How Beliefs Affect Your Skin and Health with Dr. Mario Martinez

Dr. Cates: Hi there. Welcome to The Spa Dr. Podcast. I’m Dr Trevor Cates. On today’s podcast we’re talking about how beliefs affect your skin and your health. My guest is Dr. Mario Martinez. He is a clinical neuropsychologist who specializes in how cultural beliefs impact health and longevity. He proposes that longevity is learned and the causes of health are inherited. He has studied healthy individuals a hundred years or older worldwide and found that only 20 to 25% can be attributed to genetics. The rest is related to how they live and the cultural beliefs they share. Dr. Martinez is the author of the bestselling book, the Mind Body Code, how to change the beliefs that limit your health, longevity and success. In today’s interview, we talk about how to identify situations and beliefs that are impacting your health and your skin, and Dr. Martinez gives us specific examples on ways to shift these into healing opportunities for your skin and your health. So please enjoy this interview. Mario is so great to have you back on The Spa Dr. Podcast. Welcome.

Dr. Martinez: Thank you. Thank you. It’s been a while and I really, really enjoy our conversations.

Dr. Cates: Yeah, absolutely. So for people who didn’t catch your podcast interview when you came on before, let’s do a little review of, of that. Just start, because I think it’s so interesting and I do encourage people to go back and watch that because everything from that interview is still relevant and we want to just add on to the new things that you’ve been discovering. So it’s great. Well, we’ll get into that soon. But just to, to start, I love, I, you know, I’m so fascinated by this idea that we covered last time on that we’re so impacted by our culture, how we’re raised, who’s in our environment, the people around us and not just on a psychological level but on a physical level too. And so, um, you know, give us, give everybody kind of an overview of what we, you know, what we talked about last time and as it regards to that. Okay.
Dr. Martinez: No, I think your audience will be very compatible because of the work you do. But what I’m bringing into science is that we, it’s, it’s indisputable now. The everyone would agree that mind and body communicate with each other. I think what’s missing is that it communicates in a cultural context. And culturally the easiest way to describe it all anthropologists will argue for, for eight years, basically very simple. It’s a collective belief or thought about other important things in life, aesthetics, wellness, ethics, things that are really mad. And since it’s our biology will follow our consciousness and our belief system, then culture is very powerful. Neuropsychologically can, I can give you a lot of examples. Acidominologically. So basically the way to look at it is that the world is out there and the world has infinite possibility of interpretation. You can interpret in many ways and the culture will weave a fabric around the world and what you see as the fabric rather than the world. So an example of that, if you shame somebody in the United States, which is a individualistic culture, and the person who sees the shame feels the shame, they have inflammatory molecules, tumor necrosis factor. And other things. You go to a collective culture like Korea or Japan and you insult them, they would only have that response if they see that an insult as shaming their family, their job, their people. So it’s a collectivist kind of thing. If you ask people to see things neuropsychological, you show them something and the individualists cultures will remember details or the individual, the collectors will remember interactions between the individual and the environment. So it’s, it’s the, the brain is cultural and the immune system is culture. It has to be because we lost our epigenetics that we have as animals. A rat, you give them a poison and you let them grow them. And the two rats will never eat the poison again, nor their offsprings will eat the poison. But we lost that because we have language. We just say don’t eat that. But in order to compensate, the immune system has to respond to bio symbols, not just to, to, to the biology, but the bio symbols. And here you see a stop sign and you stop. And you might have even had a little bit of adrenaline. You go to the Amazons and they see an octagonal red thing with some, some red signs and white what appears to be symbols. No idea. No response. Why? Because we’re conditioned culturally for our biology to respond to whatever the collectivist a tribe says to us.

Dr. Cates: Yeah, absolutely. And so in the last podcast we talked about the impact that culture has on the aging process. And you looked at many, you talked to many people and different cultures that are over a hundred years old and living healthfully and vibrantly and you got some really interesting takeaways from those people.

Dr. Martinez: Yes, I studied the centenary, healthy centenarians all over the world, all the five stones and beyond. What I found is that at first I thought it was a neuropsychologist. Well, it’s going to be gene. So they even have the Methuselah gene. Well, that’s nonsense. 20% is only the genes consistently. What I found is that, and I had to develop a theory around these people because they know what they’re doing. And I had to learn from them. And what I found is that we culturally create these, what I called portals of aging, and each culture has a different way of looking at the portal. So for example, a portal is a newborn and you have the infant or the child, the adolescent, young adult, and then specially the middle age, which is really very significant. And then of course we have the elderly. All those things are mostly cultural rather than biological. So for example, if you, our cultural assessment, 45 is middle age. You’re in the fishbowl of that portal and middle age. Not only are you programmed or designed to to believe that because of what you were taught, but if you try to get out, they’ll admonish you back into that portal. What do you mean at 45 you’re middle age. You shouldn’t be thinking about going back and getting a phd. You have to go into your retirement. Why you wearing that skirt? Do you want to look like a teenager? And they bring you back into that and then you begin to age and you begin to get sick. The middle aged because your biology, would acquiesce to the portals and then in the aging, but I found is that the centenarians don’t have, they live agelessly. They live space conscious rather than time conscious. So they live in that future precedent that, that I was talking to you about before the interview, which I’ll talk about later. Sure. One of them I always remember because he had a vegetable garden and he was 102, and I said, that’s a really nice vegetable garden. What are you going to be doing with it? And said, well, this is nothing compared to four years from now. Where do you see it in four years? The guy’s 102. So they live in the present but with a future component, not afraid of dying. They see themselves as ageless. I saw another one in Cuba, 102 year old man said, look at that old guy. How he’s walking and the old guy was probably 30 years younger than him. So they don’t have a sense of age and they don’t have the aging. So the way I define it as growing older means passing of time. Inevitable aging is what you do with that time based on what you assimilated from your culture. And that’s what you see with people who retire. The brain is said to be curious. And then they go to far to watch the sunset. They’d get sick within the first year and that guy within four or five years, because we’re not built for that, we built, to be developmentally learning until the moment we die. So it’s totally different.

