How To Communicate With Your Doctor w/ Dr. James Kneller
I would just say, be as honest as possible about your feeling, don't try to downplay your symptoms, don't try to exaggerate your symptoms to the doctor, don't be too stoic, but don't be too histrionic either.
Try to be as genuine as you can, be about what changes you're experiencing, what levels of pain you're experiencing, how those things have impacted your ability to function.
The more honest you can be with your body, and the more honestly you can communicate to your doctor, the better off you're gonna be, and the more you're gonna get out of your visit.
Welcome back to The Speaking and Communicating Podcast. I am your host Roberta Ndlela. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning in to.
Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development. And by the end of this episode, please log on to Apple and Spotify, and leave us a rating and a review. Now let's get communicating.
Now let's get communicating with our guest today, joining us from Arizona. Dr.
James Kneller is a cardiologist and an electrophysiologist who's here to help us discover the root causes of disease that your doctor might miss, and how we can use our communication skills for better health as we communicate with our doctors and
health professionals. And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show. Hi, Dr. James.
Hello, Roberta.
Thank you. It's an honor to be here. Thank you so much for your kind introduction.
My absolute pleasure.
Thank you for being here as well. So, what is it about communication when dealing with your patients is something that we all need to keep in mind?
Effective Doctor Visits
Yeah, well, communication and health care is so important.
You know, and doctors focus on their, the quality of their communication, which is all becoming compressed more and more into very short segments with patients, which is a change that none of us have enjoyed, because most physicians do go into
medicine because they want to interact with patients. And enjoy understanding and getting to know that individual. So we have to be concise. And I think that's true in the business world, and it's becoming true in medicine.
And for the doctor, the priority is to quickly establish rapport, communicate empathy that they're there to help and be useful to the patient, and have their best interest in mind.
And hopefully that then creates the environment for the patient to relax and feel trust towards their doctor, and then start to describe how they're truly feeling, so that the doctor can really understand, as best possible, how that patient can be
helped. So the onus is on the doctor to quickly establish a good rapport with the patient, and then patients, knowing that they're going to see a doctor, can do their best to clarify in their own minds how they're feeling, what they've been told
about their condition, know about other doctors that they have seen, other tests that they might have undergone, which may not be available for that visit, and really be clear about what medications you're taking. You know, the doctor might have a
list of your medications, but that isn't always what exactly it is a patient's putting in their mouth each and every day at home. You know, so one thing the patient can be clear about is, hey, this is the regimen that I understand that I'm supposed
to be taking, and this is what I am taking, and here's my list, and here's the dosages, and the doctor can then say, you know what, thank you for doing that, because the list that I have for you has several discrepancies, and we need to clear that up
They are taking those?
You know, people have five, six, ten medications at home that they're taking, but they're not clear on what they are.
Do you know what I mean?
That's something only a person can bring to you, because other providers are prescribing, canceling prescriptions, making changes, so the information that the doctor has in front of them at the time of your visit may not be up to date.
It really helps if a patient can be clear about what they're in fact doing at that point in time, so we can make informed decisions about what to do moving forward. Little tips like that can be really good for a patient, you know.
Write down your questions in advance, bring them in on a piece of paper, take notes during your visit, kind of treat it like a business transaction.
Yes, because your health is first and foremost your most important priority. I think sometimes we get confused with the fact that doctors are very educated. They were in medical school for almost a decade.
We confuse that with them being psychic. I mean, at the end of the day, I have to come into your practice and let you know what I'm taking, how I'm feeling, listening to my body.
Literally give you all the information I could possibly master from my health experience.
That is so helpful, so helpful to come with clarity. And like you said, I think a lot of people think you're a little bit psychic as well as doctor. And, you know, it's like, oh, well, you know, best, you're the doctor, you tell me.
And people come very passively to the interaction and expect to be told. But to really get a quality visit and sound advice, it helps to participate as much as possible. Yeah, be clear about how you're feeling.
Be clear about what you're doing right now and what questions you have. And even take notes about what your doctor is saying to you.
And speaking of drugs that people are taking, so you, despite having gone to medical school, are also a champion for natural remedies.
There's always this debate of whether is it good for doctors to recommend those alternatives, because when they were in medical school, they were trained to prescribe the drugs that we were talking about.
Natural vs. Drugs
Yes.
So we are trained to diagnose and prescribe. And as practitioners, we are bound by certain practice guidelines that say for certain diagnoses or conditions that present to you, this is the treatment armamentarium that you should be drawing from.
