Registered dietitian Jonah Soolman joins us to discuss his time working in an alternative medicine clinic run by integrative doctors. He shares some of the shady practices he saw his bosses engaging in, why food-sensitivity testing and other alt-med tests are often misleading, the dangers of trying alternative or integrative medicine if you’re in recovery from an eating disorder, the devastating situation that finally made him leave the clinic and start speaking out about the harms of alternative medicine, and more.
Jonah Soolman is a registered dietitian specializing in the treatment of eating disorders and disordered eating using a Health At Every Size perspective. He and his wife, Joanne, co-own Soolman Nutrition LLC, a private practice where they offer individualized nutrition counseling, in Needham, Massachusetts, USA.
Most commonly, Jonah works with people who have tried numerous diets and are sick of seeing their weight temporarily drop only to inevitably rebound. Fed up with failing diets and being at war with food and their bodies, they come to Jonah because he offers the antithesis. By taking the focus off of weight and rules, he helps them to form a new and more peaceful relationship with food based on satisfaction, flexibility, and health.
When Jonah is not working, he enjoys getting outside and moving his body. In addition to time spent playing NCAA tennis, his proudest athletic achievements include riding his bicycle from Seattle to Boston for charity, running up Mount Washington on four separate occasions, and rebounding from multiple back surgeries to finish the Newport Marathon four times. Find him online at SoolmanNutrition.com.
Resources and References
Christy’s latest book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Subscribe on Substack for bonus episodes and more
Jonah’s private practice, SoolmanNutrition.com
Jonah’s Food Psych episode from 2016
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
Transcript
Disclaimer: The below transcription is primarily rendered by AI, so errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: Welcome to Rethinking Wellness, a podcast exploring the diet culture, disinformation, dubious diagnoses, and disordered eating that are so pervasive in contemporary wellness culture--and how to avoid falling into these traps so that you can find your own true well-being.
I’m your host Christy Harrison and I’m a registered dietitian, certified Intuitive Eating counselor, journalist, and author of the books Anti-Diet, which was published in 2019, and The Wellness Trap, which came out on April 25th and is now available wherever books are sold. You can learn more and order it now at christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap.
Hey there! Welcome back to Rethinking Wellness. I’m Christy, and my guest today is Registered Dietitian Jonah Soolman, who joins us to discuss his time working in an alternative medicine clinic run by integrative doctors. He shares some of the shady practices he saw his bosses engaging in, why food-sensitivity testing and other alt-med tests are often misleading, the dangers of trying alternative or integrative medicine if you’re in recovery from an eating disorder, the devastating situation that finally made him leave the clinic and start speaking out about the harms of alternative medicine, and lots more. This is a great conversation, and I can’t wait to share it with you in just a moment. Before I do, a few quick announcements.
This podcast is made possible by my paid subscribers at rethinkingwellness.substack.com. Not only do paid subscriptions help support the show and make me able to make the best free content I possibly can, but they also get you great perks like early access to every episode, bonus episodes (including one I did with this week’s guest, Jonah), special bonus Q&As, subscriber-only comment threads where you can connect with other listeners, and lots more. Just go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com to sign up.
This podcast is also brought to you by my second book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being, which is now available wherever books are sold! The book explores many of the topics we cover in this podcast, including the connections between diet culture and wellness culture; how the wellness space became overrun with scams, misinformation, and conspiracy theories; why many popular alternative-medicine diagnoses are misleading and harmful—and what we can do instead to create a society that promotes true well-being. Just go to christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap to learn more and buy the book. That’s christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap.
Now, without any further ado, let’s go to my conversation with Jonah Soolman. So, welcome, Jonah, to the show. Thank you so much for being here.
Jonah Soolman: Oh, thanks so much for having me. I can't believe it's been, I think seven years since I was on Food Psych, so it's good to do another episode with you.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, you too. I can't believe it's been so long and so much has changed in our lives and the world since then. So really looking forward to catching up for this one.
Jonah Soolman: Yes, definitely.
Christy Harrison: And I'd love to just start out by having you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do in your career. Now, some folks will know you from the Food Psych days long ago, but for many people listening, you'll probably be new to them.
Jonah Soolman: Sure. So I am a registered dietitian. I work in private practice. I share a practice called Sulman Nutrition with my wife. We've had this practice for over a decade now. I can't believe it, but we both specialize in treating eating disorders. That's not how I started out, but it's kind of how I think my specialty has kind of evolved. I've kind of ended up in that place. So that's what we do
Christy Harrison: And we had such a great conversation about that in our first episode, so I'll be sure to link to that in the show notes. But for this episode, I wanted to talk to you about something you did early in your career that you have moved away from, which was worked in an alternative medicine clinic. So can you tell us a little bit about that experience?
