The Trauma That Shaped Me

A father ran down a hospital hallway and placed his lifeless child in our arms. 

That single moment changed how we practice, how we teach, and how we judge the flood of health advice that fills our feeds. We talk candidly about the weight of trust, why humility can save lives, and how real medicine often starts with knowing when to call for help, and doing it fast.

From there, we zoom out to the online health economy, where fear and urgency sell quick fixes. We unpack the red flags behind discount codes and sweeping claims, and we explain why experts speak in nuance, not absolutes. 

You’ll hear how we think through personalized decisions, why supplements can be helpful only in context, and what accountability should look like when outcomes are on the line. 

Along the way, we share practical filters: ask who benefits, demand evidence that matches your situation, and look for guidance that admits uncertainty and details trade-offs.

Prevention takes the spotlight as science-based care that happens before the crisis. We lay out how daily habits, nutrition rich in plants and fiber, movement you can sustain, consistent sleep, stress tools that stick, and strong social ties, quietly compound to keep families out of hallways on the worst day of their lives. 

If you value evidence over hype and want a stronger therapeutic alliance with your clinician, this conversation offers a grounded path forward. If it resonates, follow the show, share it with someone who needs a steady voice, and leave a review so others can find it too.

Go check out my website for tons of free resources on how to transition towards a healthier diet and lifestyle.

You can download my free plant-based recipes eBook and a ton of other free resources by visiting the Digital Downloads tab of my website at https://www.plantbaseddrjules.com/shop

Don't forget to check out my blog at https://www.plantbaseddrjules.com/blog

You can also watch my educational videos on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMpkQRXb7G-StAotV0dmahQ

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Thanks so much!

