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It's more than just a ticket. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My guest on today's show is Mohamed Ashoury.

Mohamed is a doctor, and he's here today to share with us some ideas of how to save money on your medical costs. Wouldn't it be great to know about the stuff that you actually need and also to know about the stuff that's a waste of money so you could get the same or better results for cheaper?

Mohamed, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. Mohamed Ashoury, MD Thank you, Josh. Josh Brennan I'm glad that you reached out to me with this topic. There's going to be two major aspects of our conversation. First, a little bit about your personal financial story, especially as it relates to early retirement.

Then we're going to dig heavily into the topic of medicine, of how to save money on medicine. I can just hear the screams of people coming right now. Don't save money on your health. You have to spend money on medicine. This is going to be a fun and provocative topic.

First, I'd love to hear a little bit about your personal story, especially as it relates to retirement and personal finance. Mohamed Ashoury, MD Sure, sure. I finished residency in 2009, and immediately I started spending as much money as I could just to catch up for those initial few years.

I did pretty well. I got into debt. I bought a condo. I was, I think, $50,000 in credit card debt, maybe $45,000. Josh Brennan You did it right. Congratulations. Mohamed Ashoury, MD I did it. Yeah, I did it professionally. I had student loans. Pretty much by 2012, I just didn't know how to get out of it.

I was so inundated with debt. I was making a ton of money at the time. I was pulling in, I think like $300,000 a year. I just didn't see any way I could ever retire unless I was going to work into my 70s. That's when I just turned it around.

I found a website, YNAB, which I know you're pretty fond of. I just got so much great information there. I just started keeping track of everything, brought my expenses down to $7,500 a month, which was awesome, which was huge for me. Just kind of slowly chipped away at it.

I think I've made pretty good progress now. Josh Brennan So tell me that number again. You brought your expenses down to what number? Mohamed Ashoury, MD $7,500 a month. Josh Brennan Okay. That was down from, do you have any guess what you were spending before? Mohamed Ashoury, MD Yeah, it was probably about $10,000 to $11,000 a month with everything that I was spending on.

I was spending money on cars, clothes, traveling, food, that sort of stuff. Josh Brennan How old are you now? Mohamed Ashoury, MD I'm 37. Josh Brennan You consider yourself to be financially independent, right? Mohamed Ashoury, MD Yep. Josh Brennan Okay. So the timeline for you from graduating, well, I guess we got to figure when you graduated from school versus residency.

How many years of an active career did you pursue as a physician until you now consider yourself financially independent? Mohamed Ashoury, MD So 2007 is when I started kind of moonlighting, taking a little extra shift on top of my residency. So from 2007 until now, but I would say from 2007 until 2012, I was busier accumulating debt than working towards financial independence.

So from 2012 until now is when I think I really just got serious about it. Josh Brennan So about four years and it's primarily based upon reducing your expenses. What did you do? What were the major changes in your lifestyle that you did that allowed you to reduce your expenses?

Mohamed Ashoury, MD I think I just second guessed everything. I just said, you know, this is how much I'm paying on rent. I don't need to pay this. What's the lowest I can pay? I'm paying this much for my cell phone. I don't need to pay this. What's the lowest I can pay?

Just everything. My insurance, the fact that I own the car, I don't own a car now. Traveling, all the different things, food expenses, all the things that I thought I really, really needed. I just cut them out completely. So in 2012, I think it was August 2012, I actually moved out of a penthouse in downtown San Diego and rented a 212 square foot apartment in a really gorgeous part of town, but just completely downshifted.

Got rid of everything and said, all right, I'm not going to buy anything. I'm not going to add anything back into my life. I'm going to bike everywhere, which isn't easy to do in San Diego. I said, all right, let me just build it up and I'll buy or purchase whatever I desperately, desperately need.

- That's hardcore, man. Are you still living that kind of super minimalist lifestyle or have you adjusted to a more comfortable standard of living? - I moved from San Diego to Portland about a year ago. When I moved over here, I still got a really tiny studio, 140 square feet.

I got rid of my car completely, so I biked everywhere. But I feel like I have a really good lifestyle. There's parks around here. I play soccer. I go rock climbing. I have a nice gym membership. The food's amazing here. I go out, drink with my friends, beer. The lifestyle is really good.

I don't know how much of a minimalist lifestyle it is, but yeah, I don't have a car. Even though sometimes I will get a rental if I need to, I bought a condo here, cash, for about $140,000. It's small. It's 350 square feet, but it's close to everything. It's close to a grocery store.

It's close to public transportation. It's within walking distance to my job. - In the last four years, from 2012 to 2016, do you have any guess on how much you were making during that time? - So 2012, I probably made about $230,000 and then $300,000, $350,000. I got up to $430,000 in 2014 and then back down to $300,000 and some.

So I'd say on average about a solid three something, $330,000. - That's great. You mentioned you're picking up extra shifts and working extra in order to get your income up? - Exactly. That was the time when I had the student loans and the credit cards and probably some other little expenses.

I had a car for a while, so I paid that off. That's the time when I really got serious about picking up extra shifts. I said, "Okay, I have good use for this money. I'm probably not going to burn out because I'm not just picking up extra shifts to be a workaholic." I used all that extra money to pay down the debt.

- It's exciting. It definitely shows the power of a strong income. You certainly invested many years into building that income, but it demonstrates how with focus, living on $7,500 a month is $90,000 a year. You can live a really great lifestyle on $90,000 a year if you minimize a couple of those major structural costs, have reasonable housing, reasonable transportation.

It leaves you with luxury in every other budget category, but yet still when you have a substantial income, you can make a major difference. At this point in time, two more questions and we're going to move to saving money on medicine. First, what are your thoughts? Do you intend to quit working?

Are you going to adjust anything or are you satisfied and planning to continue the career that you've built? - Yeah. I think in a positive way, I'm struggling with that a little bit. I would love to do something for free, just practice medicine for free. I think that's going to be in the long-term plan.

At the same time, it's kind of a shock for me right now, not recognizing that I don't have to work anymore. It's really exciting. It's awesome. I'm super excited about it. At the same time, I think I'll just keep going for this next year and just keep saving the money for now and definitely want to do something more productive.

You're probably going to hear me be a little bit critical of the medical industry. - I'm glad that we're discussing that. It's so new for you. Like you said, you just declared it on March 1st. As we record this interview, it's March 22, 2016. This is just a few weeks old.

It's going to take a little time to settle in. I'm excited about the possibilities because there are some, I don't know what you're into personally, but there are some awesome aid organizations. There are some awesome organizations that could really use somebody with medical expertise especially if they don't have to pony up a big salary.

I see some of these doctors who go in and to work with people in remote areas of the world. For me, if I were skilled in medical, that's the direction my bent would be. Very cool. Last question on this topic before we transition to medicine. If you were giving advice to yourself, a young medical student, maybe just graduating from school, heading into residency, what would be your words of experience from having lived a couple of different lifestyles over the last decade?