So we come with that. And I think we all certainly start there. And especially when you're young in your practice, you're very by the book, by the book, you know, that's how you're trained.
Then when you've been practicing for a few years, I think you start to step back and take a broader perspective. And you start to learn that some of these therapeutics, they're very powerful and they have their place.
But medicine also has its gaps and it has its blind spots. And there are other things that patients can do to improve their health. And should be doing to improve their health.
And we can also appreciate that most of the pharmaceutical drugs were inspired by plants. Scientists first learned that a plant had a certain effect on somebody.
So they went and isolated the molecules or compounds in the plant that had that effect and then tried to reproduce those in the lab. And then tried to tweak those molecules to make them even more potent.
So understanding that that's really the background of drug development, I think we should have confidence to advise patients that taking natural substances can provide much of the therapeutic benefit that the drugs have.
Then on an iterative basis, being able to assess your patient, how they're responding and how they're improving, then we should be drawing on the pharmaceuticals to make up the difference.
So I think it's very appropriate to start with natural and then draw on the pharmaceuticals as needed. But we don't have to pretend like those things don't exist and that the natural therapies don't exist.
Because that's not something you hear very often, which is the fact that the drugs, even their origin came from plants. Because I was about to ask you, there's this pushback of, oh, this doctor is not just pushing the drugs.
Now he's talking about alternatives and plant-based medicines. You find that a lot of the time, if doctors do that, there's the pushback and there's the controversy.
We've hardly heard of a world where both of these co-exist, the plant-based and the drugs.
Yes. You know, as a very interesting example of that, I've been a champion of turmeric for a long time. And this is a turmeric gummy supplement that I've helped develop for Natural Cardiology Institute.
It contains almost 9,000 milligrams of turmeric equivalent per serving, which is a whopping dose compared to most turmeric supplements. But for example, as a cardiologist, well, most of us know that turmeric will dramatically lower inflammation.
But do people also know that these compounds act like all three cholesterol-lowering drugs?
There are compounds in turmeric that act like statin drugs, their natural statins, their natural PCSK9 inhibitors, and their natural forms of azetamide, which prevent cholesterol uptake in your gut.
All three major classes of pharmaceutical drugs for lowering cholesterol are represented by turmeric. So for example, so what a wonderful place to start.
If you have dyslipidemia or high cholesterol or diagnosed cardiovascular disease to have natural compounds as a basis for your therapy and then add the pharmaceuticals as you go along.
So turmeric is one of my favorites and we've been thrilled to develop a product that we are now marketing and making available to the public, which is just a fantastic background supplement for so many cardiovascular diseases.
Hypertension, atherosclerosis, diabetes, glucose intolerance, things of that nature.
Mainstream Medicine Limitations
Why don't we hear about it? Because everyone says, oh, doctors aren't trained, they have to get more training, you know. And that's true, we don't get trained in natural ingredients.
So it's up to the doctor to research those for themselves a little bit. Number two is that many physicians now are employed. So they work for a large health system, for example.
And the large health system, their employer, sort of mandates that you only do what's by the book, because we don't want you going outside of guidelines, you know, so we don't get sued. We need to manage this large group of physicians.
We want to know that all of our docs are by the book and only doing guideline directed therapies.
So when natural things don't appear in guidelines, those doctors, you know, 80% of them in the United States who are employed, aren't going to talk about anything else.
So in that scenario, all you're going to get from your doc is guideline directed therapy, which is, of course, pharmaceutical based.
There's broad lifestyle recommendations like, oh, go eat a plant diet, you know, and get exercise and can give broad recommendations like that because those things are published.
But is somebody going to get into the weeds with you about certain natural products, you know, will someone talk to you about turmeric or berberine or curcetin, some of these other molecules?
No, that's not going to happen in mainstream medicine, you know, in the employment model.
Yes, because that's not what the training is. Because my next question is also going to be, I don't know if this is true and you can correct me as a doctor.
We have this perception that if I'm sick right now, it's better to take the drug because it's a quick fix. Because supplements, they tend to take some time to start working and start having the healing effect that I'm looking for, is that true?
Yes, that's true. They're not as aggressive as the pharmaceutical, and patients tend to want quick fixes. They're also scared and so they want to stamp out the problem as quickly as possible.
So if they feel like the drug is going to do that, they'll reach for the drug and prefer the pharmaceutical. The supplements can take longer to integrate with your physiology, change your physiology.
