➡ Dr. Andrew Kaufman hosts the True Health Report and in this episode, he interviews Paul Cech, a renowned biologist, boxer, triathlete, and trainer who has founded the Cech Institute. They discuss Paul’s approach to natural healing, his experiences, and his knowledge gained over decades. They also delve into a peculiar phenomenon where men, particularly successful executives, have been known to die of heart attacks while having a bowel movement on Monday mornings. This is linked to stress and lifestyle factors, and they explore the importance of living a fulfilling life and maintaining heart health both physically and emotionally.
➡ Many health professionals mistakenly believe that the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems in our bodies work like a switch, one being on when the other is off. However, these systems work together, balancing each other out. Overexertion, such as excessive exercise, can disrupt this balance, leading to health issues. It’s important to maintain a healthy balance between physical exertion and rest, and to understand that pain is a signal from our body that something needs attention.
➡ The speaker discusses their approach to helping people in pain, focusing on identifying a dream goal or objective that motivates them. If a person can’t find a goal they’re passionate about, the speaker then explores their fears or ‘nightmares’, often finding financial crisis to be a common issue. The speaker emphasizes the importance of commitment to achieving goals and the role of coaching, rather than ‘fixing’, in their method. They also highlight the need for individuals to take responsibility for their own progress, rather than expecting someone else to solve their problems.
➡ The text discusses a system called the Czech totem pole, which represents the hierarchy of control in our body systems. It explains how issues in one part of the body can cause problems in another, using the example of basketball player Kobe Bryant’s knee pain being caused by an issue in his neck. The text emphasizes the importance of understanding the root cause of physical issues, rather than just treating symptoms. It also highlights the role of mental stress in physical pain, and the need for comprehensive analysis and understanding of a person’s lifestyle, beliefs, and behaviors in effective treatment.
➡ The text discusses the importance of understanding the interconnectedness of our body systems for effective treatment. It highlights how issues like diet, jaw alignment, and eye disorders can impact our overall health, often leading to misdiagnosed conditions. The author emphasizes the need for a holistic approach to health, considering mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects, rather than focusing on isolated symptoms. He also shares his experience with alternative healing methods, such as plant medicines and spiritual healing, to address underlying issues like the need for love, safety, and validation.
➡ The speaker defines addiction as any repeated behavior that doesn’t give the desired results, such as excessive coffee drinking, overeating, or neglecting responsibilities due to video games. He believes that these behaviors are often attempts to escape reality and find joy, making it difficult for addicts to transition to healthier lifestyles. He also discusses his work in helping people understand themselves better and become leaders in their communities. Lastly, he mentions his book “How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy” and his ultimate detox protocol, both aimed at improving overall health.

Really, my love is to get to the actual cause of people’s problems, which is almost always mental, emotional, and belief systems, and family crisis and family trauma coming through the gene line. This is the True Health Report, where critical appraisal fuels true freedom. Hello, and welcome to the True Health Report. I’m your host, Dr. Andrew Kaufman. Now, today, I have more than a guest that I’m going to have a discussion with. I would really call him a legend, and he is none other than Paul Cech. Now, Paul has had a very distinguished career and life in general.

He was a biologist, boxer, and a triathlete for the army, and became a trainer and evolved into learning several different healing disciplines and has incorporated essentially natural healing into his process and other very important things like alchemy that we’re going to discuss today. And Paul founded the Czech Institute, where he’s been training professionals to. To work with clients on health issues, on sports and athleticism and many other things, personal philosophy dealing with psychological stress and many other things. And we’re going to explore his experience and the current models based on all these decades of wisdom and knowledge and experience.

So welcome, Paul. It’s a great pleasure to be with you. You’re one of my heroes, so it’s fun to hang out with you and have a dialogue. And I’m just super grateful and proud of you for being, you know, when I. I didn’t know about you till Covid, but when I found you, I was just like, finally, a doctor with some common sense who’s got the balls to tell the truth. And so you’ve been a very important person, and I’ve turned on countless thousands of people and students to your work because I think it’s super important.

And you’ve been a guest on my podcast twice, both of which I really enjoyed, and so did my listeners. Well, I enjoyed it as well, and it’s very nice of you to say those things. And as I really have researched and investigated how you approach these issues, I find that we are really tightly aligned on our philosophy of health and healing. So it’s great to have a compadre in that respect here talking about this, because, you know, clearly we came to these truths by our own unique paths. Yes. But nevertheless, we arrived similarly. So I was listening to a recent lecture of yours, and I thought it might be fun to talk about this and then go into the underlying concepts.

But you mentioned that you knew of several people, you know, you said, dying from poops. Yeah. So can you tell. Tell us a little bit about that? And let’s kind of analyze it a little bit. Yeah, well, it’s actually statistically known that the most common time men die of heart attacks is on Monday morning, which psychologists link back to the stress that people are, you know, in my own way of paraphrasing, are, are really living in Flatland. They’re not, they’re not, their heart’s not in their life. They’re, they’re, they’re doing what they’ve been programmed to do to make a living, etc.

And I had read this research many, many years ago and I was working with a man that was extremely fit, probably about your age at that time. He was a green beret who had done multiple tours in Vietnam and could still do like 40 chin ups. He was like, steal this guy. But he was having some health challenges and I was just getting into his life issues with him and then he didn’t show up for his next appointment. And then I, I had to investigate and I found out that he died of a heart attack while having a bowel movement first thing on Monday morning.

