Dr Robert Rountree
Bob has been practicing family medicine in Boulder, Colorado, since 1983. He began his professional career at Wellspring, Partners in Health, a multidisciplinary clinic that included MDs, NDs, TCM practitioners, nutritionists, bodyworkers, and somatic therapists that was one of the first holistic healthcare centers in the U.S. Since January, 2002, he has been the Medical Director of Boulder Wellcare, a private practice specializing in integrative, personalized medicine. He is the long-time Clinical Editor as well as a regular columnist for Alternative and Complementary Therapies (Mary Ann Liebert, Inc). He has coauthored numerous books and written numerous book chapters on Integrative and Nutritional Medicine, including the Textbook of Functional Medicine, Clinical Botanical Medicine; Clinical Natural Medicine Handbook; The New Breastfeeding Diet Plan; Immunotics; and Smart Medicine for a Healthier Child.
In addition to his medical practice, Bob is an original, long-standing member of the core faculty for the Institute for Functional Medicine in Federal Way, WA. In June, 2015, he was given the Linus Pauling Functional Medicine Award by IFM, in recognition of his many years of mentoring and training health care providers. For over ten years, Bob has served as the Chief Medical Advisor for Thorne HealthTech, a world leader in the development and manufacturing of pure, high-quality nutritional and botanical supplements, along with advanced multiomic and diagnostic testing. In the past two decades he has had the opportunity to lecture all over the world to professional and public audiences. As an avid mountain hiker, Bob is especially passionate about the great outdoors, wild nature, and the preservation of biodiversity.
Listen to the episode on Spotify here or on your favorite podcast platform and check out the Urban Monk Academy here.
Podcast transcript:
Living a Healthy Lifestyle with Dr Bob Rountree
[00:00:00] I’m excited to introduce you to Dr. Bob Rountree. Great guy. Uh, one of the legends in the functional medicine world still teaches helps train young docs to understand a bedside manner, functional medicine. How to think about taking care of the whole person in front of you, that you’re going to really enjoy this interview.
He is a well rounded, seasoned doc. Who is out there, hiking and taking care of himself so he can take care of you. Enjoy Bob Rountree.
Track 1: Dr. Roundtree, great to see you. Welcome
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: thank you. Wonderful to be here.
Track 1: I’m a big fan of the work you have been doing, big fan of every interview I’ve done with you, so I’m just excited to have you here to share your perspective as a working guy, right? A working doctor who sees patients. A lot of the folks out there with voices haven’t seen a patient in years, right?
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: I am still in the trenches. I’m in the trenches still. Yep.
Track 1: And there’s a degree of accountability. There’s a degree of realism that [00:01:00] comes with seeing the people that come back and say, Hey, man, that didn’t work, or, Hey, that made me worse. And you can’t throw darts. You have to be as careful as you can in your recommendations with people whose lives can really take a wrong turn with bad advice.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: Absolutely.
Track 1: It’s, they call it a practice because, you’ve been at this for a very long time and you’re still practicing.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: Amazingly I love it actually. It really keeps me on my toes and it, it really opens me up to all the possibilities in life.
Track 1: Amen. Yeah. I think, my favorite advice is from folks that are in the trenches, because literally that’s the workshop, right? That’s the workshop. You have a very broad perspective being, a famous functional medicine guy for years. I just I’ve always loved your comprehensive, holistic view on this thing called health, right?
Like we used to talk about, telling people to inoculate their microbiome by taking hikes. And you were saying this years ago before any of this stuff was cool, [00:02:00] right? And
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: Green spaces.
Track 1: Green spaces and you live in one, as do I, right? And it’s intentional, right? It’s, I need to inoculate my kids with the right, chances in life.
And that has a lot to do with the air they breathe. So we were talking about this offline, I think it’s a really important piece to this whole puzzle, and I asked you overtly, what’s the difference between people who get well and people who don’t. You had a very clear cut answer, so I’d love for you to answer that and then let’s jump into it, because really the crux of it isn’t how much vitamin D you’re taking, although that’s a tactic if at this high level you don’t get this one part right.
You’re not getting well.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: Yeah, it really boils down to whether the person sees themselves as a victim of life or they believe they’re a master of their destiny. And, that sounds really glib of me, but it’s a core issue. And you can spot it right away. And the person who’s [00:03:00] saying this happened to me and that happened to me, and I just can’t get ahead and I don’t know what to do.
Versus the person who says, what are the skills that I need to accomplish the task ahead of me? What are the changes I need to make in my lifestyle and I’ll do them. It’s really that simple, really boils down to it.
Track 1: , I got paper here that says I have autoimmunity. I have genetic profiles that say my parents had crappy genes and that’s why my life sucks. There was covid. The economy’s bad. I. China. Like I can’t tell you how many excuses I’ve heard in my life, but to your point, none of that matters.
