Speaker 1: Welcome to the Jeff Crilley Show. And now, here’s Jeff Crilley.
Jeff Crilley: Welcome back to the Jeff Crilley Show. I’m very excited about my next guest, Dr. John Michels. He’s a former first round draft choice with the Green Bay Packers. He’s got a couple of Superbowl rings, and an injury cut his NFL career short. But that turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
Jeff Crilley: Dr. Michels, welcome to the Jeff Crilley Show.
Dr. Michels: Thank you for having me today.
Jeff Crilley: Well, first of all, I got to say so Dr. Michels is a client of Real News PR, and the ladies in my office call you Dr. McDreamy. So I’m just going to throw that out there. He is a handsome man, and he stands about 6’5″.
Dr. Michels: I’m 6’7″.
Jeff Crilley: 6’7″.
Dr. Michels: It’s probably just the Grey’s Anatomy scrubs that I wear into the office. That’s the only reason why.
Jeff Crilley: Well, you’re one of those guys, he’s so good looking. I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV. And you had a busy day yesterday. Tell everybody about yesterday.
Dr. Michels: Well, sometimes one man’s misfortune is another man’s benefit, and Tony Romo’s injury the other night led to a lot of questions about what’s the future for the Dallas Cowboys, what’s his prognosis look like. So I got invited to do a couple radio shows and also be on television on multiple news stations in Dallas to discuss Tony’s injury and the future of the Cowboys.
Jeff Crilley: Well, something I think is very unique about you is that you weren’t 12 years old and woke up and said, “I want to be a doctor.” You were led to medicine because of your injury. Take us back in time. What happened?
Dr. Michels: Well, first of all, I loved the quote that, “Life happens for us. It doesn’t happen to us.” So life will take us down the journey that we’re supposed to go down. I thought I was going to play 15 years in the National Football League. Like you said, I was a first round draft pick for the Packers. I made the All Rookie Team my first year. We won the Superbowl in my rookie year, went back to the Superbowl my second year, and my future was set in front of me. I was thinking I was going to be a Hall of Fame NFL offensive lineman. And then in my third training camp, I blew my knee out. After six reconstructive surgeries over the course of two years, my career was over, and I had to figure out at 27 years of age what was I going to do with the rest of my life. All I knew was football. That was what my passion was. I was a religious studies major. I thought after that 15 year NFL career that maybe I would go on and do some ministry work, but now at 27 years old, life had taken a different course.
Dr. Michels: So through the injury, realizing that I had lost my greatest passion in life. I loved played football as much as I loved doing anything else in life and that was over. And I felt if I can keep that from happening to other people, if I can keep other people living out their passions in life, that’s a life well lived. And that’s what inspired the career in medicine.
Jeff Crilley: Well, one of the things that I know from visiting with you off mic, you’re really passionate about getting people better, and I think the whole medical system now, doctors don’t even spend enough time with patients these days to get to the root of the problem, do they?
Dr. Michels: No. I think there’s multiple factors that play into that. One, reimbursements in medicine have gone down so much that doctors are having to see more and more patients on a day to day basis just to keep their lights on and pay their staff. That’s a difficult place to be in, but I’ve always taken the philosophy that if I can’t make a living taking really good care of patients, then I just need to find something else to do. I was trained during my medical training my a great mentor named Al Watson down at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, and he said, “Every patient that sits across from you, treat them as if they were your own family member. Think of them as this is your mother, your father, brother, sister, son, daughter sitting across from you, and don’t do anything to them that you wouldn’t do to your own family member.” And I’ve always held onto that philosophy in the way that I practice medicine and that includes spending time with them, listening to their problems, really hearing the depth of what their illness or injury means to them and how to bring them back to health and wellness.
Jeff Crilley: My guest right now Dr. John Michels. He is with SpineDallas.com is the website. Let’s talk about pills because I think there is an epidemic across the country, and for many doctors, they’re just writing the script and getting the patient out the door so they can see somebody else. But that’s not your style.
Dr. Michels: That’s not. There is absolutely an opioid epidemic going on in our country right now. More people died last year from opioid overdoses than from automobile accidents.
Jeff Crilley: Wow.
Dr. Michels: And we’ve seen the high profile cases of people like Prince dying from this, but it happens on a day to day basis. And you’re right, for many doctors, this is the quick, easy band-aid to make someone feel better and get them out of your office. But we’re creating chronic problems by dealing with the drugs instead of treating the underlying problem that’s causing the pain, and that’s my philosophy, I don’t want to put a band-aid over the pain. I tell each one of my patients who sits across from me, say it’s a Wednesday afternoon, I say, “Look, you have better things to do on a Wednesday afternoon than sit in this office across from me getting a refill of a medication. Let’s find the source of your pain, treat the source of that pain, and get you on living your life.”
Jeff Crilley: How much of a person’s pain has to do with their weight or just kind of their lifestyle?