- I would say ignore the prestige of the profession, ignore how other people treat you, and definitely ignore the income. Don't just keep working and keep spending because you can easily outspend any kind of income that you can make. Recognize that that income has so much more potential for something really good, like whether you give the money away to a good organization, whether you can become financially independent and then give your expertise, give your knowledge away for free.

Knowing that you can do that in less than 10 years, I would love somebody to just drill that into my skull back then. - Sometimes we have to have a little life experience to be ready for advice. After living like a broke college student for years, usually to young residents, the BMW starts to look pretty attractive.

Sometimes it takes a few years of driving a BMW, sitting in traffic to say, "This is fine, but it would be just as fine in a different form of conveyance." Let's talk about medicine. Specifically, you sent me a note to recommend to suggest this show topic, saying how we could save on healthcare.

I'll tell you, I'm totally into saving on healthcare, but I want to start with just the big rebuttal. Anytime I ever say anything about saving on health expenses, people immediately accuse me of negligence, negligence toward myself and negligence toward my family. Are we going to play roll the dice on the roulette wheel here and we're gambling with our health just to save a buck, or is there a reasonable path through looking at various medical expenses with a rational mind?

Absolutely. I think medicine in America is practiced completely in a shotgun approach. We're throwing a ton of technology. We're throwing a ton of medications, treatments, labs, and everything at patients. There's so much room for patient autonomy, step in and saying, "Well, yeah, that's great, Dr. Ashoury, but I'm cool.

I don't want that." It's so sobering. It's incredible when I witnessed that. I think I probably haven't said this, but I trained in family medicine, so I did that. Right after I finished residency, I started practicing urgent care because even though I did a lot of family medicine, had my own patients that I was following through in residency, it was just not appealing because there was a lot of hand-holding.

These patients became dependent on me. I feel like they started neglecting their life a little bit because they would wait until they got the appointment with me. Then they're like, "Okay, Dr. Ashoury, what are you going to do for me? I've gained another 15 pounds." That's not good. I started practicing only urgent care.

I see my patients coming in, and every once in a while, someone will just completely stop me and say, "Yeah, that's great that you want to get a chest x-ray, but what would happen if I didn't get the chest x-ray?" You immediately have to change your mentality as a physician because we're trained to protect the patient.

We're trained to make sure that we don't miss something big. We're trained to self-preservation. I don't want to get sued. I don't want to miss something huge that's going to come and bite me in the butt later. When you get a patient like that, it's very refreshing. That's the patient where you want to focus on, and it's rare.

It's very, very rare. I'd say probably the past few shifts that I've had, I can recall two patients. Two patients that actually pushed back. Oh, yeah. I see about 30 to 30-some in a 10-hour shift. What percentage of the patients that you see actually need to be there with you?

Oh, my goodness. Three to five percent. Wow. Now, just for the sake of clarity, I would probably have you on if you were on the fringes of the medical profession, but my impression is that you come from a fairly mainstream medical background. You're not pushing, I don't know, herbology as medicine.

You're a mainstream physician, mainstream educational background. In one room, you're doing Reiki, and in the next room, you're prescribing antibiotics. You're coming from a mainstream perspective of practical experience. It's so funny, right? Because in America, we do have to qualify ourselves. I mean, my name's Mohamed. I was born in Iran, and I lived in Germany for a while.

Sometimes people are like, "Oh, you finished medical school in your country? How was that?" No, I finished medical school here in the States at UCLA, and then I did UCLA for family medicine residency. You kind of have to justify that to a lot of people, especially when you start saying, "Well, actually, you don't need to give your child antibiotics for this ear infection because it will clear." Oh, well, maybe in your country, you guys did that.

Sometimes you have to justify it, but no, I don't practice herbology out of the back office. I actually don't know much about Western medicine. I do know that it works. I do know when to refer patients to maybe, I don't know, acupuncturist, rarely, but sometimes a good chiropractor, that sort of stuff.

But no, I definitely have good, strong conviction that Western medicine is great, but we are completely overusing it. We are completely, completely addicted to it. So, the next category on our outline here is the risks of going to the doctor. Are there risks of going to the doctor? There are huge risks of going to the doctor.

Yeah, absolutely. I think, where do we start? I mean, by just the fact that you know, so Josh, you're coming in to me and you have, let's talk about a vague complaint. You have abdominal pain, you have back pain, you have a headache. The risk by coming to the doctor with those things is that I am not thinking like, "Oh, well, it's probably just a migraine.

You're good to go." I can't diagnose you with a migraine or a tension headache or a simple headache based on just examining you, at least not in our current medical system. A lot of these diagnoses that I give you are what we call diagnosis of exclusion, which means I ruled out an intracranial bleed.

I ruled out a subarachnoid hemorrhage. I ruled out an aneurysm. I ruled out a tumor. I ruled out a vertebral artery dissection. I ruled out, oh, you name it. So, I rule all that out. Then I can say, "Guess what, Josh? After the MRI, the CT scan, the blood test, the spinal tap, everything's fine.

You just have a headache." And you've probably experienced this and I'm sure people who are listening to this have experienced this before. Definitely. There's a place, I'll tell you, me personally and my family, I'm on the suspicious, I want good medical help when I need it, but I generally don't want it to be the first thing.

Now, obviously, I'm in a car accident. My arm's hanging, severed, holding by a strip of flesh. Get me to a surgeon and let's see if we can reattach this thing. But it seems normal that our body is designed to heal itself. If you have vague symptoms or a little bit of pain, a little bit of discomfort, if there's nothing really striking, maybe just give it a little bit of time and see how it works.

Because the other thing that I observe as a layperson, not qualified in any way to give medical advice, I observe simply that if you have vague symptoms or a vague experience, it's not enough information for a physician to even be useful. You need something more specific, something that can actually be slightly categorized so that the physician can rule something out.

Yeah, it's funny because you're so good with words so you can say this so nicely. I unfortunately can't. But now that you say it that way, it makes a lot of sense. And when somebody does come into my office with vague symptoms, it's so difficult because... And I think when you become a more seasoned physician, sometimes you can tease that out.

Somebody comes in, you say, "Well, what's the reason you came in? What's your biggest fear? What are you worried about? Did somebody tell you something? Did you come across something?" "Well, Doc, honestly, my dad died of an aneurysm." Or, "I was online and I saw this article about how...

God, I don't know. Something crawls into your brain and lays eggs and I was worried about it." So then I can say, "Okay. All right. I assure you there's nothing that's laying an egg in your brain. That I can rule out. Are you happy with that?" And every once in a while they're like, "Oh, yeah.

That's great. That's awesome. Thanks, Doc." But I think your grandma could... That's the thing. I feel like people have lost that independence, that autonomy of just saying, "Hey, I can own this. This is my body. I have a headache. I have an abdominal pain. What would I do for it?

Is it getting worse? Is it getting better? Is it so severe that I can't do anything with it? Let me go to my grandma. Let me go to my aunt. Let me go to that old lady in my apartment complex. She looks, I don't know, motherly. Maybe I can ask her and see what she thinks." So I think that's really the first step and not going to the doctor, not dishing out $50 or $100 in the urgent care for it.