But what I believe more is that they'll also be reversing the disease process at a more profound level than the pharmaceuticals. So it's better for your long-term health to be incorporating natural therapies into your regimen.
But I agree, the effect isn't as fast because the pharmaceutical drugs are more powerful, so they'll get the number you want more quickly.
You know, whether it's blood pressure reduction or cholesterol reduction, changing thyroid function, what have you, the drugs are going to get there faster.
Right. But if you do start them, you'll find, like you said, they reverse some of the things you potentially could have had, which then was going to make you need the drug in order to be a quick fix, yes.
Yeah, and hopefully reduce your dependence on the pharmaceuticals and allow you to scale back on the amount of drugs you take or to lower doses for the things that you still need. And all of us should be proud of that as physicians.
We want people to get better, you know. We don't want you to be on the same old prescription, you know, year after year, decade after decade, which often happens, you know.
I think we all would like to see disease reversing, your need for certain therapies to be declining.
COVIDʼs Healthcare Impact
Now let's talk about the COVID pandemic.
How did it change health care in the last five years or so?
That's interesting. So COVID, both the virus and the vaccine, really hurt a lot of people, created a lot of chronic disease, gave people a lot of health problems. And we're still coping from those things.
People still come to us with new complaints of symptoms related to both. And we're still helping people discover the fact that they do have either COVID injury or vaccine injury.
Like someone will be like, I've been fatigued ever since then, or I started having blood clots several years ago. And, you know, then you can start to go back and say, well, what, what was your COVID vaccine history?
And what was your booster history? And can you correlate any of that with those things? And then we'll find, yeah, your blood clot started after your initial COVID vaccine, or after your booster, or after your second booster.
We'll see people's health dramatically change after any one of those events. Not all, not everyone for sure, but, you know, the people who come to doctors have medical complaints.
It's just going to be interesting what the long-term effects are on trust in health care. I think there's going to be there is already, and there will be more of a large erosion in trust of official guidelines.
A lot of people lined up in droves for the COVID vaccine, knowing that was what was recommended to them by the governing bodies and by health authorities. And a lot of people got hurt and seriously hurt from that.
You know, you could argue that maybe it decreased their chances of dying of COVID at the time of the pandemic. And I think there's some truth to that. But you were getting exposed to a lot of risk.
And so, a lot of people who really would never have died or had a problem with COVID, suffered a lot of vaccine injury as a result of following the public recommendations.
And a lot of us were following public recommendations. Because my next question, Dr.
Kneller, is when it comes to vaccine injuries, and we all know the pushback regarding anybody, even suggesting that anything they're suffering from could be from the vaccine.
Did you find that as doctors, even just saying that made your life a little more difficult?
I haven't experienced that personally. We've seen different people who have been very outspoken about the COVID vaccine. We've seen them be censured and criticized and limited, in their practice and professional capacity.
I think we're all scared of talking about it in the exam room one-on-one with a patient. Then we know that these things are happening, and we know that the dangers are real.
So I've collected a list of remedies that you can use to dissolve spike proteins and things like that. And I'll happily recommend those to patients who have vaccine injury or COVID injury. And I've seen some great results from them.
And you just have to preface it and say, you know, these things aren't in the guidelines, but there are some studies and a lot of anecdotal evidence for their benefit. I don't see them, they're going to hurt you in any way.
You are certainly welcome to try them and see if you feel better and see if you have some of your function return. And we've had people with, you know, stage 3B kidney failure completely normalize their kidney function.
People with neuropathies completely go away. You know, blood clots and clotting disorders disappear. Wellness and energy improve it.
You know, with natural products that do, are thought to dissolve spike proteins, for example.
Because a lot of the time when people were confused about the entire situation was because they just kept saying, you're denying science, you're denying science, this is science.
Therefore, if you come and you say, I have this symptom and it comes from me being vaccinated, you're denying science. So it almost felt like you're being guestlit.
You're not supposed to validate your experience or your health condition you had at the time because you're denying science. Who are you? You're not a scientist.
You're not a doctor.
Yeah. I mean, those are the narratives that get played out in the media and that sort of thing. I mean, those of us who have been practicing medicine for a while, I think we're a lot humbler than that.
I mean, we've all seen elderly people's blood pressure drop and them fall over because their blood pressure medications were too strong.
You know, we all have people on statin drugs who absolutely can't tolerate them because their joints ache and their bones ache and, you know, they're miserable.