Peace, love, plants!
Dr. Jules

Chapters

• 0:00 Section A

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:10

Yo blindies buddies, welcome back to season three of the podcast. This year is gonna be amazing. We'll be talking about all of the different pillars of lifestyle medicine, from nutrition to exercise to stress to sleep and everything in between. Yo, blindies buddies. Today I want to talk about something a little bit more sensitive, something that I rarely share, not because it's dramatic, but because it basically shaped everything. It shaped the way I practice medicine, shaped the way I talk about health, and it even shaped the way I move through life. There are moments that never disappear with time, they fade into the background, but they resurface when you least expect it. Whether it's images or sounds or feelings, they just wait there and whoops, they pop up whenever they feel like it. Now, this is one of those moments, something that happened to me when I was in medical school, and although I've managed to deal with it throughout the years, I think it's reasonable to talk about it because it gives me that kind of the opportunity to explain why I do what I do. So I was a third-year medical student, I was doing hospital rotations and rounds in a hospital in Sherbrooke, and I was basically walking the floors wearing my white lab coat. It clearly identifies me as a doctor, even though I was anything but a doctor at that time. I was a medical student just starting my clerkship or extelna, which we call it, and I was still learning, I was still unsure, living in doubt, and still very aware of everything I didn't know. Out of nowhere, a father came running towards me. He had his four-year-old son in his arms, and the child was lifeless. He didn't ask who I was, he didn't ask how much training I had. He didn't ask if I was ready. He just looked at me straight in my eyes and extended his arms, almost like he's asking me to take his child. Now, in that moment, I actually felt something that I had never felt before in medicine, or probably even in my life. It was complete powerlessness. I was a medical student, maybe 20-something year old kid with almost no real-world experience. And yet, in his desperation, this father, this stranger, was willing to hand over the life of his child to me. Not because I was the best person for the job, but because I was the only person there. And is is giving me shivers just talking about it now, but that's the weight of real truss. Trust like that hits you before you even feel prepared to receive it. Doesn't wait for you to become confident, and it doesn't care about your titles. That type of trust arrives or happens when people are really afraid, really vulnerable, and they would place any hope they have in you anyway. Now I remember standing there, my heart was pounding, my mind was bracing, and I was very painfully aware of my limits. And for the first time, I truly understood what trust and responsibility actually meant in medicine. And I well, I did the only thing I could do. I screamed for help like a little baby. But within moments, experienced doctors actually arrived on scene, and people who had trained for this exact scenario for years were surrounding me, the dad, and that lifeless child. These people, they knew their roles, they acted in concert, they acted together without hesitation or ego. Everyone just took over seamlessly, and they helped save that child's life. Now, I remember standing there afterward, shaken and humbled. And I remember realizing something important that night. Medicine, it's not about knowing everything, it's also about knowing when you do not know. It's about humility, teamwork, asking for help early. And that experience that day stayed with me. And I'm 44 years old at the time of recording this, and it pops out in my brain regularly, every few weeks. Just stays for a minute. It just reminds me that I am not perfect, and there are still things I don't know, and I should be continuously improving myself. And it reminds me to ask for help, and it reminds me to not pretend like I am an expert in every single domain. I ask questions to other doctors, I even ask questions to my medical students sometimes. But that that experience also taught me that behind every single patient or every chart, it's there's a family living their worst nightmare. It reminds me that decisions that we make in seconds can ripple outwards for years. And it it reminds me that trust is often given before it's even earned. Or once you feel that weight of that what that responsibility that just put on your shoulders, you never forget it and you always respect it. Now, that experience did more than shape the doctor I became and I am today, it shaped my tolerance for how trust also gets handled in healthcare. Now, I just feel that once you have held that responsibility, once you have looked into the eyes of someone so desperate and afraid that they would give you their lifeless child without asking any questions, it becomes impossible to ignore when trust actually gets abused or misused. And I've always vented about how frustrated I've become with the way we share medical information online. Nuance health subjects cannot be reviewed in 30-second reels. And I remember the first, it happens regularly now, but I remember the first few times where people said, Jules, your articles are too long, or your posts are TLDR. TLDR means too long, don't didn't read. So people were inconvenienced with the few minutes it took to educate themselves on health and healthcare. People are so used to information being shared in five-second sound bites or bumper stickers that they forget that there's actual nuance out there and complex medical issues and interventions and treatments. It can't be the same treatment for everyone all the time. There has to be personalized care, depending on who you are and your history and your medication and your goals. There are too many complex, nuanced concepts to review in 30 seconds. But my podcasts are too long and my posts are too long, and I get it. And I think that's why that the people who have stayed are the people and the people who are in you, you who are listening to this today, you've stayed with this podcast. Where it's, I mean, we're probably at the 110th or more episode. If you're still here today, is because you care about nuanced information. So all that whole that whole speech to say thank you, but also to explain that that's one of the things that actually frustrates me the most. It's watching fear being used as a tool online. And I see influencers that are selling untested treatments with confidence and urgency, and I see complex science that's reduced to scary sound bites. I see people being told that established medicine and board-certified professionals are not trustworthy. And while they're