And I’ve known of other people, men, mostly successful executive types, to die having a bowel movement on Monday morning. And so, you know, if a person for example, is even a little bit constipated, they have to generate quite a Valsalva maneuver. And that’s exactly what creates weightlifter’s heart. And I know all about it because for years I was really focusing on strong men lifts and I was doing a lot of very intense lifting. And at that time I was doing single arm clean and jerks for sets of four with 160 pound dumbbell and all sorts of other, you know, very intense lifting.

And I began to have a really bad case of tachycardia and bradycardia and woke up in the middle of the night feeling like my heart was going to jump right out of my chest. Went to a doctor friend of mine who quickly diagnosed I had weightlifter’s heart. So I had to switch over to doing more of a circuit style slash aerobic workout. And after about two months, the whole condition just evaporated. And then I became much more careful to undulate my periodization so that I didn’t overload my heart. But the point making is the same thing that gives you weightlifter’s heart, which hypertrophies.

The left ventricle is demonstrating that there’s enough pressure on the heart to put a lot of load on the heart. And if a person is backed up at all and they have to create a Val Salva maneuver and their heart’s not healthy. And I, and I think it can be heart health from a mental emotional perspective as well as a physiological perspective. Because this guy that I was working with was by no means a guy that was eating junk food or living the kind of lifestyle that you’d think would set him up for a heart attack.

But he was really what I would classify as being full on in a midlife crisis. And so the pressure of generating a balm was enough to just, you know, blow the circuits and off he went to hang out with God for a while and, and maybe redream, but I don’t think this is at all uncommon and I think it’s very real. And so there’s two messages in there. If you’re not living from your heart and enjoying your life and taking responsibility for what you create, your heart carries that burden physically, emotionally and mentally. And if you’re a weightlifter and you’re not undulating your periodization so that you give your heart a break from heavy lifting once in a while, you can end up dying while having a poop.

Now, Paul, have you ever heard of anyone who had a heart attack during a poop but survived? I have not. So this is interesting because, and I, I agree with everything you said, but I have a slightly different perspective on it. So I had a client who actually came to me with heart failure, which probably was a result of the heart attack, but who described almost the same thing as you described there, woke up with like, you know, dripping sweat, massive chest pain and an urge to have a bowel movement. Went on the toilet, had the chest pain built while he was pushing out the stool, and then had a massive bowel movement and then basically completely recovered, crawled back into his room, fell asleep, woke up the next morning, felt normal.

So what I think may be going on is that there’s kind of the underlying cause and then there’s the trigger. So the, the underlying cause is that there is toxicity in the body and it precipitates a healing crisis which could be created by the trigger. So even your Green Beret friend who had a clean lifestyle, let’s say, just for possibility, that 10 years prior to that, he had been eating seed oils on the regular. Because there’s a lot of indirect or epidemiologic data to suggest that seed oils, and there’s even some controlled studies may be one of the primary causes of cardiovascular disease.

Yeah. And it, those oils can stay in your body fat. Now, even if you have really Low body fat, it still can be in the fat that’s around your internal organs, like your liver, pancreas, etc. And your heart. And the half life of these oils in, in the fat is two and a half years. So that means that you know it. Let’s say you have 100 grams in there. In two and a half years, it’s going to be 50. Yeah. In another two and a half years, it’ll be 25. Right. So it’s going to be in there 10 to 15 years.

And it could be that because of the healthy lifestyle and that the body’s trying to heal that, and then the stress kind of creates this healing crisis where all these toxins come out in the blood and then they could be attracted to the heart if there’s increased demand on the heart, like with a Valsalva maneuver. But if you’re able to expel them, like into the toilet successfully, then that can potentially resolve the crisis. Yeah. You know, when I hear what you’re describing, I would also propose an additional way of looking at it which would not exclude anything you’ve said, but it could highlight the difference between my Green Beret client and the guy that you just talked about.

And that is, first of all, most people have a false understanding of how the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems interact with each other. It’s. It’s been mind blowing to me to see how many doctors and physical therapists and chiropractors have the belief that if the sympathetic system’s on, the parasympathetic system’s off. They think it’s like a switch in a circuit board, which is part of the problem with this kind of computer head mentality that’s taking the world over. The way I teach it to my students is I say, put your left and right hand together. We’ll call the left hand the parasympathetic, the right hand the sympathetic.

So if you imagine that your patient that you just described was having a huge sympathetic charge, which led ultimately to the reaction from a Valsalva maneuver, the bowel movement. But he has enough vitality, core vitality, to trigger an anabolic rebound, then you would have a strong parasympathetic response, which would be why he came out the other side. Right. My Green Bray guy, one of his big problems was, is he was using exercise as an addiction to avoid confronting himself. So he was like a burned out athlete with adrenal fatigue who did not have a lot left in the tank.

This is, you know, what I, what I call Fit sick people. And I’ve had thousands of them as clients. And this is why I say to people, as a metaphor, don’t trade your liver for a set of pecs or a pair of biceps, because it’s not a good idea. The problem is people will push themselves hard enough with exercise that their conscious mind overrides the body’s natural capacity for homeostasis and allostasis. And so if you push yourself to the point where you can’t rebound, something’s got to give. And the chain’s only as strong as the weakest length.