What are you gonna do about it?
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: Yep. And a really critical part of that is not laying blame. Oh, you got cancer. That’s because you have a bad belief system. You did this to yourself. That’s not what I’m saying at all. [00:04:00] I’m saying whatever situation you find yourself in, what are you gonna do about it? That’s what I’m talking about.
Not not laying on blame because somehow, you have a bad subconscious mind and. And negative thoughts, created this autoimmunity. You have autoimmune disease because you don’t love yourself. I’ve heard that. And living in Boulder, Colorado, I used to be a big fan of Louise Hay, to be honest.
And she made some interesting points, but I think she overdid it when it came to this notion of, you have back pain because you don’t believe the world supports you. There might be some of that going on, but I don’t think that’s the main issue, and I don’t think that’s what people should be worrying about anyway.
The question is where do you find yourself and what are you gonna do about it?
Track 1: It’s funny you say that. My father has had three spine surgeries first one, before I was born, [00:05:00] and he gets up at four in the morning and stretches for an hour and a half a day so that he can get through his days without being grumpy.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: Now that’s what I’m talking
Track 1: Yep. The story’s there, the narrative’s there. The world would say, oh yeah, man, that sucks, but he’s not going down like that.
So how do
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: I’ve seen people that, that were terribly disabled that said, okay, this sucks. I’m in a wheelchair now. I’ve, I fell off my mountain bike and my lower body’s paralyzed. How am I gonna cope with that? And then other people that say life is not worth living.
And they give up. And there, there is something intrinsic about whether a person goes in that direction or the other, some people just have the innate resources that allow them to be resilient no matter what. I’ve seen people who were diagnosed with multiple cancers. They had one, they got [00:06:00] treated as a child.
Then another one came and they just went, darn. And I look at that person and I go, where did you get that? I wanna know, can we bottle that up? Because, that’s something we want to learn how to teach and we know something about how to teach that that sort of intrinsic resilience.
We’re learning a lot about what makes it up, but I think there are some people who just naturally have it.
Track 1: So the person who’s listening to this, who knows that they naturally have it, but has wandered into the space of self-pity and narrative, I think what I’m hearing right now is stop right now. Roll up your sleeves, get involved. Do what it takes to get well. Period. You know better.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: The pity party gets to be a real downer after a while. I think Rumi said something to the effect the great Persian poet Rumi said something about do not sit long with a sad [00:07:00] friend.
Track 1: Yeah. Yeah. But
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: Which is that we gotta be com. You wanna be compassionate, right? It’s not about not being compassionate and not understanding when. Bad things happen to good people. They can be sad and life gets hard and we can all get in the dumps, but it’s really important to know that that you never wanna stop looking for what’s gonna help you get back up again.
Track 1: Yeah, so if you’re the type of person who knows that. This is your rally cry to say, stop it now. Start figuring out what’s gonna get you back and start doing that. You know better if you’re the person who is listening to this and believes that you don’t have it. How have you counseled patients who are part of that narrative who don’t believe that they have it, that they don’t believe that their agency is enough and they believe in the story.
That [00:08:00] leads to that like that. I know it’s hard, but how do you deal with it? ’cause you see lots of patients every week.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: Yeah. One way I deal with it is to use a counter example. So if they say, I went to my oncologist and Mycologist said that there’s only a 10% survival rate from this particular cancer in five years. And I go, can we get in touch with that 10%? Let’s find out, who those 10% are.
Bernie Siegel a surgeon from Yale used to talk about the exceptional patient. And a lot of times he would say that exceptional patient, the one who beats the odds is somebody who can actually be a little bit obnoxious. ’cause they don’t just take what they’re told and go gee, what a bummer.
There’s a 90% chance I’m not gonna make it. So what I do with patients who are looking at bad odds and are told there’s nothing you can do. I say, if 10% of people can make it. Then that tells us it’s possible. It’s [00:09:00] possible. So let’s get curious. And that word curious is really important.
I’ve actually sat with people who said, I’m just so distraught and discouraged that I can’t go on in my life. And you know what I’ve said this more than once. If you do away with yourself, you won’t find out what happens tomorrow. Aren’t you curious? Don’t you wanna know what happens tomorrow? You won’t get to find out if you kill yourself.
And it’s amazing. We have a part of our brain that can’t stand that. That’s got to know. So as soon as you word that, use that word curiosity. I think about my cat, like my cat can be. Laying there on my chest in bed, getting stroked, everything’s fine. And then there’s this slight noise outside and man, he’s like wide awake, pupil’s dilated.
What is that? [00:10:00] And I think that’s gotta be something really deep in his psyche that makes that happen. And I think that’s deep in all of our psyches that to be curious. So when a person is really discouraged, I think sometimes curiosity is the single best thing to say. There are people that have beat this.
