Whole Foods Plant-based Diet Saved Her Life | The Exam Room

story time here on the exam room podcast brought to you by the physicians committee and when i say story time i'm talking about perhaps one of the most remarkable stories you will ever hear in your entire life my guest today is someone who has had a health transformation and then some to this day she is still defying the odds she is an inspiration for so many she has become a case study and let me just rattle off what kate mcgoy smith has done she has reversed blindness she has reversed type 2 diabetes she is dealing with a very specialized pulmonary hypertension it's a terminal disease but as you are about to see she is still very much alive and well and there's a whole lot more to this story but i just i have to let her tell it because it is quite literally perhaps the most incredible thing i have ever heard in my entire life and i mean that kate thank you so very much for being here i'm very delighted to be here chuck thank you thank you for being an inspiration now let me ask so let's check these boxes here so people get an accurate idea of everything that you've gone through and continue to go through uh reversed blindness that is correct correct yes absolutely type 2 diabetes we're able to reverse that as well yes i was especially with a 15.1 a1c all right i told you it's going to be a good story uh talk to me about this very specialized form of pulmonary hypertension i understand it's it's a terminal disease it is a terminal disease unfortunately it's called idiopathic so i say even the idiots don't know the cause or cure pulmonary arterial hypertension so it's very rare it only affects two to four in a million and it's localized high blood pressure in the pulmonary arteries of the lungs so it's not like what people might think when they hear hypertension because many people feel that's almost a rite of passage at about 40 where you have high blood pressure and you get cholesterol and then you have to deal with it this is um this is symptomatic where you have uh quite acute swelling in your abdomen your upper legs your ankles you have shortness of breath you're subject to fainting dizzy spells and your oxygen depletes very quickly it i ca it came for me with severe right-sided heart failure and as a result i was and at the time i was diagnosed because it's so rare uh affecting only as i mentioned two to four in a million i was told i only had two to five years to live and most people because it's so complicated and i think if people are understanding the medical profession better that they're more like medical detectives they have to rule out a lot of stuff before they figure out what you actually have and i understand that partly because i'm a former registered nurse who worked in the operating room bedsiding community before i entered clinical social work as a therapist and um so it takes about two sometimes up to two years just to diagnose and at that point most people are immediately sent to palliative care or they don't even survive the diagnostic process and it's discovered on autopsy and how long ago again was this diagnosis i i it took about nine months to diagnose and then in december of 2007 i was given a right heart cath where they have to go through your artery here down into they take a wire and put it down into the chambers of your heart then into your lungs and you're awake during it you actually have to they secure a bed in icu because it can be that can be dangerous to your health you can it can have adverse effects and what they ironically want to do is part of the test when they first diagnose it and they want to make sure it's a fool proof it's kind of the gold litmus test to do a right heart catheterization because the drugs that they have to give you are so severe uh that they would cause a lot of damage to you if you didn't obviously need them and so what they do is they actually test to see if you'll respond to nitric oxide gas which would be a vasodilator and unfortunately i failed that test and no amount of studying would help me pass it and i had to immediately go on medications and they have different levels of medication and the first believe it or not and i can really appreciate this and the men might appreciate this in the crowd is i had to go on viagra because it was originally a heart drug and uh it's a vasodilator so it's trying to open up your your arteries uh to get as much blood flow in because blood of course carries our nutrient and oxygen to all parts of our organs that we need vitally and so i was put on that and within a matter of a couple months i was left blind so blind that when i looked in the vanity mirror to brush my teeth all i'd see is black black face black mouth yeah so it was like i was drunk trying to brush my teeth because i could not figure out where the toothbrush went for a while there and had to adjust to a blind world and i was also put on oxygen and you know they usually give you these little carrying wheeling trolleys with the oxygen and unfortunately even a little pebble can twist it and turn it so your wrist is really sore it's not like these wonderful gizmos uh for golf carts or anything it's it's very um a low end so i ended up carrying my oxygen tank on my back so i looked like a scuba diver with a plastic mustache dark glasses and a white cane so i was like the modern walking elephant person you know the elephant man well you know because people just didn't even know