Jonah Soolman: It was one of my first jobs as a dietitian, well, I would say about approximately a year after becoming a dietitian. So it wasn't one of my immediate first jobs, but I really wanted to work doing outpatient counseling and there just weren't that many opportunities to do it, and along came this chance to do it in an alternative medicine clinic, and I didn't know too much about alternative medicine, but I was like, Hey, this is a chance to counsel, which is what I wanted to do as opposed to doing clinical work, inpatient or food service work or any of the other things that dietitians tend to do. So I was like, well, this is an opportunity to do the kind of work that I want to do, even if it's in a specific field that I a little bit foreign to me. And there just wasn't really a whole lot of work to go around at the time the economy wasn't great and everything, and so I was like, okay, well, I'll take this and kind of I'll learn some stuff and kind of see how it goes. I think was my attitude.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, and what was that experience like for you? What did you counsel patients to do or what did sort of a typical day look like in that job?
Jonah Soolman: It wasn't a great experience, and I'm sure we'll expand upon that, but in terms of what I did, I would say I had, I think two main roles that I did. One, the purpose why they hired me was to do I think what we call lifestyle counseling. So I used to work as a personal trainer, so I had the fitness background as well, and my employers liked that as well, so that I could talk with people both about food and physical activity. They also wanted me to talk to people about sleep hygiene and stuff. I have no in that, so I didn't really spend time talking with people about that. But we talked about food, we talked about physical activity, and what I didn't realize until I got in there and started the job was that the approach that they wanted me to take was very prescriptive.
It was appointment number one, you talk about this appointment number two, you talk about this appointment number three, you talk about this, et cetera. That wasn't the way I was trained. It wasn't the way that I was. When I say trained, I mean that's not the way I learned in my schooling or in my internship. It's not how I was used to going about my work, and I didn't realize it was going to be like that until I started working there and they started to kind of give me my training, my orientation. Then it became clear that, oh, okay, this is how they want me to do it. All right, okay, this feels a little uncomfortable, a little bit weird, but, and as part of that lifestyle counseling, they had me doing body composition testing using a BIA machine and also weighing patients, which was fairly uncomfortable.
I was basically putting patients on diets, weight loss diets for the most part. During my interview process, they made clear to me that supplements were a big part of how they worked in terms of recommending supplements, selling supplements to patients, but they told me directly that I wasn't going to be in a position where I had to be pushing supplements, which was great. I wasn't really comfortable with that. And then once I started there, it became clear that wasn't true. They did actually expect me to push supplements, and in fact, they tracked how many supplements each practitioner sold, and it was part of our annual review process. So I felt a bit misled there. The other thing was I didn't know until I started working there that they also wanted me to put patients on detoxes. There were two versions of the detox. The most common was a four week, so 28 day detox.
It was basically like an elimination diet. There were also some supplements involved, but for the most part it was a pretty strict elimination diet, and I wasn't terribly comfortable with that either. It was not something I expected to have to do. I'm imagining what it might be like for our listeners right now to be thinking like, okay, well here's this guy and he's talking about he started this job and very clearly off the bat it's not what he expected. Why did he stick around? I mentioned that this was one of the first jobs that I had as a dietitian, but my first job was a temporary research position that when I took it, we knew it was only going to be a two month position, and then the role was going to be over, the research was going to be done, and it was going to be time for me to move on.
And then after that, I took a job and ended up working in outpatient counseling practice where we just simply didn't have enough patients and they had to lay me off after two months. And I also had another counseling job that I quit after literally four hours because it became clear immediately that they weren't going to be paying me in accordance to the contract that we had signed. So I was like, this just isn't going to work. So after those three jobs, I went back to my old college and I went to the career center there and I was doing some work with a career counselor just trying to help me figure out what was next. And one of the things she said to me was like, you're new to this field of dietetics and you've had three jobs in less than a year. Whatever job you take next, you need to stay there for at least a couple of years.
You need to show that you can hold a job in this profession. And that next job happened to be this alternative medicine clinic. So even though I got in there and I started seeing red flags immediately in the back of my mind, I had that career counselor's words echoing in my mind saying, you got to stay there. You got to stay there. And I also knew, okay, well the economy's bad. It was hard to get a job, and I guess I kind of got to stay here and I'm not making excuses, I'm just sort of explaining that's sort of the lay of the land. That's where I was operating from when I went in there. So even though they started springing stuff on me like, Hey, you have to push supplements. Hey, you have to do these detoxes. Hey, this lifestyle counseling is very prescriptive, et cetera, et cetera. I felt like I didn't have much choice, so I stayed.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that makes complete sense. I can understand the pressure to stay in an environment like that. What was the sort of response of patients to the prescriptive counseling to the detoxes and elimination diets and supplements? Did you get a sense that it was working? Did you get a sense that people liked it? What was that like
Jonah Soolman: In terms of the detoxes? I think that most of the people who chose to do a detox did so because something was bothering them. They had some sort of symptom that they hadn't been able to figure out, and they liked the idea of this process is going to help me to figure it out. At least that's what they were told. And also, I think that people kind of liked the idea, the fallacy of I can undo something. I can undo damage that's been done to my body even though it doesn't work like that. That's sort of the message that the doctors were selling them when the doctors would tell them to do the detox. And so patients like that aspect, and I mean over the course of 28 days, a lot of symptoms would sometimes improve, but it doesn't mean that they improve because of the detox.