There are people on the other side. There are people that have dealt with really difficult circumstances and have somehow come out ahead. What did they do and how might you do that?
Track 1: Amen. And it seems to me that curiosity is placebo adjacent. I. Whereas placebo adjacent is that place of pity. How often do you leverage placebo and the belief that one can get better with folks that come in with that kind of mindset? I.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: I would say all the time but I don’t think of it as placebo. I think about it as Seligman’s [00:11:00] work. Optimism which is very powerful research. And one way I’d describe Seligman, I don’t know if I’m getting this right or if Seligman would agree with me, if if you take an optimist and a pessimist and you give each of them a test with 10 questions on it, and each of them misses six, right?
So they get 40% right? The pessimist will say, gee, I, this is just not for me. I must not know this material. I totally failed. I only got 40%. The optimist will say, at least two of those questions were improperly worded, right? They, the, it wasn’t my fault, it was the question itself. It was the test itself.
How do you apply that? So in other words, what Seligman would say is the optimist will bend the truth a little bit. So let’s say you have two people with the same cancer and [00:12:00] both of them are told, the odds are not good, right? The odds are 60% against you, right? And so the pessimist will be more accurate.
The pessimists will say, yeah, then that’s probably what’s gonna happen. And Bernie Siegel used to talk about the person who was told you’ve got two years to live, and at the end of two years, they would kill over. And then Bernie Siegel would also talk about the person who. Say had lung cancer and they came in to see the doc and a mistake was made and the doctor looked at the wrong x-ray and said, your cancer’s gone.
And the person says, wow, that’s amazing. I don’t know how it happened, but I’m good now. And they would live way past their expiration date. So they lied a little bit. So Seligman would say the optimist bends the truth, but then when you look at the. The outcome for the pessimist versus the optimist outcome is much better.
So bending the [00:13:00] truth, being a little less accurate, oddly enough, plays out in their favor. I’ve always thought that was an amazing observation. So again, the person who says, yeah, but here are the facts and here’s the evidence, and the evidence is not in my favor, and so I’m screwed. Again, I would say optimists aren’t gonna believe that.
They’re gonna say there was something wrong with the test. The, maybe the X-ray was mixed up. The CAT scan was mixed up. The blood test wasn’t quite right ’cause it doesn’t apply to me.
Track 1: And I’m the
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: lo and behold,
Track 1: those odds.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: they beat the odds.
Track 1: Yeah, so the optimist has a slightly different frame, an importantly different frame, and the optimist also puts their feet under him and starts moving. The person who gets better takes action towards some sort of result, right?
Whether it’s eating differently, moving [00:14:00] their bodies, taking their supplements, whatever it is. What are the big levers? Once you have the operating system adjusted, so someone’s listen, I’m gonna beat these odds. I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna do what it takes. I’m not waiting for a savior. I gotta help myself.
I gotta fix myself. What am I gonna do? Then what are the big levers in your experience in clinical practice that really start to move the needle and bring vitality back for patients?
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: So Milton Erickson, the great hypnotherapist, used to do a really interesting kind of mind trick. I guess you would call it a trick, which is he would say, what are you gonna do? After you’re over the problem. So he would ask the person, so if you solve the problem and you look back and you said, how did I do that?
Then what did you do? Which I always thought was an amazing thing. Years ago I saw a patient who had extensive metastatic [00:15:00] cancer and and she didn’t really come to me for. Counseling. She came in ’cause she wanted to know about supplements and diet and that sort of thing. And I looked her in the she’d been told, you’ve got a month or two.
And I looked her in the eye and I just said, whatcha gonna be doing in two years? And I said it in a really congruent way. So you asked about how do I use placebo? I don’t know if it’s true or not. I just assumed it was true that, is that a placebo? I’m not giving her any magic pills or anything like that.
I’m just saying, what are you gonna be doing in two years? And I asked it in a way that made it clear that I believed she would be here in two years. And she said, I’m gonna be doing this stuff with my family and this stuff with my church. And she had this whole story, and amazingly enough. Two years later, she comes in and she said I’ve just had a recurrence.
And she looked at me and said, [00:16:00] why didn’t you ask me what I was gonna be doing in five years?
Track 1: Open the Aperture doc.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: I was like, I and I, it just occurred to me like, okay, you don’t wanna be too specific. When you mention these things a lot of what I do with people is say again, assuming you’re past the obstacle, instead of let’s let us having let’s have a discussion about the big wall in front of you and how you can’t get over it.
Oh, the wall is so high and so deep, there’s a moat in front of it. Here’s all the problems and here’s the reason I can’t get over the wall. I just go if you’re over the wall what would be happening in your life? And I wanna know. That in some detail, right? And I wanna do it in a very congruent way and a very clear way so that it isn’t oh, maybe you’ll beat this thing, whatever it is.
