Inside The Vatican with Dr. Sanjay Gupta: What Happens When Science and Faith Collide?
Inside the walls of The Vatican, Dr. Oz sits down with Dr. Sanjay Gupta to help gain a better understanding of the often misunderstood connection between Science and Faith. Dr. Gupta explains the power of prayer as a physician, and what so many people get wrong about the role of God in medicine. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The feeling among a lot of people is that for scientists, they are not people of faith.
They are not religious.
You know, this whole collision of science and theology has been a longstanding one.
I mean, we know that people have died over this collision.
So the idea that you're going to bring it up to your doctor, might it be offensive?
I don't think it is, but maybe a patient thinks that way.
They just want to keep the science in one bucket, the faith in another bucket.
And I think you and I are here to tell them that that's not necessarily the case.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
Welcome everybody.
So one of the beautiful parts about having a podcast is you get to travel with me.
So when I go to fun places, I get to bring you along.
Sometimes it's difficult to bring a whole film crew, audio, lighting.
It gets into the way of the experience.
And so I love when I can actually have conversations with people that I really care a lot about, get them to open up about things that matter to all of us, and I can share them with you.
So I was recently invited to a conference in the Vatican.
I know it sounds odd-y, but this was actually a conference organized by the Pope.
And there were a bunch of people involved in the process.
It was called Unite to Cure, a global health care initiative.
And literally, we were in the Vatican with some of the top luminaries in medicine.
Not all of them are household names, but many of them are.
And we got into some deep stuff.
Specifically, of course, the Vatican is interested in ethics and medicine, but there's also the religious influence on health.
And there are a lot of deep insights that came out of those discussions.
And one of the most important came from a panel that I was moderating, where I had a Father Kevin Fitzgerald, who's a leader in the Catholic Church, Rabbi Ed Reichman, obviously a leader in And Elder Dale Renlund, who's in the Latter-day Saints, is a Mormon.
And the three of them got into it about the role of faith in the healing process.
And interestingly, they were sort of all on the same side, essentially arguing that one of the things that we forget is many people are defined by their illness.
They ask you, why me?
But one of the beautiful parts about faith is it helps ensure that you're never defined by your illness.
They also pointed out that Science can heal, but faith helps you search for meaning, which is important to do when you're struggling, especially if there's no clear cure on the horizon.
So I had the chance to sit down with Elder Dale Remlin.
He happens to be a cardiologist, a heart failure cardiologist, of all things.
And I'm a heart surgeon, and I started my career doing a lot of heart failure surgery.
So we had played in the same sandbox once before.
About 10 years ago, he was called by his church.
You know, the Mormons get pulled away from their day-to-day lives on a fairly short notice and are sent to do God's work.
And so he was sent to Africa.
And after a few years serving there, brought back and became one of the elders of their community.
And here's my interview with him.
So Elder Weldon, thank you very much for joining me.
I was impressed at my first session at this entire Vatican Conference of having three faith leaders who happen to be physicians at the same time, combined both of those disciplines, ones that require some overlapping expertise but some that are different.
What impressed you the most about the three days you spent at the Vatican?
I think it's been fascinating to meet so many remarkable people.
Including you and your wife.
It was a delight to meet her.
And also to hear how there's such a convergence on some of the religious wisdom as well as the scientific.
That they don't have to be at odds with each other.
That we don't have to believe anything that isn't true.
And so that the science and the religious aspects actually come together.
There's a point in the conversation where we were talking about the role of faith in a hospital setting, and many listeners are concerned about taking their doctor's time, or as was raised to me by Sanjay Gupta, maybe they're afraid that if their doctor's talking about faith, it's too late to use the usual stuff.
As a heart failure specialist, and a renowned one, who had to deal with end-of-life issues frequently, how did faith play a role in those discussions as a clinician?
And now that you're an elder in LDS, how does it influence the advice you give to some of the disciples?
I think some of the issues that a doctor may face is that he needs to recognize the humanity of the patient.
He needs to recognize that a patient, if they have faith in a higher being, that it is quite okay to encourage them to tap into that higher power, especially to seek help to go through the difficult times they're going through, to come to peace with things, to heal things as these challenges come in their lives.
I believe that what happens with prayer is that somebody actually seeks for help because the rain, wind, and floods come on everybody, and what's needed is the strength to go through those challenges.