I feel like there's a tendency in financial planning as a profession to try to always go to the extreme in order to protect yourself as a financial planner. Something simple... I have a buddy of mine who's my age. He's an estate planning attorney. It's just funny to me because he's an estate planning attorney.

So for him, a simple will is not enough with simple instructions. You've got to imagine every circumstance and scenario down the road. He's not willing just to say, "Just have a will and a sign of guardian and let them figure out if you have a simple affairs." I feel like the same tendency can be there in most professions.

Is that the case in the world of medical practice that the doctor has to be concerned with what's practical but also has to kind of go and protect against everything? We've got to rule out every possible outcome? Absolutely. I mean, that's always my biggest fear. If I walk into the urgent care, I just don't want to miss something big.

So I got to really, really, really go far out. Somebody comes in with a very simple complaint and I really got to rule out all the craziness that could be around it. Is it a vasculitis? Is it an autoimmune disease? Is this some odd infection that we haven't encountered?

Is this histoplasmosis? Is this malaria? In America, we don't see any malaria, so it's so easy to miss malaria in this country. But the most common things are common. If someone comes in with a headache, it's probably a tension headache. It's probably a migraine. It's probably from them clenching their teeth and referred jaw pain.

But like you said, probably somebody who's really good can make those diagnoses. But with the way the system is, with the way the culture is, the lawsuits, the patient complains, all these other things, you have to go to that next step. What are the influences that affect your mentality as a doctor in today's world?

I'd say it's what's expected of me, I think. What's expected of me. I feel like I'm expected to be infallible. I'm expected to make no mistakes and to not get anything wrong. But I'm given a limited set of resources and I'm being given a fallible income. So yeah, I mean, if you paid me $10 million an hour and let me run any kind of test and everything possible, sure, maybe I wouldn't make any mistakes.

But I think that's what is driving me, is this very unrealistic expectation to cure and not miss anything while in reality, it should be 99% in the patient's hands and it's not. So how do you deal with that? I mean, you get pulled in all directions. You've got the primary goal, which is to care for the health and safety and well-being and comfort of your patient.

That's primary. But you're also faced with the fact this person could turn around and sue you. You've got the threat of litigation if you miss something. You've got the practical realities of your practice, running a business. You've got the professional realities of wanting to be acknowledged as an expert in your field.

How do you deal with these various conflicts of interest? Well, I think what's important in medicine is you have to practice within the scope of your practice. So I'm an urgent care physician. I'm not a surgeon. So I will do what I was taught in Western medicine. But at the same time, I am looking for a way out.

Not trying to escape medicine, but I'm also recognizing that the majority of the patients that I'm seeing and the majority of the patients that I'm unfortunately making a lot of money off of, I don't need to see. They don't need to be there. By me being there, I'm sort of enabling them.

So I am doing the next step. I am saying, "Okay, I've got to become financially independent. I have to not rely on this income, and I have to do something else with it." Like you. I mean, not saying that you left your profession, but you're taking it to a whole different level.

You're taking that veil off of it and saying, "This is the reality of personal finance. This is the reality of economy. Let me give you all the knowledge and have you make your own." Same here. I want to be the consultant. I used to be really big into cars.

And one of my great, great buddies, a mechanic, he's just brilliant. And when you take a car into him, he's just giving you his opinion. He's not emotionally vested in it. He's not trying to lead you in this direction. He's not trying to upsell you. He's just telling you, "This is my professional opinion about your car." And he's usually right, but then he'll just walk away.

And it's sort of funny. That's what I want to do. Come to me for medical advice, but just take your health in your own hands and just own that. - Yeah. And the parallel I would draw from finance that I'm hearing you say is in the world of finance, when you need insurance advice on life insurance, you need a life insurance agent.

You don't need an article on the internet. You need a life insurance agent who's practiced and experienced. When you need portfolio advice because you're trying to figure out how do I structure my portfolio and can I stress test it such that it's going to sustain me for a 30-plus year retirement, I think that's a really good place for a financial advisor.

The problem comes when what somebody actually needs is a budgeting system. And then they're sitting in the office of an insurance agent, and the insurance agent is taking time to try to fix their budgeting system and then try to convince them to buy insurance. And so the actual diagnosis of the condition, what's the appropriate insurance product, what are the appropriate insurance products, that conversation gets minimized because the other things are to the maximum.

And I feel like the same thing applies in the world of medicine and what you're sharing is if I come to you and I have a specific clear symptoms and if you're a specialist, you can spend very valuable time diagnosing something that's significant. But if you've got to weed through all this other stuff that should be common knowledge that should be addressed first, then your effectiveness is diminished.

So let's talk about the most common, I would say, misconceptions, the most common medical misconceptions, the things that you see people all the time that they don't need to be spending money on. What is the first thing that you see people coming all the time and you say, "You should not be spending money sitting here in my office asking me about this"?

Gosh, I'd say things like back pain and upper respiratory infections, upper respiratory. So what do we mean by that when we say upper respiratory? So pretty much any kind of sinus, ear, nose, eye, throat, lung, chest, throat. I mean, did I say throat already? Ear, whatever. Any kind of infection that you catch from other people, any kind of, any of this cough and cold stuff, I see...

So this is cold and flu season for us right now, right? I probably, and I do phone visits too. We do this tele-visit stuff, but I'd probably say 85 to 90% of my visits right now are all for colds. Colds, colds that we would never... I can't do anything for.

I can't treat a cold. I can recommend over-the-counter medicine. I can prescribe you a stronger cough medicine, but I'm seeing like 30-some patients just for colds in one day. Can you imagine? So what do they expect you to do? Why do they come in to see you? I don't know.

It's... I don't... Maybe... So this is the weird thing. I think I was raised in a different culture. I wasn't raised, but I was about 10 when I lived in Iran. And so in that culture, you don't take your kids in for colds. So maybe there is a bit of disconnect there.

But I think maybe in the Western culture, you go in for a cold because you just want it to be better faster. And that's really what I get from the patient. Like, "Hey doc, I'm kind of tired of it. It's been seven days. It's been 10 days. I really, I can't, you know, I need to stop coughing.

I have meetings. I have phone appointments. My clients are getting annoyed that I'm coughing. They're worried that I'm passing something on to them." You know, or sometimes they're, you know, they're just miserable. They're like, "Doc, I can't sleep at night." You know, or "My ear hurts so much. It's really becoming frustrating.

I don't want to take all these over-the-counter meds. Can you just give me some antibiotics so I can get better?" And that's really where the crux of it is. I want antibiotics. Do you think it's primarily like almost a placebo that I'm going to feel better because I've been prescribed a pill and this magic pill is going to make me better?

Well, the pill is not coincidentally magic. I mean, antibiotics like azithromycin, erythromycin, doxycycline, these were intentionally designed to decrease inflammation. They're fed to farm animals to decrease inflammation. They just make you feel better when you take them. Even if you're not having an infection, even though, you know, people know all the side effects, they want them because they've taken them before and they are getting better.

