The Importance Of Proactive Health Management With Tanna Donalson

 

One of the biggest mistakes people make when it comes to their health is to completely depend on the broken healthcare system. To save yourself from getting drowned in medical nonsense, you have to start a proactive approach to your health management. Brian Dewald chats with Tanna Donalson, Certified Physician Assistant and owner of Redbud Medical Spa, to explain how to advocate for your own health. She discusses how to navigate the many hurdles of the healthcare system, from unnecessary billing to the lack of focus on nutrition. Tanna also explains how a simple mindset shift and adopting a healthy lifestyle can positively change not just your physical but your mental well-being as well.

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The Importance Of Proactive Health Management With Tanna Donalson

I am joined by Tanna Donalson. She is an entrepreneur, a model, an actress, a PAC, and the owner of Redbud Medical Spa. Thank you so much for joining us. We’re going to talk about all kinds of exciting things. We’re going to talk about some paradigm shifts in medicine, and we’re going to talk about everything, health, history, working out, fitness routines, nutrition, all kinds of fun stuff. I’m excited to jump in.

We are at BAM. It’s known as Bad Ass Mavericks. Maverick is the name of my little boutique mortgage company, and I thought we would carry it right into the show. A maverick is someone who is unconventional and independent and doesn’t think or behave like others. Tanna, if I mentioned those words to you, I figured you would be a perfect candidate as soon as you and I started connecting on this. What are your thoughts? Are you conventional, or are you outside the box a little bit?

Not just a little bit. I’m the black sheep rebel in medicine, breaking all the rules.

This is going to be awesome. In your own words, what does that look like? What do you think when I say unconventional or doesn’t think or behave like others do? I knew you were going to answer that way, that’s why I was so excited to have you on here.

For me, when I was 22, thinking about going into medical school of some sort, I didn’t know I was this rebellious until I started to learn the system. I just remember so many times sitting in grad school, listening to people talk, and thinking, I was probably hell to raise, the one who asked why, poked, and pushed back on everything. It just didn’t make sense to me why everything was so reactive, but this was the career I chose.

 

 

I went into emergency medicine and trauma, reacting to everything that came in the door, but I was never taught how to get in front of anything. I started asking questions, being a pain in the ass, pushing back, breaking the rules, and getting in trouble. That’s why I am in private practice, because I’m unemployable.

Experiencing Growth By Taking Action

I love that. What’s scary is that this is the unconventional way of thinking. You bringing these things up is a pain in the ass, in a way. It’s terrible that that’s the case, but here we are. We’ll jump into lots of different stuff around that. I love hearing about growth. Talk to me about your idea of growth because I know you’re an entrepreneur, and you’ve got all kinds of fun things going on. What does that mean to you if I say the word growth?

On the topic of growth, I posted something like this on my Instagram story. These are not my words, I’m just going to totally screw it up. Somebody else said this, but there’s a little bit of a dopamine surge that you get from reading all the books, listening to all the podcasts, and getting involved in all the self-help stuff. The real money is in the action.

For whatever reason, maybe it’s just my extra energy, maybe I’m motivated differently than other people, but these things that I’ve learned, not all of them. I have plenty of growth that I need to get into at some point. I have put some of it into action. I’ve learned something and done something with it, and my life, my business, and everything reflect that. Growth, to me, I have a desire to grow. I have a desire to learn all the things, but I also have a desire to implement that stuff into life and relationships.

That’s huge. It is because a lot of people can be the smartest people in the room but just don’t take action. Maybe, you know, there’s some sort of psychological advantage to folks like you who can do that, but action is where all the fun is, even if you fail. I have this whole premise that I share with my team. I’ve got five employees, and we chat every Monday about wins. I don’t call them losses, we call them lessons. W’s and L’s are wins and lessons in my book. It’s fun.

How else are you supposed to learn if you don’t screw stuff up and fail a little bit? I love it when my kids screw up and fail. Not that everything has to be a teaching moment, but how else are you supposed to learn?

Tanna’s Work On Fixing The Healthcare System

I’m not a textbook, which doesn’t work well for me. I don’t retain any of that stuff. If I screw it up, I learn, and I love that thought. Go back a little bit to medicine and basically give us an outline or a high-level view of what you do.

I feel like I do a lot of things. Here we go.

I figured. I think you do a lot of things.

I do a lot of things. I like to do a lot of things. I cast a wide net because I can do a lot of things. I can help in a lot of different ways. At the same time, I don’t want to do everything. I can’t be good at everything, that’s for sure. My background is in emergency and trauma. I did that for fourteen years. I learned by fire. I was thrown to the wolves. I did some crazy stuff, and I have lots of stories to tell. That was my time in Western medicine. During that time, I learned what I’m passionate about, which is longevity, health, wellness, getting in front of disease, and just listening.

Believe it or not, that’s a skill that isn’t taught in medicine. I know it’s super weird, but I got good at listening, good at empathy, and good at stepping into people’s shoes, caring about what they’re going through. When I bailed on corporate medicine, which I hate to say because that makes me sad. I wish I could have stayed in the system and still practiced in a way that felt ethical and good to me, but I couldn’t. I left, and now I’m in private practice.

I have a medical spa where I do mostly aesthetics, but I also do some concierge functional medicine, hormone replacement for men and women, weight loss, peptide therapy, which is a whole new world, a fun one. Some functional medicine includes nutritional evaluations, genetic testing, and so on and so forth. There’s a lot that we can do. It’s all centered around health, wellness, longevity, biohacking, getting in front of disease, finding things before they become problems, and not just being a reactive practitioner waiting for the ball to drop and then trying to fix it.