So that's part of the advice that I'd give is to go ahead and tap into it.
I don't think a physician needs to leave his faith at the door, but I think the patient is there with the physician because of his physician skills.
And the fact that he's a physician who happens to be a person of faith is the way it should be, not that it's a person of faith who is the physician.
There was a very provocative question, maybe the most provocative of all that we had at the conference, on the higher moral standard desired, maybe even expected, when you're within a faith.
And is it possible that it might induce guilt?
In fact, might be blamed for suicide or other tragic events that happen to people's lives because they can't hold themselves to that standard successfully?
I think one of the helpful things was Rabbi Reichman cited a study, a meta-analysis of 68 studies on the effect of religion and religious practice on the incidence of suicide attempts or suicide.
And 84% of those studies showed an inverse correlation.
In other words, higher faith was associated with a lesser incidence of suicide attempt or suicide.
So that's one data point.
The other thing is that the guilt that comes is if people believe in an angry God instead of a God who is very interested in seeing people progress.
And as people see that they've made a mistake and they want to change, that God is actually joyous about that situation.
He's not a scolding, angry God, but someone who wants individuals to succeed.
I think also that people need to know that the things that suicide is really caused in some ways, at some end point, by intense pain that the individual feels.
And that is aggravated by loneliness, helplessness, and hopelessness.
And religion should be able to help with all of that in terms of creating or suggesting a higher purpose to life, to create a community that's around to alleviate the loneliness, and to provide hope and help in situations when those seem to be lacking.
Let me pursue that because it caught my attention when you said it the first time on the panel, and I'm revisiting it.
There was a comment made in our conversation that the primary goal of medicine is to heal.
And the primary goal of religion is to give meaning.
How do you marry those to get fully well after any kind of a challenge in life?
Well, the meaning provides the healing.
If you understand God's purposes and understand that life is going to have challenges, and part of what is expected is to see how we go through those challenges.
And that as we go through the challenge, even if we make a mistake, there's healing that's offered.
And so the healing comes from recognizing the meaning of life, the reality of God and His ability to heal.
The other big question was asked, in fact, we surveyed the audience, is that we all want to heal.
We asked everybody, 300 luminaries, everyone wanted to get better, be better today than they were yesterday.
The big question is how?
How do we get there by using faith as a tool for advancement to provide a rudder, so to speak, to people in their lives so they feel their best, but they can also physically perform at their best?
So what is the obligation of religion in that category?
I think that without the belief in a higher power, without some meaning that's beyond this life, one actually is without power, without direction, and without the ability to steer.
And I think that religion can provide those things and help people in a direction get better.
I think the expectations of treating others with kindness, the expectation of helping others that are in need, Can provide great meaning and help us become better people.
There was a nice dialogue between you and the rabbi and the father about...
The role of religion in changing the patient's experience.
And the line that caught my attention was that none of us want to be defined by our illness.
And our faith helps us transcend that natural inclination to say, why me?
Why am I the one that gets caught with the cancer, et cetera?
And the why question rarely leads to any help or healing or meaning.
The question is, what can I learn from this experience, is the one that does lead to meaning and help.
So, a person of faith who's going through a horrible trial, if they're asking the question, what does God want me to learn from this, is actually stepping on the right foot at the right time, as opposed to someone who sits back and consistently says, why me?
And finally, this issue of knowledge, which most of us in the medical space are completely infatuated with.
I wanted to learn everything.
I'm sure you did, too.
We're both heart specialists, so it's especially powerful for us because we have similar personalities often.
But then there's this transition from knowledge to wisdom.
How did you apply that when you were full-time practicing?
You've been 10 years now in the elders.
Actually, you were called from your practice.
I understand both you and your wife was a lawyer.
You joked that there was one loss and one gain.
So no net change in the force.
The loss of a doctor, a bad thing.
The loss of a lawyer, a good thing.
So no net change in the force.
So it was all our right.
How do we transcend knowledge and make it into wisdom?
Knowledge alone doesn't help us at all, really.
It is the application of knowledge in the right way that seems to be what I would define as wisdom.
And one of the things that happens over time is that a physician can, if he's understanding the needs of his patient, become a wiser doctor, even though his knowledge has not increased.