I say the same thing about the whole 30 diet. It's like over the course of a month, symptoms come and go. Something is bound to improve over the course of 28 days or 30 days or whatever. And if you're doing a program like that, you just kind of assume that it was the detox or the elimination diet or whatever that caused the improvement, but that's not necessarily the case. It could just be that whatever was bothering the person just resolved. So it was a little bit misleading, I think, in terms of what patients took away from the experience with the detox in terms of the lifestyle counseling, there was a lot of pressure on me to bring about weight loss. I felt the pressure both from my bosses and from the patients, that was pretty uncomfortable. I mean, when patients would be losing weight, they were very happy.
Some of them would call me a guru, which always just I felt sort of cringey about because I was like, I don't actually really know what I'm doing here. I don't have any secret for how to do this. I'm just putting you on a diet. But, but when the weight loss would stop or when the weight would start to return, patients would get frustrated. Oftentimes they'd get frustrated with me because I was the one who would help them bring about the weight loss. So they'd be looking to me for some sort of solution, like, okay, what do we do now? And I was like, I don't know. I don't have any magic solution here. That was uncomfortable for both myself and a lot of the patients, the lifestyle counseling that I ran into quite a few unhappy patients, whereas the detox, I think people tended to walk away happy oftentimes, but it was sort of like a misguided happiness. They thought they had learned one thing about their bodies or whatever, but they probably really hadn't.
Christy Harrison: Interesting. I mean, related to that, you mentioned Offline that you were doing some kinds of testing, different kinds of testing for people. Can you talk a little bit about the kinds of testing you were doing and what you know about those tests now that maybe you didn't know back then or didn't know as clearly as you know now?
Jonah Soolman: Yeah. Thank you for reminding me about that. I forgot, as part of the lifestyle counseling and as part of the detoxes patients would do IgG food sensitivity testing, which you and I know is not terribly accurate. And so patients would receive these results and they'd come to me with these panels of dozens of foods that they had been tested for, and there were many positives that would come up. And one anecdote that I told you Offline, but I want to tell the listeners was I remember there's this one time when our lab made a mistake. I knew the phlebotomist really well. It was an honest mistake, and they told me about it. They had taken, I believe it was two vials of blood from the same patient, and they accidentally mislabeled one as being from a different patient and set them both for IgG and one would think because it's the same blood sample that they would come back with the same results.
But they came back with different results, which just showed how inaccurate they were because it was the same blood sample, but two different results. Oftentimes, people would look at the results and they'd say to me like, oh, man, I tested positive for all my favorite foods. And it's like, yeah, no kidding. Because my understanding is that IgG testing, it's more the results are more reflective of exposure. So if you've eaten a food recently or frequently, I forget exactly what it is, but you're more likely to test positive to that food. So no wonder that someone would test positive to the foods that they eat frequently, but then that would mislead patients because then they would feel like, oh, okay, well that must be why I'm not feeling well. It must be because I eat whatever. I'm just making this up, but I eat raspberries every day and I tested positive to raspberries.
The reason I must have acne is because I was eating raspberries or whatever. Therefore, if I cut out the raspberries, my skin is going to get better. And it's like, no, that's probably not going to happen. But that was the message that they were told. I sort of tried to justify it to myself from my side of the table as feeling like, okay, well, this seems kind of sketchy to me. This isn't an approach to medicine that I would choose for myself, but the people who come here, this is what they want. This is what they've chosen for themselves. They've made an informed decision, and this is what they want to do, so that's their business. But what I came to realize was that for a lot of patients, it wasn't an informed decision. They weren't told about the limitations of these tests and approaches and everything.
They didn't understand what they were getting themselves into. And I felt really bad about that. And I remember this one specific patient I had who he came back to me with his IgG results, and he said to me, he's like, do I really have to avoid all these foods that I've tested positive to? And I felt really stuck because on one hand I was like, okay, if I tell him, no, you don't have to really avoid all these things, then I know it's going to come back and bite me because then this patient's going to go tell the doctor who ordered the test. And then that doctor who also happens to be my boss is going to give me grief, but then if I don't tell the patient, then he's going to walk away feeling like he has to avoid all these foods that he doesn't actually have to avoid. And so I felt pretty stuck there. I believe I ended up being honest with him and told him, no, you don't have to. But I just remember, I felt like I was in those of positions quite often where it was just kind of an icky feeling and uncomfortable feeling
Christy Harrison: Completely. I'm so curious about the doctors and that piece of it, and I know you don't want to give away too much information for various reasons. It's not about naming them, but I'm just curious because I think this happens so often in these alternative medicine type spaces where someone will have an actual md. These were credentialed medical doctors, right?
Jonah Soolman: Correct. Yes.
Christy Harrison: But they're giving these tests that are really not evidence-based and doing things that are shady and pushing supplements and stuff like that. And I think so many people tend to get misled because they think, well, this is a medical doctor and maybe insurance even covers it. And so it feels like it's safe and it feels like it's evidence-based medicine and it's really not. So I'm curious if you have any thoughts on that to share.