what the heck was coming toward them yeah but to look at you today i mean you would just you would never ever ever know you look so healthy today that's that's just amazing i i feel pretty good and and yet i'm i'm struggling with some of the side effects um because again modern medicine is uh tries its best there's excellent at acute care but you know and the whole goal is i had five specialists in my life and the whole goal of my pulmonary specialist was to just keep me alive a little longer the idea is to try to slow down the progress progression of the disease with very heavy duty some of them were i was on experimental drugs because they're trying everything at it but what they forget is guess what they're only thinking of my lungs they're not thinking about my eyes my liver my heart you know anything else so unfortunately are my kidneys and unfortunately my kidneys took a real beating and so i'm at end stage kidney failure right now and have been since 2013 and yet i remain off dialysis so i'm hoping that gives some hope to people who are challenged by kidney disease because there's many many hundreds of thousands if not millions of people there i know there are millions of people affected by kidney disease and the plant-based diet has continued to keep me alive i absolutely love love your optimism and your drive to inspire others and offer that hope and i think hope in your case can come as simply as crunching some numbers so you get your first diagnosis in december i believe you said december of 2007 right so then you're looking at uh terminal within two to five years but yeah you don't have to be three young children at the time right well right so and i was very invol i was uh actually i was working in a job where i was had started an initiative program of a free on-site counseling program for kids from pre-kindergarten to grade 12 and their families i started it from blank paper and i was the sole practitioner and as i continued to work in the program i became i was the clinical supervisor and manager of 12 counselors and 13 school sites and that's what i had grown in six years yeah it's never a great time to get a diagnosis like that uh but as i was saying with the numbers here i mean clearly to put it in sports terms you've out-kicked the coverage significantly here um but my question is with this condition being so rare i mean is it just like kind of bad luck is it diet driven like we hear about with other forms of hypertension they have because it's idiopathic they actually do not know what the cause or cure is they still can't figure out it they believe it is some kind of form of autoimmune disease uh unfortunately when something so rare guess what there's no funding there's no support we actually my husband and i had to start the support group with another patient because the hospital fortunately i'm in calgary alberta canada and that hospital uh peter lockheed where i received my treatment it actually served not only uh southern alberta but even the province next door in bc for patients so they had to travel to get treatment there because there's just not that many uh pulmonary material specialists um to be able to get treatment even what was it like the day that you got that diagnosis i would imagine i i mean saying that it was like getting hit with a ton of bricks wouldn't come close to it i felt i refer to it actually chuck is when i talk to people because i do some whole plant-based coaching and lifestyle and i come from it with a psychological flexibility because i use my counseling skills as well is i will say it was like i got hit i was i was um a front on full head collision where some people let's say have just diagnosed with diabetes they say you know what that can be a fender bender and you can kind of punch that out and you can get going with your life but i had a full-on major car collision and so my body was never going to be quite the same i'm not going to be the typical success story um that you know i don't have any i walk away with zero health problems as we often see in other success stories which is really exciting and i'm so happy for them but that's just not the case for me and when i was diagnosed i actually they knew i had severe right-sided heart they first diagnosed that i had all the swelling and they diagnosed that i had type 2 diabetes which i felt really bad as a nurse i thought i kept putting it off and i think moms out there will understand i really thought oh it's just i'm working too hard i've got three kids i'm their homework helper plus i'm working full time and a demanding emotionally draining job of dealing with kids from suicide to conflicts to whatever you know abuse situations and and uh so and my diagnosis with diabetes i ended up having an a1c at 15.1 that's how much i had put myself on the back burner maybe i wasn't even on the stove at times and and so i i was looking at dealing with that but they discovered i had a heart problem and it turned out i had severe right-sided heart failure and a specialist interviewed me at the heart clinic and he also referred me to the sleep clinic where it turned out that i had um uh sleep apnea which is a sleep obstruction and so my my sleep specialist said oh you know what if you just go on cpap your heart will remodel you'll be fine but literally in about a month later when she redid the test she came back to me uh reviewed at that time with another doctor and i thought this is kind of strange why is she