I love that. That’s how you and I connected. We’ve got a mutual friend, and we’re both clients of another gentleman who’s been on here as well. He’s been on our show. He introduced us, and he knows my background. I’m super transparent about all of it. I don’t know the difference in a lot of it. I came to you and just said, I’m with you. I got into biohacking and these new ideas and stuff over the last year. I’ve done quite a transformation.

I was 260-some pounds a year ago. A1C was through the roof. I don’t even know what that means. I’m going to talk to you about that a little bit, but I never had gone to a doctor and heard the words, “If you do these things, it will improve your quality of life.” There wasn’t even a why behind it. It was, “You take this, take this, take this pill, take that pill.” That’s not working. “We should add another pill.” That’s not working. “We should just add to the dose.”

I’m just like, finally, I threw my hands up in the air, and I’m like, “This isn’t even doing it. How am I supposed to get better, number one? How am I messed up in the first place?” This just doesn’t make any sense. Teach me how I can improve. When I came to you a few months back, I was just like, “Here’s my struggle. I can’t seem to figure it out.” I still don’t know what it means.

I want to ask you about this because I think it’s a relatively common theme that a lot of people deal with, but my glucose was whacked out, and I can’t do anything. I don’t know how to get it any better. I told you my story. I’ve been very active the last year. I’ve been eating all organic food. I order almost everything in, grass-fed, grass-finished, like the best of the best, no alcohol, all of these things, and my glucose is still messed up. I’m just like, “Why am I still feeling a little off?” That’s where you came in with the peptides and all that.

Understanding A1C, Glucose, And Insulin

Let’s start with some of the ideas behind high A1C and glucose, and what does insulin do? If I’m a fifth grader, can you help? It is because at this time, I retain things. I love talking to Adam Wade because he just puts things in such perfect layman’s terms for me that I don’t have to be at his level or at your level to understand some of this stuff.

He’s very good at that. He’s very good at color coding. I wish I had a color-coded chart right here to show you.

We should get him on here just to help us with some visuals or whatever.

He would be great at that. Simply put, when you’re born and you’re young, you have this organ, the pancreas, and its job is to secrete or spit out insulin every time you eat anything that has glucose in it, which essentially is everything. Glucose hits the system, your pancreas recognizes that, and it sends insulin out there to push the glucose inside your cells so that you can burn it for fuel.

If you remember back to being twenty, when you could eat a whole pizza and be hungry an hour later, and it’s not on your hips an hour later, it’s just gone, and you can eat more, those days are gone for you and me. Back in the day, that was because your pancreas was working, it was optimized, and it was functioning well. It wasn’t sluggish. It wasn’t tired. Over time, you get some degree of insulin resistance.

To be completely frank with you, this is anecdotal, friend hat on, not medical, and I don’t have the actual data to tell you, but I’m telling you, almost every patient that I test has some degree of insulin resistance. Meaning their pancreas is not putting out as much insulin as it once did. Not only that, the insulin it is putting out encounters some resistance built up in the body.  Instead of the glucose going inside of the cell and being able to be used for fuel, it’s getting stored as fat. You also have a higher level of circulating glucose, meaning your blood sugar is higher longer.

In the ER, I can’t tell you how many times people would walk in through the door with a blood sugar of 300-something and feel fine. It’s because they’ve been living for a decade or longer with this elevated blood sugar, and they didn’t even know that they were diabetic or they come in because they have numbness in their feet, or they’re going blind, or something like that. It’s literally because of diabetes, it was undiagnosed for a long time. It’s crazy. To answer your A1C question, an A1C is like a 90-day average of what your blood sugar has been doing. Instead of getting a static reading of a blood glucose level, which is very affected by what you just did, you’re getting a 90-day average in the form of a percentage. That’s how we test for diabetes.

That’s super helpful. Again, because I don’t know these kinds of things, I’m just generally curious. What does diabetes do? Everybody knows it’s bad for you, but what is the potential? Does it cause other issues? Go down that path a little bit.

It doesn’t do anything good. It does everything bad, and it affects every organ in your body. The low-hanging fruit here, it causes a hyperosmolar state of your blood. Your blood’s thicker, there’s more sugar in your blood, and your blood’s thicker. You’re going to have all kinds of risks involved and downstream effects from that hyperosmolar state. One thing would be neuropathy, nerve damage, typically starting in your fingers and toes. We will test the sensation on the bottom of people’s feet because you’re not always aware if you don’t have great sensation on the bottom of your feet. We test for that.

The next thing would be nephropathy, kidney disease. Things get clogged up, and kidneys start functioning worse over time because of the elevated glucose. The list just goes on. Diabetic retinopathy, the retina is damaged. Again, the blood flow is compromised to the retina. You have decreased sensation, decreased eyesight, kidney damage. You have a higher degree of cardiovascular events, earlier death, the list goes on.

Super scary. I’ve been told I’m type 2 diabetic but never all of those things, nor how to improve it. Other than, “Take this pill.” “This isn’t working? Let’s add to it.” “That still isn’t working? Let’s double the dose.” I started going down a rabbit hole of, “What are these pills?” I’m like, “Am I better off just not taking anything?” That’s why I went as far as I could naturally with food and exercise and things like that, which we’ll talk about a little bit. None of that was ever brought up, and I think that’s why I enjoy you so much personally.