Jonah Soolman: Yeah, I mean, I think I was a patient, I'm still a patient in my life before I ever became a practitioner, and I think before I became a practitioner myself, I had this belief that whether it's doctors, dietitians, whoever, the people who work in the medical field, that they all know what they're doing. They all have my best interests in mind, their ethics or sound. And then when I got into the profession, I found that that's just not always the case. Doctors, dietitians, et cetera, we're all just people too. And people don't always have patient interest as the priority. They don't always know what they're doing when they do it. And I kind of lumped myself in there to an extent too, to be honest. I mean here I was putting people on detoxes and stuff like that when I didn't think it was a great idea.
I didn't have sound evidence behind what I was doing, but I was doing it anyways. I felt pressured. And again, I'm not excusing myself, I'm just explaining. And doctors, they feel financial pressure, whatever happens to be, I mean, they have their own reasons for doing what they're doing, and it's not necessarily about prioritizing patient care. I mean, the doctors, like you said, I'm not going to name names. I'm not going to mention where I work or anything like that. Not even really the point anyways for them, this was their way of trying to attain fame and fortune. They thought they were going to have dozens of locations spread out over the country. They thought they were going to become famous for this. They thought they were going to establish their own medical school, and they also thought that this was their path also to making a lot of money.
I mean, I remember with the supplements, for example, we had a price sheet where it had the wholesale price listed in one column, and then it had the price that we were selling it for, which is basically a hundred percent markup. We were specifically told never let the patients see this. They didn't want patients to know how much profit they were making off of these supplements, but it was a really big money maker. I mean, they would do other things too. For example, if I had an appointment with a patient, I would meet with a patient for say, 45 minutes, and then the doctor would come in at the very end sometimes for maybe just a minute, maybe five minutes. But what that enabled them to do was they would bill the insurance as a doctor's visit, and they could make a whole lot more money if they billed it as a doctor's visit rather than a dietitian's visit.
But I mean, it's not like the patient was getting anything out of those one to five minutes with a doctor. I mean, I would basically just explain to the doctor what we had talked about, and the doctor would be like, okay, it was just a way of making money. I mean, I remember when they hired me and they were training me at first, they brought in this outside consultant who also had a lifestyle counseling practice, and they were having her train me. I remember they kept on emphasizing to me how much money she made a year through her practice. Therefore, I should be trying to replicate what she does, not because she's necessarily a good clinician, but because she makes a lot of money. There's just a lot of emphasis on the financial piece of things, and that's just the reality of how some people in the healthcare field are.
And it's not just an alternative medicine sort of thing. I mean, I remember going to a mainstream, actually, I've got several mainstream medical conferences over the years where I go to the tabling sessions or the poster sessions or whatever, and there are vendors, they're advertising different programs that doctors can bring into their practice, and they're not advertising how much this can help your patients. They're advertising how much money this can make you. And that's really, I don't know if patients who work outside the profession realize how much finances play and the drive to make money plays in some of the decisions that doctors make. And that was certainly true with where I worked
Christy Harrison: Well and that alternative medicine providers make too. I think that's the interesting piece of this as well. I think in wellness culture, there's so much made of doctors don't want you to know, and doctors are just out for profit. Doctors are in the pocket of big pharma, blah, blah, blah. So try our supplements, do our natural health thing, do this alternative medicine thing instead, because the implication is alternative medicine actually cares about you and actually wants to get to the quote root cause of the problem and all that, which is such appealing Rhetoric for anyone who feels sidelined or dismissed or unserved by conventional healthcare or who has encountered physicians who really don't have their best interest at heart and are primarily in it for profit. And those types of doctors are out there, but then it's conveniently neglected that alternative medicine is also rife with all that kind of stuff.
And in some cases, I think more so because there's at least some oversight and need for disclosure at least, of how much money doctors are taking pharmaceutical companies, let's say, and you can look it up and for medical doctors, there's a database to look that up. But for naturopaths or chiropractors or acupuncturists or whatever, there's not. And also I think there's not the same kind of tracking of the financial relationships that people in the integrative medicine space, which it sounds like these doctors were, it's like alternative medicine with an md. That's what's kind of known as integrative medicine. There's not the sort of same emphasis on tracking financial relationships in those spaces when it's not about pharmaceutical companies when it's like a relationship with a supplement company or a testing company or something like that. I don't think there's the same kind of transparency there. But I think from what you're saying and from what I've found in my research on alternative medicine, it's like those kinds of financial relationships and decisions that are made for financial benefit as opposed to patient care are rampant in that space too. And it's, I think something people really would do well to understand in this environment where it's like, yeah, conventional medicine's got you down. Come on over here where we're not into big pharma. And it's like, okay, but you're into all this other wacky stuff that is just as problematic.
Jonah Soolman: Yeah, that's a really good point. And you explained that really well. I'm glad that you said all that. I mean, I think people can't discount what a significant factor the supplements play in all of this in terms of the finances. A doctor can run a sketchy blood test that's going to show a result that tells someone that they need this supplement that, Hey, we just happened to sell in-house at a huge markup, and now this person is going to be paying out of pocket for this supplement, and once they finish one bottle, they're going to come back and buy another and then another and then another. And the same patient who comes in next is going to be doing the same thing, and then all this passive income starts coming in. So there's this a massive amount of money that can be made there. If you convince someone that they need the supplement and this supplement is going to help, then all this money starts flowing in.