doing this review and i had a you know i think god gives you those inklings and that's when she told me she said i'm provisionally diagnosing you with idiopathic pulmonary tear hypertension which i'd never heard of and and she said you only have two to five years to live and then i was put immediately in the waiting room and the funny story here is there is a funny part of it um and maybe that's what's helped me along the way is um you know my husband and i were then they gave us some papers because she said i don't know how you've ever been able to work like how you even stood up and i remember a few times almost fainting at the photocopier and again i just thought i was a little bit tired and so we were out in the parking lot and anybody's been in a hospital parking lot they're really expensive and we were sitting there crying and crying our hearts out and then i all of a sudden said to my husband oh my god like we got to get going this is really expensive to cry here like we better get the heck out of here and i said can you drive and so you know what he did he said yeah i think i can and he pulled himself together we paid and then we drove off somewhere where we could cry with for free [Laughter] levity levity in a situation like that certainly has helped me many times i will tell you chuck well that's that's what i was just thinking i mean you get a diagnosis like that and clearly you're still standing and there is that old adage that laughter is the best medicine you who has worked in medicine your entire career is there something to it i think it i think that you're proof i saw it many times you know when i was about 15 i began working as a nurse's aide and they often made me take care of patients like i've dealt with a lot of dying patients i dealt with patients recovering like going through withdrawal from drugs because of course i was a lot cheaper body to have in the room than a nurse and and i had to find some of the humor of it like i still remember a man wearing it was a wonderful wonderful man and he was very thin and he was wearing a large timex watch and all i could think in my head was and i was hoping no one heard it out loud i thought you know you said the timex commercials they go through skiing and everything and they go and it keeps on ticking and all i can think of is he's dying and it keeps on ticking that clock and so i began to realize i needed that sort of black humor to help me through some really tragic things at a fairly young age at 15 you know doing this kind of work and i've continued to use that humor throughout and it really helps give you the bounce that you need of that resiliency i find well let's talk about let's try to put this in a little bit more of a chronological order here so um we we've got uh i mean we've got the disease here we we've got the blindness and the diabetes um when when did the blindness and the in the diabetes first surface for you uh well the diabetes the diabetes came be just before the diagnosis in 2007 um probably about a month before because and that's and that's when they realized i had type 2 diabetes so they gave me a few weeks off so i guess what the first book i got um was neil bernard's book reversing diabetes it was the only one available we have a large bookstore chain at the time called chapters and it was the only one available and i was like what do you mean like food how is that possible so we tried it you know i was we were pretty clumsy at it but i was really excited and what i did is i was able to get my a1c down to um seven from 15.2 down to seven feeling following neil bernard's book i was so grateful that i actually called pcrm.org had to look them up and just said i just want to thank you for for read this book and thank dr bernard it really means a lot to me and that was my journey of in being introduced to a lot of whole plant-based leaders and um you know uh one of the things that also helped is we had a a national uh sort of speaker called george strapanopoulos and he had what we call red chair interviews he had these big bright red chairs and he's kind of like who you your stephen colbert or uh another you know famous person in in your in the united states and he came on one night and i do believe this is when i was blind um and i just happened to have the channel on there and i do feel that was honestly a gift from god because of course i couldn't see anything on television and he came on and he said i saw a documentary called forks over knives it changed my life it might change yours and that's all i'm going to say and i was totally intrigued i had been a client of the canadian national institute for the blind i just applied for a scholarship so i could have voice activated computer because my whole goal was to write goodbye stories to my children and so i wrote to the producers of forks over knives asked them is it ever going to come to calgary alberta and they thought maybe in a year's time and lo and behold in about a year's time it came and it was an alternative theater which meant walking up two flights of stairs which honestly was like climbing mount everest for me with the oxygen the blindness the tank on my back and guess what we did it three times and i sat right in the front row so i could hear see some shadows but i could hear it all and we why we went three times is because we took our children to it we took our oldest and then the other two and we said this is how we're going to try to eat wow