How To Advocate For Your Own Health

It’s because your outlook on things aligns so much with mine. I’m a big fan of, I told you, biohacking, and so I’ve been following and I’ve gone down this rabbit hole over the past year for some of these guys, and I’m fascinated by Dana White. He’s the UFC president, and he got teamed up with a guy out of Miami named Gary Brecka. To hear some of the stuff that he’s done just with a lot of the things that you and I have been working on is just insanely fascinating to me. Do you have any myths that you think you can help me debunk?

If you are not failing even a little bit, how are you supposed to learn? Share on X

The biggest thing that comes to mind, I’m thinking bigger than just the things that you and I have talked about. I’ll give you an example. It’ll be easy here. When I had my son, I was billed twice for his circumcision. In fact, I just got a bill in the mail for lots of thousands of dollars, and I didn’t get an itemized statement. I know better. I asked for an itemized statement, and circumcision was on there twice. I had to have an argument with the lady, who’s non-medical, on the phone about how my son was only born with one penis, and it’s not possible to need two circumcisions.

The myth that I’m debunking is that we have the power to push back. We have autonomy. We have our own agency. We have the ability to say no or to advocate for ourselves. We’re coming out of it, thank God. I feel like, for a long time, we just went to the doctor and did what they said. Look at our parents’ generation. They have fifteen doctors, and they follow whatever those doctors tell them to do. They’re not asking questions. They’re not pushing back. Being an advocate for yourself, at least knowing what you don’t know, start asking questions, look stuff up, read.

That’s how you and I connected. I was just going down, looking for new answers, and not necessarily liking the information I was given or the amount of information I was given, which is just crazy.

The myth is that we know better. The myth is that we know how to take care of you better than you know how to take care of yourself. Come into the system, we will boss you around, and we’ll take great care of you. The truth is, the system’s broken, and the system is not going to take great care of you. You are.

I agree. I saw a meme the other day, and I’m going to butcher it, but it was something along the lines of, imagine if doctors got paid to heal people or keep them healthy, not just give them medicine. I was just like, this is totally my life.

They’d have to go back to school.

I know. The problem is, and you tell me if you agree with this or not, but my perception of all of this is that they’re learning from the person that they learned from, that they learned from, that they learned from, it’s just like a broken record. They don’t even know any differently. They’re just like, “This is what I was told at my Harvard-whatever crap.” I don’t know, we’re going down this crazy rabbit hole, but anyway.

A hundred percent. If you look at how medical students are taught, it hasn’t changed. We might gain a list of twenty new drugs that have been pushed out, just another drug to cause another problem that needs another drug, but we’re not changing the paradigm. We’re not changing the direction. We’re not changing the way we take care of people at all.

Going back to the crazy story about your son, how old is your son?

He’s thirteen. With one penis.

I’m shocked that he’s thirteen, and you’re still having to deal with that stuff. I’m in the mortgage business. I’ve probably pulled somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 credit reports in my career. I’ve been doing this a long time, maybe even more. I think this may have just changed as far as billing on credit reports, but you would be so, maybe you wouldn’t be, but the general public would be pretty shocked at how many collections and erroneous, mainly, things that I see on credit reports that are all medical-related.

I think it’s aligning with what you’d mentioned about your story with your son and his single penis. They’re just like, “I thought the insurance was covering this. I thought I paid this.” I’m like, chances are you did. They’re just like, “I don’t know.” Maybe that’s a whole other conspiracy theory we should talk about. Are they triple, quadruple billing just to be like, let’s see what we can sweep under the rug kind of a thing? I don’t know.

Totally. Stuff isn’t disclosed. We don’t know. That’s why I got a bill. This bill was for a little shy of $20,000 or something. I had terrible insurance at the time. A lot of people, maybe most, would have just paid or set themselves up on a payment plan. I’m like, “Can you just tell me what I’m paying for? Can you just show it to me?” It was Tylenol that I never got, office visits. It said that the pediatrician came into the room every day, but he didn’t. Two circumcisions. All these things. There’s so much corruption. You just have to start asking questions. Push back.

How Tanna Helps Her Clients

I love that. That is super great advice. In a general nutshell, what does your process look like? How do you help people?

It depends on what we’re talking about. If we’re talking about regenerative health, longevity, biohacking-type stuff, what I’ve been doing is just scheduling calls, either video or on the phone, and getting a detailed, spending an hour, sometimes an hour and a half, depending on how complicated things are.

Taking my time with these people, taking a deep dive into their history, their family history. A lot of these people are healthy. Their desires, what it is they’re trying to achieve, what it is that bothers them. It can be as small, for me, I’ll give you an example, as I’m getting this close to maybe needing readers. Things up close are getting a little bit blurry, and I’m super angry about it.

Guilty.

I am going to try Cerebrolysin, which is a peptide.

You guys should try that.

You should, and get out of those glasses. We’ll see if our eyesight gets better. Getting down into the nitty-gritty, granular detail of somebody’s life. What bothers them? What gets in their way of their days? All of these things. I think there might be some solutions for that, or it might be telling of something underlying. Maybe we need to do some intense lab work, or whatever. I spend a lot of time with these people and then create a custom plan for what I think would be good for them. It’s a collaborative thing. They can say no to whatever they want to. I’m going to give them all the information, and then they decide.

Help me with this piece. I’m sure this comes up sometimes. Why would somebody come to see you instead of their old-school doctor? I know my answer for that, but I’m curious, is that a general question that comes up quite a bit?