I mean, I remember one of the doctors who worked at the practice, they got into H C G for implementation for rate loss. That's not something that I did. I wasn't involved with that. But I remember at one point, one of the doctors asked, I believe it was a member of the front desk, how much are we selling the H C G for? And the woman at the front desk told him, and he got excited because it was so much money and he knew how much money was being made there. And yeah, I mean if people think integrative, alternative, holistic, whatever term we want to use, that people who work in that space are somehow pure at heart. It's not like that. It's just not. And so I'm really glad that you said what you said.
Christy Harrison: Thanks. Yeah, that's something that's on my mind so much because of the Rhetoric that's around floating around in wellness spaces online and that I've heard from even people who are listeners or people who've been listeners of Food Psych and are interested in eating disorder recovery, but want healing from other chronic conditions and are sort of looking for more holistic modalities. I think it's so easy to get seduced by that Rhetoric that over here we're pure and we're not influenced by money and we're not influenced by anything other than true patient care. And it's like that's a sales pitch, actually, right? That's the pitch.
Jonah Soolman: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think a lot about the Food Psych episode that you did with Alan Ovitz, I hope I'm saying his last name right? I've never met him. I've listened to him. I've read his book, I've read transcripts of his interviews, and he's an incredibly smart man. One of the things that he talks about is how seductive a lot of these pitches are and how it kind of plays into people's weaknesses and their fears and kind of telling people what they want to hear. I mean, one of my favorite quotes from him, and I'm paraphrasing because I don't remember exactly what it is, but he is basically talking about how scary it is to live in a world where there's all these conditions that we don't really understand why they come about or how to treat them. But then if you tell someone like, Hey, I have the answer, and the answer is that you avoid these things over here and you take these things over here and there doesn't even have to be a foundation for these claims, but just the fact that someone is telling you that, Hey, I can help you with this, that's just so enticing, and that's just a huge part of how, at least in my experience, a huge part of how alternative medicine operates.
Christy Harrison: I'm curious in that vein, sort of what the patients who the clinic was seeing were coming in for. Do you feel like they were not being served by conventional medicine in a lot of ways or what had attracted them to that practice?
Jonah Soolman: I think a lot of them, not all of them, but a lot of them were people who had for various reasons, grown wary of mainstream medicine. They didn't trust mainstream medicine, they didn't trust the people who worked there for the reasons that we've been discussing. They felt like, oh, it was corrupt or whatever, and that this alternative approach was somehow more natural and more pure at heart, and I mean patients would come for all sorts of conditions. It could be anything from, I used the example of acne before. It could be anything from that to, I remember I had this woman who had stage four cancer and didn't want to go the route that her P C P was recommending for her in terms of, I can't remember if it was chemo, radiation, whatever it was. I honestly don't remember, but she felt like this sort of alternative medicine approach was more likely to help her or would be more comfortable to her or whatever.
I remember this one patient that I had, he had a kind of cardiovascular disease. I do remember what kind, but I don't want to say it because I don't want to be too specific. The doctors at my clinic had convinced him that rather than going the traditional route to treat this, that they instead had an IV infusion approach that would help him, and he found this really appealing, and so he started doing, I believe it was one infusion a week pretty much every week, I think for almost a year. And what no one told him was that this particular IV infusion approach, the American Cancer Society had expressed concern, might increase cancer risk. No one had told him this, and then after about a year of doing these infusions, he got diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer and died two weeks later. And that was the point at which I gave my notice.
To me, I felt like I worked really hard in school. I worked really hard in my training and everything. I got into this profession and did all this work because I wanted to help people and we're clearly not helping people, and that was just sort of the tipping point for me. I was just like, I'm not saying that the doctors killed them. I'm not saying that, but it would be one thing if he had been told like, Hey, there's this risk, even if it's a theoretical risk, some people out there think that this treatment could increase cancer risk if that had been explained to him. And he was like, okay, yeah, I get it. I understand, but I still think that this is the right course of action for me, then fine. He's an adult. He made his decision. He made an informed decision, but the fact that this was never explained to him, and he went into this blindly because the doctors wanted to be selling him these expensive infusions every week that he was paying for out of pocket at the expense of legitimate treatments that he could have been doing, and then he died.
That was just too much. I was just like, I just can't be part of this anymore. I just couldn't do it. So that's when I gave my notice.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that's completely understandable. I would be horrified to learn that too. I think if that was going on with a patient of mine, it's the notion that people aren't getting informed consent, I think is a really huge thing in spaces like this, in alternative medicine. I think there's such a lack of informed consent and such clarity, and this is the only way kind of attitude that a lot of recommendations are delivered with in alternative medicine that it kind of obscures how illegitimate not scientifically based or in some cases maybe there's some nugget of potential Scientific basis, even though it's speculative and not really shown in randomized controlled trials. Maybe there's some sort of reason to believe something might work. And then in other cases, there's just no Scientific evidence, no good Scientific evidence or really any evidence at all as to why something might work, and yet providers can deliver their recommendations with such authority and such confidence, and this is the way, and all these other doctors have missed this, but I found it, and we're going to do all these tests and I'm going to help you and we're going to get better and we're going to get through this together.
