Why Relying Solely on Doctors Can Keep You Unhealthy - Sandy Martin

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome back, listeners of the Tron Podcast. This is your host, Rashad Woods. I've always had the pleasure and continue to to talk to people who've carved out their own paths and niche in life. And nothing is more important than your health when it comes to these matters. And I had the special honor of talking to Sandy Martin. She's the creator of BioEdge, and this is how you're going to learn about longevity, carving out your own path for your own health, because health is so personal. Thank you, Matt.

SPEAKER_00 0:24

Thanks for having me. I really appreciate having the opportunity to speak with you and reach your listeners too. Um you have some really good guests come on, and I'm honored to be here.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

Thank you. You reached out to me, and I gotta be honest with you. You know, when you talk about people's health, it's so personal. And you know, sometimes people have a tendency, myself included, to just take the pill from the doctor and then go to the pharmacy, pop it in your mouth, and consequences be damned until you're the guinea pig.

SPEAKER_00 0:50

And they've they've trained us to do that, right? Like it's it's good for them that we do that, that we don't question and we just take the pill and move on. Yes. And um, I got prescribed a couple of things when I had a mysterious brain injury. I took me five months to find out what it actually was. I was misdiagnosed as having a TBI as if I'd hit my head. And my doctor was like, You must have, you just don't remember. I can see it on the brain scan. But in hindsight, the brain scan was done wrong. And so, and he didn't perform it himself, so he couldn't have known. And he prescribed a drug that I didn't need to take. And my intuition that that seemed like an extreme measure was what got me on this road. And that was November of 2020. And it's taken me a long time to heal and figure out how to approach healing from a perspective that frankly doesn't drive my friends crazy because when I talk about it, I can be a bit much.

SPEAKER_02 1:47

Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:48

Um, so I had to come up with a framework that makes sense because just saying no to a doctor doesn't make sense to people.

SPEAKER_01 1:55

I think you know what's funny is I saw a commercial a long time ago when I was a kid. I'm 43. And so there was this commercial where people were talking, sure, the person that was talking at the picnic, was talking at work, was talking to their spouse, and then talking to the car mechanic, and then when they got the doctor's office, they stopped talking, right? And you're like, you question everything, and then it literally was like, and you're like, whoa. And I'm not suggesting that they're that the medical industry does not have innovation or wonderful physicians, but we have a tendency to clam up because we assume that they absolutely have every single answer, right?

SPEAKER_00 2:26

And they know more than us, frankly. Even as much as I know now about my health, I presume my doctor knows more.

SPEAKER_01 2:33

Correct.

SPEAKER_00 2:34

I may not always follow the advice exactly as it's given because I feel like our doctors don't even have the freedom to say what they think anymore.

SPEAKER_02 2:42

Right.

SPEAKER_00 2:42

So while my doctor's clearly smarter than me, I know my doctor's also restricted by the insurance system as to what he or she can recommend.

SPEAKER_01 2:50

Well, now your doctor can only see you for eight minutes, right? Eight minutes. Like, think about that for think about it. It takes you two weeks to book an appointment, it takes you 30 minutes in the lobby, and then you get seen for eight whopping minutes.

SPEAKER_02 3:03

Right.

SPEAKER_01 3:03

You know what I mean? And you're like, dang, all that. And so to your point, again, you know, I I never want to sit back and say that I know more than everybody else, but I think that you owe it to yourself to research fully about the breadth and depth of what you ultimately have to live with. And you went through it because you had that injury injury injury, excuse me, that was misdiagnosed, and it turns out it was mold related.

SPEAKER_00 3:25

It was. And it was only because I just kept reading. I mean, my cognition was just like a screeching halt. I struggled with sentence structure, I couldn't read a spreadsheet anymore. Everything I knew to be me, that everything I thrived doing at work, it was all gone. And everything got really slow for me. And I found out that it was the processing side of my brain that just hit it was blocked, it was inflamed because the mold had created. I think of it, like I picture it like cobwebs in my brain, just blocking the signals, just something in there. I just needed to get in there and clean it out. But people don't even talk about the brain that way. They didn't even know the brain had inflammation until 2012. Wow. Really? So yeah, they figured it out in 2012. They thought that because the skull limits the ability for the brain to expand, that it just never got inflamed. It just gets inflamed differently than the rest of the body. And so that inflammation is what causes brain fog. It's what causes, it can cause ADHD. It can cause depression. Like I won't say depression is caused by inflammation, but inflammation in the brain definitely causes depression.