Now, he needs to continue increasing that.
He can't be content to stay But as that knowledge base increases, if he has learned from his patients, he becomes a wiser doctor and as a result, a better physician, a better healing physician.
God bless you and thank you for your contributions to the conference and to society.
Thank you very much.
So that was Elder Dale Renlund.
LDS is an influential church with a lot of very loyal members, and it was fascinating for me to see a cardiologist, a man trained in science, who began to focus more on the faith part of his life.
He'd been a religious man throughout his life, he shared with me outside this interview.
But I was impressed to see how much he'd been able to fuse those two ideas together.
Along the course of these discussions, I got a chance to talk to a lot of folks that I thought the world of.
And I want you to spend a few minutes with someone that I really respect because she put together the conference.
More than anybody else, Dr. Robin Smith has been influential in getting the different pieces of the puzzle that have to fit together to fit perfectly.
Because you don't just get a bunch of world-class scientists and leaders of faith institutions to just join up.
It doesn't happen organically.
Although, interestingly, the Catholic Church has been trying to do it for 170 years.
In 1847, this Pontificate Academy was created and was primarily designed to get world leaders, intellectuals in particular, to offer insights into what was happening in the world to the Pope. and their colleagues.
And it actually has had a huge effect of getting the church to stay in the zeitgeist of what's going down.
So I asked Robin Smith to help explain her passion, her vision for this wonderful conference.
Thanks so much.
I don't know how much effort it took to put this together, but to bring all these big hitters together and have them stay means you've organized something special.
Take me back to the very beginning.
What fit got you thinking, hey, maybe I can have a conference at the Vatican talking about really important stuff where faith and science could work together?
Well, I could see we were at just an incredible time in...
Really, the history of science where stem cells and the cells of our body were going to have an impact on medicine, things were changing.
And so you couldn't even talk about it because people all of a sudden heard stem cells and they thought negative, embryonic, it's not okay with the church, just misunderstanding.
And I realized we need to educate people and we need to educate people of different faiths because these misconceptions are what leads to people just being afraid and not understanding.
When we come back, Sanjay Gupta, one of my close friends, is going to tell you a little bit about why we should not be defined by our illness.
Really cool stuff.
Well, having talked to attendees from past meetings, including luminaries like Sanjay Gupta, Meredith Vieira, I mean, tons of folks who I just love hanging with anyway, they all pointed out that the conference has morphed into something much bigger than just stem cells.
And I remember when you came to my office yesterday, Yes.
All these huge folks, they come, and that's the real person in my office.
It was mostly about stem cells, but I was surprised to see how many big hitters from technology are here because obviously that's threatening to people, and there's a need for the church to understand the role of technology in our lives.
You've broached into broader topics like the role of spirituality in the actual healing process.
How do you know how far to go?
How do you make those editorial decisions?
Well, I think it's really about building a bridge between science and faith.
And so bringing different thought leaders together and asking the hard questions is what's really important.
So I don't think we're really necessarily censoring what's spoken about, but we talk about issues that we think are important for people to dialogue, see the different perspectives, and really create that interdisciplinary approach.
And you just can't do that if you're not in a setting like here.
So I'm going to give you some specific observations that I've had.
In one of the earlier panels that you assigned me to...
One of the participants asked us, he was a head of a major church, or one of the leaders of a church, asked us to inquire about the role of a high moral expectation of organized religion and people feeling guilty and even thinking about suicide.
I was so surprised by the question, because it's a kind of honest question, someone in the back of the room who's questioning.
Their faith, this whole process, would ask.
And yet he wanted to have it asked because he wanted a chance to articulate a thoughtful response.
Is that the kind of openness that you've seen coming and going?
Absolutely.
People have different perspectives and even in different religions' perspectives.
But yet everyone is very respectful.
And part of it is just having the dialogue, asking the questions, and recognizing you may have a different belief, but you can see it from someone else's perspective.
And I think the key here is not to be isolated.
It's when you're feeling down, when you're feeling suicidal, to know that you can go to someone who will understand and be able to help you through those hard times.
This is about hope and healing and giving people inspiration.
When you speak to the leadership of the Catholic Church, what kinds of dialogue have you had about technology?
It's something that is in the forefront of many people around the world.