selling the alternative that comes with a discount code, I mean, if people are creating a problem only to sell you a solution, you have to be highly skeptical of that. And every time I see that, my mind goes back to that hospital hallway. And I find myself asking that same simple question. If my own child were lying lifeless in front of me, who would I want making decisions? I would want someone trained, someone accountable, someone who's grounded in science and evidence, and someone who understands uncertainty and risk and individuality, and someone whose priority is the patient, not engagement or sales or personal branding. And I completely understand why people feel frustrated with healthcare. And I agree with one of the important criticisms that I that we all have about our system. It has historically underdelivered on prevention. We have focused heavily on rescue and not enough on the upstream work that we need to help people avoid medical conditions to begin with. Now there's a huge gap between a firefighter not having time to educate the public about not putting things on fire because they're too busy putting out fires. And that's really kind of where we are now in our healthcare, where 80% of medical visits in primary care are related to lifestyle-induced chronic medical conditions, whether physical or mental health related. Very tough to find time to prevent diseases when you are too busy managing them. And our system is simply not built to incentivize prevention. Now that's exactly where I see my role. Lifestyle medicine is not an alternative to science-based care. It is science-based care. It's the work that happens before the crisis. And it's the reason that fewer families end up in hallways having the worst days of their lives. My goal with lifestyle medicine has never been to replace conventional medicine. It's been to strengthen it and to bring evidence-based lifestyle counseling to the public and to people who understand how daily choices actually shape long-term health. I want to build a culture of prevention, both in my community, but also in the clinic where I train and teach future doctors. Just be thoughtful about who you trust with your health. Be skeptical, be cautious of messages that are built on fear and urgency. Always ask yourself who actually benefits from the advice being given? Look for accountability, not certainty. Experts tend to talk in nuance and not in absolutes. When someone asks me, hey, what do you think about a certain supplement? My next question is for who? For what? Why do you want that? So when someone says the reason that you are not sleeping and yet you're tired is you have low magnesium and then sells you a supplement, I mean, they're really, really, I mean, I see right through that, but they're really following the playbook when it comes to creating fear and urgency in order to sell the solution. So prevention doesn't look dramatic. It doesn't it doesn't promise instant results. It happens quietly through habits that are repeated over time. And small incremental changes do accumulate. Now these small habits need to impact your nutrition, your movement, your sleep, your stress, your social connection. And every time that you engage with evidence-based information, I want you to question fear-based claims. Now you're part of that shift towards a healthier sharing of health information online. And I just simply hope that you are an educated consumer of health information. Now, if you're here, you're on the same mission as I that I am. You want to normalize prevention, you want to help replace fear with understanding, and you want to help protect the trust that matters most. The trust that we put in the very people that are taking care of us. Now, I mean, I'm not a particularly insecure person, but I mean I have friends that are dietitians, and that's nutritionist probably the domain with the most amount of misinformation. The wellness or big wellness industry is much bigger than big pharma, and it just goes unregulated. People can do what they want when they want and have no accountability. Now, if an influencer promotes a diet that leads to someone experiencing atherosclerosis and a stroke or a heart attack, there is no accountability. But if I, as a doctor, do the same thing and start promot promoting hocus pocus diets with magical claims behind them, and my patient experiences a poor outcome, I am 100% accountable for the information I give. So all you can do is hopefully, I mean, there are bad actors everywhere you look. I my biggest hope is that you can trust your doctor and they're trained in having an open mind, but also basing their judgment on evidence because there are so many bogus claims out there. There's a lot of sea of confusion online, and that's on purpose. There's a lot of consensus in the medical community on what consists of a healthy diet or a healthy lifestyle, but unfortunately, wellness influencers would lead you to believe that it's the supplement that you're missing. That's really the cause of most of your problems. Now, I have zero issues with supplements. I recommend some to my patients every single day. I might actually do a full episode on the supplements that I consider for myself and for my patients. But that's a conversation between a doctor and a patient. That's a personalized individual choice based on history, on physical exam, on medications, on other supplements, on possible interactions, and based on goals. It's everything's a trade-off. There's always pros and cons to every decision we make in medicine. Your doctor has been trained to understand these statistics so he's better equipped to balance the pros and cons with you. Right on. Hope this makes sense. This is simply my story, a story that I went through in medical school that shapes decisions that I make every single day and every single time that that experience flows through my brain. I have not experienced any symptoms compatible with PTSD. So thank you for those who who care about that. But it just makes me reflect, it brings me back to that concept of trust and of how trust is something to cherish and is something to respect. And I hope that you experience trust with your healthcare team, your physiotherapist, your chiropractor, your naturopathic doctor, your dietitian, your occupational therapist, your dietitian, your dentist. You get the point. I just hope that you experience true trust and the power of a healthy therapeutic alliance with your healthcare provider. I can just hope that my patients feel that in my office. Cool. Right on. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you in the next episode. Peace. Hey everyone, go check out my website, plantbase drjewel.com to find free dollar resources. And remember that you can find me on Facebook and Instagram at Dr. Jewel's Cormier and on YouTube at Plant Base Dr. Jewel.