SPEAKER_01 4:36

So that person that quote unquote is spacing out or not concentrating could really be having that type of condition taking place the entire time.

SPEAKER_00 4:43

They might be exposed to a toxin. It could be perfumes. Something as simple as cologne could cause someone's brain to become inflamed. That's and so for me it was a combination of paint fumes and mold writing on the paint fumes. That's why it went to my brain first instead of my body. I was in an area that had been wet for like 40 years. And I didn't know. I didn't know how bad it was behind the wall.

SPEAKER_02 5:06

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

And it was explained to me later that those paint fumes just went straight in. I don't know if you know, but our eyeballs are actually attached to our brain. And and our brain is forward facing. It's like literally little pieces of brain on our face. Oh my gosh. And so it's sensitive.

SPEAKER_02 5:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:24

And they found mold in my retina.

SPEAKER_01 5:26

That's insane.

SPEAKER_00 5:27

And that's part of how I knew.

SPEAKER_01 5:29

That's scary. That's very scary, right? And so now, you know, and it has nothing to do with something somebody did because, you know, when it comes to you know that environment, your body is so exposed to those things, it just takes proximity. But you know, it could be a dirty air filter on your on your furnace, you know.

SPEAKER_00 5:47

Or in your car.

SPEAKER_01 5:48

Or in your car. Oh my gosh. It's that's crazy. What's your background?

SPEAKER_00 5:52

You know, like how did you my background is in running Comic Cons of all things.

SPEAKER_01 5:56

I saw that. It was Galaxy Cons. So I was just, yeah, I saw that. I'm a little bit more than a lot of people.

SPEAKER_00 6:02

Are you really? What's your favorite?

SPEAKER_01 6:03

Honestly, it would have to be. I I used to watch Spawn was big for my day when I was in the 90s, right? It's because like that cartoon was really, really cool. The movie was okay.

unknown 6:13

Right.

SPEAKER_01 6:14

Yeah. You know, Todd McFarland was unique because he wrote Spy he used to illustrate for Spider-Man and everything like that. But I was I remember the HBO cartoon, you're like, whoa. Like that was that was really hefty. But I used to watch, I used to like Spawn quite a bit. And I love Blade, of course. Blade was, you know, the creme de la creme of it all.

SPEAKER_00 6:31

So I was I was running events with 50,000 attendees in a weekend. And um it you gotta hold a lot of moving pieces in your head at one time in order to do that. And I just couldn't do it.

SPEAKER_01 6:44

I I just want to say briefly that I always found it funny how people made fun of the geek, and I'm not saying you are, but I am. And now, like the geek is this is like the in-crowd inverted. It it inversed itself, right? So if you like comics in the 90s like I did, yeah, nobody wanted to admit it. Now it's like Rashad, what's that all about? Sorry, man, you weren't in the in-crowd, you know, 35 years ago, man.

SPEAKER_00 7:07

Where are you based? What's your closest Comic Con?

SPEAKER_01 7:09

Uh, Detroit, so they have like the Metro City one. Motor City, excuse me, Motor City.

SPEAKER_00 7:13

Motor City Comic Con. And then Fan Expo Toronto's not too far from you. That's another one.

SPEAKER_01 7:17

Right, right. They would do one at the uh at the like, I believe it's no buy expo center. I think now it's called the Suburban Showcase Collection. And then they would also do one at the uh the GM Renaissance Center too. That was really cool. I was actually in that building working when they filmed Reals Real Steel with Hugh Jackman. That was really fun. Yeah, that was a lot of fun. So um obviously, so now you're with Thyle hacking, but you kind of figured out your own path because you wanted to be in the driver's seat of your own health conditions. What led you to then eventually hosting conferences and getting into this space that you're now into and so passionate about?