Dr. Michels: Huge component. It is so much more than just the injury. There are emotional, psychological components to pain. Lifestyle is a huge component of it. When we talk about diet and exercise, I’ll have a 500 pound patient sit across from me and tell me their knees hurt, and I say, “Yes, they do. They absolutely hurt. There’s no way they wouldn’t hurt because our body wasn’t made to hold that kind of stress load on it. So I can take the pain away for now, but our goal then is going to be to do some work on the way that we eat, the way that we move, the way that we live so that you can be pain free long term.” And that becomes the huge component of getting people better is they have to invest in their own health. I don’t have a magic wand. I don’t have a magic pill. I wish I did. I’d be a billionaire right now, but I don’t. And so people who want to be healthy, I’m the type of doctor they want to see because I’m going to give them strategic goals that they can take on a day to day basis in order to eat better, in order to move better, in order to live better so that they can live out the lives they want to live.
Jeff Crilley: And I think our lifestyle as Americans just- I mean, we’re sedentary people now. It’s not like in the ’50s and ’60s in which send the kids out to play. The kids start at an early age as couch potatoes and even I hear tech neck is a syndrome of this sedentary lifestyle.
Dr. Michels: It is. We’re dealing with chronic thumb injuries from people being on their phones and swiping across their phones. It’s unbelievable the lifestyle that we lead now because yes, most people are sitting behind a desk for 12 hours a day not moving, and that’s a big portion of the patients I see because of course you’re going to have neck and back pain. Our bodies weren’t meant to do that. Studies have shown that when you were seated, 220 pounds per square inch are going through the vertebral bodies in your lumbar spine. 220 pounds per square inch. When you stand, it’s cut in half, 110 pounds per square inch. When you lay down and you’re stretching, it’s cut even further to 50 pounds per square inch. So the amount of stress that’s put just through our low back when we’re seated all day is tremendous, and you’re going to have back problems. So I’m encouraging patients that if you do have a desk job, stand up. You need to move around. Walk to the water cooler. Lifestyle changes are going to be a huge component to you getting better.
Dr. Michels: Pain is actually our best friend because it tells us that there’s something potentially or actually happening that’s going to damage our bodies, and it forces us to change. That’s why it’s so unpleasant. So we need to listen to pain and honor pain and make changes in our life based on that pain so that we don’t have these chronic issues.
Jeff Crilley: So if somebody’s listening to this right now and they’ve been nursing an injury or maybe they’ve been taking a pill to mask the pain for years, that’s serious, isn’t it?
Dr. Michels: It’s very serious, and we’ve shown studies where if you’ve been on opioid pain medication for just one month, functional MRI studies have shown changes in the gray matter of the brain, you’re actually losing gray matter in the brain from just one month of use of these medications. So imagine years and years what’s happening to your brain. So that’s where I want to get people off of dangerous medications. I want to treat pain at its source, and I want to get them functioning and living their lives full of passion and living out their dreams.
Jeff Crilley: I think you told me off mic that 80% of your patients right now, back pain. Why so high?
Dr. Michels: I think partially what we are talking about, the sedentary lifestyle, our back were not meant to function from a seated position all day long. We are meant to move and stretch and run and explore and too many of us are sitting behind a desk in a cubicle for far too many hours of the day. So I think we’ve become far less active, and we’re also become far too overweight. Our diets are way out of control, portion control. Even the medical community has promoted diets that have been a little bit irregular. We’ve promoted these high carb, low fat diets, and have looked over the past 50 years at heart disease has gone up, obesity has gone up, diabetes has gone up. And we’re now recognizing that maybe this high carb diet is not the best way to go, that we need to cut the sugars back in our life, that we need to have more vegetables, more natural foods.
Dr. Michels: I have a philosophy that if you can’t pronounce a food, you probably shouldn’t eat a food. Because if you don’t recognize that ingredient, guess what, your body doesn’t recognize it either. So that’s a philosophy that I stand by. If you look at the back on the ingredient sheet and you can’t pronounce half of what’s there, don’t put it in your mouth.
Jeff Crilley: Okay. What can the average person learn from an athlete in terms of taking care of their core and really taking care of their body?
Dr. Michels: Well, when we talk about Tony Romo’s injury and someone actually asked me the question yesterday, “Do you think he is in greater danger because he had the back injury back in 2013 where he had surgery?” I said, “You know what, I think that was actually protective for him.” Because the Tony really had to focus on his core strength, getting his abdominal muscles strong, those muscles that support the spine. It’s essential to make sure that we have strong core so that our spine is protected from injury. And I think the reason Tony was able to escape without a catastrophic injury the other night is because his core muscles were so strong.
Jeff Crilley: Okay. So give us the website one more time.
Dr. Michels: SpineDallas.com. That’s www.SpineDallas.com.
Jeff Crilley: Thank you so much for joining me on the Jeff Crilley Show.
Dr. Michels: Thanks for having me.
Jeff Crilley: Dr. John Michels.
Jeff Crilley: When we come back, he is a Wall Street whiz, and we are going to learn some lessons to his success when we come back on the Jeff Crilley Show.