And so I think what I’m saying is my guy had such a sympathetic surge, he could not generate a parasympathetic rebound. He was too depleted. Your guy had enough reserves that the system naturally swung back. And a simple way that I teach people to think about is just swing a pendulum. The further it swings to one side, the further it’s going to swing to the other side if you don’t have the resources. Because the greater the swing, the more effort it takes for the body to manage it. Just like if you’re driving a car, if you wander a little bit, it’s not so hard.

But if you hit the ditch and start going sideways, you have to be very focused. And it takes a lot of energy to control the vehicle and get it back on track. And I think a lot of people, as athletes and just general people keep hitting the ditch, but they’re getting progressive lower in their capacity to rebound. And that’s when a crisis emerges. Right. And I think this is a, you know, a really useful description, and I think it also applies to the work stress side of things. Right. That because you have to expend a lot of energy, right.

To produce your work product. And the more stressed and the more you hate it, right. Then your energy to be productive is going to be further and further depleted. And that, you know, also falls in the sympathetic, parasitic, sympathetic balance. Yeah. Right. Because when you’re stressed out and worried about it, then you’re going to have over overactive sympathetic nervous system. And just for those of you who aren’t familiar with those terms, the, the, the, we’re talking about the autonomic nervous system, so the part of, of the nervous system that regulates our body functions, but it’s somewhat unconsciously, like we can influence it with conscious action, but it’s, it’s going on, you know, behind the curtain all the time.

And the sympathetic is like the fight flight side of things. And the parasympathetic is the rest and digest side side of things. And I think you all have a sense of that. And these are always in balance. Like the push pull analogy that Paul brought up. Yeah. One thing that comes to my mind, I feel is important to share, and I see this as a chronic problem worldwide, not just with athletes. And it has a lot to do with, unfortunately, has a lot to do with religious programming and a lot of unresolved childhood traumas and programming.

And it’s what I call externalization of the self. I think for a variety of reasons, which would be a long list of them, it would take a long time to go through them all. But what happens is in our culture, we don’t really have an intimate connection to spirit or to source. We have a lot of ideas about it, and a lot of us are programmed with beliefs that make whatever we refer to as God very scary. But the outcome of that is that people, instead of having a balance, like inward, outward relationship, like people in Tibet, where they have a long culture of meditation and inner arts, and Buddhism, where, you know, Osho says Western religions are religions for children because there’s always somebody to tell you what to do in a big daddy in the sky.

But Eastern religions are religions for adults because they tell you that you’re responsible for your own mind and what you create, create out of it. So when people get in the habit of identifying themselves by the status they have, the power they have, the money they have, where they live, how much they can lift, how many women they can have sex with or men they can have sex with, or dot dot. That’s the externalization of the self or the soul nature. And so people desperately try to build that up outside of themselves and don’t realize that ultimately invites the pain teacher.

And the function of the pain teacher is to bring you back into contact with what you’re actually creating so you can really get clear on whether or not you want to keep doing that. But if a person doesn’t have a skilled doctor, therapist, coach or guide to help them recognize that the inner self is really starving for attention and is the source of your entelechy, your guiding wisdom. The as the acorn holds the entelechy of the oak tree, the soul holds the entelechy or the guiding influence that ultimately the soul comes here to express. So if a person’s lost with their inner heart’s compass, they can create impossibility walls all around themselves and build them.

I’ll give you a quick example. I’ve had patients that are multi, multi millionaires. But live like they’re broke, talk like they’re broke and act like they’re broke. One of my patients was a tennis champion and one of her friends was very, very wealthy. And she came to me one day and she was telling me the story in great disgust. She said, my neighbor, who, who’s a multi, multimillionaire offered to take me out for dinner. And guess where they took me? I said, where? Carl’s junior and like, she goes, I don’t even want to eat this crap.

Fast food. Yeah. And like, so here you see how our psychological state can have a radical influence on how we use our time, energy and resources to create in the outer world. But ultimately we will at some point invite the pain teacher to ground us and have a very good reason to hold still and come within. And for many of my patients, it was their cancer, their illnesses, their injuries that actually introduced them to the spiritual life. Yeah, I, I have definitely observed that as well. And I love how you talk about, you know, pain being a teacher.

In fact, I was recently on a, like, discussion webinar and was asked about pain. What, you know, what is pain? Why do we experience it? And I said, it is information, basically. Right. Which is. And the information is for you to learn from. So I like even better calling it a teacher. What. When you work with someone or, you know, when you’re teaching your Czech Republic future, check professionals how to work with people. How do you approach the topic of pain? Because I know that’s probably like the most frequent kind of thing that you would see related to, you know, physical activity.

Right. It’s going to be a pain complaint, especially low back pain. Yeah. So how do you have this discussion with people to help them see the truth of the matter? Well, the first thing I have, I have to do is, is identify what is the belief that’s driving the behavior and the choices that led to the pain in the first place. You know, there can be mechanical causes of pain, like workers and athletes who just don’t know how to use their body correctly to lift. But there’s often an emotional relationship. For example, athletes like we talked about that are pushing themselves too hard.