I feel lucky, blessed to be practicing now. It is because I do feel like there’s a general wave of just this awakening of people realizing how broken the system is. It’s not going to protect you. You’re going to protect you, if anyone is. I wish I could take insurance. I wish everything I did was covered by insurance. It’s not. At the end of the day, people are paying an insane amount monthly to have their insurance.

In my mind, it’s there to cover catastrophic events. Otherwise, you need to be in the hands of somebody who can do exactly what I just said, sit down with you for an hour and a half, listen. Not just react to your sinus problem or your toe pain, but ask about how it is that you envision your life to be when it’s most optimized. Figure out what it is I can do to help you get there. I don’t feel like it’s a tough sell. I feel like more and more people are like, “I want someone to sit down with me and listen and help me figure out a plan.”

I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but this is my opinion, is that there’s no ulterior motive. It’s a win-win for both sides. That’s what I love about being one of your patients. It’s the right key. Big, right word there.

Thank you. If I could do this inside of the system, I would. If I could figure out a way to take insurance, see more people, offer this stuff to everyone, I would. I can’t. It’s not built for us.

Thoughts About RFK Jr.

That’s just part of the system, if you don’t fit inside of our box, then we’re not going to make it easy for you. This might be a little bit of a good segue. You mentioned a lot of people have woken up to some of this stuff. What are your thoughts about RFK Jr. coming in? You think that’s going to be, hopefully, a good sign for things to come?

Aside from anyone’s political alignment or beliefs, him being nominated and passing through to the full Senate, to me, is a demonstrative thing. It was a tight, narrow vote. It was 13 to 14. It wasn’t overwhelming, not at all. It’s all about vaccines, and we can get into that, but whatever. Anyway, the point is, if somebody cares enough, if there is an altruistic side of this man’s heart, and he does want to make the food and the health industry better, then it’s about freaking time.

I don’t care who it is. Already, he’s making leaps and bounds, and he’s calling stuff out, and he’s making people held accountable for some of the things that they’re doing when it comes to vaccines and pesticides and testing and whatnot. I’m all for it. I think it doesn’t matter if I like him. I think we need some serious change, and I think that he will stir some things up.

The healthcare system is broken and will not take great care of you. It is all up to you. Share on X

I agree. I don’t know if I like him or don’t like him. I can’t watch the television and get any truth out of the matter in terms of, there are just so many sides, and I didn’t want to make this all political. I was just curious. I think having a fresh bit of ideas in there, and if there’s going to be a push to make things better. I’ve seen the food pyramids and all the things, and I think it’s a bunch of crap. If he can get in there and shake some of that stuff up, then I say, more power to him.

Sometimes he’s scrutinized for supporting things that mainstream medicine rejects, peptides, psilocybin, the list goes on. Research on vaccines, or whatever. When there’s scrutiny like that, to me, it’s not a red flag. It is something that tells me to pay attention because we might be onto something. The people that there’s corruption in there, they don’t like this. We’re going to take money out of their pockets.

Especially as much as they make. They’ve got a lot of power to be able to do some of that stuff.

It’s super sad.

Tanna’s Work Process And Methods

I totally agree. You answered this already, but I want to maybe go a little deeper with it. If somebody comes to you and says, “Here’s my problem, and here’s my challenge, and here’s what I want to do, whether it’s health or nutrition or anything like that, what’s the protocol?” I know it can be very overwhelming, at least for me and hard. Sometimes like a little bit of a mindfudge, to be honest with you. When I first contacted you, I was like, “I’m on top of the world. There’s no way I’m going to be unhealthy whatsoever.” I had another test done, and I was like, super deflated. I know I went in a bunch of different directions there, but where’s a good place for people to start, is my question.

In the functional medicine world, as I’ve learned that and realized how people have their structure set up, I’m a little disappointed on that side too. It is because I contacted a physician who charges $2,500 for you to come sit with her for an hour to go into an in-depth history. I’m never going to be that person because I do care, and I want people to have access to this. Truly, for the cost of an office visit, which is a fraction of that, to sit down for an hour, hour and a half, and take a deep dive, the path will pave itself.

You don’t have to know, “I want this and this and this, and these are the things I want to target,” because those things are going to get exposed and come up as we talk about your family history or things that you want to avoid or ways that you want to optimize your life. You don’t even have to know. All you have to know is that you want to live a long time and you want to prevent disease. I’m good with that. We can start there.

Understanding Mindset Shift And Benefits Of Peptide Shot

Perfect. That’s a wonderful answer. That’s basically how you and I got started. It was just like, “Here’s a couple of challenges,” and you’re like, “Cool, let’s do this, this, and this.” All of a sudden, here we are, we’re rolling. What’s a common challenge or issue that you see with folks? Is there 1 or 2 things that just seem to be the most common that you run into day to day?

Health problem-wise?

Health, nutrition, any of that kind of stuff, challenges or whatever.

I think the biggest thing that’s difficult to overcome, and we’ve already touched on it, is that as there is this wave, this awakening where people see, the system’s not protecting me. My doctor has no idea what I’m talking about, or whatever. They still have a difficult time. If I talk to my parents, and if they see this, I love you guys, their whole life, they’ve been doing it a certain way. They trust their doctors. They go to the doctor. They’re sick. They wait until they’re sick. They go to the doctor. They do what the doctor says.

Instead of proactively thinking about what it is they want to avoid, it’s like risk management. I feel like I’m practicing risk management medicine, where I’m like, “This could happen to you. You’re set up for this because of family history or because of personal choices, or whatever. Let’s stop these things, start these things, and do this thing so that thing never happens so you don’t die too young.” It’s hard. I feel like the biggest thing that I run into, the biggest hurdle, the biggest challenge, is mindset.