Now, one thing that I think is a problem about the way we’re trained as doctors in the Western [00:17:00] world, is that when we diagnose an illness, it’s a label, right? Jeffrey Bland, one of my mentors, wrote a book called The Disease Delusion. So we give a person a label and one example I have for that is the person who has say a red, swollen joint and they go see rheumatologists and the rheumatologist says you have a red, swollen joint.
It could be, a number of different things. Let’s do some tests. And they do the test and they sign everything is negative. I was thinking you might be on the way to rheumatoid arthritis, but you don’t have rheumatoid arthritis, right? So it’s like they’re trying out for a team and the doctor says you didn’t get the jersey.
And then a year later they get a joint on the other hand that’s red and swollen, and they go back to the doc who says, now you have symmetrical arthritis, so we’re gonna call that rheumatoid arthritis. I’m gonna give you the label. And the person goes, [00:18:00] oh, thank God. At least we know what’s wrong with me.
But what they didn’t realize is that they were given a label that amounts to a jersey that’s been welded to their body, right? You’ve, you just joined the team. You joined the team of people with rheumatoid arthritis, and here’s your jersey. And by the way, you can never take it off. So we are so hooked on the international classification of disease, of giving people a diagnosis and then saying, this is quote what you have, and then it becomes that person’s identity, right?
And then they get stuck in that. What they don’t realize is that what we call disease is not a thing, right? It’s a behavior. Your immune system is behaving in a certain way, and if it’s behaving one way, it can behave another way. That’s a pretty profound thing. So a person [00:19:00] who’s got normal health, if they get a little paper cut in their hand, they just assume that paper cut’s gonna heal.
A person who’s got diabetes that’s outta control with high blood sugar. They may not be so quick to believe that cut’s going to heal, because sometimes wounds don’t heal in diabetics, right? So they’ve lost some kind of intrinsic belief system that they had that the healing was gonna be natural.
And what we need to do is get them back to that intrinsic belief system of going, Hey, your body’s got a blueprint. Your body knows how to heal things. Your body knows how to heal wounds. So all you have to do is give it the right nutrients, make sure that part’s taken care of, but we also need to change this idea of the outcome.
What do you think gonna is gonna happen if you’re worried that wound’s gonna get infected, and then you’re gonna have to have your big toe cutoff, right? If that’s in your mindset, then it could happen. If you have a strong belief that says, oh, [00:20:00] my body knows how to deal with this, and I don’t have to fool with it, I don’t have to stare at it every day in a way, what we’re talking about with belief systems is the same thing we do when, our dog gets a cut and we put a dog collar on.
It’s we don’t want you licking it. And by licking it, I mean paying too much attention to it. How do you get on the other side of that wall? So the wall is a diagnosis and the person gets intimidated by that diagnosis because they went to see a mainstream doc who said, oh, here’s the wall of this diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis, and now you’re stuck with it.
Track 1: You’re almost cursed with it.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: people, I cursed with it. I’ve seen, patients who started getting weird neurologic symptoms and they were told you don’t have multiple sclerosis now, but you sure look like you’re gonna get it. And what does that do? That creates a mindset that, makes them think, okay, this is inevitable.
There ain’t nothing in medicine that’s inevitable. There ain’t nothing that’s [00:21:00] inevitable.
Track 1: In this example doc of say, let’s just, let’s switch from a cancer diagnosis to say a diabetes diagnosis, where it’s like, Hey, what are you gonna do in two years when you’ve beaten your di your diabetes? And they start, or five years for, for
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: Yeah, let’s give five years.
Track 1: What’s your five year life look like on the other side of diabetes?
Do you then go back, I just wanna make sure I heard this right. Do you then go back and ask them how was it that you beat the diabetes? Do you help them problem solve in future pace how they did it? Milton Erickson would’ve.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: Yep. Yeah. And then you backtrack. Oh. Gee, five years from now stopped eating. All that sugar that I was eating all the time, and I really got into a decent exercise program. James Clear in the book Atomic Habits talks a lot about how people build those activities and he’s very incremental.
Get a membership at the gym, go to the gym, walk in the door, and if that’s the best you can do, go home. [00:22:00] And then maybe the next time you go to the gym, you stay five minutes and then the next time you go to a class. So that, that’s great. It’s wonderful advice, but it also is, it’s really swimming upstream.
Again, if the person says to themselves in five years I’m gonna be done with this issue, right? And how I got there is I just allowed myself to start these habits bit by bit. Then you’re starting from a place of success.