There can be a mental relationship to pain because people are living out ideas that are just not true, true. Like I’ve had countless athletes drinking massive amounts of coffee and, and you know, I always have them bring all supplements that they’re using and they bring in gym bags. You know, some of these people are spending 1500 bucks a month on supplements. And so what I, when I investigate I say, why are you taking all these supplements? And they start giving me all these ideas, which is like stuff they’ve read off the Internet. And so there you can see a mental source of imbalance because they’re believing in things without actually testing them or talking to people that might know whether or not it’s true.

And so really what I do is, is I have a 1, 2, 3, 4 approach. The first thing I do with anybody that comes to me in any kind of pain, as I ask them, you know, I quote psychologist Jerry Wesch, if you have a big enough dream, you don’t need a crisis. So now that you’re in pain and you’re not able to do the things that you want to do, what is your dream goal or objective? Because if I can’t identify a dream goal or objective, that produces more levity than the gravity of the situation they’re in.

I found you can write people the best programs in the world, and they simply don’t do them. And so then I look at the body. Oh, what are some, what are some examples of, of their dream goals that you’ve heard in this situation that maybe give you confidence or maybe create doubt in your mind? Well, I, I have a process called qualifying the dream that I teach all Czech professionals. And, and the way you qualify a dream, 10 would be Kazi pilot committed, 0 would be apathetic. I say, if you don’t have at least a 7 out of 10 buy in from the heart, I don’t really care about the head.

If the heart doesn’t buy in at least a 7 out of 10, then I have to keep working with them to identify a worthy dream goal or objective. And there are many cases in which people simply cannot find something that they buy into. So then I re. My default is, then let’s find out what your nightmare is, because that’s where most of your life force is being sucked up. It’s like a short circuit in the system. Turns out the most common nightmare I run into is financial crisis. People just overspending themselves into debt. And that has a tremendous knock on effect because it sets the body up.

Typically, you know, I’m being very efficient in what I say, but what I see the most common outcome is people get acidic from the chronic background tension. Sympathetic overload, constant interwind. But sorry, you asked me what do I tell them about the pain or how do I. Well, no, no, so let me, let me summarize and rephrase because I think, I think you actually answer the question. So I was Asking about, you know, what I was thinking, it was like more the specific nature of the dream. But you pointed out that it’s really their commitment to that dream goal.

And if they are not having the right level of commitment, then something is interfering with that. So you assess like the what’s your nightmare? Kind of the opposite of the dream goal is what are you? The worst thing you’re afraid of. And I bet on a 1 to 10 scale, probably they rate it very high. Yes. And so. So those are. That’s the thing. Interfering. Right. With them from reaching their actual goals. Yeah, I never. Now you were asking what some of the. The dreams were. So one of the things that’s most important there is that I help them realize that the time they’re spending in rehabilitation, therapy, counseling, etc, is actually not to fix a problem.

I have a statement that I make with all Czech professionals. We do not treat diseases that have people. We coach people that have acquired a disease. Yes. And I think one of the problems we have in the Western culture is that we don’t realize how powerful our language is. And so the analogy I give my students is, say, if I say I’m treating you to dinner tonight, who do you automatically assume is paying? Well, they always assume that I’m going to pay. Okay. Then if you go to a doctor or a therapist for treatment, then the assumption is you’re just going to lay there and someone’s going to fix you, Your pain is going to away, your problem’s going to go away and go, you can go back and keep doing the same shit that got you in trouble in the first place.

So I use a coaching model and I tell them no matter how good a coach is, they can’t get out on the basketball court and shoot the ball for you or play hockey for you. They can only direct you to enhance your abilities. So I operate not on a fixing model, but on a coaching model. And my rule is I don’t do anything for my patients or clients that they can’t do for themselves. If they can’t mobilize their first rib, I’ll do that. You know, if they need their temperamentibular joint mobilized or their atlas corrected, I can do that.

But if there’s anything that I can teach them how to do, then they need to learn that. And my rule is we don’t pass go. If I give you stretches or mobilizations, exercise, diet and lifestyle corrections, and you come back and you’re not doing them, we’re simply going to review those for the session I’m not going to keep going because I’ve found over and over again that people will spend tons of money, then just come back and complain they’re not getting better because in their mind they came to get treated. And yes, so I think that’s a disease in our western cultures mind which we spread all over the world unfortunately.

But common goals, like many, many people say they just want to play with their grandkids. Paul, if I may interrupt for a second because I just want to back that up because you know, one, it fits in with what you were talking about about like paternalism, you know, that it’s like father medicine is going to care for you and fix your problems rather than you fixing them yourself. And when I work with clients, you know, as a teacher, as a consultant, I, it’s the same thing. Right. First, I’m not providing medical treatment or medical care. I’m teaching information and perhaps providing a little bit of coaching.

But it’s up to you. Yeah, right. And many times also I give people like I, I teach them about alternative choices. I’m like, well this, you know, would likely help you if you did this and so would this. And you know, you choose between them. You know, here’s, here’s how this one works and here’s how this one works. And you know, it’s when they don’t follow through or they self sabotage. Right. That’s, that’s when they don’t achieve their, their dream goals. Yeah. So I’m sorry, please go ahead and continue where you left off. Well, what I was saying is you asked me what some of the dreams were.