You mentioned, and I was super curious to ask you about this in general, you helped me with it before when we had our consult, our one-on-one. It is because I think it’s still relatively new. You touched on this and even mentioned this, but explain to me, what’s a peptide? Let’s get into the peptide chat.

Fun. It’s my favorite topic lately. There are so many peptides. If you hang around long enough, this will be the future of medicine. This will be how we get in front of all the diseases. It’s going to be a big deal. The problem is the FDA, big pharma, they’re going to make it difficult for us the whole time. It’s super weird, but it’s legit. They’re onto this. The reason is because Ozempic is a peptide. When Ozempic came out and everyone figured out it works so well, there was hell to pay for that. It’s now commercialized, and big pharma charges an asinine amount of money for it. Some compounding pharmacies can make it sometimes, depending on what’s going on with the FDA, and so on and so forth. I digress.

Peptides are amazing. There’s a whole lot of them, and they’re all targeted for different things. Some of them are found in gastric juices. Some of them are found in other areas of humans or plants, or they’re manufactured in a lab. Regardless, they’re just long-chain amino acids. Some of them are longer than others, and they are essentially coded to do a certain thing. The jury’s out on a lot of this. When you use something like BPC-157, it’s still bizarre. It will always blow my mind how you can inject it into your abdomen, and somehow it just knows that you have a bulging disc at L4-L5, like I do.

It just knows where to go to repair tissue. It’s amazing. Over time, we’re going to do more research and figure out how that works. The nice thing about peptides is they’re not completely innocuous. They’re not completely risk-free, but they’re pretty close. We have yet to find a way to overdose people or cause terrible things to happen, terrible outcomes. The only thing we know for sure is that it could potentiate tumor growth if you already had one.

We have to be proactive and careful with screening, making sure that you’re checking your prostate levels, doing your colonoscopies, your mammograms, and all the things. As long as you’re doing that, there’s a peptide for everything. Like I said, I’m going to try Cerebrolysin to see what happens with my eyesight. We could get into them, but there are several that are targeted for orthopedic recovery, tissue regeneration, and things of that sort.

There’s one that increases delta waves in your brain that will help you sleep. There’s one that increases melanin that will give you a tan, called the Barbie peptide. There are so many peptides, and they’re so much fun to play with and learn about. I’ll be the first guinea pig on all the weird ones, maybe starting with the Barbie one. We’ll see.

We’ll have to start taking notes, and we’ll do a whole other show just on peptides, before and after or something like that.

I’m going to show up tan.

With super white teeth and blonde hair, maybe. Can it change your hair color?

I don’t know. We’ll see.

Is this a newer tech? I don’t know if technology is the right word for it, but are these new-ish findings in the medical world?

No. Yes. Both. Peptides don’t know they exist. They just exist. They’re difficult to patent because, for instance, if this fig tree behind me has a peptide or a chain of amino acids in it and someone extracts it, finds out that it causes your hair to turn blonde, the fig tree made it. The fig tree owns the rights to that, and so it’s difficult to then go reproduce it and say that it’s yours.

Peptides are a sticky area of medicine, but a lot of them just exist. They exist in our bodies, they exist in animals’ bodies, they exist in plants, they just exist in nature. They’re not new in existence, but what’s new is all the research being done on them and finding out that this one can do that. This one can also do these things. There are peptides that have been around for a long time, like twenty years or more.

Maybe it’s just new to me because this is all new to me.

It’s new. I’m medically trained, no one said a word. I don’t even know that I ever heard that word in grad school. It’s new to the world in that sense. We haven’t talked about it. They’re not new in existence at all. We didn’t just create them.

Cheating The Healthcare System And Careful Data Consumption

Got it. This is a fun subject. If you were to teach a class, what would that look like?

We are always getting a ton of new drugs that will cause new problems that need another drug, but we are not changing the way we take care of people at all. Share on X

How to cheat the system.

Elaborate, please.

When you get a bill that’s not itemized, you make a phone call, and you ask them to itemize it. You find out that you were charged for two circumcision. Just start. Little things, like if you find out that you need a whole bunch of labs drawn and your insurance only covers 50%, there are several, and more are coming up. I use one in particular called UltaLabTest.com, but you can go order your own freaking labs. Order your own labs, decide where you want to go.

The results come to you because it’s your body, and we are smart enough to know. Maybe sometimes you just want to check your A1C. You just want to know where it’s at. Check it, it’s $21. You don’t have to bill insurance to do it. If you want a chest X-ray, it turns out you can walk into Touchstone or Health Images and say, you have to have an order, but someone like me, you can Venmo me some money, whatever. Hopefully, the feds aren’t watching this, but I’ll write you a prescription, and you go get your X-ray. You don’t have to go to urgent care.

You don’t have to go to the ER. You don’t have to go to your primary care, wait three weeks, and by then, you’re either dead or your fracture’s healed anyway. You can get quicker care and bypass some of the red tape that the system has created. In my spare time, if I had any, I would love to create a class teaching people how to bypass all of this stuff.

Interesting. That’s why I think, moving forward, folks need to have somebody like you in their life, to be able to help and be a resource and bounce things off of. You’re on my speed dial, and I’m like, “What about this?” I try not to blow you up or anything or annoy you, but that’s hopefully the way things start to move forward.

That’s why I wanted to have you on here, to share. It is because whatever I was doing before didn’t work. All of a sudden, here you are with me. It’s like everything’s improving very easily and quickly and makes sense to me, which is great. Do you have any resources that you’d like to share with folks, books, podcasts, or anything along those lines?