And they've probably grown up taking antibiotics when they've gotten sick. So it's intentional. I'm very convinced that medications these days are engineered, built, designed to, you know, make you feel good in some sort of way so that you do want them. I guess I'm just testing my own perspective to see it, just to find out if I'm wrong or right because I don't want to be foolish or foolhardy.

It's especially as a parent, you know, I feel the weight of my children being sick much more heavily even than myself because of that sense of responsibility. So I don't want to be foolhardy. But I was raised, my mom was a farm girl and I guess just kind of a more practical approach that if you're sick, you get in bed for a couple of days and generally, I eschew the use of medicine unless it's very much needed because I figure every medicine has potential benefits and it also has potential side effects.

I mean, if I get diarrhea when I'm traveling, I don't want to use Imodium unless I'm going to fly and I'm going to be on a plane because I don't want my system disrupted. I figure my body is trying to get rid of something and it's trying to fix itself.

So I should just give it some time and let it work, stay hydrated and give it some time to let it work because I don't want to be dealing with the side effects of everything. So I'm looking to see if what I hear you saying is that that practical perspective is valuable.

What other things do you see people for all the time that you would say are just common misconceptions? Yeah. So I think in Western medicine specifically, people feel the need to take vitamins. They think supplements and vitamins are helping their cause and it's not. Vitamins have a ton of side effects.

Vitamin C and calcium can increase your risk of kidney stones, can increase your risk of heart disease later on in life. So vitamins, I don't know. I hope you're not taking them, but I just don't recommend them. Do you say that as a blanket statement, meaning just no vitamins or a multivitamin a day might be useful?

How hardcore are you? I'm pretty hardcore. I mean, even in Europe, it's pretty common knowledge for physicians to say that vitamins are not good for you and they actually are detrimental to your health. And when you research it, they really are. They don't offer any benefit and some independent studies have shown that they increase your independent mortality.

So they're not good for you. That's one I haven't researched, but it's an interesting topic to me. What next? Oh, this one's a good one. Cholesterol screening and blood sugar screening. So people think that they have to go to the doctor to regularly get their blood tests done, get their cholesterol done, get their blood sugar done, get their blood pressure checked.

We definitely overdo it. I think there's a need for that in somebody who is at high risk or has a very unhealthy lifestyle. Sure, you can get a good sense of where you're at, but blood tests are not that accurate. And I think that's what a lot of people miss.

You can get somebody who is six foot tall and 350 pounds coming in, but their blood tests, everything might be perfect. Their blood pressure might be perfect. Does that mean everything's okay? No, it doesn't. It does not at all. So that's another big misconception. That's been personally my medical history.

I've always been overweight, but I've always had perfect, anytime there's lab tests or blood tests, all the ranges for cholesterol and blood sugars and things like that come back as within the normal ranges. And it can be probably misread. On the one hand, it allows me a sense of security of, "Oh, yeah, I'm overweight, but at least I have perfect blood numbers.

Therefore, everything's fine." I don't know if that's good or bad, but that's my personal experience. I think it's understandable. People just want to have some sort of a sense of where they're at. And if they see a bad cholesterol number, then at least they would kick it up into the next ...

They would say, "Okay, that's it. I got to really get my stuff together." But I feel like we lull patients into a false sense of security by telling them, "This blood test shows everything's fine, so you're good. But who designed the blood test? What does this blood test really measure?

Is it really looking at the lining of the vessels?" And it's not. It's like in a good economy, if you got a crappy bunch of tech stocks in a good economy, you're always going to be fine. But when it's really tested is when the economy crashes and everything else crashes with it.

Same here. If your body really gets sick one day, if you contract, God forbid, some sort of a crazy illness, a cancer, something, and your health is not that good, I don't care what those numbers read, you're not going to recover that well from that illness. But if you're healthy overall and you do get really sick, you're probably going to be okay.

I'll touch on that in a little bit, but people can get cancers and heart attacks and strokes and be just fine if they're healthy. So that's another big one. Mammograms and PSA tests. Right. So we overdo mammograms. There's been plenty of studies for that. Not only do we overdo mammograms, which means by the way, a mammogram is a low dose x-ray that we apply to breast tissue and men can get mammograms as well.

And we look for cancers. We look for real subtle abnormalities. And the problem is we're radiating so many young women's breasts. We're radiating people who possibly are a bit at risk for cancers. And by radiating them, we're increasing the risk of cancers. And then when we do find something, we over biopsy them.

We over-treat them. Benign cancers that probably would be fine, we're going crazy with it. PSA tests. So we do a prostate specific antigen, which is a blood test that checks whether you might have prostate cancer. A lot of people want them. They come in, they ask for them. Unfortunately, a lot of times these are abnormal for other reasons.

For example, your prostate's a bit inflamed from an infection or from just being larger due to age. And then PSA is abnormal. Great. Let's do a biopsy. Biopsy didn't show it. Let's go in with a camera. So it's just a big spiral. Ear infections. Ear infections in children. There's a lot of great studies and a lot of good pediatricians will not treat ear infections in children anymore unless, for very specific reasons, if the child's very young or if they're recurrent and the child has decreased hearing.

But other than that, ear infections, probably viral, even if bacterial, will go away on their own. So our thought, we want to be very careful with a very young baby. We try to be extra cautious with a very young baby as far as anything like that. But with a similar advice to a cold, apply.

Just give it a little bit of time. Watch the child for a little bit of discomfort, a little bit of sickness that's not necessarily cause for alarm. Give it some time and watch for acute symptoms. Watch for something that's really worrying. Is that a reasonable approach? Yeah. So I like this question because this is a great money saver and stress saver for parents.

So you have a little one, I don't care, three months, a year, two years, and he or she comes down with a cold, coughing, congested, can't breathe out of the nose, has a croupy cough, has a barking cough, a little bit of wheezing, fevers. But the child's eating, the child's pooping, the child's peeing.

There's no weird coloration. Sure, the kid might have a little bit of a hard time getting through the night. If you really want to, you can do a bit of Tylenol or ibuprofen for the fevers or the pains. But if the child is doing well, they're able to hydrate.

And that's really the biggest key with children is if they can hydrate, if they're having wet diapers, you're probably okay. If they can keep something down, even if they're retching and vomiting, nausea, you know, they don't want to eat, their throat's really sore. If they can get through this very, very well, as long as they're staying hydrated, as long as they can take in some calories.

It doesn't have to be solids. It can be Gatorade, it can be Pedialyte, as long as they can keep those things down. Yes, watch it, wait it out, because you bring them to the doctor's office and those lungs sound terrible, I got to get a chest X-ray. If that ear looks horrible, probably going to have to recommend antibiotics.

So, on the next four bullet points on our outline here of our preparation for today's show, these are pretty wacky. And so I'm going to give you a chance to talk about this and then I'm going to push back on how these things actually save money. But I'm going to read because I think this is a funny setup.

So, under the heading of common medical misconceptions, you have indicated, number one, you need a doctor to control your pain, alcohol is bad for you, coffee is bad for you, cigarettes kill, and you'll die if you don't eat. So, you got a little bit of a case to make because these are unusual.

