Stay Off My Operating Table

For years, nurse practitioner Dr. Efrat Lamandre ("Dr. E") told patients with normal labs that nothing was wrong with them. She now calls that habit unintentional gaslighting, and calls herself a recovering medical gaslighter. Her new book, The Problem with Good Patients, turns attention to the other side of the exam table: the pre-emptive apologies, the deference, the quiet decision to...

A woman in her 60s tells gerontologist Zora Benhamou she "never went through menopause." She hasn't had a period in years. Benhamou has heard this story hundreds of times, and she says it's the most dangerous one a woman can believe about her own body. In this conversation with Dr. Philip Ovadia, Benhamou — founder of Hack My Age and a specialist in aging and longevity — walks...

In 1991, a 19-year-old pre-med student was diagnosed with end-stage ovarian cancer and told nothing could be done. She is still alive. Dr. Nasha Winters joins Dr. Philip Ovadia and Jack Heald to trace the strange, unscripted path that got her there, and the decades of research since that convinced her modern oncology is aiming at the wrong target entirely. Winters, now a naturopathic oncologist wh...

Dr. Ken Berry argues humans have a species-specific “proper human diet” and that low-carb/keto approaches can prevent and reverse diabetes, yet major institutions resist due to incentives and enforcement pressures. He founded the nonprofit American Diabetes Society and built “Dr. Berry AI” to spread practical guidance and advocacy. 01:49 Dr. Berry's Background 07:35 The American Diabetes Soci...

Dr. Sean O'Mara scans hearts for a living, but not the way most cardiologists do. He measures the ring of fat wrapped around the heart muscle itself, a structure most physicians were never trained to look for and few insurance codes account for. In this conversation, O'Mara walks Jack Heald and Dr. Philip Ovadia through a case that reframes what fasting, the microbiome, and the body&apos...

Dr. Aseem Malhotra relates his path from mainstream interventional cardiology to challenging the mainstream's cholesterol hypothesis. Malhotra explains: why biased research funding misleads doctors and patients about statin benefits and harms why most coronary stents don’t prevent heart attacks or extend life outside acute situations why medicine is not an exact science the "Saturated Fa...

A 34-year-old functional medicine practitioner had every marker doctors look for: a zero calcium score, clean metabolic labs, a lean and active build. Six months later he had a widowmaker heart attack with a total blockage and no plaque anywhere else in his arteries. In this conversation, Dr. Stephen Hussey walks Jack Heald and Dr. Philip Ovadia through what happened after the stent, the questions...

Most chronic physical and mental health problems trace back to "ancestral mismatch" — the gap between the ancient environment our biology was shaped by and the modern, overly convenient one we now live in. Dr. Berg's book breaks this mismatch into nine trackable "environments" (food, social, light, work, cognitive, etc.) and argues that fixing willpower isn't the answ...

For decades, Professor Tim Noakes told the world that carbohydrate-loaded muscles were the secret to endurance performance. He built a career on it, wrote a bestselling running manual around it, and trained a generation of athletes to believe it. Then, standing at a podium, he tore the nutrition chapter out of his own book. In this conversation with Dr. Philip Ovadia, the South African physiologis...

Dr. Jay Wrigley, the physician behind Hormone Diet Doc, returns to the podcast after spending nine months building an entirely new framework for hormonal health, drawn from three decades in clinical practice and his own hundred-pound transformation. He rejoins Dr. Philip Ovadia to unpack why the standard thyroid test so often leaves patients with false reassurance, and what actually happens betwee...

Dr. Cassie Smith spent a decade being failed by her own specialty. As a board-certified endocrinologist, she developed Graves' disease, then Hashimoto's, then infertility, and no colleague could give her an answer. The answer she eventually found wasn't in a prescription pad. It was in her gut. In this conversation with Dr. Philip Ovadia, Smith explains why millions of people on thy...

Robin Switzer has spent nearly a decade building one of the largest gatherings in metabolic health, watching thousands of people arrive chasing the same thing: a way to feel better. But somewhere between the Oura Rings, the continuous glucose monitors, and the endless lists of things to optimize, something shifted. Dr. Philip Ovadia and Jack Heald sit down with Switzer to talk about that shift, an...