So when any new therapy comes along, I always have a sense that this is going to work for a lot of people and be a good thing and effective. But I know we're going to meet people who just it doesn't agree with and they don't have that result.
You have to then respond to what's right in front of you. This person isn't tolerating or responding to this therapy.
So we need to change it for them, not insist that they plow forward despite their symptoms and live in misery because the science says it's the best thing for them.
So when we see that we have so many examples of that in our own experience and other areas of medicine, that we're humble, one size fits all doesn't work for everybody. And so we're happy to be alert and awake.
And when those situations present to us, we come up with alternatives, you know, and find solutions that do work for people. That's the business of practicing medicine. And that's why we haven't been replaced by ChatGPT quite yet.
I would hope not, because you know how when Google started, some of us would talk to ourselves on Google and say, I have a headache, I couldn't sleep last night.
What do you think I have, Google?
Yeah, that can be helpful. It can also be misleading, you know. I actually like it when patients have tried to research their symptoms a little bit, and they come with questions.
And it's all about experience to say, no, that's a little far-fetched, but this other thing that you researched is probably plausible, and we shouldn't work you up for that.
Right.
But I'm concerned that the practice of medicine is becoming more and more match the symptom to the guideline therapy. Guideline therapy says start these combinations of drugs. Your cholesterol is high.
So guideline therapy says start these combinations of drugs. After a while, I don't see why the system needs me to do that. You know, a computer can do that.
I wonder if doctors are going to start to be replaced by the technology, or there's going to be so much oversight by the technology, and that would solve a lot of problems in healthcare, because there are doctor shortages.
So can we come up with an AI doctor who really is just as good? The way medicine is practiced, I wonder if I can see that trend happening in the future.
I don't feel that pressure yet, but give it a couple years, and I imagine that might be a real thing.
I personally feel there's a role, and an important role, for the doctor-patient relationship in that conversation, in my experience, to respond to you and come up with alternatives based on your complaints, or what I notice about you, or what I can
dig out of you by pushing a little bit harder. Do you know what I mean? Like the person with COVID injury, they don't always realize they had COVID injury. They're just like, I'm white god, I've been fatigued for a couple years, I don't know why.
I guess I'm just getting old. You know, it's all age. I'm like, well, I've seen a lot of people like you, so I'm going to start to probe about what was your vaccine history, or what was your COVID infection history.
You know, because the virus can come up with those long-term symptoms as well. And then you can help the person realize that certain things did happen to them, which are responsible for the changes in their health that they experienced.
Even though they wouldn't have put that together, they wouldn't have suspected it.
Yes, especially because it was something new. That level of a pandemic was something new to a lot of us. And therefore, we couldn't instantly make the connection of what's happening in our bodies versus what was going on globally.
Right.
Yeah, it's hard. And I mean, I don't think doctors knew either, but as the years accumulate and we see more and more people who have had different injuries and responses to the vaccine and to the virus, we get smart about it.
Then we can counsel patients that, yeah, this is probably what's going on.
Patient Empowerment
Now, Dr.
Kneller, going forward, what would you recommend for us, everyone listening, first of all, how to listen to our bodies, how to interpret what our bodies are telling us, and then if we do consult with a medical professional, how do we communicate
Yeah, I would, thank you.
I think that's a good question. You know, what your doctor wants to hear most from you is what your experience has been. How has your health changed?
How has that impacted your level of function? I developed hip pain. Now, I can't climb the stairs anymore.
Or now, I can't walk through the mall anymore. Or now, I can't swing my, you know, leg up over my bicycle anymore. That's what we want to hear from the patient.
What are you experiencing? How has it limited you? When did it start?
Has it gotten any better, any worse since it started? Have you noticed any things that alleviate your symptom or make your symptom worse?
And by listening to those stories and hear you describe those things as clearly as possible, then helps me formulate a differential diagnosis and a testing and treatment plan going forward that I think is going to be most effective.
So what I would ask most from patients is be as clear as you can be about how you feel, how your health changed, and what the timeline for that is. And if you can really be good about that, then I would call you a good patient.
And if you're somebody who has previous diagnoses and you're on different medications, try to keep a list of what you're taking now. Keep a list of things that you tried in the past and discontinued for whatever reason.
You know, certain drugs just made me feel too unwell, so I stopped it and we picked an alternative. You know, I got a rash when I took XYZ, so we stopped it and took an alternative. And now here is what I am in fact taking every day right now.