That is so seductive and so appealing to anyone who is struggling with chronic conditions or conditions that were missed or have been misdiagnosed, and people are really in the alternative medicine spaces. Clinicians are really doing people a disservice by not giving stronger informed consent and getting stronger informed consent, doing more informing that these methods are really not proven. This is experimental. This is based on what I learned in whatever integrative medicine continuing education I did or whatever. This isn't something that actually has good science behind it.
Jonah Soolman: Very good point. I mean, I remember with the IgG testing panel that they would run, and also I believe it was the candida testing that they did too. I believe at the footer of the test results, there were some disclaimer, I can't remember the exact words, but it basically, I think said for research purposes only the company who is doing it was basically trying to say, this isn't really a legit diagnostic tool, but that's how the doctors were using it. I remember I had this one patient who she did the candida test and came back positive, and the doctor sent her to me, put her on this candida diet, and we talked about it, and I remember she was crying, literally crying, I really don't want to do this. She was so upset, and ultimately she didn't do it. But then she went back for, I can't remember how many weeks later, she went back to her.
That same doctor got a follow-up candida test, and this time she tested negative and the doctor said to her, see, you really didn't want to do the diet, but you did it and look how much better you are. But she didn't do it, and I, because then she met with me again and she's like, I'm supposedly better now. I didn't do anything. And it just goes to show how inaccurate these tests are, but the way that they're presented to patients is just like you said, these are legitimate things and we're going to find what the other guys didn't find. Conventional medicine let you down. We're not going to do that. We are going to get to the bottom of this. We're going to figure it out. That message, even though it's often not true, it's just so appealing, especially to someone who feels like they've been let down by a doctor at some point previously in their life.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, completely. I mean, I have so many chronic health conditions and spent so many years trying to get diagnosed and get the right treatments, and there's still things that are unraveling, and it's really frustrating process, and I have think because of feeling dismissed and feeling like no one could figure out what was going on with me in the beginning, it was natural that I would be attracted to alternative medicine and going down rabbit holes of my own research, finding things that were really not evidence-based and not good for me, and that probably exacerbated the problems that I had and may have contributed to new problems that I developed and just not great. And I look back on that now with so much compassion because I think I was really desperate. I was really struggling and I was just looking for whatever I could find, and I think at the time it felt like, well, what do I have to lose?
This is maybe kind of weird and out there, but I might as well try it. And especially with regards to diet stuff, it's like, well, it's just diet. It's just food. I can always switch back if I want to. Not recognizing how risky it actually is to mess with your diet. Going on a diet is a huge risk, I think for most people because we live in a culture that primes us for disordered eating, and so going on a diet is kind of lighting a match to this Tinder that's already there and most of us,
Jonah Soolman: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the increased eating disorder risk of going down that route, it's not something that's really taken into account, but I mean it's understandable. I mean, you were suffering, you wanted to feel better, and so you were just looking for anything that could potentially help. And I get that a lot of the patients who came to see me, they were often in desperate situations where they felt not desperate in the sense of their lives weren't at risk, but desperate in the sense that they were just so frustrated they hadn't been able to figure out why something was wrong or how to treat what was wrong, and they were just looking for answers. And then here along come these doctors who are more than happy to fill that void and be like, I've got the answer. Even if they don't really have the answer, that's almost like secondary, there's something that's so comforting to hear someone say, I've got the answer. I can help you. And oftentimes I felt like we were taking advantage of desperate people.
Christy Harrison: I mean, there's something I discovered in my research for the book, the Wellness Trap about the care effect. It's known as a care effect, which is kind of a placebo effect that comes from having someone take you seriously, having someone empathize with you and give you the kind of care that we all really deserve, the kind of care that makes you feel like you're being heard and that someone's going to get to the bottom of things and that they're just, they're listening and they're there with you. That in and of itself can help people feel better, and I know for me, having doctors who conveyed that sense of reassurance and empathy, and we're going to get to the bottom of this, other people have let you down, but I'm not going to, that hope did help me feel better in those early days of working with a new provider. And then when things would kind of go sideways and they wouldn't work out the way I expected, and maybe the doctor sort of doubled down on their previous recommendation, then it kind of got muddy and that placebo effect started to wear off. But I think the profound impact that empathy and support and having someone who really feels like they're on your team can have on people shouldn't be underestimated, and I think we could use a lot more of that in conventional medicine too.