Track 1: I love that. I love that framing. And then are there answers, so you’re asking a person who say, presumably a lay person who doesn’t understand the nuances of functional medicine or, turning around insulin resistance. So what are their answers typically? What’s the genius that comes out once they’ve future paced and then they go backwards and say what they’ve done?
I’m very curious as to how those answers shake out.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: I think the first thing that really surprises people [00:23:00] is they say, I knew all the answers when I first came to see you. I knew how I knew what I was not doing right. I knew I was eating too much. I knew that I wasn’t taking enough time for myself and my family. I knew all those things, but I had convinced myself that it was some kind of mystery, that this disease was attacking me.
That I was walking down the sidewalk minding my own business, and type two diabetes dropped out of the sky and hit me. And, suddenly my insulin wasn’t working.
Track 1: Yeah.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: But what surprises me, I think when I. Start from a place of success in the person’s mind, right? And an imagination experiment.
When they look back, they go, oh yeah. I just, I really came to see you because I wanted you to give me a hard time about not eating right, but that wasn’t working. [00:24:00] It wasn’t working. ’cause they just they were given a hard time about not doing something when they were a kid. By their dad or their mom.
And so I just produced that in my office.
Track 1: Yeah.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: And if I go, I’m not your daddy, right? I’m not here to chastise you because you ate too many candy bars yesterday. I’m not gonna do that. But what I’m asking you is what kinda life do you wanna live? What do you want things to be like in the future?
Track 1: That’s a big part of this conversation that I think is appropriate to circle into here is why, right? If I don’t really have a reason to live, if I don’t really have a map of my future, if I don’t really have something to future pace towards, then who caress if I eat the chocolate bar right now?
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: Yep.
Track 1: And so having something pulling someone forward instead of exerting effort to say no every time to every impulse. And there’s so many impulses nowadays. So how do you help? Patience. [00:25:00] It’s we live in this compartmentalized world where you’re a doctor, so doctors talk about health.
Whereas, priests talk about, spirit and, it’s, this compartmentalization, I think makes it almost hard to have a real honest conversation with folks. And I know you don’t care about that crap. And so you tell it like it is. How do you frame these conversations with people?
So that they then have something pulling them forward into more vitality because that’s what their life requires to power the dreams that they said they care about.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: You may know my friend Dave Rakel, who’s a kind of famous family doctor, wrote a lot of chapters in, in mainstream textbooks, et cetera, but is also very functional medicine oriented, has done a lot of work with the va and he put together a questionnaire. They use for vets many of whom are stuck in chronic health issues, PTSD, things like that.
And the first question on the questionnaire is, what do you want [00:26:00] your health for? And I tell people over and over again, if you can’t answer that question, it’s gonna be a bit hard for me to work with you. I’ve got to find something that makes it all worth it for you. And sometimes I get into deep existential discussions with people who say I don’t really want it for anything.
I’m just getting through my day, et cetera. For people who are very scientifically oriented, sometimes I get into physics and what’s called the quantum foam, and the notion that the whole universe is conscious. I don’t care if a person believes in a certain religion, et cetera. But if you read the scientific research in modern physics, it says the universe is conscious, the entire universe is conscious.
It might not be conscious in a way where it’s using words, but it’s aware in its own way. [00:27:00] And once you understand that and realize that. Then you realize that every single thing that happens in your life, is coming out of this cosmic foam and happening for a reason. So for me, that means the individual religious beliefs of a person are almost secondary.
The first question to ask is are you gonna go with what the facts show? Which is that this universe we live in, first of all, it’s bigger. It’s so much bigger than us than what we can comprehend.
It’s alive. It’s alive, and how do you tap into that? So for the person that can say I want my health for my family, or something like that, then that’s. That’s easy for the person that says I don’t really know and I don’t know where to go. Then again, we get into this deeper existential kind of thing, and I can’t convince somebody that.
The world is alive. I or the universe is alive. But I can say, you might wanna check out the literature on it because it’s, when you [00:28:00] read complexity theory and quantum mechanics and all that, it’s pretty darn compelling what the physicists are saying. If you get a big enough microscope and you look on a small enough level, then the universe is pulsating and vibrating.
And it, it’s, I think it’s communicating with us.
Track 1: Amen. On the flip side is without reading any of that, if you go spend a few hours in the woods breathing the air, listening to the birds, feeling the breeze and hearing the leaves dancing, I. There’s also this ancient wisdom of everything being alive that reminds yourselves of who you truly are and where you came from.
And I think that path is equally as accessible to people who are more ripe brain or people who you know, have had those experiences and that ties us in with something bigger than ourselves. And I can’t tell you how powerful of a form of medicine that has been over the years where I just, I prescribe hikes for people.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: [00:29:00] Yep. So I have a cabin in Colorado that’s up at about 9,000 feet and and hiking is my thing, right? That’s all summer long. I. I get out into the woods and I get as far back into the woods as I can, and it changes my consciousness dramatically. The amazing thing to me is that the winter will come and it can get cold and windy.