How do you mean that these are misconceptions? So, misconceptions is, you know, if you even look at a cigarette, you're going to die. No, not true. Plenty of good studies out there show that if you're smoking one or two cigarettes a day, your risk of cancer, your risk of heart disease is minimal.

I'm not saying smoke, I don't smoke. I'm not telling anybody that you should go pick it up. But, you know, let's face it, we have this big campaign against tobacco, but it's also a big financial campaign. Tobacco is not as bad as it's made, it's this huge villain. It's insane.

It's insane and it's not true. You know, I've only ever met one person who actually does that. I'm sure more people do, but I had one friend who was a financial planner and she had one cigarette every single night. And so, every night after dinner, she would go out on her balcony and she would smoke one cigarette.

And I never knew anybody else who could keep that point of non-addiction, non-over usage other than her. But, there would be a perfect case study of what you're talking about. Right. And I think one other thing to consider is when you're driving in traffic and you're, you know, butt to butt to another car, you know, the amount of chemicals you're getting in your system is way, way, way more than a pack of cigarettes that you could get because you're getting it every single day.

You're also sedentary. You're sitting down, you're stressed. When you're sitting down and when you're stressed and your body is getting these nauseous chemicals in the system, there's a big difference. And when you're all relaxed, chilling, listening to some Joshua Sheets podcast and smoking a cigarette, it's very different. You know, I have a theory on cigarettes and you could, I've never talked about this publicly.

This is just one of my little pet theories. But I think that sometimes smokers who occasionally, I don't know what the number is on this because obviously there's pretty damning evidence on the level of carcinogens at a point and I don't think you're disagreeing with that. But sometimes I wonder if smokers' happiness isn't simply due to the fact that they take breaks and they breathe.

And those two things combined can make a big difference on your stress levels. Now, I have zero medical qualifications to opine on this subject. So take it for what it's worth. But when I read studies and just talking about the impact of stress and how the chemicals, whether it's the levels of acidity or just the chemicals that your body creates when responding to acute stress, I see how just simply the virtue of slowing down, taking a break and kind of what smokers will do out on the smoker's corner is sit down and breathe and talk.

Now, of course, you could do that without the smoke going into your lungs. But my theory is that sometimes smokers have a more positive lifestyle simply because of taking the time to have a break and to breathe. Yes. And Josh, honestly, if I could prescribe one cigarette a day to somebody versus Xanax or Ativan or Prozac, I would do so.

But I still need my medical license for a little bit. So I'll hold off on that. So keep going on these other. So another one, you need a doctor to control your pain. Pain is such a big one in America too, right? Because people are busy. They got stressful lives and they just can't be bogged down with pain and pain takes over the world.

But I think people are more afraid of pain because they think it indicates something really bad. And that's never, never the case. No. Well, I should say that's almost never the case. When your body hurts, it's OK. The pain is probably going to go away or there's something you're doing wrong.

And you don't need a doctor for that. If you have a bad knee, some exercises, some maybe some weight loss, some strengthening, the pain is probably going to go away. You don't need a surgeon to go in there and say, oh, you have a meniscus tear. We're going to clean this up.

So in my case, I have a small tear in my medial meniscus and I got a labral tear in my right shoulder and I still do everything that I'm pretty active. I'm fit and everything. You don't need a doctor for that. You just don't. And it hurts. Yes, it hurts every once in a while.

It's not a big deal. Once you get used to that kind of pain, once you accept it and say, hey, this is my body, it's going to be all right. It's not depressing. I don't have a bad lifestyle. It's just something I noticed. So I think just putting it into perspective, it's really, really important.

It's OK to live with pain. It's not a big deal. Our pets do it all the time and they're the happiest things on the planet. Here's my way of thinking about it. Feel free to correct it. But my thought, I like the more natural approach. And with regard to pain, this makes sense to me.

Pain is my body's way of saying, I have a problem. I need a little bit of time to rest and recuperate. So treat me gently. So if there's some mild knee pain or mild shoulder pain, I need to be careful and not put excess weight. It's the body's way of protecting that so that it can mend and heal itself.

It's not something to immediately freak out about. It's something to observe and to notice and to perhaps give a little bit of extra rest to that body part. It's not something that I should cover up. It's not something that I should try to numb with medicine. Just it's something that I should pay attention to.

Now, again, my caveat, of course, there may be an acute pain and that's a symptom of something significantly wrong. But is that a reasonable way of thinking about it? Absolutely. I agree 100%. And I know some of your listeners might have some serious chronic pain issues. And so, of course, they're crucifying me and hopefully they're not crucifying you.

But there are certain conditions. There are certain things that are so bad. There are certain types of pains that are so tough to deal with. And again, I'm not saying you don't need a doctor at all. But we're talking about the most common pains that we have. And they are exactly that.

They're signals. Something, your body's saying, "Something's off. Can you please just give me a break?" And you do that and it works. So, I agree. You'll die if you don't eat. All right. This is a good one. So, you'll die if you don't eat. Patients come in, they say, "Doc, I've been having nausea.

I've been having vomiting, diarrhea for the past seven days. I haven't eaten anything for three days." Okay. That's fine. You're not going to die. You don't need to eat. You won't die if you don't eat. You're not going to become more unhealthy if you don't eat. You can drink water.

You can drink your calories. You can do Gatorade. You can do Pedialyte. But people fast. People fast for days on end. People actually – there are some studies that show that individuals who fast a few hours a day or fast for a few days in a row have certain better health conditions.

I'm not a fan of that. I never think it's good to do some sort of an extreme to your body. But there's nothing wrong with not eating. And if that's part of your sudden weight loss plan, that's fine too as long as you realize that you're probably going to crash pretty good afterwards.

Coffee and alcohol? Right. So, I drink coffee regularly and I think I heard you take a sip of yours. So, coffee is not bad for you. There's great studies that show that it can decrease your risk of colon cancer, certain other types of cancers. It stains your teeth, sure.

It can give you more acid, but probably most of your acid is coming from stress. Alcohol, right. If you have an addiction, it's very different. I don't know if you drink or have drank, but if me or another one of my friends drinks alcohol, we're not going to get addicted to it.

We just don't have the genes. We don't have the predisposition. But a little bit of alcohol does not cause cancer. A little bit of alcohol does not destroy your liver. So, I think also recognizing that, that these little insults to your body mean nothing in the big scheme of things.

You can deal with quite a lot and come out just fine, but it matters whether you're stressed, whether your body is just depleted of energy because then it can't cope with it. And here's a good one. Last one. I know I keep talking a lot about this scientific stuff, but there's been a lot of great studies that show people have a higher risk of melanoma if they've been drinking a lot of alcohol and been under the sun for extended periods of time.

So, that combination together has a much higher effect of you having melanoma than just having either sun exposure or alcohol. Interesting. So, you make that statement and obviously I understand, but I don't understand the meaning of that. Is the idea don't drink when you go in the sun or is the idea that stressed out people are the ones who are just slamming them down while they're sitting in the sun and that's ultimately what's leading to the melanoma?