okay yeah yeah see now when i said at the top of the show that this is going to be perhaps the most incredible story we've ever told on the exam room uh yeah this is why i said that this is just absolutely remarkable the way that everything had played out for you i do believe a god i mean i know everybody has their own spiritual beliefs but i do believe uh god's been a great companion and just the odds because you know what at the time when i once turned the tv was on and the stephen colbert show when he was that doing that political kind of spiel that he did i actually thought that was must have been fox news i'd heard about fox news of course i've never been able to see it and i thought he was saying such outrageous things i thought well i think this is fox news so i turned it off a meeting i had no idea it was a comedy show no comment through that you know when you're blind it's amazing what you don't also know but you you pick up other things but like i had no idea i didn't know for example when i learned to start cutting up vegetables and stuff i would cut my fingers on mushrooms i found that really hard because i could only stand at my island for maybe a minute because i would be too exhausted so i had to sit at the dining table i had no idea there were sliced mushrooms available and i was really excited when i found that out because i was blind and of course could not see that in the store game changer yeah so let's talk about some of those other simple tasks that the majority of us just kind of take for granted i mean you mentioned brushing your teeth a little bit earlier now you're talking about chopping vegetables and how just climbing two flights of stairs for you was like climbing mount everest what are some of the other simple things that most of us don't even think twice about well i was very lucky we had electric stove because i of course had an oxygen and i had a 50-foot oxygen cord attached to me because it's very expensive to carry around tanks in the house so they have an oxygen oxygen generator and so um you know because i could have blown up when i was cooking even so i had to be really careful to learn how to use a stove which was pretty scary for me because of course i didn't want to get burned and i also was had oxygen around in my nose and on a long cord i didn't want anything to explode um so there was just even you know daily things that i was a homework helper to my kids but they would have to sort of read i couldn't read even one full sentence i could try to with a magnifying glass i could get one word at a time i felt like a grade oner because by the end of the sentence i was like what was this about and so i ended up giving all my professional library to a domestic violence shelter uh for their staff and um you know that felt a little heartbreaking because i thought that was the end of my my career life and my identity that way and that was a really tough blow but i also knew that it was a for a good cause but two of the things chuck i will say were my north stars when i got diagnosed i didn't want my children to know the severity of my prognosis of death because they were young they were school age and one was just beginning high school kind of thing and so i took treated it like sex education if they ask questions i would be honest but otherwise i asked them not to go on uh you know on the internet because they would get maybe misinformation and that i would be honest with them and so i just when they were they were ready then i could share a little bit more information but they also saw that i was deteriorating so i said to them there's two things i can do one is i can try to take worry away from you so i'm gonna make a promise to you that i'm going to try as hard as possible to get as well as possible and the second thing is i don't have a corner on suffering you suffer i suffer everybody suffers so i've got to find a way to make a contribution to the to the world to the community i don't know what i'll be like maybe it'll be a smile maybe it'll be something bigger i have no idea but i have that obligation that's why i'm here on earth is to make some kind of contribution and those have continued to be my north stars um even today your outlook on all of this is just it's so profound to me and it's it's definitely going to leave a lasting impression um did you always kind of have this optimism i mean you talked about going to see forks over knives three times and being so gung-ho about it and saying this is how we're going to treat this were you absolutely convinced that you would have this remarkable turnaround or what were your expectations i i had absolutely no expectations in fact chuck all i knew is the only possibility of me living a little longer than the then if i got to live to five years was a lung transplant and so what i did know about organ transplant is that you have to have the rest of your body as healthy as possible because obviously they don't want to give such a precious gift to someone who has cancer part of their body or something like that you know or has diabetes in their body they want to make sure this transplant lives on for a long time because there's been a great sacrificing gift given and so all i thought of is you know when i found out that you know when dr esselstyn talked about the fact that there's no morbidity to this and that you could only improve i thought okay i'm not a gambling person never bought a lottery ticket in my life i'm