A lot of people that have grandchildren say all I want to do is be able to play with my grandkids. Athletes, if they’re competitive, say, well, I want to win, you know, whatever the competition is. Interestingly having, you know, I owned a physical therapy clinic for three years and I worked the biggest one in San Diego for four years. I worked with a chiropractor specializing in sports injuries for two years. And prior to that I was trained by an osteopathic physician as the trainer of the army boxing team. So by the time I started the Czech institute, I had 11 years of clinical experience.

So I got to see how a lot of these things play out. But when people are, for example, coming to see me when I own my physical therapy clinic through workman’s compensation and I would ask them what their dream is, I rarely ever heard that it was to go back to work. In fact, I found that I had to. I actually had to study how to analyze illness behavior. And, and I found in research, there’s, there’s questionnaires and tests you can do to determine if someone’s got illness behavior. And so I found that I actually had to work with people and counsel them that they didn’t need to go back to being a UPS driver if they could really find out what it is that they loved enough to, to grow and to change for.

And, and it might be seeing a career counselor. It often takes some exploration to help people find these things, but a lot of them just have the belief they’re just stuck there. And, and, and so, so my point is, is that they would not actually want me to rehabilitate them because if I did, they had to go back. And if they could get by on what workman’s compensation was paying them and watch TV all day and throw frisbees to, they had the world by the tail. But as a therapist being monitored by insurance companies, if I don’t get results, I’ll be my own death sentence by playing that game with patients.

So I quickly found I had to really do a deep study of psychology and B behavior change to get a, be effective as a therapist working on orthopedic rehabilitation and athletic injuries and also high performance conditioning. And so I spent, you know, 30 years now going very deep into depth psychology and everything related to it and reading books on behavior change and, and, and working on it in myself too, to find my own patterns. But I, I think that’s one of the key things. And I just wanted to show you a system I developed. It took me about 15 years of research.

This is called the Czech totem pole. Have you ever seen me talk about that before? I have. So you’ll notice at the top there’s a bird there. That’s the symbol of the soul and the psyche. So what this is is called the survival reflex totem pole. And it demonstrates, based on my research and clinical experience, what systems have hierarchical control over what other systems. You’ll notice at the bottom you see a little man that looks like a slave there. These are called slave joints. So that’s every joint from C3 to, to L4. 5. The hips, shoulders, elbows, wrist, hands, knees, ankles, and feet.

The rest of them are in the hierarchical system. So at the top you have breathing, then mastication, then vision, then auditory, vestibular, then upper cervical, then visceral, then limbic, emotional, which is a floating symbol. It can go up and down because people can commit suicide. And that’s based on psychosocial medicine. Then you have the sacrum and the coccyx, because the phylum terminale attaches to the coccyx. So any distortion of the central nervous system will automatically create distortions in the lumbo pelvic girdle. And then below, you have the slave joints. You know, 90, 95 to 98% of people coming for orthopedic problems of any kind or athletic injuries have pain down here.

But I constantly find problems all through the system that nobody looks at, and I can tell you exactly how that plays out real quick. There’s an athlete by the name of Kobe Bryant that once came to me in trouble. Fortunately, his private strength coach had done a lot of training with me, and he called me up and said, look, Paul, Kobe’s had really bad left knee pain for two years now. We’ve tried every single doctor and therapist, and nobody knows what the hell to do with them. And he’s really getting frustrated because he’s in so much pain and is getting worse.

And so he finally is willing to come see you. So Kobe came down to see me, and as soon as he walked in the door, I took one look at him and go, this guy’s got a really bad atlas subluxation because his head’s sitting crooked on top of his neck, which is a classic indicator. I put him on my very expensive bilateral scales. He was, I think, 17 or 18 pounds heavy on the left leg, which I think was his painful knee side. Now, when you consider that your. Every stride you take when you run, you get four to seven times kinetic body weight in shock through the kinetic chain, and he’s running about, you know, some.

Some say 6 to 10k a game. So that’s a tremendous amount of load. If you take 17 pounds and multiply it by 1509 strides a mile for the average person, it turns out to be thousands and thousands of extra pounds a game because of that imbalance. So I said to Kobe at the time, I said, look, I can do a very comprehensive evaluation on you. It’s going to take me about five hours to do it, and you’re going to have to fill out paperwork. It’ll take you about four hours to fill it out. I’m going to look into your family history.

I’m going to know more about you than your mother does, or you can let me correct what I see going on right now, and we’ll just see what happens. So he said, let’s just see what happens. So I did a manual therapy correction on his atlas, put him on the scales, zeroed him out to equal weight on both sides. Took me about, oh, 25 minutes. And I said, now let’s go out into my gym. And I said, I want you to do anything that used to hurt to you and see if you can tell me if it’s any better.

So he started running and jumping and hopping on and off of his left leg. And all of a sudden, he just screamed. He goes, oh, my God, I don’t have any pain. How the hell did you do that? Then he turns to his strength coach and says, why have I been going to all these doctors and therapists for two years have made me worse. And this guy that doesn’t even have a college degree figured me out in six minutes. And his strength coach said, I told you, he knows what he’s doing. I’ve been trying to get you here for two years.