I think our biggest epidemic is loneliness and that loneliness is in part caused because your technology is sucking us away from other people.
How do you even have that dialogue?
Well, they're very concerned about it as well, especially for the children.
That's really where it's so important, where you're ingraining people's ability to communicate and be part of a family and feel connected.
People feel connected to the machine, but not necessarily to people.
I think technology, though, can be used to reduce the isolation because it's access.
So you can get even healthcare or just a social worker every day into someone's home who may be so depressed they can't leave their house or ill.
Technology can be used to actually improve access and improve communication, but we want people to really not forget about one another.
It's a big session on big data.
Not the kind of big data that Facebook shares without you wanting it, but the kind of big data that comes around because you have internet everywhere.
You've got every bit of your information collected if you wanted, and certainly if not today, it will be the reality in two or three years even, not long distance expectations here.
So what concerns have you seen raised about the power of big data to help and to hurt?
Yeah, so I think, you know, it's interesting.
When we were on the show and we announced the contestant winner, they were a little worried about someone knowing that they had an illness or the genetic predisposition to an illness.
How would that affect their career and their future?
People are worried about what's done with the data.
So I think it's really important to have people feel protected and understand the benefits of it, which is to provide healthcare that's more efficient.
You can determine from population health in many ways what the right treatment will be for the right patient at the right time.
Since you raised them, this wonderful family that you joined on the show to surprise them with this beautiful trip to the Vatican.
Give their backstory for the audience.
It's really incredible.
So the mother has an autoimmune disorder, and she has three beautiful children, and they must have a genomic component, which we don't know what that is yet, because all of them are getting a different form of an autoimmune disorder.
So they're all affected by disease.
And so they're very excited to be here and seeing the therapies in development and the closer that we're getting, hopefully, to a cure for her and her children.
And let me ask a celebrity question.
You've been able to attract all kinds of big hitters.
We've had the Eds playing in the Sistine Chapel.
We've had major musicians like Peter Gabriel last night with a very heart-winning tribute to his wife who had lymphoma diagnosed less than two years ago.
And thanks to some of the physicians that are here and the contributions of many others around the world, it's had a remarkable recovery.
How do these musicians first respond when you reach out and say, hey, you want to come to the Vatican and talk to a couple hundred luminaries in science that you've never heard of, but are working behind the scenes to make this all possible?
You know, I think what it shows is that health is affected for everybody.
It doesn't matter who you are, that someone will get cancer 45% of the time.
Heart disease, you know, rare diseases affect over 300 million, even though they're rare diseases.
So no one is immune to it, and they want to help people.
So I think what's unique about this setting is trying to have the access to care that you may not have if you aren't a celeb or you don't know somebody.
How do you get access?
How do you get into those clinical trials?
Vice President Biden said that in 2016, only 5% of people with cancer even get into a trial.
So how do we educate?
How do we help people really understand the power of medicine, technology, where things are going, and how to get there?
And most of all, to help one another, share your stories of hope.
Let me give you credit because you're a remarkably humble, thoughtful, insightful person who's really been able to lead.
So God bless you for all you've done.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for being here and being a part of it.
You're amazing at being able to synthesize the information, make it interesting, and make it really human.
You have such great panelists.
I just sit back there and watch in awe.
God bless you.
That's Robin Smith, the insightful, visionary leader of the Cura Foundation, who created this wonderful Vatican Council, where so many wonderful people were able to join.
Now, in order for the Council to function, you've got to have moderators.
And Robin felt strongly that it was important to get moderators who had some experience talking.
Sometimes we talk a lot, like people like me, who get to speak for an hour in the day.
Every single day.
But she also asked other folks, people I think the world of, Meredith Vieira, Max Gomez, people you all know.
But Sanjay Gupta, maybe of all the people they could have invited, was the wisest because he's really good at teasing out the stuff that matters.
And I asked Sanjay to step out of the usual places he speaks, you know, hardcore science, breaking news, and things of that nature, and speak a little bit about how he sees faith playing a role in medicine.
And like me, Sanjay still practices.
He's a neurosurgeon.
Does a wonderful job clinically, which gives some street cred to speak on the air as well.
And here are his thoughts about the role of faith in science.
Sanjay, you've got one of the busy schedules around, but you made time to come visit the Vatican to be part of this conference.