Jonah Soolman: Yeah, totally. I mean, it makes me think of in another facet of life when I've contacted tech support for a computer issue or something, and the representative says, I'll be happy to help you with that. I can help you with that. When they say that the stress level just goes down, I'm like, great, this person's going to help me. And oftentimes they end up not, but there's this something that's so comforting about that, and certainly I hear what you're saying in terms of healthcare, there is that sort of placebo effect that can happen at first, that care effect, as you said. Yeah, that's a real thing. Certainly. Yeah,
Christy Harrison: And I think that keeps people coming back to these alternative medicine practices in some cases where they're not actually getting good care and they're not actually getting the kinds of interventions that are going to help them. And in fact, maybe these interventions are doing damage in some of the examples you gave, and yet the care effect is so powerful that it's like people want that people more of that, and so they'll often keep coming back for more in those spaces for longer than they maybe would if they didn't feel like the doctor was really listening to them.
Jonah Soolman: Yeah. Yeah, that's true.
Christy Harrison: We talked a little bit about eating disorders, and I'm curious to hear more about what the attitude of the doctors at this alternative medicine clinic were to eating disorders. You mentioned Offline that you had some interesting conversations with them about patients with an eating disorder history.
Jonah Soolman: It was a risk that was not taken into account at all as far as I can remember. The anecdote that I shared with you Offline, if I remember correctly, it was a patient who was referred to me for one of those detoxes and she had an eating disorder history, and that was in her chart. I remember talking with this patient at this point in my career, I didn't know much about eating disorders either. My wife was working in that space, so she knew quite a bit about them, but for me, that just wasn't what I was focused on at that time. But I knew enough about them to know that, okay, well, putting someone with an eating disorder history on this very restrictive detox doesn't seem like a great idea. And I remember talking with the patient and being like, are you concerned at all that eliminating all these foods and everything for four weeks is going to trigger anything for you?
And she was like, oh, no, no, that's in my past. But I remember then after that, I got called into a meeting with my boss with one of my bosses, and there was also one of the business directors was also there, and they both gone on me for the doctor was unhappy that I had been hesitant to put this patient on the detox because she said she really wanted to, I can't remember what word she used, but basically said she really wanted to jolt this patient, really give her a jolt to show her how much better she could feel in four weeks basically. And so she was unhappy that I hadn't totally backed her up, and this business manager started getting on me too about it, and I was like, why is this guy even here? He's not even, but again, finances. He didn't like the fact that I hadn't fully supported what the doctor was trying to do.
That's why he was there. But again, no one cared that this patient had a history of an eating disorder. That just wasn't something that was taken into account. And certainly no one took into account the increased risk of eating disorders that we were certainly creating for probably pretty much every patient that I saw, whether someone was coming for a detox or someone was coming for weight loss, lifestyle counseling, whatever you want to hear, coming for a candida diet, whatever, all these things, they had to increase eating disorder risk, how could they not? And that was something it just wasn't even talked about. It wasn't talked about internally. It wasn't talked about with the patients. It's as if it wasn't a thing. It just wasn't even on anyone's radar. And looking back, that's really horrifying. I look back and I'm just like, I feel so much shame for so many different reasons for the work that I did there. And now that I work in the eating disorder space, I feel especially bad because I'm sure that some of my former patients had to have gone on to develop disordered eating and or eating disorders. How could they not have? And to know that I played a role in that and bringing that about for someone who got into a helping profession to know that you did the opposite. For some people, that's just a horrible feeling.
Christy Harrison: It is.
Jonah Soolman: And so I feel awful about that.
Christy Harrison: I mean, it's completely understandable, and I'm struck by how open and honest you are in all of this as sort of a way to, you mentioned Offline that you're sort of atoning for it in a sense.
Jonah Soolman: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, I feel like I can't undo what I did, but I can try and talk with people about it in hopes that maybe someone else won't go down that same road. That's why I am pretty open about this stuff. Even though talking about this, I think that if I were a listener and I was listening to myself, I don't know if I'd walk away with a good impression of this guy. I don't know if I would be like, Hey, this is a dietitian that I want to see because he's done some sort of sketchy stuff in his career. If a listener feels like that, I totally get that. I absolutely get that. But I talk about this stuff anyways. I feel like it's my responsibility now because of the damage that I did. It's my responsibility to try and help people to avoid going down that same road in the future. I just sort of feel like that's kind of what my duty is. Now,
Christy Harrison: On a related note to that, how do you see alternative medicine and integrative and functional and holistic and all of that stuff now after that experience? And what would you want people to know if they're considering using it?
Jonah Soolman: A quick story that relates to that. So before I switched careers and became a dietitian, because like I had a previous career. My previous career was I was a research analyst for the Department of Transportation. Most of my work was in the trucking industry, but I also did some work with alternative fuels. And one of my colleagues, what he used to say was, alternative fuels are alternative for a reason. One fuel, for example, maybe it reduces tailpipe emissions, but it creates so much pollution at the factory where it's made that the net result isn't any better, or maybe another fuel if you get into a fender bender, it's so unstable that your car explodes or it's just so expensive, no one can afford it, et cetera, et cetera. And so that notion of these things were alternatives for a reason. I think that applies also to alternative medicine in terms of there are reasons, legitimate reasons why these approaches are not part of mainstream medicine.