Dr. Cates: Yeah. So we want to keep active, keep thinking about the future and planning. And I mean, of course, I think it’s important to live in the moment too. But if you’re setting yourself up in that environment to where you’ve got other people that are living active lifestyle and they’re continuing to learn and grow and develop, then that helps support your own growth and development, right?

Dr. Martinez: Yes, very much. Because we’re, as you said, we’re social beings. We have to have someone that confirms, not necessarily our beliefs, but our consciousness and people that you can talk about and you can say again, the example of going back to school at 45, what a great idea. What are you going to major in that’s totally different then admonishing you back into some age that has, it’s been determined. For example, if you want to retire in, um, and in turn in say Australia, uh, you have to wait till 70. You want to retire and Turkey, you can retire at 45. So what does that mean? It’s just culturally determined in some countries in South America and in Europe, they’ll give you a cane social service when you turn 50, because eventually you’re gonna need it. And you see people with canes after 50. It’s, it’s, it’s totally cultural, not biological.

Dr. Cates: Yeah, absolutely. And, and so when we talk about disease, illnesses, diseases, what is around us and our surroundings, surroundings of what people say around us. What we believe ourselves has a very big impact on the physical body and does the disease process right? I mean there are a lot of different layers of course to disease, but I know that you’ve been looking at a lot about some of some of the diseases. And I know before we started the recording, we talked about skin diseases and how that can be impacted by our belief system.

Dr. Martinez: Yes and now we have the new religion is the high priest with the white coats. You know, especially allopathic model and the, the holy hosted, they give you us a pill and the wine that you drink is whatever medication you’re taking. So there’s a tremendous amount of placebo affect on the people that you give up your power to, instead of coauthor your health with. So what, and when they give you the sentence as well, this is how it is. You’re going to have to live with this forever, for the rest of your life. Or that’s how that is. And what do you want for your age, those kinds of admonitions that is empower you and take your personal agency away. It said, well I guess the doctor knows. So that’s it. I’m going to live with this. So when you begin to challenge that Info Info intelligently with the help of professionals are like yourself and other people. Okay? Then you can begin to challenge that. And you can say, all right, if the body is responding to my consciousness, and as you know, truly genetic illnesses are like 3 to 4%, no more. The rest is learned in some way the acquired illnesses. So you have an over, let’s say in a hyper, immunological response in this case would be like a skin disorder, psoriasis or whatever. So you begin to look at it and you begin to see, all right, my body is doing something that’s incompatible with the way it was designed to be. And those are the causes of health. As Homo Sapiens, we have 150,000 years of trial and error for the causes. Not, not to get sick, but what are the causes of health that we learned? And we can apply those that, that information is in. But it’s the wisdom that if you eat a hamburger, it turns into Trevor. How does it do that? Well, it’s tremendous intelligence that we have that, that it’s implicit. So what we try to do is to then go to that intelligence and say, all right, let’s say you have psoriasis and you do all the other things that you’re doing at diet and whatever the topic, topical, whatever. Now let’s look at it in a different way. In addition, let’s say that your immune system is over-responding, and in your case you have a genetic predisposition for skin disorders. Other people would be diabetes, whatever, predisposition and not sentence. Let’s find out how you are over responding to the world in general, how are you over, why is your immune system responding to If you have an analogy, just micro organism as if it were an elephant and other people don’t. Well, you have a predisposition. So in psoriasis for example, what you’re, you’re saying is, all right, let me look at this. What is my life like? Where am I only responding? Where am I a hyper vigilant about things and how did I learn to get sick? Which is really a hard thing for people to wrap their heads around. How does, how can you learn to get sick? You’re learn to get sick because eventually at some point, what happened, whatever happened to you, had a function. So let’s say you had a function for you to overreact in the world and maybe even have some allergies because it was necessary because you had abusive parents or because you were living in a war zone or whatever. That’s adaptive. And you don’t get sick there because there’s an override of conservation that’s necessary. Conservation will override any dysfunction. But if you keep living that and you’re no longer in the worst zone and you’re no longer with your parents who are abusive, then it loses the function. It reaches a critical mass and we give it a name, psoriasis or diabetes or whatever. We begin to treat the external process, rather than treating how this thing was learned. How did this person learn these behaviors and why is it that siblings, one will have it and another won’t because we have a very subjective reality is how we interpret the world. I’ve worked with patients who are identical twins were both, sexually abused by the father. And with three archetype of wounds that I’ve talked about, abandonment, betrayal and shame. One of them will see the abuse as betrayal. The other one will see it as shame. Identical genetics, and they each have a different psychoneuralogical processes with shame and abandonment. So those are examples. And what you want to do is become a detective or of your body in your body is a lab and you can get excited about what you’re going to be finding rather than, oh my God, I have this like this is a genetic thing or this is, I have to live with the rest of my life. And I’ve worked with so many different illnesses and seeing so many good things happening as I’m sure you have, that there’s something to this awareness. Am I over responding and responding or am I doing an auto, self destruction kind of thing? And in many cases because inflammation, in many cases, people with these kinds of problems, especially autoimmune have a shame archetype of wound I’ve seen, I have not seen in a thought or Myalgic who didn’t have some kind of shame, or a rheumatoid arthritis and most illnesses including depression is more inflammatory kinds of things then serotonin. So if you can identify the inflammatory components, then you can begin to see, okay, here it worked. And the other thing is that the patient could learn, look how intelligent you are. Your body knew how to uh, adjust to something very difficult that was necessary. And it was, it wasn’t making you sick, but now your body says, can we come up with something new and you’re not given it something new. So that’s some of the ideas,