I just want to understand why people like you make time for something of this nature.
Well, it's really interesting with this particular conference.
One of the first stories I covered was the stem cell story back in 2001. And at that time, Funding for Stem Cells in the United States cut back a lot of the reason?
Because of the collision with the Church, the collision with theology.
So fast forward 15 years, and all of a sudden, at the Vatican, you have a conference based on cell therapies, which I found fascinating in and of itself.
But I think in many places still it's hard to get all of this knowledge in one place and get all these scientists who come together.
So I feel like this is a place where I learn a lot but I also see this exchange of ideas between people that I would not normally see.
There was a panel earlier today where three physicians who happened to be leaders of their faiths, Latter-day Saints, a Catholic theologian, and a rabbi.
Sounds like the beginning of a joke, by the way.
Walk into the Vatican.
And they were very thoughtful about the ability of religion to help within the healing process.
And it's not just the fact that the folks of faith seem to do better in life.
Probably because some habits are forsworn, like cigarette smoking and human bonds.
But actually within the hospital itself, there's the ability of people to redefine who they are.
They're not defined by their illness quite as much.
How does this apply to your personal practice as a neurosurgeon?
And do you feel that movement to allow faith to be a bigger part of healing is the way to go?
And what are the pitfalls?
It's really interesting.
I think that...
Faith, however people define it, and I think it's not even necessarily denominational, nor is it even necessarily religious.
I mean, people can have faith in their fact that they're going to recover.
They're practicing optimism.
I've always found that interesting, the fact that if you believe it, it's more likely to become so.
And now you have better data around that.
You can see, just like if you're feeling toxic and you release toxic chemicals into your body which make you more sick or less likely to heal, the opposite can be true as well.
So when you practice optimism and you release these chemicals, things like tumor necrosis factor can actually go up in someone who's being optimistic.
That's a natural produced substance in our body that helps necrose or kill tumors.
So that has always fascinated me.
I do also find it interesting that people often turn to faith when all their other options have run out.
I mean, time to pray, they say.
And I think what I've been more convinced of is that the time to pray or to practice faith or to be optimistic should be a process all along if you really want to accrue the most benefits from it.
In many ways, science has an expectation that we will find the answers.
What I've been hearing at the Vatican is the Church, not just the Catholic Church, but faiths in general, make it okay not knowing all the answers.
That's not really the goal.
In fact, medicine's goal is to heal.
The church, the faith's goal is to give meaning.
How do you translate that?
That's a great question, Mehmet.
And I think you're right.
I mean, this idea that you have to have faith somehow, you know, is commingled with this idea, well, we don't know and therefore just believe, you know.
I don't think that that's, you know, there are times when you just have to believe.
We don't know the answers to everything, so you have to have gut instincts, you have to have judgment.
You do that all the time as a heart surgeon, certainly.
I think that that seems like a better analogy, maybe, than just saying one is faith-based and one is science-based.
I don't think that they're mutually exclusive.
And I think, again, a conference like this, I think, really highlights that point.
They want, everybody wants data.
They want evidence.
They want facts to help support things or to steer them off the wrong path if they're heading down the wrong path.
But it doesn't mean that that somehow eliminates the value of belief and faith, nor does faith and belief get devalued by evidence.
If you poll patients, and I've done this at Columbia, most do not want to talk to their doctor about their faith, but most want to talk to somebody about faith.
How do you reconcile that?
Well, this is, I think, a bit of a non-intuitive thing, but I do feel that, again, even for people who would call themselves people of faith, and I want to say this respectfully, but when it comes time to pray, It almost, to many people, because of the culture, especially in the United States that we live in, it's different in India, by the way, but in the United States, when it's time to pray, it kind of means that you might be near the end, that all other options have sort of been exhausted.
That shouldn't be the way that it is, but if you're talking to your doctor about prayer, the feeling might be that this has gotten really bad, and now we have to talk about prayer.
See, I never thought that was the reason.
It's an interesting idea you're throwing out there.
I always figured it was they didn't want to mess up that precious covenant they had with the doc, or they know they only got three minutes.
I mean, I'll talk to someone else about my faith that I trust is good at it.
I got to talk to you about the neurosurgery case you're about to do.
No, it's interesting, and I imagine there's different reasons, but I think you're a good example of someone who's been able to blend these two worlds, right?
