us. And she has trained, also in aesthetics. So we are a comprehensive team of physicians. Besides that we also have some other practitioners, like we're going to have acupuncture, personal training nutritionist and massage therapists. And we're going to be able to provide the patients, not only the whole evaluation, we're also gonna be able to provide them with the aesthetics.
Myrdalis (11:27):
So we want them to look good inside, feel good,-looking outside and the way they look outside and we're going to have an experience for them where they can recover the same way that an elite athlete would. So usually, they have like infrared cryotherapy, compression, they have serial compressions. They have, we have IV therapy. We have, classes for them, cooking classes, educational classes for our patients. And we're going to also have educational classes for the community as well. So it's really a team approach that we're applying to this new concept.
Denise (12:07):
If I, if I can just make a little plug, please add a hypnotist to your list of people that you're going to talk to, makes a phenomen difference to a lot of things. Yeah.
Myrdalis (12:16):
Yeah. So we've been talking about the, the mental aspect, the coaching, the, hypnotist we're going to see how we're going to implement that part of the team, but it's certainly, in our next stage, we're going to be like doing this, opening, opening in stages and that's coming up as well.
Denise (12:33):
How long did it take you to plan the clinic.
Denise (12:35):
Since March
Denise (12:36):
And this is a complete, is it a refit or are you building from the ground up?
Myrdalis (12:41):
So we, I started planning in March, let me see, was it March or May, it's between March and May that I started.
Denise (12:52):
That's a month and a half ago.
Myrdalis (12:53):
March. It was March, really. So in March we started planning and then we have, we have found a location that will allow us to provide the services that we want to provide. So that location is already built, which is this building right next to me. And we are remodeling that and we are hoping to open in August, this is 2022 that you guys are seeing this reporting. So, yeah.
Denise (13:16):
Yeah, yeah. And how would people, uh, if people are coming from a way, if it's not just Sarasota people there, there's, Sarasota's a fairly big tourist destination. I assume. I certainly know the name, so it can't be that... I'm not terribly good with where things are in Florida. But people can come and, would spend a time and you'd build a plan for them and then they could go back to their home states and just keep in touch. Or how would you envisage that working do you do telehealth?
Myrdalis (13:44):
So we have, we have different membership levels and we're gonna be able soon to provide service across. I think most states is going to happen soon. We don't have that yet, where we could have telemedicine for those patients. But right now we're concentrating like on the Florida patients. When they come here or anybody who's visiting from outside, while they're here, we can certainly take care of them. We're going to be partnering with different places around the area where they could stay for longer periods of time. Yeah.
Denise (14:14):
Good. And do you, you envisage people seeing you, you know, for an annual checkup to make a new plan, or how do you think they are going to come for a specific issue?
Myrdalis (14:21):
That's definitely. Yeah, no, that's definitely part of it. Like in a membership, we have built into that our basic membership, like where they come for, the evaluation they're going to have after I gather, because first we're going to gather data like anything. Right. You gather the data and then we're not going to be making necessarily like a plan on the first visit that we have to wait for all these things. Then we sit down with them a second time and then we're going to have our periodic visits that are included there, where they can come. And, well, they will have to come or we're going to have a virtual visit so that we can make sure that what we talked about is being done for accountability, because nothing works without really accountability. So we're going to have the accountability, the support and the coaching for our patients as well.
Denise (15:06):
Okay. Well, obviously we all studied the history of medicine, way, way back when we were in school. Hippocrates, think it was Hippocrates who said* food is medicine, isn't it? Why do you think we fell away from practicing a more holistic approach? And now we're having to go back to that or hopefully some of us have gone back to that.
Myrdalis (15:27):
Well, you know, I think some things, as you said, sometimes are like easier in the way that it doesn't take time. Right. And we've looked for easier solutions that might come in the form of those pills that you were talking about. And then we've also as physicians historically, unfortunately we just want like to relax and be physicians, right?. And just let us do our thing. And I don't want to deal with any marketing or any business planning or any administration. So we've given all that to other people and those other people, you know, the intentions, good intentions might have been there, but things have evolved where not necessarily having the best health, basic long term benefits of changing a diet or contributing to your sleep in a longer meaningful way are going to be matching the goals that those managers might have in mind. So we have given away our rights to be able to direct medicine in many ways.
Denise (16:29):
How about, what do you feel about the way actually doctors treat themselves as the machines? We tend certainly in training, you don't eat properly cuz you haven't got time, you don't get enough sleep. You don't all the things that you're going to be teaching your patients about. How do you think we can approach that? Because it may well help a lot of us to have a more balanced life-style.