Most conversations about diabetes focus on controlling blood sugar. Dr. Ian Lake spent 20 years following this playbook—counting carbohydrates, injecting insulin, managing his type 1 diagnosis according to conventional medical guidance. Then a serious hypoglycemic episode and early signs of retinopathy forced him to reconsider everything. What he discovered became the foundation of his practice an...

A genetic connective tissue disorder deemed incurable by medicine improved dramatically through carnivore nutrition and structural medicine that conventional practice overlooks. DESCRIPTION At 16, Edward Goeke developed debilitating symptoms that left him bedridden: crippling pain whenever he felt emotion, constant tachycardia, and progressive deterioration. For two years, doctors dismissed him. M...

Your body cannot release stored fat or heal itself when it perceives threat; gratitude is the measurable physiological switch that lowers cortisol, raises oxytocin, and allows metabolic transformation. DESCRIPTION Ben Azadi lost 80 pounds and reversed suicidal depression through metabolic healing. His father wasn't as fortunate—a preventable decline into type 2 diabetes, neuropathy, and strok...

For twenty years, Kelsey Buchalter cycled through hospitals, medications, and every conventional treatment psychiatry could offer for anorexia, bulimia, and anxiety. None of it touched the underlying problem. What finally did was a single instruction from a nutritionist: eat only red meat and eggs for ten days. Now a health coach at Ovadia Heart Health, Kelsey sits down with Dr. Philip Ovadia and...

Cardiac imaging expert Kim Mischo spent 20 years inside the cardiology machine — running nuclear stress tests that told patients they were fine, then watching some of those patients have heart attacks the following week. She knew the system was broken long before she could prove it. Now she can prove it. A non-invasive scan exists that can detect coronary artery disease at 5% blockage — before sym...

Martha Carlin wasn't a scientist when her husband was diagnosed with Parkinson's at 44. She was an auditor — trained to follow the evidence wherever it leads, and to never take anything at face value. That discipline took her somewhere medicine hadn't yet looked: the gut. What she found over the next two decades reframes how we understand not just Parkinson's, but chronic const...

Most people trying to get healthier are losing a battle they don't know they're fighting. It's not a lack of information. It's not even a lack of effort. It's something quieter — the stories running beneath the surface, the environments they've stopped noticing, the split-second decisions that feel small until they're not. Martin Silva has spent 20 years coaching...

Craig Emmerich spent a decade eating low-carb and feeling great — until he wasn't. What followed was a quarter-million dollars, a chronic Lyme diagnosis, and a hard-won education in what diet alone simply cannot do. In this conversation, Craig and Dr. Ovadia pull apart one of the most seductive myths in the metabolic health space: that the right food is always the right answer. They talk prot...

The science of what to eat has never been clearer. The problem was never the biology — it was everything else. Dr. Ty Beal, a global nutrition scientist who helped author the new U.S. Dietary Guidelines, has spent his career mapping where modern diets fail and why they keep failing. His Nutritional Value Score ranked foods with a rigor that finally puts organ meats in their proper place, calls out...

You've done the work. You cleaned up your diet, fixed your sleep, addressed your metabolic health — and something is still wrong. Brain fog you can't explain. Fatigue that won't move. Weight creeping up for no apparent reason. Personality changes your family notices before you do. Nurse practitioner Ally D'Amico spent 14 years watching patients spiral through specialists, colle...

Your body already knows how to heal itself. The question is whether anyone is giving it the right signals. Dr. Adeel Khan trained as a conventional physician before following a thread most doctors ignore: what if we could restore the system, not just manage the symptoms? That thread led him through sports medicine, global laboratories, stem cell research, and a fundamental rethinking of what aging...

Nick Norwitz has an MD, a PhD, and a cholesterol level that should have killed him — at least according to the standard model of cardiovascular disease. For seven years, his total cholesterol held above 700. His LDL sat in the high 500s. Every clinical algorithm flagged him as a cardiac emergency. He took none of the prescribed medications. His just-published case report shows zero coronary plaque...

You got the tests. You got the diagnosis — maybe more than one. You took the medication. And you still don't feel like yourself. Reed Davis has spent 30 years working with exactly those people. As the founder of Functional Diagnostic Nutrition, he's trained over 5,000 practitioners in a methodology built on one counterintuitive premise: chasing a diagnosis may be the wrong move entirely....