It depends on what your interest is. My caution, I don’t have one person that I follow that I think is just amazing about anything. A lot. I’m a little bit of a biohacking junkie, so you can put me in front of Brecker or anyone in that field, and I can nerd out all day long. I love listening to podcasts and listening to new research. The biggest caution, it’s more about what not to read. Especially with social media, anybody can get on anywhere and say anything. Knowing that whatever’s being said to you is backed by actual knowledge, data, and research, to me, there are so many public medical journals that you can read, and everyone is smart.

They’re written at a fifth-grade level. Everyone’s smart enough to read this stuff and figure out what the truth is. People just don’t try that hard. They just scroll social media and listen to whatever anyone says. I’m very careful with the input that I accept and from whom I accept it. I hope that everybody else is too. My oath to do no harm includes everything that I put out there, whether it’s on this show or here in my chair. It’s going to be true. I’m going to make sure that whatever I’m saying is true and that it’s backed by real science, data, and research, not just my opinion.

Backing from some big pocketbook or something. I think that’s another big, scary thing. What is something that might surprise people to know about you?

Prior to a few months ago, I used to be able to tumble like a gymnast still, and I’ll be 43. In the less cool but real sense, I wish there was a way to tell the truth about this stuff to everyone and know that they know they can trust me. It’s not because I’m trying to boost me or build me, but I so desperately want everyone to know the truth.

I so desperately want everybody to be well and to not be on a hundred meds. I used to get in trouble all the time. I would take people off meds in the ER. I’d look at their long list and be like, “I don’t know if we need this and this and this, let’s try to not, let’s see what happens.” I truly do want people to be well. It’s not to benefit myself financially. I’m barely charging. I’m not charging what I should. It’s out of altruistic reasons. That’s a boring answer, but it’s the truth.

Living Healthy To Live A Better Life

It’s the truth. I’ll agree. This might be another good transition into, I want to talk to you a little bit about health and nutrition. I’ll share a little bit. When I first started paying attention to what I was eating, I dropped the first 30 to 40 pounds like that. The rest of it slowly came off. I got to the point where I felt like a total weird hippie that went to, anyway, I guess it didn’t matter where I would have gone. I didn’t care. I was like, this is just a hippie whole-food conversation, or this guy’s kind of dumb, or whatever. Full-on organic, no GMOs, all of this stuff. Grass-fed, finished. I buy almost everything I eat from a farm or a farmer or something like that.

My wife’s very vocal, she’s been on here as well. She’s suffered from depression for a long time. Funny story, she doesn’t cook at all. If she were sitting right here, she’d laugh. She burns water. She screws up toast. It’s a funny thing in our household. Anyway, my point is, I do all the food prep and all the cooking and all the stuff. When I started going down this journey, so did she.

What’s super interesting is that it started to improve. Found out newly, she’s been misdiagnosed with PMDD for at least a decade. Severe depression, anxiety, all of these things, it’s been a substantial improvement, more than any crazy combination of medicine that she’s ever taken has done to improve her mental health. Not only from a physical standpoint but from a mental standpoint. Will you share a couple of thoughts on just nutrition and how that can affect people?

The thing that came to mind when you were talking about your wife first is how disappointed I am, and it’s hard to blame the system. It is because everyone’s just doing what they’re paid to do, and they’re drinking the juice. No one person is at fault other than the system as a whole, government, whatever. In school, I don’t remember a class. Maybe I had one. I could be wrong. If any of my colleagues reads this, they can correct me, but I don’t remember one class about food.

I don’t remember sitting through anything, learning. I remember learning about the Mediterranean diet or a low-salt diet for cardiovascular health, things like that, but never that food is medicine. Why is it that we don’t start there? Even in medical school, we do not start with the low-hanging fruit? That is the low-hanging fruit. You go to the grocery store multiple times a week.

Probably, you have choices that you can make. If you knew better, maybe you would never advance to these levels of disease. If we got ahead of it, that’s part of functional biohacking medicine-type stuff. It is food. It’s so sad to me. It’s a great testimony that your wife feels better just from eating healthier alone. She didn’t have to do a million things that cost a million dollars or be on a whole bunch of drugs to feel better. It’s just freaking food. Why did we not teach it? We don’t teach it. It is medicine. My kids know food is medicine. They eat things they don’t want to eat.

I bought, I think it was a half a cow, from this outfit east of town a little bit in the spring. It was almost a year ago, and it’s all organic, grass-fed, finished, the whole line. We got into this deep conversation, like you and I are in, for about 45 minutes on the subject. At the end of it, my big takeaway was this, food is either poison or medicine. Pick or choose which one you want. It was pretty interesting. What are your thoughts on exercising and weights? I’m going to preface, I saw something on one of your reels on Instagram, which I absolutely freaking love. It said, “We’re training for a feeling, not a look.” Talk to me about that.

I sit here mostly with women all day long and have for a long time, including in the ER. There are lots of people who don’t have a perfect physique but are completely fulfilled, very happy, very confident, successful, and have great relationships. The physique itself is nice, but it hardly matters. What matters, especially to me in healthcare, is what’s on the inside which is why I’m pretty diligent about ordering labs, repeating labs, and making sure I’m asking questions. It is because if you look similar, I can tell that you’ve lost some weight or something, but in general, you look the same.