Myrdalis (16:57):
Well, I see that. I see. Yeah. I see that as a continuum, like where you have the physician who besides being a physician has really figured out what their priorities are. So they have, they know what for themselves, they have figured their mission, their vision, their values, their, their principles. So you have that physician who has all figured it out and they know, and they have chosen the things that they want for their life. And then you have somebody who has just blindly gone into medicine because it's what we do. And then we go through medicine and then is overwhelmed with everything on all the choices that we've had because it's just following the, you know, the, herd .
Denise (17:38):
There's no time to think. You just do it.
Myrdalis (17:40):
Yes, exactly. So it's not like the physicians, as in general, they do something. We do have a problem with physicians, you know, being burned out. We know that that's, that's an issue and it's the majority of us who are burned out right now. So the majority of us are not in that category who have, you know, figured out and who exercise and get their sleep and have maybe found entrepreneurship and other ways of passive income and things like that, to be able to come to medicine and to their patients in a much healthier way. So most of us are, are not there certainly. And that's why we have created like our maxAllure Mastermind, which is our mastermind for physician entrepreneurs. And that's because myself, I was burned out. I've been burned out more than once. And I found through entrepreneurship, which is SahaVida Institute, which is the Institute that we've been talking about is, is part of, of, of that
Myrdalis (18:34):
recovery for us, for me, it's giving me. But having control of your life, having control of your patients' experience, of your employees' experience, it means a lot to a physician. That's what we've been trained for, right? We've been trained for, to make things healthier and have these protocols. And when we are able to do those things, we are in control of that. As physicians, we are much happier and a lot of burnout comes from losing that control, that control that we're losing from, you know, you can mention just starting from a higher level, like something like Roe v. Wade, where actually I have physician friends who are very happy that that change is happening because of their, religious concerns. And then we have physicians who work there who are very unhappy, you know, as humans, because they feel that we're losing, rights for our patients.
Myrdalis (19:33):
So you have things that are so big that are difficult to control for a physician who's been trained to give their best to their, to their patients. And then you have the other things that trickle down from there. You have the pressures from the hospitals, the pharmaceutical companies, the health insurances with the prior authorizations and all those things, the requests and the requirements and the expectations that you're going to do all these documentation. And you have everybody documenting late , you know, at night without spending time with their families. So the lack of controllable, that whole experience then adds up. And then we have not only that as physicians, we are training until our thirties, we leave in our thirties and then we can get by then many people who are not trained were not studying for such a long time.
Myrdalis (20:24):
They can get into mid career crisis. And then coming up surely is midlife crisis. So you can have like this whole world, you know, like tornado of, things happening with burnout, mid -career crisis, midlife crisis. And there we are as physicians. So it's a lot of pressure to control that experience. And that's where the burnout is coming from, from all these other things. And when we're trained, it's like, here's what you have to do. You have to make sure that that patient's going to survive no matter what, that they're going to be healthy. And here are the things, all the things that you can do with that patient. However, we get out to the real world. It's like, how do we do all that, that we were trained? We're like, yeah, we were ingrained with that knowledge and we cannot really use it the way that we want because we have so many people between ourselves and between our patients. There's like so many layers for us to be doing our work that that control is lost.
Denise (21:24):
Yeah. And, and the loss of autonomy is huge in burnout.
Denise (21:41):
Do you wanna talk about, a sort of a more general, the things you, if they don't have your lovely clinic nearby them, what are the things that they should first look at in their lives when they think that they're not necessarily burned out, but they think that they could improve their general health if they addressed some of those things. Because not everybody has a sympathetic doctor to talk about. They'll go to a doctor who says, take this feeling down, take this ,don't exercise. Just take this. hopefully not too many of them, but there are a few.
Myrdalis (22:23):
So as a patient who really feels ill or who's really feeling that the system is not giving them the answers that they're looking for. One of the things that you should do, like anything, whenever you have a problem is to recognize that, that there is something happening and then write it down. I feel like through writing down doesn't mean that you have to journal every day. Journaling actually helps a lot and I think it helps a lot with gratitude and that can help you calm down and set up your priorities, but just write down those areas that are really bothering you as a patient before going to anywhere. And then you can identify from there where you think you need priorities and you can seek help depending on these things, that you have written down. As a patient, these days, there's a lot of help that we can get from reputable physicians.