It’s 10 degrees Fahrenheit, and I’m going, you’ve gotta be kidding me. Why would I want to go outside? And then a little voice in my head says, because you have to. Because you have to. So I’ll bundle up put on all my gear, et cetera, and go out and start hiking and again, it’ll be windy and cold and I think, why am I doing this?
And suddenly, after about 15 minutes, I’ve forget about all my hesitation and a [00:30:00] whole new world opens up. And that’s even on days when I’ve gotten up and I’ve read the news about what’s going on international, internationally, and I’m going, oh, can’t believe what is going on in this world. It’s a real mess right now.
It could be very discouraging. I can get really down, and again, that voice says you gotta get outside, and I get outside and I go for a hike and I’m not doing anything amazing. I’m just going for a couple hour hike up in the woods and it totally changes everything. It changes everything.
It changes my outlook on life. I can feel it change my physiology. I start getting creative again. I began to have thoughts about. Projects and things I wanna do. It’s amazing how much of an impact it has now for people that say I’m just not an outdoor person. I think movement in general has the same impact.
I dance every week. My wife is [00:31:00] a dance teacher. She teaches something called nia, which is a really fun kind of dance. And I take her classes every week and it’s a kick. Just moving around, moving different parts of your body, again, opens up the consciousness and really helps you tap into that internal vitality. So there’s something that works for everybody. For me it’s hiking, dancing, and, oh, did I mention swimming? I have to swim twice a week because I’ve gotta get into the green spaces and the blue spaces, I’ve gotta get into the water. That’s lifesaving to me. There’s something about the immersion and the water and the fluid movements, being the merman.
There’s something about all of those things together. Each one of them is beneficial in its own way. Now, if I told myself, Bob, you gotta exercise. You gotta exercise, but because it’s good for you and you’re gonna live longer, and the research shows that [00:32:00] exercise, I would never do it
Track 1: It’s not your personality. It’s gotta be fun.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: It is gotta be fun.
I’ve gotta love it and I’ve gotta know, again, I’m projecting when I go out for that walk on a cold winter day, I know something’s gonna happen. I know on the other hand, on, on outside, on the other side of that wall, somewhere at some point into the hike, my consciousness is gonna change. So I’ve moved forward and that’s pulling me into the hike.
Again, rather than saying you gotta go do
I get pulled into it.
Track 1: You mentioned this internal vitality when I get myself out and I do it all the time, right? Like I’m just a grumpy guy if I don’t get out. But I also experience, I. Vitality as a currency of life, as witnessed through birds and trees and sunshine and everything else. There’s everything is running off the same type of metabolic processes.
We’re [00:33:00] photosynthesizing rays from the sun and creating energy, and it’s transferring between us and all these other plants and animals, and there seems to be this interesting currency of energy that runs through all life that you become a little more aware of when you. Step out of isolation and you start to witness it in movement in reality.
And I’ve seen that snap a lot of patients out of their funk.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: Yeah. Yeah. I, for me, really get touched by animals. We have a cat who’s ornery and old, but also can be really loving and I’ve had a lot of days where I was grumpy and, he jumped up in my lap and just wanted a love and. It really touched me. It really deepened me. So I think it’s an example of what’s going on all around us.
Now, if you’re sitting in an office all day [00:34:00] long and the shades are pulled down and you’re not looking outside, you’re getting the opposite of that, right? So anything that can op you, open you up to the world outside yourself, whether it’s your pet or the birds outside the window. Do you know the a breeze that’s going by a plant?
The amazing thing about about the biophilia research which is a love of life, is that biophilia is actually programmed into the human mind. And supposedly that’s biophilia is why we love. Babies of any kind of species, right? Baby raccoons where you go, oh, maybe I don’t like adult raccoons very much, but baby raccoons, they’re so cute, right?
Track 1: So we, we have this built in program in our brain that is a love for life. [00:35:00] And all we have to do is figure out how to tap into it. That’s why they’ve done research on people in hospital rooms, and they found that if you put greenery in a room, then it affects the person’s healing.
That’s a huge lever that we forgot to pull on because we got really good at com compartmentalizing. And diagnosing and all things that, we thought we were really good at until we lost the baby with the bath water. And the proverbial baby here has that ee quo, that energy of life that somehow triggers us to remember.
Track 1: And once we do, healing seems to be facilitated across the board.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: Yep. Yeah. So how do, again, how do we tap into the natural joy that a little baby has right when they, there’s some little toy spinning above them and they’re giggling and laughing, like nobody taught them to laugh. That’s the important thing is they didn’t have to learn how to laugh. They’re not mirroring that from a parent That’s [00:36:00] natural.