However, I know that your bone density is better, your muscle mass is higher, your cholesterol is down, your thyroid is functioning better, and you no longer have an elevated whatever it is that’s causing problems with your kidneys, then I’m so happy. I don’t necessarily care that the shape isn’t exactly as you want it. I think that whole super skinny girl on the front of a magazine problem that I grew up with, hopefully, those days are gone. I care so much about what’s on the inside because that’s what’s going to help you live longer.

I just thought that was a super cool statement when I saw it on your reel. What about exercise? What are your thoughts on women and weights?

I could talk about this all day. Weightlifting and women, especially after menopause, once estrogen starts to tank, decrease all-cause mortality by almost 20%. It’s like 19.1% all-cause mortality. Death by any reason, 20%. We’re talking about, I believe the last study I saw said, 57 minutes a week. It’s not even 57 minutes a day. It’s not 57 minutes three times a week. It’s 57 minutes a week.

In total? Fifty-seven minutes total per week?

Yes, a week of weightlifting in women decreases all-cause mortality by nineteen-point-something percent. It decreases cardiovascular mortality by 30%, cardiovascular disease is still the leading cause of death in women. Post-menopause, when estrogen starts to drain, you lose 20% of bone density in the first five years.

This is agnostic from hormone replacement, which is why I do hormone replacement, bioidentical hormone replacement. We call them skinny fats, people who are addicted to cardio but never lift weights. They’re skinny fats. That’s what they are. It causes slower recovery. It causes joint and ligament issues. It can cause bone demineralization if you’re doing too much of it. Weightlifting is the opposite of all of that. I’m not saying cardio is bad.

I’m saying that when I was in college, I would run for like an hour and a half on a treadmill and leave, walk past every weight, and never lift one of them. I was twenty. I was in great shape, but I did not have much muscle mass. That ship sailed a while ago. I’m almost 43. I do some cardio, and some of it’s intense, a lot of it’s not intense, but I lift heavy. That’s important, especially as a woman. Same for men.

Is there a fear? I don’t mean to try and project this, but I know just from my wife’s experience, she’s like, “I don’t want to lift any weights. I’m just going to get bulky.” I’ve heard that come out of her mouth for a long time. You lift a lot of weights. You don’t look like you’ve got a neck or anything. You’re doing like a wrestler-type looking lady. Is that a fear?

You can feel better just by eating healthier. You do not have to do a million things that costs a million dollars or consume a whole bunch of drugs. Share on X

I’ve never been a bodybuilder. I cannot comment on the extreme dedication and work it takes to look like that. The idea of any woman just lifting heavy three times a week and becoming like the Hulk is ridiculous. I don’t know where that bulking fear came from, but it’s completely ridiculous.

Following The Food Pyramid Will Kill You

Thanks for saying that. I work out with a trainer often, and he’s a professional bodybuilder. He goes through, I’m just like, “Are you freaking kidding me?” No thanks, bro. What about going back to the nutrition piece? How do you help guide folks into making good decisions there?

When you said, “If you could teach a class, what would it be?” that would be part of it too. If you look at the food pyramid, remember the 9 to 11 grains or something that were on the bottom? The food pyramid would kill everyone. If everyone followed it, it’s completely backward. It’s so ridiculous. If we’re talking on a fifth-grade level, I like to keep things simple, I can overwhelm the system. If somebody comes in and they’re sort of new to all of this, I always start with protein. Making sure they’re getting enough protein, focusing on protein.

I love this, by the way, and I don’t mean to cut you off, but is it different for men and women? Is it a body weight thing? Does it depend on what you’re trying to do? Give a general protein recommendation, because I think a lot of people don’t get enough, based on what I’ve learned.

They totally don’t. A gram per pound of body weight, something like that, if you wanted to just start somewhere. It depends on what you’re trying to do. It depends if you’re a man or a woman, it depends on what your weight is. It depends on a lot of different factors. In general, nobody, unless they’re intentional. It’s amazing. If someone starts to track, they’ll be like, “I didn’t realize I was eating no protein.”

5 to 10 grams a day. Hardly anything.

Women are the worst because they’ll grab a kale salad with some shredded carrots, and then they want to know why they’re not putting muscle on. Protein. The other thing that is an issue, a lot of times, women are more complicated. That is for darn sure. A lot of them are in a caloric deficit, and it’s harmful, and it’s making it more difficult for them to lose weight because they’re constantly in this state of starvation. Some of them do overeat.

Sometimes it’s straightforward—quit drinking Coke and quit eating Oreos, and everything gets better. A lot of times, it’s someone who’s eating well, not getting enough protein, undernourished. I have a test, Genova makes it, it’s called the NutrEval test. You stay off of all your supplements or anything for ten days. You do a blood test, and it will tell you exactly what you lack. For example, I used to take a multivitamin and all these different vitamins, D, all the things.

I did my test, and it turns out glutathione, I don’t make enough glutathione. B6 was the vitamin that I was low in. Those are the two things that I take, and that’s it. I don’t take anything else unless I just need it for some reason. Starting with a test like that to see, at baseline, when you eat the way you normally do, what is it that your body absorbs well? What is it that you need help with? I love starting there and then starting with making sure they’re getting enough calories and making sure they’re getting enough protein. That’s baseline.

One-on-one. I love that.

We can get into the weeds of nutrition all day long, but that’s the baseline.

I think that speaking from experience, I’ve gone through a lot of what you’re talking about and made some massive adjustments. I’ve got a couple of things I want to talk about around those. I can tell you from just personal experience, the way I feel, I’m more outgoing, I’m more outrageous in a good way. My energy is through the freaking roof.