So if you're going to make a decision about me, base that on what I'm actually doing right now, rather than what's on a list in my medical record, which may or may not be accurate.
Right. And speaking of food as well, I remember I used to just have these health palpitations and I went to the clinic and the nurse, you know, she did an EKG, nothing wrong with my heartbeat.
She tested quite a lot of things and she said, everything is normal and I started to wonder, should I actually track what I eat? If I eat something now, I write it down and say, okay, am I having the health palpitations or not?
And see if there's a correlation between the food I eat versus when I have the health palpitations. Because sometimes I think those are not as easy to track, maybe.
Right. Not as easy to track. I mean, if you can, if you can clearly associate things, that's great.
If you have a suspicion, you know, if coffee always sends you into palpitations or a certain spice or eating Chinese food, because maybe it has MSG, something like that, that might trigger you.
You know, if you can keep track of those things and notice what those triggers are, that's all helpful information.
Yeah, because maybe you have an allergy or, I mean, here in America, as you know, we're eating genetically modified foods, we're eating more and more processed foods, or there's chemicals in our foods that are completely banned in countries like
Europe. You know, the genetically modified grains that we're eating aren't even allowed to grow in Europe. And those things have health impact on Americans.
And a lot of times Americans will go to Europe or maybe South Africa and eat regular foods over there, and their health problems clear up, their rashes get better, their arthritis gets better. They start to tolerate gluten, for example.
So we have to be so vigilant, especially here in the United States, about what our foods might be doing to us.
And very hard to know because they're getting changed scientifically in the background and presented to us as the same old thing, and we don't have a clue. But those things do have impact on people.
Yes, there's no way you can tell the difference. I remember I just recently came back from the US, and when I got home, so we bought a loaf of bread.
I'm like, oh, I had forgotten that bread actually has those tiny little crumbs, because when I was in America, the bread was like almost perfect. You know, it's clean, there's no crumbs.
And so I forgot you got those tiny little crumbs, and put it on a plate, you're going to mess up the place, you know what I mean? Little things like that, because the bread is real.
Because it's real, right? And ours has been all that's been taken care of to make it cleaner, more convenient, and all of those things having health impacts on us.
Unfortunately, yeah. Any last words of wisdom? Anything we need to remember when communicating with our doctors?
And most importantly, when listening to our own bodies, because they are always communicating with us.
Right. I would just say be as honest as possible. Be as honest as possible how you're feeling.
Don't try to downplay your symptoms. Don't try to exaggerate your symptoms to the doctor. Don't be too stoic, but don't be too histrionic either.
You know, try to be as genuine as you can. Be about what changes you're experiencing, what levels of pain you're experiencing, how those things have impacted your ability to function.
The more honest you can be with your body and the more honestly you can communicate to your doctor, the better off you're going to be and the more you're going to get out of your visit.
That's very true, Dr. James Kneller from Arizona. The Cardiologist, Electrophysiologist, and the YouTube channel is James Kneller MD.
You published two books. Are they out yet?
They are not out yet.
Oh, okay.
Almost soon, soon to be going to press.
Soon to be going to press.
My book on Natural Cardiology Therapies is my next one that we're finishing off and doing everything we can to push that over the finish line. Please visit our website, naturalcardiologyinstitute.com. Lots of great information on the website.
I can do telehealth consults with individuals anywhere on the planet. And we have great natural products that we're developing to help people manage their cardiovascular disease and recover from cardiovascular disease.
Lowering blood pressure naturally, treating heart disease, atherosclerosis naturally, lowering cholesterol naturally, making your cholesterol healthier so that your body benefits from that essential compound, rather than suffers from its destructive
influence when it's compromised. Very important. That's my passion project and what I'm committed to outside of my routine practice, which is very busy in conventional medicine and procedural electrophysiology.
Yeah, visit us anytime, message us through the website. I'd be delighted to hear from anyone.
And we're available for individual consultation to help folks do advanced testing to understand their health conditions and ways that testing isn't being performed for them through the conventional system.
And then to develop natural therapy regimens to complement the treatment they're receiving already.
Very, very important.
The website again, Natural Cardiology institute.com.
I know it's a mouthful. It's all one word, but hopefully it'll pop up for you.
Right. And the YouTube channel as well. Once the books are published, I will update the show notes from this episode so that all our listeners can get hold of it.
Awesome.
Thank you. We appreciate that.
Thank you, Dr. James Kneller. Don't forget to subscribe, leave a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify and stay tuned for more episodes to come.