Track 1: Yeah. So if someone is listening to this right now, and I guarantee you someone is who is to wallowing in their.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: Yep.
Track 1: Diagnosis or is, down and beat down in terms of energy levels and their ability to believe that they can heal your counsel. Aside from future pacing and how are you gonna feel would be what to this person?
And look, folks, just to qualify this, Dr. Roundtree seen thousands and thousands of patients and as people from all over the world seeing them for all sorts of complicated health concerns. And we’re talking about a very high level about an operating system fix so that the system can fix itself.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: Not long ago, I had the pleasure of spending some time with Jim Gordon, who wrote the book, transforming Trauma. He’s an amazing psychiatrist that has gone to places [00:37:00] where people have been deeply traumatized, have gone, spent a lot of time in the Ukraine. For example, and the question comes up that’s similar to what you’re asking, which is how do you sit with somebody who’s been through these really horrific experiences?
And the first response that he comes up with is that community is everything. That connecting with fellow human beings. And just sharing experience is a place to start. So again, if a person is doing what you say wallowing, is just feeling lost and despaired, then the first thing is to find connection, right?
That doesn’t really take that much effort. Simply finding somebody to talk to and to be with, and to share the feelings. In a way that hopefully the other person can empathize with, [00:38:00] and simply being seen and heard is the start of the journey. Feeling seen, feeling heard, knowing that, hey, I’m I’m a legitimate human being.
I’ve been through some really difficult times, some horrible experiences, et cetera. But I, if I can bond with another person. Around that experience, then that bond gets stronger and stronger. One example of that is something I recommend a lot called HeartMath, I’m sure you know about HeartMath, which is a lovely kind of meditation that you do that’s focused on the breath and your heart rhythms and some of the research that the HeartMath people have.
Shown is that by focusing on that heart energy that it starts to expand and you actually naturally begin to connect with other people. Very powerful stuff. And it’s only 10 minutes a day. So a person who says, oh, I can’t do anything. I’m [00:39:00] helpless. I don’t know where to start. You can do this heart math thing for 10 minutes, can’t you?
Track 1: Yeah.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: And there, there actually is an app that the HeartMath people have put out that’s called something like Global Coherence, I think. Where you’re actually meditating with other people around the world. What an idea. Very cool. So
Track 1: Really good research
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: able to reach out,
Track 1: Like 400 third party studies alone and counting like this is not fly by night stuff, right? These people have been around for a long time doing good work.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: Yep.
Track 1: Yeah. And.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: again, I’m just looking for an opening. I the best thing I can offer for somebody like that is just to be with them. Is to sit with them and to understand and to know how difficult life has been can be, has been. It can be that way for all of us. Things happen, we get down, we feel helpless.
Yeah, we all feel [00:40:00] victimized at times, but do we stay there or not?
Track 1: Are there any safeguards around. On the types of people the concern I have here in that is you find that a person who has a similar experience, and then it becomes a pity party, where then you commiserate together and it doesn’t become a positive outcome. It becomes, a, a moaning session, right?
So how do you set that up so that there is a positive outcome in, sharing, but then doing something, moving your feet under you.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: Okay. It’s something I learned from Virginia Satir. Which is that I, you don’t stay in that state very long. And at some point it’s important to ask what were times in your life when you felt good, right? What were times in your life when you felt resourceful? And then to anchor that in, right? To reinforce that.
And that’s something my wife, who’s a health coach she talks about all the time what’s been [00:41:00] good. You can pace the person by listening to them and being with them and experiencing expressing empathy. But at some point it’s important to, to help them realize at some level in your life, you’ve not been always helpless at some level in your life.
At some point in your life there was something that that worked out for you. You solved the problem, didn’t you? You can’t have gotten all this way in your life and never have solved a problem. Tell me about a problem that you solved and how did you do it, and what inspired you to do it?
Track 1: I love that.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: But I don’t start there.
I don’t, I don’t like to hammer people with that because they can get offended. I wanna start by letting them know that I care, that I, it’s painful what they’re going through, and I get it. I get it. I’ve been through my own pain. I know what that feels like, so I’m willing to listen to that
Track 1: Yeah.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: and then at some point [00:42:00] I wanna lead them, help lead them into finding their own resourcefulness.
Track 1: And people need to be heard. And I think one of the areas where the traditional medical system has really failed is doctors don’t have time to listen. And so the conveyor belt is not very conducive to that. So having a doctor’s stop and listen and hear is magical, right?
There’s something very powerful that happens when people are heard.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: Yeah. Unfortunately, I think medicine is getting so corporatized in this country that. The doctor no longer has the option of being that understanding wise person that one would choose to go see if they need this kind of help. They’d be better off seeing a health coach, right? Maybe they’ll get it from their doctor.