So, in between that, it means that if your body's under stress because you're overworked, you're not sleeping enough, you're fighting with your spouse, and your body is so depleted of energy that it cannot even maintain the simple act of treating little tiny cancers, treating little bit of DNA damage that happens every single second in your body.

If you're in that condition, you put a little bit of alcohol in your system, then sure, it can damage your body. If you go drive behind a big semi truck and you inhale all those carcinogens, sure, then you have a higher risk of cancer. But if your body is really not under that much stress and your body can do a lot of self-regulation and self-healing, you could probably work in some pretty dirty industries with a ton of carcinogens and you would be just fine.

And I think that's a really, really important thing to take into consideration. I read a book one time, you mentioned the acidity of stress, and I guess I read a book one time talking about the acid-alkaline balance of your body. And the major premise of the book was, I believe it was called The pH Miracle, if memory is right, but the major premise of the book was that it's the acidity of your body that causes your body to become sick and that if you focus on acidity, you can generate better health.

And so the primary cause of acidity was self-created hormones and chemicals in the body, primarily due to stress. That was one of the author's conjectures. And then also many other factors, coffee being acidic, meat being acidic, sugar being acidic, etc. I haven't seen that theory. I read that book on it and it seemed to make sense to me as a layperson, but I haven't seen that theory spread more widely.

I haven't seen that receive a lot of popular attention. Do you know anything about that? Is that accurate? Is that known in the medical circles? Has that been corroborated or disproven in some way? It's just that the way we do scientific research, I don't think it's been ever proven.

That's just not the way things are tested in medicine. Things are tested on animals based on whatever outcome you get. If the animal didn't have a horrible outcome, you test it on humans and then you just go for it. But if you look at other cultures, so some cultures believe in hot and cold versus acidic and basic.

So it's just one of those things that's been around a lot of cultures for a long time. And yes, if you talk to people who are a little bit more holistic based, they absolutely believe in that. And my patients, even the patients that I have who lead their life that way, I feel like they're much healthier by just controlling their acid base.

And they can call it whatever they want. This food creates more heat. This food creates more cold. This food creates more acidity. This one more basicity. So I know where I've experienced those is with stress. So I have observed if I get a there are a few emotions that when they get to me, I feel them physically.

And the big three are when I get a sense of overwhelm. And this happens to me from time to time. I generally put so many things on my to do list and I start to get overwhelmed. That leads to just this tension. And I've noticed it. I don't want to be too dramatic, but it almost just forces my brain to shut down.

And I've learned that I have to proactively manage that. I'm not great at it. I'm getting better at it. But just proactively managing that sense of overwhelm. I have to shut everything off and I have to focus on just some simple quiet reading. I have to build time into my schedule where I ignore the world because it seems like I have so many things running at me.

I got inboxes filling up in eight different applications. I've got all these things coming in. Everyone's upset at me. Everyone's blah, blah, blah. And so I tend to get overwhelmed. Another one is that I feel the physical effect of that emotion. And so I know there's a physiological connection.

Another one is fear, which I don't experience a lot of that, but I know that sense of unease if I start to get it, I feel it. And then the big one for me is criticism. I feel that in my stomach. One of my major character weaknesses is I'm a people pleaser and I like to please people.

And so when someone is displeased, it causes me, I feel it in my stomach, Mohammed. I actually get viscerally sick when that, and I have to just turn it off. I usually have to ignore it for a little while, let some time pass and then relate. But I am convinced that those emotions and just call them stresses, those stresses have a physiological effect on me that I can feel.

Not that I know I'm going to get sick in 10 years, but I can feel them now in the pit of my stomach. And so I'm convinced that a lifestyle of that type of stress built up over time has a physiological effect. It has a physiologic effect and a long-term damaging effect because people put themselves under these stressful situations for so long and they don't have good coping mechanism, good coping skills.

You do. I mean, just listening, I feel like listening to your podcast, you seem to do such a good job of taking criticism and brushing it off. Or it might just be show, but I doubt it. Usually people succeed when they have good coping mechanisms. And I think if you can develop that, if a person can develop good coping mechanisms, then you can do fine.

And even though you do get a bit of damage in your body, you can recover as well. And I think that's important too. Yeah. It's not, no, I don't brush it off. I've just learned how to, because I know it's going to affect me. I've learned how to put some distance between it and then I've grown in that a lot.

It's a new skill that I've learned over the last few years. And so I've learned, listen, I'm not going to allow this to affect me. And usually for me, it's just time. Just give it a few hours and then you quiet your emotions, you quiet your heart. For me, I pray, I quiet my emotions, I quiet my heart, and then I can go back and I can start again.

But with a quiet spirit, then I can go ahead and face things and I can look to pull the good out of it and disregard those things that are not helpful. So talk about, we've talked about some of these things as basically ways of saving money. And so the general consensus that I pull from what you've shared so far is slow down just a little bit, be a little bit more, have a little more what used to be common sense.

Don't rush to the doctor for everything and just slow down a little bit and let your body simply work. And that is a kind of a defensive approach to cause you to not always be forcing, putting money out the door. But what are some of the things that we can do proactively here under lifestyle and genetics?

What are the things we can do proactively to invest in our health so that we don't wind up even, so we have fewer symptoms, so we get sick less? So, you know, your body doesn't come with a manual. So a little bit of it is you just having to develop that sense of being in tune with your body.

And I think a lot of people are not doing that. It's recognizing, like we've already talked about, when my body's under stress, what is it that I got to do to de-stress it? Is it I got to take some things off my plate? Maybe I got to cross some things off my to-do list.

Is it better for me to spend these next three hours to tell my loved ones, "Hey guys, I'm sorry. I got to step away for a little bit. I just got to clean all these things off of my stress list." And once you do that, you just feel great.

And that alone might create a better sleep the next night. It might decrease your need to eat or binge on unhealthy food. So I think that lifestyle, that sense about your body is really important to develop. And yeah, there is no good way of telling you how to do it, but if you just try, you'll get it right.

You'll eventually figure it out. So definitely, stress, right? Decreasing stress, decreasing your sleep. A lot of us, I think you're in your 20s or I don't know, you're young. 30. Okay, 30. So we probably still need eight to 10 hours of sleep. And some of us say, "No, no, no, no, no.

I do great on five." Yes, you do. Absolutely. Many people function much better. They're more alert because their body is so much more stressed that they actually do better with tasks and getting things done when they only sleep four to five hours. But that doesn't mean that that's what you need.

And of course, diet. Diet's a big one. And I'm sure we'll get into that in a bit if we still have time. So weight loss, right? So weight's a big one, controlling your weight and controlling how much activity you have. And somewhere in the bottom of this document that me and you are looking at, I've mentioned you can weigh a lot more if you're very active.

You can weigh a lot more if you're eating healthy food. So weight is becoming less and less of an issue in medicine and science. We're finding out that it's not as important what you weigh. It's more important probably what you're putting in your body and how active you are.

And again, in this culture, it's all about running and marathons and crazy stuff. You don't need to do that. You can walk. You can bicycle. You can just getting up from your desk and going somewhere and going for a quick walk while you're doing a phone conversation, while you're reading something, even like walking on those stationary treadmills.