What’s the point? The totem pole, you know, when your atlas or axis is out of place. Nuca’s research shows even three quarters of one degree will cause significant tension in the central nervous system. And I could give you a long, elaborate explanation, but it’ll create distortions through the body, because if the atlas is out of place, the head does not sit level. The vestibular system’s off, the eyes are off, and that’s what we need to see, what’s trying to eat us and what we want to eat. So that is like the gyroscope in a pilot’s dashboard.

And if it’s off, every system in the body will try to compensate. So if the head’s caught from a contact injury, for example, and you’re leaning to the right, then the torso will shift to the left and the weight shift will go to the left, because it’s trying to get the eyes level with the rise and the teeth level with the rise in the vestibular system be in a neutral position. And so people kept treating the knee and the. In the back, and they were just, you know, symptomatically approaching it. Right. But, you know, really what I’m trying to point out here is that this is, you know, almost 4 billion years of evolution.

And every one of these systems is. Has a hierarchy of control because it’s based on what the body needs to do to keep itself alive. And the psyche is riding at the top. And one’s perception of pain or one’s perception of stress is as real as actual pain or physical stress. The brain and the. The psyche cannot differentiate perceived from actual stress. People create more pain with their minds than they do with their environment usually. So I, I have, it takes me four to five years, depending on the student to train them in the comprehensive analysis of these systems.

The point being is I need to know which system is causing the compensations or I’m just treating symptoms. And I got to know why. What is the beliefs and the behaviors that have led to the choices such as diet and lifestyle practices, exercise practice, sexual practices, recreation or whatever it is that I am actually dealing with the symptoms of. Or all I can do is allopathic medicine and it just doesn’t work very well. Right. And this is exactly the approach that I take with people. It’s, you know, a discussion to find out all those things. I’m not as systematic as you because I basically my training as a psychiatrist was largely about interviewing so well, that’s.

The problems are at the top. Yes, but all these things, you know, you, I can I ask about all of those aspects that you mentioned as well. And you know, it’s, it is really surprising that they didn’t have Kobe see a chiropractor because I would think, you know, any decent chiropractor would have been able to recognize that. But, but you know, I’ll just interject. No, really, I, I, I have been a keynote speaker at the National Upper Cervical Chiropractic association conference. They have to do a two year specialized training in order to adjust the at axis complex accurately.

Nuka Nuka has identified over 10,000 patterns of subluxation and it has to be put back in place on a specialized table that takes gravitational load off the neck. And it has to be done exactly, precisely. I’ve tested them all over the world and there’s only a handful of good ones. So the first thing I did was send Kobe Bryant to my buddy Kenny Shepard, who I’ve been working with since 1988. Got him straightened out. And Kenny and his wife Ann Marie shepherd are some of the few that are very accurate. But my student, you know, I’ve got almost, I think I’ve got 64,000 Czech professionals around the world now.

It’s very, very hard to find someone that can do the upper cervical correction accurately. I teach basically what would be muscle energy techniques to do it. But there’s cases where the joint mechanics are completely screwed up, often because of impact injuries. And so then you have to have a Nuca chiropractor to do the job properly. But my only point is it’s not at all as simple as just a chiropractic correction. In fact, a lot of don’t get, throw bullets at me, chiropractor. But a lot of chiropractic adjustments actually cause these problems because the skill level, you know, most chiropractic adjustments for an atlas are like hitting a Swiss watch with a sledgehammer.

This thing is wickedly sensitive. And I’ve. The list of people that I have helped with serious problems, often after multiple surgeries, by correcting that atlas with manual therapy is unbelievable. And people often just break down in tears because they didn’t realize how simple of a correction it was if someone actually knows what they’re doing. But the other thing that’s very, very important is we have huge problems due to our diet, influences on our occlusal system, on the jaw, and any malocclusion whatsoever creates torsion in the atlas axis complex as a compensatory mechanism. I found countless people with ocular disorders, such as an esophoria at one eye pointing outward, too much exophoria or esophoria inward pointing, esotropia, right.

And there’s a, like, there’s a long list of ocular disorders. And I’ve had people with severe scoliosis that nobody could help. And I identified serious problems in their eyes and have had mind blowing results by sending them to behavioral optometrists who work on the mental, emotional aspects of vision. And I’ve seen scoliosis, I mean like 50 degree curves, 55 degree curves, come down to almost normal within about six months of seeing nothing. But a behavioral optometrist. And I measure these things goniometrically accurately, use X rays. So when you start seeing the power of these control systems to influence everything below your vestibular systems, directly linked to the atlas, the eyes are direct the motor system.

So if the eyes are out of balance and the whole motor system’s out of balance, and thousands of what look like athletic injuries are actually ocular dysfunction, causing faulty movement patterns in the body. So this whole head system is actually very, very intimately in contact with the whole digestive visceral motor system. And so I learned many, many years ago as a young therapist that I had to assess the cranial nerve function on everybody, or I would not know if I was treating a symptom. And then, you know, some of these times I have to find people like you.

I have to find neurologists, I have to, you know, have very elaborate scans done. I found people with brain tumors, you know, a long laundry list of things that people never would have thought were involved. I’ve had to use orthodontists I’ve had to use biological dentists. I’ve had to send people to ear, nose and throat specialists. A quick example is I had a guy with what was diagnosed as restless leg syndrome, who was an elite level triathlete. Chronic pain in his left leg after, oh, you know, maybe about 30 minutes of running, he would get severe pain in his left leg and, and he couldn’t run or bike and nobody could find anything wrong with him.