But a lot of the new docs coming out in training are just feeling really harried and overwhelmed, and they’re [00:43:00] following. All these orders from above that say you’ve gotta rush through your schedule. So I’m actually telling people, be compassionate to your doctor
Track 1: Yeah. It’s crazy.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: of going to your doctor for compassion.
Maybe it needs to be the other way around.
Track 1: Yeah, I just got invited to speak at a conference of, 15,000 medical doctors about suicide medical. Practitioners committing suicide at stunning rates because their lives just suck, right? These are folks that got into a field. You look, you could have got into banking, right? You want money, you go banking, right?
You got into the field of medicine to help people, and then all of a sudden the clerks are telling you what to do. The bean counters are telling you to run faster. It’s not great. The doctors are not happy either. And so you’re old guard, right? You’ve done this for a bit. You don’t have to go work for an HMO at this point in your life, but the young folks coming through, thank God. Yeah.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: yeah. Again, have compassion for your doctor. If they, don’t [00:44:00] stop for a minute to say something empathetic. It may not be their fault.
Track 1: Yeah they’re facing time compression just as you are. Okay, so we’re running outta time. I just wanna get a couple, like for you, the highest leverage points to restore vitality. In conclusion, obviously we talked about a lot, but anything else you would like to add to that? For folks that are really trying to find the vitality back in their life, like what parting words of wisdom would you leave Doc?
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: Yeah. Again I try to help people see the big picture in their life. And that’s something I can do as a doctor sometimes. I’ve taken care of people for 25 years. I I have some patients in my practice for 30 years, and I’ve seen the big picture. I see how time. Evolves for them and how there’s always ups and downs.
So if a person comes in and they’re in a state that’s not resourceful, then what I try to do with the lens of my camera is pull back. If I don’t know them all [00:45:00] that well, I might ask them how other people view them and what other people would say. So a person says, gee I’m really having trouble with this and I, I’m not doing well.
And I say what would your spouse say? Or what would your siblings say? The, so the person can have a bigger perspective. And then what’s going on in the world? What are positive things in the world? Again, trying to nudge them towards optimism without forcing optimism on them and admitting that I have my own journey around that.
I don’t wake up automatically optimistic. I have to work my way into it over and over again. But there is this thing called neuroplasticity that says that the more you do something, the more you do something. The more it gets programmed in. The other phrase that I use a lot for myself and in my own meditation is radical acceptance.
And that can be a hard one where [00:46:00] you say to yourself, no matter what happens in my life, there’s something to be gained from it. Yeah. It’s the old silver lining thing. Sure. But what’s wrong with it? What’s wrong with saying, okay, I’m gonna accept everything and figure out how to move on. So how can I help people radically accept every little thing in their life, every small detail. So those are the two things. The big picture and the acceptance.
Track 1: Love it. Love it. I really appreciate the fact that you’re still carrying a torch, seeing patients and helping folks on a one-to-one basis. And I hope to God doctors like you stay in the business, right? Because it’s what it’s what that relationship should be. I.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: Yeah I hope that I’m not too much of a dinosaur. I’d really like to see, compassionate, smart, creative people continue to come into this profession. I think there’s a lot of [00:47:00] need out there.
And I don’t know what to say. The answer is for the healthcare system. I can’t do anything about this system itself.
All I can do is work within my own sphere. And so if a person feels so compelled, I would encourage them to create a similar sphere.
Track 1: Yeah. Yeah. A sphere of goodness and one that like proactively helps people and look, that in and of itself is a service to humanity and people value that and come to you. It’s not like you’re out there banging away saying, come see me. You have plenty of patients. There’s a reason for it. So if you’re a young healthcare practitioner watching this, then you know, look, maybe reach out to someone like Dr.
Roundtree, Dr. Bla, look for mentorship from people who have been doing this in a way that is humanistic. And, there’s a lot, there’s a lot to learn. So how can people find you, doc?
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: I guess through the Institute for Functional Medicine. I’m not really taking new patients right now, but I do I do [00:48:00] sometimes give advice or, have a referral network, et cetera. So yeah I’m lecturing for the Institute for Functional Medicine. I lecture regularly at the Integrative Healthcare Symposium every year so people can look up those lectures if they can’t go to the symposium.
And I try to to get the word out about other possibilities for treating conditions, I’m not even calling them diseases right now. The, there’s always other options.
Track 1: Yeah. Yeah. And that in and of itself opens the aperture and allows for healing to be possible.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: Yep.
Track 1: Bob Roundtree, your hero. I really appreciate everything you’ve done for the profession and for the world, and I really appreciate you being here for us.
bob-rountree_1_01-05-2024_160655: You bet. It’s so great to talk to you.
Track 1: Always a pleasure. Thank you.
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