gonna go ahead and say this makes sense when i heard the science behind it i very much believe in science and um and its value um and uh my husband and i both went like this is what we got to try this makes sense and so all i cared about was could i last long enough to have a lung transplant and try to get my body as healthy as possible and that's what i went in with in the meantime i had the side effects or the side benefits of not being diabetic anymore um getting my eyesight back after 15 months of following a whole plant-based diet um being able to have more energy i lost about over 100 pounds i you know was took off almost all my medications except my pulmonary arterial hypertension meds they came a couple about a year a half later and you know i was really thrilled and i was able to exercise up to an hour a day yeah okay so here's here's some kind of the way that i'm looking at this you were diagnosed with a terminal illness and then sprung back to life yeah not a whole heck of a lot of people can say that i want to ask you specifically though about getting your eyesight back this is something i've spoken with eric adams about he was able to reverse his diabetes and regain his eyesight but we didn't exactly walk through what that process was like was it a gradual regaining of your eyesight or did you wake up one morning and just all of the sudden you could see again oh wouldn't that be neat if you could just wake up and have that happen um actually i got inspired because at the time i was taking the start solution graduate certificate um i've taken the cornell one and i've taken this one and a few other things but i was taking that and it was john mcdougall that inspired me i was listening to it by tape because i was blind and and he said you know you can actually reverse your your blindness and what i knew about my blindness was when i went to my retinologist who was a wonderful man dr williams and he said uh i s he said well you know i i said you know what can i do about this he said well kate and he said with my husband there so it wasn't my imagination i remember him saying it really clearly he goes well kate it's honestly a choice of yours you have to choose between your lungs or your eyes what do you want to choose because my medication was contributing to the to my blindness because i was having a lack of oxygen to to my eyes and the diabetics diabetes i had diabetic retinopathy as well so when he said you have to choose between your eyes and your lungs what are you going to do it took a matter of like seconds i said i choose my lungs and because i said you know my lungs with my lungs i can hug my kids so that's all they need for me and yet here you are today yes i'm looking right at you and looking right back at me and i mean just how filled with gratitude must you be to be able to see again and not have to worry about nicking your fingers when you're chopping vegetables in the kitchen and more so being able to see your children in addition to hugging them well i mean i i didn't get to see my son graduate from high school like you know i was still blind at that time and then i got to see them graduate from university and that was really breathtaking and uh very grateful um for all of it you know um i never asked myself why did i have to have this because it's such a horrendous horrible horrible disease you wouldn't wish this on anybody else and so it's kind of like i took one for the team um in having this disease and no one else in my family has it there's no generations of having it it's just you know and it's not likely my children will ever have it um so you know i am i live with gratitude uh and that's how i founded forksmart.org because i wanted to create a summit so that i thought i was saving up for a lung transplant and um i said to my husband you know i want to have dr esselstyn come and ann esselstyn come to calgary which is known as cow town alberta beef is considered the number one resource that we have here and so of course uh plant-based diets not that popular to be honest that's cow food even as one of my doctors actually said oh so are you still on that cow diet you know so and so i gave him a card once that i said i'm you know i'm i'm moving on the right direction the big cow on it yeah so you know so i ended up uh what i did was uh we formed the summit and uh we had dr esselstyn and ann esselstyn come and we were really excited and i thought if one person comes well we had almost 400 people show up um and and he did a wonderful job for us it was a friday evening and he it was just superb and i just thought and then it started we started doing summits after that and our last summit was with t colin campbell and dr shane williams who's a cardiologist practicing in brace bridge ontario who also all subscribed to whole plant-based diet but we had to do it because of covet we had to do it online which was a bit disappointing not to have them in person because when our speakers come we make all the food from scratch all oil-free whole plant-based they're in hampers they have a menu for the whole weekend and we were so looking forward to hosting um to colin campbell and his wife karen but that wasn't possible and now we've sort of switched over uh forksmart.org uh a family has who's really been inspired to eat whole plant-based and has done that for a number of years has um decided to take over forksmart.org and they're going to open up a food service so we're excited my husband