If they worked as well as alternative medicine practitioners want us to believe, then everyone would be offering them, but they don't. Oftentimes the research just isn't there to support it. The results aren't there to support the claims that are made about them, and so they stay on the fringes instead of the mainstream. And there's reasons for that. That's what I would hope that people would take away is it's not about, oh, mainstream medicine is corrupt, big pharma, et cetera, et cetera. They don't want you to know the truth. It's that these other things just aren't proven enough to be really relied upon. And I think that's really the truth of it, and that's what I would hope that people would take away.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I love that. I think that's really helpful and concise sort of way to put it. And I agree, if this stuff was really as effective as they make it out to be, it would be everywhere. And it's not some vast conspiracy to cover it up, just no, there's just not good evidence behind it. This podcast is called Rethinking Wellness, and I've been asking guests what that means to them, what it means to rethink wellness. And so I'm curious, from your experience, especially going through this with the alternative medicine space, how have you rethought or maybe are you still rethinking wellness for yourself and what does true wellbeing look like outside of the pitfalls of wellness culture?
Jonah Soolman: Well, one thing that immediately comes to mind is we dropped the term wellness from our business name about five years ago when you and I recorded that Food Psych episode, the name of our practice was Soul and Nutrition and Wellness. And then in 2018, we decided to drop the and wellness and just be soul and nutrition. I started to realize, I was like, well, what does wellness even really mean? And I couldn't even remember really why I chose to put that name in the business. When we started the business, I was like, I don't even remember my rationale. And it's just such a charged word that means so many different things to different people. Some people would see that word and they would approach us expecting that I would do sort of alternative nutrition sort of stuff with them, and I didn't. I started to understand how maybe that term was misleading to people, and so we just dropped it.
It's just such a convoluted term. I think for myself, you, I've had a series of health problems. I've had three back surgeries. My back is still not great, et cetera, and it's just so easy to fall into the trap of wanting to feel better and feeling frustrated and desperate that there's just no easy answers, and to start going down the path of sketchy approaches with promises that things will help even if they really don't. And I think that the reason I bring that up is I think that because of the experience that I had working where I did and doing the kind of work that I did, I think I've started to understand better that wellness, however we want to define it, isn't always completely attainable. In a hundred years, healthcare is going to have so many more answers than we have today. We're going to have such a deeper understanding of things, and we do today, and then a hundred years after that, they'll have even a more complete understanding mean.
But as we sit here today, there's still a lot of questions that we just don't have answers for. People die every day of diseases that we don't know how to cure. And so I think there's certain degree of acceptance. I think I have started to feel that maybe I didn't feel before, just sort of in terms of this limitation far of how far we can get in terms of wellness, how much better can we actually get before we start bumping up against things that just aren't feasible, things that we just don't know how to do. And so within wellness, I think we just have to accept that we can't completely control these things. And I know you know that, and I know a lot of your listeners know that too. But it's true. A lot of what happens to our body, a lot of what happens to our health, it's just out of our hands. It's not in our control. And I think that I'm more conscious of that because of my personal experience and also my professional experience.
Christy Harrison: That's so well said. Thank you for sharing that, and thank you for everything you shared. This is really, really great, and I'm excited to chat a little bit more for the bonus episode. If you can still stick around for that. I want to dig in a little bit more to that idea of acceptance. I think that's something that takes a lot of people many years to come to. And I get questions a fair amount from people who were like, how do I get to a place of acceptance? How do I stop feeling resistance to the idea of letting go and accepting that these are my limitations or whatever. And so I'm interested to hear more of what you have to say about that, and then to talk a little bit more about a couple other things that came up during the episode as well, so we can stick around for that. But in the meantime, can you let people know where they can find you online, learn more about your work and connect with you if they like?
Jonah Soolman: We do have social media accounts, but we're not very active on social media now in comparison to how we were in the past. So the best way for people to find us is just simply to go to our website, which is soman nutrition.com, and that's really the best way.
Christy Harrison: Awesome. Yeah, we'll put a link to that in the show notes. I love a simple website link. I'm also have stopped giving out my social media handles because I don't really do much there, and it's nice to be more Offline in that way.
Jonah Soolman: Definitely.
Christy Harrison: Well, thank you again, Jonah. This was a real pleasure and excited to talk with you more.
Jonah Soolman: Thank you so much.
Christy Harrison: So that's our show! Thanks so much to our amazing guest for being here, and to you for tuning in. If you've enjoyed this conversation, I’d be so grateful if you could take a moment to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you’re listening. You can also support the show by becoming a paid subscriber for just a few bucks a month. With a paid subscription, you unlock great perks like bonus episodes, subscriber-only Q&As, early access to regular episodes, and much more. Sign up now at rethinkingwellness.substack.com.
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Rethinking Wellness is executive produced and hosted by me, Christy Harrison. Mike Lalonde is our audio editor and sound engineer, and administrative support is provided by Julianne Wotasik and her team at A-Team Virtual. Our album art is by Tara Jacoby, and our theme song is written and performed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Thanks again for listening! Take care!
I Worked at an Alternative Medicine Clinic. Here's What I Want You to Know.