That is great activity. It doesn't need to be this elaborate gym membership with this exercise, a bit of cardio, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. It doesn't need to be that. I'm convinced some of that stuff is really damaging. I was about to say I keep that opinion quiet and here I am broadcasting it on a podcast.

But it's a little hard from a non-athlete perspective to be taken seriously when you're criticizing other people who are very active. I have a friend of mine who was just a committed triathlete, Ironman. He was just so committed to it. I love and admired his character and his dedication and his discipline.

But when I look at the effect on his body, his body just seemed to be breaking down. He had all these damages from overuse, knee issues and whatnot, which significantly impacted his life. It seems to me that just a more reasonable perspective is a healthier approach, not being so extreme.

Now, that type of person, it seems to be connected to their character where they just have an extreme personality and that's where they find their outlet. Again, I have no place to criticize someone who goes out and does that. But it doesn't seem to me to be the most healthy thing.

I'd say as objective as possible as a physician, I see both sides. I see the person who's just destroying their body with way too much exercise, lowering their immune system to the point of catching pneumonias and meningitis. I see the other person who's so busy and involved in building a business, running their business, dealing with situations that they're so sedentary that they themselves are destroying their life.

Somewhere in the middle, and it doesn't have to be perfect. That's the thing. Our bodies are amazing without it. You don't have to be perfect. You just got to do a little bit more. You just got to decrease the time you spend around the kitchen table a little bit, or at least take the food away, bring in some tea, bring in some vegetables, bring in some fruits, and then go for a walk together.

Just increasing your activity every single day in little steps makes a humongous difference. I think that's such an easy thing to implement. Talk to me about some strategies of actually navigating the medical system. Pretend I actually have some problems, I have some issues, and I need the input of a physician.

Now, what are some proactive strategies that I can implement to control the financial cost of that while getting the medical help that I need while controlling the financial outlay? A few things. A lot of insurances now, I'm a big advocate for HMOs. I don't like PPOs, and I know there's a lot of different types of insurances out there, but HMOs are nice because everything's under one roof.

For the most part, you do save money. People are worried that they're not going to get a good physician, but I think you can always spot a good physician, and you can certainly change physicians to find that. Back to your point, I think when you get a symptom, when you get something, look it up.

Don't be afraid to go online. Look things up, but recognize that there's a lot of sensationalism out there on the internet. If you have a headache and you're worried about something, take a look. If you have a rash, go online, look at some rashes. Describe the rash, and look at pictures on Google.

When you see that, you kind of get a good sense. Almost all good health insurances now, you can email your doctor for free. You can do video visits or telephone visits for free. I do telephone visits once a week or so. I talk to about 50 patients in 10 hours, and it's all free.

Our medical group does not charge for it, and I love it. Patients love it. I can chat with them online. I can see their face. They can send me pictures of their rash, of their kid's rash. They send me pictures of their poop and their vomit. Fine. No big deal.

I'm happy to look at it. It's great because I can say, "No, look. That's all that is. Don't worry. It's probably just this. It's probably just that." That's a really good way of cutting your cost. Just running it by someone. See if that doctor's eyes bulge out. If they bulge out, you're probably dealing with something a little bit more problematic.

If not, then don't worry about it. I think this is a good one. Find a doctor friend. Find even a good nurse friend. This social capitalism thing that ... Social capital, not capitalism. Social capital thing that you talk about is huge. Find a friend that's a doctor or become friends with a doctor and run something by them.

No, I'm not going to give you a diagnosis on the fly. Of course not. I don't want to get sued by you later, but I'll gladly tell you that, "Nope. That doesn't look concerning. I just weighed it out." That's another big one. Imaging, surgeries. Those are my two big, big, big pet peeves.

We do so many MRIs and CTs and x-rays. Yes, we're picking up a ton more diagnoses. The fact that we have more cancers now is probably just because we're diagnosing them more. We do them, but they're not necessary. This ties into breast cancer and prostate cancer in older patients.

They can be left completely untreated and that patient will probably not have any issues with it. They will die gracefully at an old age before they die from those cancers. That's how a lot of really good surgeons are managing cancers these days. They're saying, "Sir, you're 75 years old and you're in great health.

That prostate won't even bother you. Yep, you got cancer in it. Don't worry about it. Leave it alone." The last one is specialists. If you go to a specialist, if you go to a cardiologist, if you go to an orthopedic surgeon, and I don't want to get killed by one of your subscribers here, who is a specialist?

There's nothing wrong with going to a specialist. When you have the option to go straight to a specialist, my orthopedic surgery friends, they're trained to fix you surgically. They're less inclined to tell you, "Well, this is what I would do. I would go lose 30 pounds and I would do these exercises and you should be fine." No, they're like, "Dude, I can take you in the OR tonight at 6 p.m.

and I can shave that stuff off of your meniscus and you'll be great. You're going to walk perfectly." When you get that surgery, unfortunately, later on in life, you're going to get arthritis. There is no knee surgery that I've ever heard of that you can get done. No intervention into your knee that's not going to cause you arthritis down the road.

Is it worth it? I don't think so. Same with cardiologists who may say that, "Yeah, you probably need a treadmill stress test because we got to make sure this is not coming from your heart." Oh, it is a little bit abnormal. Let's go into your groin and go into your heart and see what's going on.

Oh, sorry, when we did that, we also knocked off this little plaque that went into your brain and you got a stroke, but your heart was good. Sorry about that. And Mohamed, what you're focusing on here is my biggest, I was going to say beef, but my biggest, I guess, frustration is it seems to me that if I go to a, like I said, if I go to a surgeon, there's a higher likelihood that the surgeon is going to diagnose surgery to improve my ailment.

If I go to a physician who is primarily dispensing medicine, there's probably going to be a prescription that I go out with as the initial stage of treating my ailment. If I go to a holistic natural health doctor, there's probably going to be some system of vitamins and natural foods and whatnot that are going to be my primary basis of treating it.

It leaves me as an interested layperson trying to be careful on both sides, trying to be prudent, but also cautious. It leaves me often in a place of not knowing who to trust or how to trust anybody. And it leaves me, I guess, not knowing who to trust and how.

Any suggestions for dealing with that? And Josh, I feel like this is how we layperson feels when it comes to a financial advisor, somebody who can give us financial advice because we go to somebody. I've talked about this before, but I've had about three other financial advisors at first who were really just more keen on selling me something.

And I'm not saying they were bad. They probably weren't bad, but they just kept wanting to sell me on stuff. And they didn't sell me on good stuff. I've made my mistakes in the past, but I learned from that. I learned and I made mistakes and I researched it and I listened to good podcasts.

I went on good websites and now I have an awesome financial advisor who is great, who gives me very objective information. He gives me options and he's like, "Hey, dude, it's your money, man. You got to decide. But these are the things that I know and these are the things that I'm good at and this is what I recommend.

But you should do what you do." And so I think it's the same for you guys out there. When you go to your doctor first, get the sense. Is this person just burnt out and just wants to get out of the room and is going to throw an antibiotic at you?