and i will be consultants to it um and we're very excited about that because if we can marry really the powerhouse of plants with convenience and delicious nutritious taste like you know we're going to get more people eating this way and speaking of eating here a little bit of housekeeping with about the five minutes or so that we have left what was your diet like pre-diagnosis was it that standard calgary beef heavy diet it was the standard american diet but actually we had been when we moved to calgary in 93 we were actually vegetarian and even vegetarian is as we know you know we ended up a lot of nuts a lot of dairy and that didn't help me keep off the weight you know if anything it helped contribute even more to it and so you know even when people think that's healthier guess what it's just not healthy enough especially for some of us who may have other challenges health challenges so um so really going whole plant-based was a radical change for a whole family that and we all adopted it and i have a producer in my air who's asking well how long did it take you to regain your site was it that full four years between the time that your child graduated high school no it was about 15 months um i was blind for over five years and then it was when i started eating this way it took like to really understand that i went down to the john mcdougall program he had a five-day program where my son but unbeknownst to me did a little bit of a fundraiser because it would have been very expensive can you can imagine me like being left alone in an airport with being blind and on oxygen trying to find my way to john mcdougall you know so my husband had to go of course and give up work for those days and of course i had to rest between and so from about starting that in december of 2012 it took about fifty i thought started beginning of december which i thought was a perfect time because guess what that's the free pass time for everybody anything they want to eat usually right or drink so i thought if i can handle christmas i can get through anything and so he suggested john mcdougall suggested like try to do this for not just a month but like as long like maybe 90 days or whatever so i thought okay april 8th my birthday i'll try to get to april 8th and then i'll allow myself anything i wanted and i got to april 8th i felt so much better even though i could not yet exercise it took about a year before i could actually have the strength to really exercise because you got to remember i was in that major car head-on car collision so it was my body really had to do a lot of work to repair and i was at level three out of four in my pulmonary arterial hypertension it's now at a level one so it's amazing they've never heard about reversal before um and so yeah it was about 15 months later and it was very gradual that i got my site back i started to notice like oh you know i had really thick coke bottle type glasses so i could hopefully see something a little bit if i was really close up you know talk about invading someone's personal space you have to look really close up at someone and i just started to notice like oh i can oh i saw that or i saw a little glimpse of something and i was sort of shocked and it just gradually came over because i couldn't see traffic lights i couldn't see anything like that i had no idea and then all of a sudden one day i started to notice there was something red and i realized it must be like a traffic light and so it just came over very slowly to the point where i was like shocked that i finally you know because i so used to being blind um and uh i knew how to really walk in the dark all the time that it was almost strange uh to all of a sudden get some sight back it was quite a shock what a wonderful one at all absolutely what what a gift what a gift um switching gears here uh really quickly you and i before we started rolling on the interview we're talking about the astronomical cost that is associated with treating all of your conditions and this is something that you looked at really extensively the cost of traditional treatment versus the path that you're on now how do the two compare okay so we wanted to do the health economics because so many people go like this is an exclusive diet it's you know it's only for the rich or whatever you have to eat all organic and we say no way you know um so what we did is my costs sometimes were depending on the drug it was up to a hundred thousand dollars a year and then the usual drug i was on because there was i was piggybacked onto a couple drugs was three thousand a month and so for now five dollars a day uh arugula is probably the number is number one on the nitric oxide um index and so i eat about five dollars of arugula every day um you know following dr esselstyn's six greens a day i don't quite have six greens anymore but i have i have huge amounts of greens all throughout my meals and everything uh but i don't have them in between meals i find that was just like overloading me with food too much and so that's what i do like five dollars a day compared to a hundred thousand or three thousand a month that is as well not as remarkable as your entire transformation but certainly jaw-dropping nonetheless i would think that you know that that's going to apply for so many conditions yeah i mean this makes it affordable for anybody you know i've lived early orange crate and i'm not really well off now like the legacy i can give my kids is health