Myrdalis (23:16):
And one of the things that we have is like, we have a lot of physician coaching for example, and you don't have to come to a clinic multidisciplinary like the one we have, we have a lot of physicians who have, opted out of being a physician through the regular health system. And they can help you navigate healthier ways of living. We have lifestyle coaches, we have sleep coaches. We have nutrition coaches. And those are physicians who have been trained in the regular system and they have decided to apply and combine these techniques. So one is first identifying where the problem is knowing that, that you need help and then looking for somebody to help you in this category. Another thing that you can do that we try to do for anything, in any area of our life, is that, get, surround your, surround yourself with the correct people.
Myrdalis (24:11):
So how do you do that? If you have an environment where you want to quit smoking, for example, and you're surrounded by smokers, that's really not going to help. Right? And you can love your family. You can love your friends, but there's some things that you have to come and do outside of that environment. And quitting smoking is very challenging to do inside a smoking environment. It's an addiction it's, you know,' it's a real challenge. If you keep going to that same, same area you going to tell me, you know, but that's where I live. That's yeah, but there's periods of time in your life. And during your day that you might be able to pull yourself out and really try to seek for an answer yourself. And we do that for, for many things. The other thing that we can do is look at examples of who you would like to be.
Myrdalis (24:58):
If you say, you know what I would like to be like that person. And if you are, if you're religious and people talk about, you know, what would Jesus do, right? And if you want to be healthy, you see that person who's healthy next to you or someone look at the way they, they eat, look at the way they do things and try to emulate them. And then whenever you're taking any action, you have to be intentional about anything that you're doing. So if you're gonna go and eat and I say, oh my goodness, I love my, whatever it is that you're gonna be eating and putting in your mouth, understand that whatever you put in your mouth is really like a drug is going to make a change in your body. And then if you see somebody who's eating, who's very healthy and you ask them how they're eating, how they're sleeping, how their activities are, then you go, why don't I do like X person does, right?
Myrdalis (25:51):
What would X person do? So those are changes that you can immediately implement in your daily life. And you don't have to go to a physician and you don't have to go to a coach yet to do, but these things you can do on your own. And then always finding a coach, as I said, that's going to be the quickest way to really get any sort of changes. But everything started with recognizing, getting into the right environment. Mindset is going to be very important. So any work that you can do on mindset is gonna really help you, um, achieve that change that you want in your life and trying to emulate what you want to be. And you know, COVID happened. We lost many people in COVID during COVID and that was, this were two years. Imagine that, I don't know if you remember at the beginning of COVID, people would say, oh my goodness, it's going to be like a year and a half before we have a vaccine right before we can all go out.
Myrdalis (26:48):
And so actually it was like a year, right? It was earlier than a year and a half that we had the vaccine and we had access to other things where we could go out. But imagine what sort of things could you have done in your life to change your life in that period of time? Right. If you had dedicated the years of COVID, which is it's a long time ago and it's a short time ago. And it was like yesterday that we started with COVID. Right? So just think about what you can do for short periods of time. And you don't have to say, oh, I'm gonna lose like a hundred pounds in one week because that's not going to work. So setting those goals smaller, like in small, dividing, dividing your goals into small goals, to make sure that you can do them. So make them actionable and make them reasonable and then make them where you can be doing them in a short period of time, in a reasonable period of time. All those things are going to help you to achieve the better health that you want to get. Important. Yeah.
Denise (27:44):
And your YouTube channel will cover those kinds of things.
Myrdalis (27:47):
They will, it will, we're gonna release our YouTube channel within the next month. It's gonna be SahaVida, the SahaVida Institute. So Saha, we have named our institute S A H A that Saha means health and Vida means life. So it's health life. We want to live a healthy life at the SahaVida Institute. We have, we want to have that for our patients. It's going to be SahaVida Institute' and it's going to be on YouTube. Our website, we have a landing page for any, anybody who wants to already register,, to hopefully be a patient with us. And that's available all
Denise (28:22):
That information will be in the show notes. So that's great. Yeah. Thank you so much. I know you have to go back and make sure that your clinic is being built.
Myrdalis (28:31):
Yeah. That's true. A building that the builders are there.
Denise (28:35):
Yes. Yes. Thank you so much.
Myrdalis (28:38):
Thanks for having me. Thank you very much.
Denise (28:42):
Thank you. Bye bye.
Denise (28:43):
Thank you for joining us at Myth, Magic Medicine. If you have found this episode useful, you can apply for free CME credit for the link provided in the transcript. If you're not a medical professional, please remember while we're physicians, we're not your physicians. So please consult with your own healthcare professional. If you think something you have heard might apply to you or a loved one. Until next time, bye bye
