Overheard from a new patient in my clinic on Friday PM after arriving from California:

"How on earth do I make my health dream come true of working with Dr. Kruse?"

The nurse responded quickly: "You have to stop looking for shortcuts. He pays attention to what you do and what you have done. He is not like other docs. If you buy "magic pills, answers in a monthly box, a one-size-fits-all solution, he will bail on you faster than a rat in a fire. I hope you know he has clippings of your "great results" you submitted to the internet gurus in your chart already."

"When we told him you were an out of towner he went looking at your history. He copied and pasted all your "stories of success" from those websites you know. He is going to ask you if you did so well with them there, why are you now here?"

Person mumbling.

Nurse: "If you continually believe the supplement makers and functional medicine doctors can turn the key on with labs and pills and instantly find millions of dollars in the health bank account he will remove you like a tumor from cancerous tissue. He does not play around."

"He has taken care of a lot of people like you from the Whole 30 crew, Robb Wolf, Mark Sisson's, and Chris Kresser. He has seen their overnight successes on their blogs after they failed badly and quietly came to him looking for an answer."

Patient: “I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success on paleo and primal living websites, and I’d been publishing my recycled truth for the last ten years on their sites until I decided to give nature a chance. I was not getting better. I was getting worse. I was part of the food guru's liar's club. You could see my story on all their blogs but I never got better using food or exercise."

Nurse: "No worries........he has them all printed in your chart. Be ready."

Me to the patient in the nurse's presence as soon as I came in the room: I saw your MRI's and labs before I came in to examine and take your history. Your success won't take forever, but it won't happen overnight. It will probably take longer than you think because your redox is terrible and was made worse from bad advice and the bad environments you built with your choices.

Your blueprint doesn’t come with a map or diet. It comes from thinking better today than you did yesterday.

Everyone is telling themselves a story........they lie to themselves too often and many repeat it to those who want to use it as a marketing tagline. It is OK to lie to others, but not yourself. If you are not good for you, who are you good for?

Unless an asshole, like me, comes along to interrupt your utopian narrative and shakes you to the core, you stick with your story and you repeat your mistakes. In other words, it’s fact until you have a reason to doubt it. I will create that doubt for your daily. (FACE WAS PRICELESS)

When you align your story with nature's and not a guru, only then will you connect will wellness.
At this point, I threw the web press clippings and all the doctor reports of excellent functional medicine labs at the patient's folders and said, "you can’t please everyone. So stop lying to them.......and yourself."

Strive to please the only person that matters......YOU.

When you add a drizzle of BS here, another drizzle of BS there, and still another drizzle somewhere else, it’s like whispering in a crowded concert hall when a metal band is playing loud enough to make your ears bleed.
Nobody hears you in the concert hall no one cares what you say or think. I certainly do not.
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Your simplified Black Swan analogy: On some social media platforms now, you can start a focus group. It’s more effective than just using your personal profile to rally people. Why? the group offers people a cause to gather around rather than a person. If it’s done well, they’ll get excited and share their experience with their friends. You will qualify people by doing this.

Then your ideas spread quicker than they would if you whispered in a noisy concert hall.
The concert hall is like the Internet. There are lots of people crowded in there. The only way you can hear anyone is if they’re shouting unusually loud, The alternative is to nudge someone, lean in, make eye contact, and talk really loud.

Let’s call it a primal scream since you wrote to Mark's Daily apple 5 times and he tried to make you famous by helping his brand. Your stories probably helped him get his deal with Kraft foods. (FACE EVEN BETTER)

You scream only when you find the right people — the ones who believe what you do, see the same future you see, and want the same things you do.

They’ll listen to you if you can bridge the gap between what they have and what they want.
Stop trying to please idiots who you have nothing in common with.

Tell your story to the right people. Be highly selective in your network.

Stop trying to woo the popular. They could care less about you. They just want to use you for their ends.

It pays to choose your well being over them. You are the most important person because you are the CEO of You Inc.

There’s nothing more pleasing to a Black Swan than reaching the right person with a targeted message of how to win the game for your life using your ability to think how you will serve yourself first to win chronically.

Nothing else matters.............

With that in the next five minutes, I told them they needed no further surgery, most of the crap they were old by the gurus was shit and the real problems were all linked to their choices and their environment. I pointed them all out, highlighted them and showed the collateral damage on the films.

I declined to re-operate and told them 100% reversal was possible when they realized the problem was in the environment they chose. As I left the room, I saw a bulletproof T-shirt in a bag with MCT oil. I told them nothing makes you bulletproof like Nature.

Very satisfying to tell the truth to someone who could not face their own reality. Coming 2000 miles to hear the truth often is not pleasant. The lesson was simple. Less is more and you appreciate the simplicity of the advice only when you are connected to nature fully.

The slope of the line of fading to mediocrity is proportional to the coherence of the connection to nature.