SPEAKER_00 7:50

Well, I think I went into the health conferences a little naively because I had been so successful in running Comic Cons. I thought if I can run a 50,000 person event, I can run a 500-person event. That that ought to be easy, right?

SPEAKER_01 8:04

Not even close.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

Nope. Turns out it's really hard to get people who don't feel well to leave their homes. Funny that, right?

SPEAKER_01 8:12

Yeah, yeah. I didn't even think about that. You're right. You're right.

SPEAKER_00 8:14

And with all of the information on YouTube and now with AI, yeah, anybody can find anything they want to know in a split second.

SPEAKER_02 8:22

Right.

SPEAKER_00 8:22

So why are you gonna go out?

SPEAKER_02 8:24

True.

SPEAKER_00 8:24

And so we're getting to a point where I think within the next year, I love these live podcasts because people can tell it's a conversation. You know, we'll flub our words and make funny faces, and we are clearly not AI.

SPEAKER_01 8:40

Of course.

SPEAKER_00 8:41

And and there's a lot of content that's being created right now. People can't tell the difference between real and AI. And so I'm back into the events business to bring people together because coming together and sitting with people and talking with people, that's a longevity strategy.

SPEAKER_01 8:57

Right.

SPEAKER_00 8:58

And if you want to live well, you gotta have friends.

SPEAKER_01 9:00

Absolutely. You know, that's beautiful. And you know, I think that when people come from their own personal stories, it it it's there's nothing you can case study about it. There's nothing you could, you know, hear you were and that you did doubt, you know, the conventional method of what you were told. And again, I'm not suggesting that if you're having a heart attack, you're having a heart attack, right?

SPEAKER_00 9:22

Like you go to the doctor, ER, straight away. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:26

Like I'm just, you know, like full disclosure here, like I'm not, you know, anybody who's listening, we're on the same vibe here. Having said that, you know, look up the doctor's credentials, look up what methods work for people, find out your own particular uh um, you know, glucose levels and things like that. There's a lot of things you can research on your own instead of sitting on your couch for months on end waiting for somebody to see you for eight minutes, right?

SPEAKER_00 9:49

Right. And and what I hope people will come to discover is that the doctors must prescribe the pill to protect their own liability. If they don't give you a prescription as you leave their office, they haven't protected themselves.

SPEAKER_01 10:07

Really?

SPEAKER_00 10:07

And yeah, because they can't trust that you're gonna change your lifestyle. And so if they say eat better, exercise, go give that a shot, let's just say you're you're on the path towards your numbers inching up. You're going in your 30s, you don't have a clear problem. They can't just tell you to try harder. It's irresponsible, according to the system. They have to suggest drugs. And so if you're inclined to not want to do that, it's really important to start digging in and figuring out what actually causes high cholesterol, for instance, because it's not eggs, it's sugar. And so heart disease is not caused by eggs, it's caused by donuts. And when we when we go to the doctor and we get our glucose tested, our fasted glucose, and we're in the 90s, that's great. You can be in the 90s for a couple of decades. You can be like inching up close to 100, and they're like, You're good, you're not over the top, you're fine, we're just gonna monitor it. But what's not happening in the industry right now because the insurance companies don't approve it, is they're not testing how much insulin you're producing. And so when the insulin raises, the glucose stays level, but you keep increasing your insulin, that's causing heart disease. And so they don't test for that. If your glucose is still under 100, you're fine. But all in the meantime, you might have really high insulin that's causing your arteries to get stiffer.

SPEAKER_01 11:39

Right, to harden.

SPEAKER_00 11:40

And then your body has to produce more cholesterol to deal with that. Right. And we just don't know. The tests they're giving us don't give us the answers. And so the work I do tries to get people introduced to what sorts of tests and concepts can get them a little deeper than the surface that we're getting with traditional care.