Or is this somebody who really cares and is going to give you a lot of options? Now, if you put that physician in a bad situation, yeah, they're going to just say, "You know what? Sorry, man. Go see the surgeon, dude, because you're just being a big pain in the ass and you're not working with me and I'm having a hard time with you and I got 30 other patients to see." And recognize that if you go to an orthopedic surgeon, the orthopedic surgeon makes money doing surgery.

I mean, we're human. If I can make $750,000 doing a few knee replacements versus make $350,000 just doing a bunch of crappy office visits, I'm sorry. I would do the knee surgeries. I would do the knee replacements because the patients want them. They're begging for them. They're fighting for them.

It's really tough as a surgeon to say, "No, ma'am. You don't need it." No, of course not, because you got $300,000 tied to it. You're going to do it. Right. Same conflict of interest in the financial advisor space. People don't – and I would imagine at least what I have observed is you get a little bit callous over time.

No matter how much you care in the beginning, when you tell people – so let's say that somebody comes out and they become an orthopedic surgeon and they know that weight loss and walking is the primary thing that they should prescribe, they prescribe weight loss and walking again and again and again and again and people come back again and again and again and don't take their advice.

So finally, I said, "Fine. I'll do the surgery," because you get a little jaded. I think the same thing happens in the financial advisory business where no matter how many times you prescribe budgeting and saving, your clients come back again and again and again and they have more credit card debt.

They don't have any savings and they're not doing any budgeting. So finally, you say, "Okay, fine. I'll just sell your products and at least you'll have something," and you start to justify it. Right, wrong, it's tough. Every profession has those challenges. - And I think as patients or as people, humans, whatever, this is what we can do for ourselves is let's think ahead.

What's the most expensive thing in people's lives later on down the road? It's probably either divorce or medical expenses. So the divorce, I can't tell you what to do there, but medical expenses, start eating right. Start being active. Again, you don't have to go crazy exercising. Just start eating a little better.

Avoid those really rich foods. The foods that are probably the worst for you is anything that's processed. Anything animal-based is probably bad for you. Anything that's dense is bad for you. So pasta, bread, it's probably not good for you. You can have a little bit, sure, but only if the majority of what you're eating is really healthy.

Do you need organic, not organic? That is such a tiny, tiny factor that I would say once you get eight to 10 hours of sleep, once your stress is minimal and once you have some activity, sure, then you can worry about organic, not organic. But the conversation around that is just silly right now.

So lose some weight. Lose enough weight that you feel good. And you can sense it in your body. When you have a little bit less weight around your neck, you're breathing better. You're sleeping better at night because your pharynx isn't collapsing on itself and making you get sleep apnea.

Your belly doesn't feel as much pressure. So then when you're sitting, you don't feel so much pressure against your heart. So get a sense of that in your body. And I think these are the things that if you start doing now, if you build a little bit of muscle mass, if you build a little bit of elasticity in your tendons and your joints, fine, no big deal.

Your knee gives out later on in life. It's okay. It's still going to go for a long time and you can probably avoid a lot of surgeries. Paul: Two final things and then final words. One, on the topic of losing weight, do you recommend to people a certain way of doing that, a certain particular style of diet?

Do you take a general approach? How do you advise people to consider that? Dr. Seheult: I mean, I usually sit down and I ask them what is it that they're already doing? And then I tell them, you know, diversify it, right? That's what you would tell your clients probably is just try a bunch of different things.

Not only be more active and get more sleep, but also change your diet to a little bit less meat, to a little bit less bread and rice. And that alone is going to make you drop a lot of weight. So I usually tell them to just start doing the diet more than the exercise because no matter how much you run, I mean, you can run on a treadmill for an hour running from the police, you know, you're not going to, you're going to get maybe 200, 300 calories out of that.

But diet, that's huge. You can lose, you can get a lot more bang for your buck just focusing on your diet. So that's my big one. I say, do your diet, be active. And with diet, I usually just ask them what they eat and I identify like two or three things that are bad for them.

And I'm like, that's it. You're done with that. You know, if you're going to have it, you're going to have it once a week in a very small amount that way you're not withdrawing from it. But that's my big one. And that's what I think has worked for my patients that have followed through.

With regard to sleep, I've seen people advocate just simply the sleep diet. I don't remember the name of the book. I didn't read it. I just read the, some reviews of it. But the whole point was if you just start sleeping more, you'll probably result in a lost weight.

I know for me, this has been a big one where I've learned I've wanted so, I want to be productive. I want to be, I want to have a high degree of output, but I've learned that I can't get by on six hours of sleep. I need more. And so I had to be really, really diligent about getting to bed on time.

And I want so much to produce things, but I just get run down and I get run down. I get my brain stops functioning. I lose my creativity and my sense of sharpness. And then over time, give it a few days. If I give it a few days, then I get physically sick if I don't sleep.

And so I've told my wife, I said, "Honey, don't ever let me stay up late because I'll get excited about a project." And I'll say, "Oh, miss this once." And then I go ahead and push through and then I regret it. So we've got a deal. I'm never allowed to stay up late.

But just a couple more brief comments on the value of sleep. - I'll say one last thing about sleep. And it's great, the fact that you're relating that personal experience from it. It makes so much sense, right? Restful sleep is so much more important than how many hours you get.

So making sure that right before you go to bed, you don't want to be dealing with something really complex. It's just not possible. You need a wind down time and a wind up time, right? When you get home, go crazy, do your work, do whatever you have to do.

And right before sleep, really wind down, start having positive thoughts. And just especially when you're dealing with a big problem that you really need to solve, the best thing you can do is just completely forget about it. Don't let those intrusive thoughts in, sleep on it, and your mind can do so much more with it than you can, than you could ever do.

And when you have good restful sleep without that stressful state, you'll do so much better. Even six hours will go a lot longer than eight hours of crappy sleep. So just that's my part on sleep. - Final words of advice. - Final words of advice. Use your doctor as a consultant, not your crutch.

Stop going to the doctors for most things. Really start taking care of your body. Start investing in your body. And I think you'll get a lot more, you feel more independent. And when you do go to the doctor, get as much information as you can online, everywhere. People are worried that us doctors hate when you come in with articles from Medscape.

No, bring it, dude. I'm not, shoot. I love looking at it and say, "Oh, I didn't even think about that." But no, you definitely don't have Chagas disease. You're fine. And yeah, exercise, diet, sleep, of course. That's it. That's all I got. - Mohamed, I thank you for coming on.

You are building a website at urgentcarecareer.com, so you're sharing a little bit more about your own personal experience. So if people want to check that out, urgentcarecareer.com. Are you optimistic about the future of medicine as a professional career? - I think so. I'm seeing a lot more people being drawn to more holistic type of medicine.

I feel like we're making disease less of an enemy. So I do. I feel very positive about it, actually. - Awesome. Thanks for coming on. - Absolutely. - Thank you for listening to this episode of Radical Personal Finance. If you're interested in building financial freedom for yourself and your family, please subscribe to the podcast with our free mobile app so you don't miss a single episode.

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