I think the feeling among a lot of people is that for scientists, they are not people of faith.
They are not people who may be religious.
This whole collision of science and theology has been a long-standing one.
I mean, we know that people have died over this collision, so the idea that you're going to bring it up to your doctor, not knowing necessarily what their point of view is, Might it be offensive?
I don't think it is, but maybe a patient thinks that way.
They just want to keep the science in one bucket, the faith in another bucket.
They think that that's what the doctors want.
And I think you and I are here to tell them that that's not necessarily the case.
Biggest takeaway when you go home and tell your kids about what you learned at the Vatican.
I think, and I have done this thing with my children who are still young, this idea that when it comes to cell-based therapies, we within our own bodies have the capacity to heal.
That is something that has really fascinated my children when I talk about this.
This isn't about necessarily a new drug.
This isn't about some operation or inserting a device into the body.
Somehow your own cells With some manipulation put into a particular area of your body, your own cells can help heal.
That our bodies have this sort of reserve mechanism in place.
We just got to direct it and harness it a little bit.
They find that fascinating.
I think they find that optimistic.
I think that makes them want to take care of their bodies more, you know, and make them think about their bodies more.
So that was a big takeaway, certainly for me and then the way I described it to my kids.
Sanjay, thanks for being passionate about everything you do.
God bless you.
Yes, sir.
Appreciate it.
Alright, when we come back, the big news today is I got to meet the Pope with Lisa.
All the insights about how it happened, what we learned.
Stay with us.
One of my favorite guys out there, Sanjay Gupti, Interestingly, he was next to me in line when we were shaking hands with the Pope.
So I have a picture of Sanjay taking a picture of me and Lisa meeting the Pope.
Did you like meeting the Pope?
I did.
It was the best.
Did you like meeting the Pope?
I did.
He's very warm, thoughtful.
He looks in your eyes.
He connects.
But I know that part of what you want to do is make sure you capture the moment because it happens and then it's gone.
So I took a picture of Sanjay best I could.
I'm a heart surgeon.
So we'd take fast photos.
Just because time is of the essence.
And I gave the camera to Sanjay, and the picture of him getting a photo of us is so perfect.
His hands are exactly placed symmetrical to each other.
The phone is exactly horizontal to the ground.
You see why it's a neurosurgeon?
Every millimeter measured out.
He looks sort of like he's photobombing our picture, though.
Yes, he does.
We'll put it up online.
You can check it out.
It's hilarious.
I think it's already gone viral.
Anyway, you can see why there's such depth to this wonderful human being.
I wanted to end the show with the opportunity to hear from a gentleman, Andrew Von Eschenbach, a physician leader who's served in government, served in the private sector.
He's established himself as a real notable gentleman who can translate what has to happen in the practice of medicine into the legal system and the legislative systems of this country.
So often doctors think they know what to do, but it's hard to get the government to allow it to happen, whether it's Medicare, Medicaid, or how we pay for stuff, Healthy Human Services, all these organizations that are dizzying alphabet soup-lettered organizations.
But Andrew Van Esenbach knows it firsthand, so take a moment to take a listen to what he said.
Andy, thank you for spending time with me.
This is a remarkable conference, in part because people like you are attracted here.
Just to recount, and I'll give the whole bio later, but to have led the FDA and to have led the NIH, you were involved in academic pursuits, in this case of cancer, but also regulating what is allowed to be used in modern medicine.
I'd love how you could reconcile that with some of the faith arguments that we've been hearing at the Vatican.
Well, you know, we both started out as physicians with the goal to care for another human being who was suffering.
And even though our roles have changed over time, that's never changed.
So what you come to is the realization that you can do that in a variety of different ways, either personally, one-on-one, but for me, being in the operating room, taking care of someone with a cancer, or I could try to lead an agency that can make drugs available for millions of people who are out there suffering.
At the end of the day, it's still what we started out to do, which is to care for another human being who's suffering.
Walk us through the challenges for someone in a position of influence to take a concept through research into development so it can actually be used for patients.
Well, I like to think of it as staying in the circle of discovery, development, and delivery.
I have always kind of preached that research is critical.
Without research, without the discovery, nothing happens.
But research is not the end.
It's a means to an end.