SPEAKER_01 11:57

I think the problem is that the barrier, because it's not covered by insurance, people aren't willing to take those type of uh methods because, you know, at the end of the day, it's very highly structured and regulated. And so if you're sitting back and say, I would love to take an unconventional approach to my health, but having said that, it's a lot of out-of-pocket expenses for people.

SPEAKER_00 12:13

That's right. And that is the that is the problem. And so my philosophy with Edge is that you don't have to get tested to start the protocol. You don't have to get tested for your insul levels to reduce your sugar levels. And so if we take a look at what's in our environment, so for example, one of my best friends was messaging me last night and she said that her doctor's her doctor told her that her daughter's liver was working harder than it needed to, recommended um some sauna therapy to help detoxing, because the liver is there to detox. And my philosophy is that if something in our body's working harder, our body's working well. Our body's not broken when your liver or your pancreas or whatever is working harder. That just means we're capable. But it's working harder because we've introduced something into our bodies that's causing it to work harder. So if we just take out that input, oftentimes we're saving money. And so if we if we kind of get into the mindset that we want to eliminate the number of threats that we can experience from our air to our water to our food, then on our couch and our screens, it's a lot. I can be a pain in the butt sometimes.

SPEAKER_01 13:23

Yeah. What's been the reception from the med from the medical industry for you?

SPEAKER_00 13:27

Me specifically, I'm still under the radar, so they don't care about me. I'm still too too little too little. Um but people like Dave Asprey get a lot of pushback. And you know, Dave and I have different approaches. He's the father of biohacking. And in the edge protocol, I'll just lay it out. It's eliminate, decode, gain, and execute. And that's the sequence in which I think that we ought to be thinking about our health. But biohacking is really all about gain. What can I do to optimize my body, my environment, etc.? And that's very expensive. And health events are really all about gain. And so I was running two events in Miami feeling pretty guilty about shoving all these products and therapies in people's face with no guidance as to where to start. And so that's why I have, you know, the notion that let's see what we can remove, let's see what we can let go of, make space to hear our bodies speak a little louder, and then make sense of it and at some point maybe add a couple of things, a couple of tailored supplements or protocols or whatever. You could just add light exposure, sunlight in the morning and sunlight in the evening. That's something to add that's also free.

SPEAKER_01 14:37

How much reception have you started to get in traction when it comes to everyday people who have said, you know, I've tried conventional medicine for years, but then this suddenly became my ray of light, so to speak?

SPEAKER_00 14:47

It's a trickle, but it's it's valuable, you know? Beautiful. It's hard to get through to people with that. Yeah, you know, it's it's hard to let go of the things that bring us comfort.

SPEAKER_01 14:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:00

It is, it is takeout is easy. Absolutely it is. Those plastic containers are leaching micro microplastics into the food, and that's one more thing we have to detox.

SPEAKER_02 15:11

That's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 15:13

And so I, you know, I just want to encourage people to trust their intuition and let go of a few things and see how they feel.

SPEAKER_01 15:20

That's fantastic. So can you describe, you know, I know you said your conference is what in Miami typically, right?

SPEAKER_00 15:26

It has been in Miami for two years, and we're moving to New York this year.

SPEAKER_01 15:29

Oh wow, that's that's awesome. Isn't that? Yeah, that's uh so what's that been like when you do you get doctors that attend it too, who actually, you know, like, you know, hey, we can find a mixture, we can find a healthy balance of the more holistic approach to you as opposed to just necessarily prescribing pills. Because I got to imagine a lot of doctors, and I'm not speaking for the medical profession, I've said, I've tried prescribing pill after pill after pill, so I'm open-minded to a different suggestion or a different perspective.

SPEAKER_00 15:53

Well, Dr. Robert Lufkin is one example. He wrote the book, Lies I Taught in Medical School. Wow. And he's a he's a doctor who taught in medical school, who is now saying the pills didn't work for me, so I'm not gonna prescribe them for you. And he went completely off the grid and um is doing his own kind of practice. Dr. Mark Hyman created a company called Function Health that for$365 a year, still not accessible to everyone, but for that amount of money, you can get this really comprehensive panel, including the tests I was talking about earlier.