because of course my career got interrupted for many many years um before i could go back to doing some work and stuff like that and so yeah and i did some plant whole plant-based coaching in the meantime but being able to go back to offering counseling services because and that's the thing i like to bring into the whole plant-based world is i really work from a psychologically flexible point of view and helping people overcome those barriers that might get in their way all that yucky stuff all those difficult thoughts feelings memories even bodily sensations that kind of get in our way and uh you know uh don't have so that we can kind of move toward more satisfaction in our lives according to who and what's important to us and that's what i help people do and i think there needs to be more work in this area because often people start a whole plant-based diet they kind of go on a honeymoon and then they sort of weigh off and what we really want them to do is sustain it and see the long-time value of living leaner stronger and longer you know i believe that uh in in your background here i'm going to take myself out of the shot uh i see a movie poster over your shoulder i believe it's it's a wonderful life my favorite movie i'm telling you what i mean just the name of that movie sums up uh your life to me i mean it's just absolutely incredible and i will also say that the fact that you are working with people as a counselor kate i can think of no better person to work with someone than you because of everything that you've been through your experience your life experience and then your optimism on top of that i mean my goodness gracious what a privilege it must be and i think that if people head over to touredmoves.com that's where they can learn more about your counseling services absolutely yes and i'd be happy to work with anyone especially if it's whole plant-based coating i can work with them internationally because i'm a certified food for life instructor i have my ecornell course i have my starch solution certificate i've taken through courses through [Music] uh the cleveland clinic so you know i have a real appreciation i've taken even the ruby cooking course so i've tried to really well arm myself with things to help people and i'm only providing information and being able to help people find that psychologically flexi flex and that psychological flexibility to really sustain what's really important to them and what matters to them as i said i mean i just can't think of anybody better to to work with anybody on the things that are dragging them down so uh you you are the buoy to life and so you just kind of pull people right up out of the doldrums and uh and i'm so happy that you're here toward moves.com is the website you see the web address right there on your screen oh uh final question uh so what what did the doctors say about your transformation i mean really quickly we have about 30 seconds left i wish we had more time but they got to be just blown you know well you know what i wish they were chuck i really wish there my kidney specialist is totally supportive of it he's not given me any hassles or anything like that um and he's really supportive but my pulmonologist i came in with a poster at the time for forksmart.org for a summit and he goes why plant-based and i've only been with him since 2007. so i was like oh you know and that's the unfortunate thing i've heard this over and over and over again chuck from other people who come back to their physicians and told them or their specialists and said look this has changed me and unfortunately they're not curious and so we understand why medicine moves sometimes so slowly unfortunately well the good news is we have quite a few doctors dietitians other health care workers who listen to this show and so hopefully they will pass this on to their colleagues i hope so and get some other people to stand up pay attention because well one of the things i have to say the gift is it really made me a real partner in my health care because i realized that my fork was a very powerful tool and so that really helped me really have more autonomy and feel really good put me more in the driver's seat than in the back seat which often is what people feel when they all of a sudden get into the medical system well kate you know when i was a little kid when i grew up i wanted to be a baseball player but now i think my goal is to grow up and to be just like you oh boy chuck i i don't know what to say about that uh i don't think i have the corner of bravery or courage or anything or even optimism i just know that guess what it can be contagious and it's a wonderful contagion to have you are the best kate mcgoy smith thank you so very much for being here and congratulations for everything that you've been experiencing and i wish you nothing but the best and continued health thank you so much if your health iq was a couple of points higher than it was a few minutes ago go ahead and like this video or subscribe to the youtube channel and to take it even higher head over to apple podcast or wherever you get your favorite shows look for the exam room by the physicians committee hit the subscribe button there as well and help to make your world a healthier place

Channel: Physicians Committee

Views: 513,813

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Id: vf6FNulxykA

Length: 43min 22sec (2602 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 24 2021