So while we're doing that, we've got to be focusing on how's that going to get translated into the development of something, a drug, a vaccine, or whatever.
But most importantly then, how's that going to get delivered?
And so until we complete that cycle, we haven't completed our job or our responsibility.
We heard from faith leaders at the conference about some of the ethical obligations to take care of folks, especially who can't afford some of the cutting-edge cool ideas we were hearing about.
We also heard about some pretty cool ideas that are going to radically transform how health is delivered, much of it putting a little bit of the onus, some of the burden on individuals to make the right decisions.
Did anything catch your attention in those dialogues?
Well, I think what we're seeing is the real need for us to take the tremendous progress that's occurring on the front end of the spectrum, the discovery and development.
But then address the issue of dissemination.
Until we disseminate that, and we disseminate that across all of the people who are in need, again, we haven't fulfilled what our role was in the first place.
So it has to start, as often it does, in the areas in which we have the most resources, the most opportunities.
But it can't end there.
And you and I both saw that, for example, when we were beginning to get concerned about avian influenza.
And we knew that we would never get a vaccine if we didn't have the virus.
But the virus was in Indonesia.
And the Indonesians wanted to be sure that whenever we developed that vaccine in the United States, that they would have access to it.
That's our moral, ethical, but it's also our medical responsibility.
What excites you the most about the rapid advances in cancer, the ones that have stunned me over the last few years?
It's a metamorphosis.
I mean, we have really gone through a phase change here.
It's not a linear extrapolation of the past.
And that crossover point was when we went from observing manifestations And you and I both know that all of medicine, the whole history of medicine, was based on observer manifestation and then empirically try to figure out what to do about it.
We felt a lump in a woman's breast or I felt a lump in someone's prostate.
But today, we now are no longer observing manifestations.
We're understanding mechanisms at the genetic, molecular, and cellular level.
And the wonderful thing about that is that understanding of a mechanism allows us to almost intuitively know what the intervention should be.
If I understand it, then I understand how to intervene in it to stop the process of the disease.
So whether it's diabetes or cancer, they're not events in someone's life.
They're processes that have a beginning and a course of action and then unfortunately often a tragic end.
Now we can look at that process, think about the different steps along the way, the underlying mechanism, and now we have a whole portfolio of ways that we could strategically intervene in that process, prevent it, detect it, eliminate it, or modulate it and control it.
And we've changed the paradigm.
There are wonderful solutions out there.
Most people probably don't know about them, and even physicians have trouble keeping up.
Best advice from you is someone who's been at the top of this pyramid trying to get the word out for how we get the average American, for example, to realize they probably should have their cancer sequenced if they've had a diagnosis before they get treated.
Well, since we're at the Vatican, I'll thank God for people like you and you specifically and eventually because I think I mean that quite seriously.
I mean, this is about communication.
It is about education.
And we can be in laboratories thinking great thoughts, but it is important for the people who are one, Supporting us to do that through their taxpayer dollars or whatever, but most importantly, who are placing their hopes and their dreams in us, that we will eventually be able to accomplish that, that we let them know.
We let them know what we're being able to do, but also let them know how they have to be engaged in that, where they come into play.
And you and I have both seen this transition from, at least I have gray hair, you don't, When I started in medical school, it was all physician-centric.
I didn't think I was God.
I knew I was God.
And I had all the knowledge of having gone to medical school and I had all the knowledge about a patient.
They weren't even allowed to read their chart.
That's radically changed today.
They are at the center of what we're doing.
It's now a patient-centric model.
And so with them at the center, we need to continue to depend upon you to communicate so effectively as you do so that they're aware of what we can do for them and they'll be a partner in that.
I'm feeling the pressure.
Andy, thank you very, very much.
Bless you.
Pleasure to be with you.
Thank you.
Andrew Van Eschenbach pulling it together.
So, listen, you heard on this show from Dr. Robin Smith, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, if you all know from CNN, Andrew Van Eschenbach spoke about government.
And we had Dr. Dale Renlund, who together with two other doctors who happened to be in the faith, senior members of their faith, opened us up to the idea of the religious influence on health.
And I got to say, part of what caught my attention when we had the physicians who were also, you know, the rabbi, the father, and the elder, is that they all sort of agreed that the major purpose of anybody who's listening to this podcast, or frankly, anyone you'll meet in your life, is we want to get better.