Well, I found out that he had had his nose broken several years previous and had a very badly deviated septum. So when I used a spirometer test on him, if there’s more than a 10% difference in airflow through either the left or the right nostril, it means there will be a disruption in the balance of the cranium and it’ll cause a knock on effect on the autonomic nervous system and the, and the posture and, and the, in the dynamic posture. Once I send him to an ear, nose and throat specialist, he got his septum straightened out, his whole body normalized, and he went back to being an elite professional triathlete with no trouble.

But it would have probably taken him 2000 years of seeing typical doctors and therapists for anyone to identify what was really going on. Right. Because they’re not, they’re, you know, I mean, one of the things that you have been critical of with respect to the allopathic medical system, Right. Is the compartmentalization where, you know, they only focus on a very narrow area of the body functioning. Right. And they don’t, they don’t see the interconnectedness that you have brought up in your totem pole diagram. I wonder. When I saw the totem pole right away, it made me think of the chakra system.

Yes. So the chakra system tells you the psychophysical correlation to these neurologically reflex driven pathways, which were built by the progressive development of cells and systems over billions of years, specifically for survival. So again, this is a survival reflex system. This is what the body does automatically at way below conscious level, even right to the spinal cord level to try to ensure survivability in nature. Right. And so there’s these compensatory mechanisms essentially to ensure survival, but they don’t function optimally. And that’s why we have to look at this hierarchy to say, okay, for this problem here, is the level of the cause the same or is it come from a hierarchical level? Right.

That’s been overlooked. And that sounds like that’s what mostly your observations are encountering. And I Don’t know if those are patients who already failed other treatments. Right. And so they’re not going to get, you know, it’s the same thing. Many people who come to me also have failed multiple other approaches. And similarly, I often experience, when I say, oh, well, have you thought that this might be a factor? And, you know, did any of the other people ever mention that? And no, no one, no one thought of it. No one asked about it. Just before I forget, for the, for the people that are engaging us right now, if you go to my YouTube channel, which is YouTube.com forward/paul c h e k live.

YouTube.com forward/paulchecklive if you search, check totem pole. I’ve got two videos on there where I walk you through each level of the totem pole. And many, many people out in, in the world who have watched those videos have reported back to me that based on the symptoms they had and what I shared in the videos, they went and saw the practitioner that would be the right one for the level of totem pole. And we’re able to completely resolve chronic painful issues. And so I think because we don’t have time to go in detail, people that want to know more about it, I present it in layman terms, but I think it’ll just help people to understand.

And for doctors and therapists, it’s also very, very important knowledge to have. Paul, do you work directly with clients these days or do you have a referral network of your, you know, alumni who are working directly with folks? I, I do work with clients, but to be brutally honest with you, look, I’ve been a therapist for 42 years now. I, I just got so burnt out on dealing with bodies and weightlifting, like, it just didn’t fill my heart. So the natural byproduct of my own inner evolution and my evolution as a therapist is that I was deeply drawn to Carl Jung’s work and Rudolph Steiner’s work and many others.

And really my love is to get to the actual cause of people’s problems, which is almost always mental, emotional and belief systems and family crisis and family trauma coming through the gene line. So I won’t take on private clients unless their case is interesting to me and it. And then when I evaluate them and figure out what’s going on, I refer them out. I usually start with the check instructors because they’re the most highly qualified, and if people can afford them, I say, you know, go to someone that really knows what they’re doing because it’s going to be a Home run for you.

In 2006, I did a year of training with a doctor that was helping people heal with psychedelics, which I had massive breakthroughs in my own healing through the use of plant medicines. Then I joined the Native American Council so that I could do Native American healing ceremonies with psychedelics. And I’ve now conducted over a thousand healing ceremonies and. And I’ve been able to fast track healing for people. So my is that using mescaline or psilocybin, it can be mescaline, it can be psilocybin, it can be ayahuasca, it could be dmt, it could be, you know, a lot of different things, depending on what I think is the right medicine for the person’s unique profile.

And so I really would say that I’ve transitioned more into handling my patients from a spiritual perspective. Because ultimately, what I find at the base of almost everybody’s problems is a need to feel loved, a need to feel safe, a need to feel wanted, and a need to feel valued. And if their life circumstances have not brought them into a state of loving connection to and appreciation for, and a willingness to see themselves as a work of art and an expression of all that is whatever model you want to use, God or universe or cosmos, then they’re almost always constantly chasing after a way to get validation, approval, and feel loved.

And I think the pain teacher brings people to people like me and you to really get a chance to really heal. What’s stopping them from being whole? Because the number of patients I’ve had to work with that had addictions is. Is through the roof. I would say eight. Eight out of ten of them are actually dealing with addiction. So I studied addiction very heavily. My brother was a drug addict by age 7. He committed suicide when I was 34. And basically, I define an addiction because all the dictionary definitions are very complex. They don’t really get to the root of it.

So I put my own definition to an addiction. An addiction is any repeated behavior that does not produce the results you want. And when you look at the repeated behaviors in people’s lives, from drinking excessive coffee to eating too much food, to staying up too late at night, to playing video games and not meeting responsibilities. It’s a repeated behavior that’s not producing the results people want. And you can’t really address issues of addiction until you get to the kind of issues that we’ve just been talking about. Because almost always it’s a. It’s a safe. I all.