It’s funny, Adam Way and I tracked this. A bunch of us said it to each other, like, when we had a record night or something like that. I can tell when I drink that my sleep plummets. The amount of deep sleep that I get, my heart rate goes up 30 beats a minute when I drink at night when I sleep. These are all kinds of fun little hacks. My point to all of this is just paying attention to the nutrition. I track my macros, I’m a nerd with some of that stuff, but my energy is through the roof.

How Fear Of Death Motivates People

My mindset, my clarity, it’s a lot of fun. My next question was going to be, if somebody’s like, “It took me forever to get there, though,” and I kick myself because I’ve lost a lot of great years or whatever, but it is what it is. It’s better than waiting until next year. My question is, what have you seen help people get motivated to get on the right track for folks that have struggled? It is because that’s been me for a long time.

Sadly, the truth, the answer to that is, it takes a scare. It takes someone close to them dying or getting sick to wake them up. It’s to go out there and just find a happy person who’s not being careful about anything but is generally healthy, whose 35, this is not on their radar. I saw so much death and dying and disease and trauma in the ER for so long that I’m plenty motivated. I know what I don’t want. My story is different than the grand majority of people. It takes a scare. It takes a problem to wake them up.

It’s unfortunate that it has to get to that level. I hope maybe somebody seeing this, reading this, something, just gets interested in trying to improve. The whole point of this show that I’m building is just trying to level up somehow, some way. We’ve had business leaders and all kinds of different takes. We’ve had mental health experts, we’ve had therapists.

I’ve got some military folks and all kinds of cool stuff coming up. The whole point is just to help people improve. My premise is, if this can touch one person and help them improve in some way, level up, if you will, that’s where it’s at. I’m sure you can agree with me here. If you’re not doing things proactively to take care of yourself, let’s, hopefully, be watching this and take the next step just to get a little bit better. It is because that starts to get the wheels in motion and the motivation going.

Once you start to see things change, you feel better, you sleep better. All of a sudden, you’re less interested in the crap food, or you’re less interested in being lazy. You’re more interested in moving your body, more interested in making a good choice. Success is motivating. That first step towards that first little piece of success usually takes trauma, loss, pain, sickness.

Which is sad.

It is sad. The other thing that I have found, this is like an interesting little piece, people that wear watches. I have an Oura Ring, any kind of anything that will collect data.

I have an Apple Watch.

Even in people that are generally unmotivated, when they start to learn what some of these metrics mean, it starts to worry them a little bit. They’re like, “Maybe there’s something I could do about my high resting metabolic rate or my HRV or my whatever it is. I’m sleeping like absolute trash. Why am I sleeping like trash?” That’s just a gateway to, we can test all the things. I love little devices that track a lot.

It usually takes a scare of dying or getting really sick to wake a person up from their wrong ways. Share on X

Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words

It is super motivating. When it yells at me, I’m like, “Shut up, I know. I’ll close the damn rings.” First of all, just thank you for taking the time. I know you’re super busy, and I’m very honored that you took time to share with us. I wrote a whole bunch of things down that I am implementing or wanting to do better with. A couple of my top takeaways were the caloric deficits. Especially for women, my wife totally struggles with that. I’m going to share that with her. I’ll try and be like, “I think you need to eat a little more.” She’s like, “Argh.”

Anyway, you don’t care about our marital deals there. The other thing that was big for me is when you said changing the paradigm. I think that, for me, it’s just a total eye-opener. It’s a totally different view now than what I had a year ago or two or whatever the case is. I can tell you for sure that it’s been earth-shattering to go through some of this and learn. I love the paradigm piece in there. How do folks connect with you? Can you share your Instagram? Or, if they want to chat with you about getting into your office and meeting with you, what’s that look like? Can you do it remotely? If somebody in Florida, perhaps, sees this, can they meet with you?

I can do virtual visits anywhere. I can give you that information, and you can put it out there. I can say it now if that’s helpful.

I’ll add it to everything here, but what’s the easiest way for folks to connect with you?

To text me. I know we’re in the new age. Text me. The number is 720-593-8844. I don’t answer the phone. If you call me, I’m not answering. It’s not happening.

What’s your Instagram handle? Can folks go find you there?

There are two. One is @TannaLeeDonalson or @RedbudMedSpa. Redbud is the Oklahoma state tree. That’s my alma mater. That’s where that came from. Those are probably the easiest ways to get in touch with us.

Awesome. Tanna, I’m honored. Thank you so much for joining us, and until next time.

Until next time. I’m honored too. Thank you so much, Brian.

Thanks for coming.

 

Important Links

• Tanna Donalson on LinkedIn
• Redbud Medical Spa
• Touchstone
• Health Images
• Tanna Donalson on Instagram
• Redbud Medical Spa on Instagram
• FDA
• Ulta Lab Tests

 

About Tanna Donalson

PA-C, MPH | CEO at Aspire Medical Technologies

Tanna is a certified Physician Assistant who’s been practicing medicine for more than a decade. Spending much of her medical career working in the Emergency Room sparked her interest in pursuing dermatology and quality skin care, and for several years she’s been working with top plastic surgeons and dermatologists to provide top quality aesthetics to her clients.

After training with one of the top plastic surgeons in Oklahoma City, she landed in Colorado (the best state). She’s been thriving in the mountain air for a few years and has loved every moment of connecting with the amazing Colorado community. Tanna is passionate about Women’s Health and is thrilled to roll out her comprehensive menu of skin care and aesthetic services in the West Metro area.