And not just better for an illness, but just be better in our life today than we were yesterday.
That's a goal you aspire to, Lisa.
Absolutely.
You squeeze me on.
Why aren't you better?
And they all agree that's it, and I think they're right.
But how?
That's where we diverge.
Because scientists have a way of getting better, for Folks of faith or who focus on faith have different paths.
We all have different goals.
Sometimes you get there through art.
There are many ways of experiencing that.
But in this conference, we all began to appreciate that it's the how part that we need to focus on.
And these are exponential times.
There are things happening so rapidly.
But as some of the faith leaders, and when the Pope spoke, he spoke a little bit about this as well, that we needed to make sure that everybody's included in And the advances that are happening, because if you know all these things about stem cells and better ways of making food and taking care of the planet and all that good stuff, you got to make sure everyone's in the same boat and understands it.
And we have dominion over all creation.
That's sort of the starting point.
So how do we progress with responsibility?
How do we make sure that we're taking everyone along for the ride?
And how do we make sure the right thing happens on the cutting edge?
For example, you know, these days it's more about cells than pills.
That came up quite a bit.
It's not just medications anymore.
It's about taking your own cells through stem cells and other tactics.
There's a pharmacy of the future that I think a lot of folks are going to learn about in the course of these podcasts where we can all of a sudden begin to use stem cells for things we never thought possible.
Autoimmune ailments.
Even autism was a topic that came up in that context.
And then there's the morality of extreme life extension.
What if we can get you to live to age 120, which there's a lot of evidence arguing that we could do that if you're pretty healthy right now.
Is that the right thing to do?
Plus, we have all the usual technology issues.
We have smartphones that are smarter than ever.
They can be your health coach in your pocket.
We have a virtual reality, which helps for people going blind, but also with anxiety disorders.
And there's this whole area of population health intelligence where we can begin to predict who's going to have trouble.
I don't know.
They said, you know, the two major predictors of shortened lifespan are your credit score and your zip code.
I did know that.
Shoot.
You told me that before.
But I think about that.
All these medical insights that I have, and it turns out your credit score and your zip code are as predictive because the people you hang with predict how you're going to do in your life.
And those are the kinds of insights that make you sit back and realize, oh my goodness, I better hang with different people or I better get the people around me to be healthier so the people, all of us get better.
And that's why families get healthier together.
And I remember hearing a story that Coach K told me It's a fascinating story about his mother.
And when he was growing up in Chicago, his mother every morning would say, go to the end of the road, take a left, there's a bus stop there, get on the right bus.
When he was a little boy, it made sense.
Go to the end of the road, take a left, the bus stop, get on the bus, wait there, when the bus comes, get on the right one and go.
But as he got older and entered his teen years and going to high school, his mother would say the same thing.
And he would push back and say, Mom, I know how to get on the right bus.
I've been doing it for a long time.
And he said years later he realized she wasn't talking about the bus that took him to school.
She was talking about the bus of people you hang with in life.
That if he went to school and was with other young people who were headed in the right direction, thinking about the same things, culturally focused on the right goals, then he was going to end up going there because the bus is going to where the bus is going.
But if you're on a bus going to the wrong place and you don't want to go there, it's a little late.
So it was a good bit of advice.
I think that was a big takeaway from the Unite to Cure conference at the Vatican was to make sure that the buses that were filling with people are filled with the right people and headed to the right place with the right drivers.
Did you enjoy it?
Yeah.
Yes.
What was your favorite part about the conference?
Besides me.
Yeah, I was going to say, you just steal my lines all the time.
I saw you.
Well, clearly meeting the Pope was a highlight of my life, let alone the conference, you know?
I mean, yeah.
Yeah.
She's not going to admit it here, but Tony Robbins was there.
She loves him.
I do.
It's like, you know, honey attracted the bee.
Well, it was also in my favorite city in the whole world, so everything was good.
Give me a grade for the trip, because I count that as one of our vacations.
Give me a grade.
A plus?
An A plus?
Yep.
She's just saying that on the radio.
I've never gotten an A plus.
All right, guys.
Enjoy the rest of your day.
Hope you enjoyed the podcast.
Lots more to come about how the world of medicine is changing.