I believe all addictions are safe attempts to get love and the beautiful thing about a beer bottle is it doesn’t complain about how you kiss it and neither does a cigarette. And so for a lot of people, this is a desperate attempt to, to, to be able to find a way out of Flatland, to have a chance to be in an alternate reality, to have something that gives them joy, that gives them the ability to not have to think about or feel their pain. But it’s often the only thing in their lives that they perceive is just for them.

And that’s why it’s very, very hard to transition addicts into a more holistic, healthy lifestyle and to learn to manage these things. It’s just like tele, just like phones and AI. A phone, an AI and a mind all have one thing in common. They make far better tools than masters. And so I find when a person’s mind is structured such that it’s antagonistic to their own well being, they become the tool of the mind. Just like they become tools to their phone and get addicted to getting likes or trying to get videos to go by, whatever it is.

And so my love, where I feel I do the world, the most benefit is to take people deeply into themselves, realize the majesty and the mystery and the awe of what it took to create any one of us and to sustain each of us. And then I find that once they pass through that, that they become walking, living examples that others can follow. And they almost always, their heart almost always leads them into the caregiver archetype in some way because they become leaders of men’s groups, they become leaders of women’s groups, they start clinics, they fund projects, you know, and so for me, that’s when I feel at this stage in my career, I’m actually doing the work that is most appropriate for me.

If I’m working on bulging discs and hamstring strains, then I feel like I’m dying inside because I’m not listening to my soul and I’m not doing what I should be doing as an elder in our culture. Now I’m, I’m getting older, you know, I’m, I’ll be 65 next year, which is hard for me to believe. Well, it, it definitely doesn’t show, Paul. You know, that is such a beautiful message. I think it’s a great way to close out this interview because there are so many take home points and it certainly gives you great feelings of, of peace to, to listen to that message.

So if people want to learn more from you, you have some courses, you train people to become Czech professionals. How will People find out more about that. How can they? I mean, you certainly don’t just take anyone into your training program. So is there a rigorous process or how does that all work? We have an application process to become a Czech professional. That’s the Czech Academy. The, the central hub of, of all my work is Paul C-H-E-K.com there you can find my podcast, you can find my spirit gym program, which is deep spiritual development, healing, all the kinds of stuff we just talked about.

I felt it was so important I had to do a public access training program. And that is basically the synthesis of my new 15 volume book series called welcome to Spirit Jim. So that’s my spiritgem.com I mentioned my YouTube channel, but paulcheck.com kind of is the access point where you can find everything. And the Czech institute is c h e kinstitute.com but paulcheck.com you can find it all in one spot and then just say, oh, I’m interested in this, or I’m interested in that. I’ve published, I think 12 books now. My most popular one I’ve shared with you, how to Eat, Move and Be Healthy.

That’s available on Amazon. And really what I did, just as a quick side note, after, you know, about 12 or 13 years in a clinic, I, I just dawned on me one day that I have to keep saying the same things over and over and over again to everybody. I mean, nobody understands how to read their poop. They don’t know what, you know, what, how they read their urine. They don’t know how to, you know, eat right. They don’t know how to. So I’m like, why am I saying this? Like a broken record? And so I’d spent years working with a professional artist making handouts.

So my, my therapy room was like a classroom. And I would say, here, let’s look at your poops. Here’s the different poops. You know, let’s look at your diet, let’s look at your sleep rhythms. So I finally said, you know what, I’m going to take all these handouts, which was two file drawers full. I’m going to string them together with some education and some story. And that became how to Eat, Move and be Healthy. And so for, you know, for 25 bucks and interestingly, I teach my Czech professionals, I say, look, after 42 years, I have found something quite interesting.

90% of the people that I help heal and get back on the road again don’t need to be taught anything beyond what’s in my book, how to Eat, Move and Be Healthy. Because the body will automatically clean itself and heal itself if you just give it your resources. So, you know, for a really small fee, you can buy how to Eat, Move and Be Healthy. There’s a series of questionnaires, there’s a score graph. It tells you exactly which chapters to read to lower the stress in the system, what joint mobilizations, what exercises, what stretches, what diet changes and lifestyle changes to make based on your scores.

And if a thousand people use the book, they’ll get a thousand different approaches. And I think it’s the only book I know of in the world that fully customizes what you do based on your individual needs. Well, you know, thank you so much for creating all these resources. I definitely recommend your book. And I will add though that I know exactly what you’re talking about with people asking the same questions that you’ve already explained countless times. And I guarantee that they’ll still do that even after they read your book. And we’ll probably see some comments below asking those same things.

But it’s a burden that we bear. But we, we realize it’s, it’s for the better. Good. Patience is a virtue. That’s right. Thank you so much for spending this time with us, Paul, and for everything that you do. Hey, my pleasure. Thank you. Birds of a feather flock together, baby. We got a lot of work to do out there. And I tell my check professionals, today is the day to be a check professional because there’s about 7 billion people that need your help. And if you can’t make a good living doing this, just go stand in the mirror and meet the problem.

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Thanks for listening and I’ll see you in the next truhealth report.
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See more of Andrew Kaufman, M.D. on their Public Channel and the MPN Andrew Kaufman, M.D. channel.