SPEAKER_01 16:29

A dollar a day.

SPEAKER_00 16:30

And what's that? A dollar a day. Yeah, exactly. And it's it's tough to make that call, you know, it's still a lot of money, but it's it it's a starting point for for a lot of people to break free of just that traditional model. And these were started by doctors.

SPEAKER_01 16:46

Do you find that it's more of a US thing? Have you looked like internationally to see if it's more prevalent that people do things in different places as opposed to here?

SPEAKER_00 16:54

I think it's different everywhere. I I was surprised to find out that even like in England, they're they're more tight with the convention than we are here.

SPEAKER_01 17:04

Oh, really?

SPEAKER_02 17:05

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 17:05

Yeah, but if you go other places in Europe, it's a little looser, um, they're a little more willing to experiment with additional therapies like stem cells and and other things that are really fringe at this point in the United States. But like, you know, it's if for people who have money, like the celebrities are getting stem cells injected through IVs to heal the insides of their body from amniotic fluid, right? Like it's it's a lot out there.

SPEAKER_01 17:33

Yeah, you hear about athletes and NFL and NBA players going all the time going overseas that things that weren't approved over here but are revolutionary other places because less red tape or you know, they're willing to you know, because ultimately there are a lot of and I hate to I certainly not a political show. There are people who have things in place for reasons that they are. And it's very hard to buck conventional because there's a lot of money behind that particular business model. I'll just say that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:02

Yeah, and not to be political, but I think the hardest part right now with health is that it's in my opinion, the second most divisive topic in the United States.

SPEAKER_01 18:11

Of course it is. Of course it is.

SPEAKER_00 18:12

They they you know they took our health and divided us based on the idea that we all want to be healthy. Uh I I don't understand that. That's the part that's hardest for me.

SPEAKER_01 18:21

You know, and ultimately you are in the driver's seat of your own, you know, healthcare decisions, ultimately. And you know, you know, and all you know, but I do think that people who have an opportunity to make themselves better, you know, if it works for them, there's obviously not a one-size-fits-all situation, right? So what may be great for Sandy may not be great for Rashad, right? There's lots of other mitigating factors involved diet, ethnic background, um, genetics, and things like that. But if people are putting themselves in the driver's seat of those decisions, they can make the best conclusions for themselves and ultimately even their families if necessary.

SPEAKER_00 18:52

Yeah, and I built a tool using AI that might help people before they get to their eight-minute doctor appointment. Um it's called bioedge decoder.com. And it's a free tool. And if you chat about whatever you're feeling in your body that's taking you to the doctor, it will guide you through systems of the body that could be driving what you're feeling. And it's not going to diagnose and it's not going to recommend a therapy. Its entire purpose is to get you to identify all of the things you're feeling before you get to the doctor's office. Okay. And then summarize it in a way that helps you say, This is what's going on with me. Could it be these three things? Or I'm open to your opinion, Mr. Doctor.

SPEAKER_01 19:40

Correct. Correct. As opposed to just, you know, yes, no, thank you, sign off. Where's your pharmacy? Here's the number, script. Have a nice day. Well, that's a pleasure. I know you told me before this call, obviously, your time is very short, and I certainly don't want to over talk because I can ramble. The randomness of nothing can go um, you know, some very crazy places. So for the purpose of the case.

SPEAKER_00 19:59

I appreciate you keeping the time tight.

SPEAKER_01 20:00

I yeah, you don't want to see you like, you know, I you don't want to see you start doing making that face, right? Like, hey, I told you before the call. So I'm not silly. You know, I remember that when people talk. Um, where can people find Sandy Martin in BioEd?

SPEAKER_00 20:13

Bioedge longevity.com. Pure and simple. All of it's there.

SPEAKER_01 20:16

Beautiful. I would like to thank you for your time, and this has been an honor and a pleasure on the randomness of nothing.

SPEAKER_00 20:21

Thank you, Rashad. Appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 20:22

Yep. Right. Well that