Dr. Cates: I think it’s really important how we talk to ourselves, how we treat ourselves. Self talk is so powerful and I think that it’s automatic for, are most of us really, probably all of us. It’s like, did we become habitual? We can get into these patterns and it may start from our parents or siblings or others that are around us a lot, when we’re children. And that how we kind of are modeling from other people and how we see them treat themselves. And then we ended up doing it ourself. And it can be extremely powerful and both a negative way or a positive way. And I think that because it’s hard to see how our words are actually hurting our bodies in that moment for us to see with our own eyes. It’s hard for people to really understand that. But I really do feel it’s important to talk about.

Dr. Martinez: Yes. And, and the two areas, two times that we’re very vulnerable because these scripts that you’re talking about before we go to sleep and just when we wake up. So one of the techniques that I teach, in all of them, these interventions that I teach are all under a contemplative state. Something more than just it’s not hypnosis and relaxation, a reflective way of looking at things when the brain can turn off the prefrontal lobe of interpretation. So why? Because before you go to sleep, if you don’t do these techniques, you’re dumping the day into the dreams, into your sleep, then you will wake up and you don’t do it in the morning, dumping the dreams until the day. So it’s a vicious cycle of scripts. You wake up in the morning, Oh God, I want to have a psoriasis is going to be well, and you have a whole script about it. And what it does is not, not only does it perpetuate, but that level of stress will cause some immunological suppression with norepinephrine and so forth. And then your immune system is not doing its work. It’s confusing itself somewhere. So at least you, you get out of the scripts and then anytime you catch yourself with a script, I wonder how my psori Stop, uh, take a deep breath and say, okay, what, what am I doing now? Do Myself, to hurt myself. And, and the script is that you’re identifying yourself with that. Now I don’t mean just affirmations that I’m okay, it has to be embodied, has to be body. So the technique that I, that I mentioned to you, where you go into the future in your mind, and I’ll explain a little bit further, then not not only do you see yourself there, but you bring yourself into the present. You begin to live as if in the present. And uh, and Christiane Northrup and I have done this with anti aging with these ideas of looking at a picture of yourself 10 years earlier and then living it, throughout the day. Well, this works even better because if you look at a picture when you were 10 years, uh, earlier, and you felt more energetic and everything, it still has some contamination with old scripts. It could be that you look really good. It just happens that you were in a bad relationship. And all of those scripts start coming out with, he and I are so in the pristine future, you create whatever you want and then you live it. It’s not just an information, but it’s an embodied affirmation living it as if. And then you’ll see the psoriasis, and this may sound very naive, but there’s got good neuro psychology behind it. You see the psoriasis and you say, Oh yeah, this is, this is my mind body, a memory good. Okay, what is my, what is my present now? My present without it, I’ll act as if it’s not happening. And you would think that’s very naive. No. You creating neuro maps that are actually creating a reality that’s incompatible with the neuro maps. They maintain the psoriasis or whatever is that you’re trying to do. And as you know, neural maps that are not used begin to lose their power. And it’s not as simple as that. There’s a neuropsychological component to it as well as psychological component. But the thing about it is that you have to look at the culture. If the culture says your father had psoriasis, your uncle has psoriasis. That’s it. Yes. All right. You give up your agency. Well, that’s it. Instead of questioning it, that’s what centenarians we’ll do. I talked to centenary and he said that he went to the doctor and the doctor told him, you need to take this and this and this and he questions why you need to take this for this, this, for that, and said, okay, I’ll take think this, I won’t take the other two. You have to worry. I’m not going to sue you. It’s okay. So then I asked them later, so how are you doing? I’m doing great. What does the doctor think now? He said, I don’t know. He died about two years ago. That kind of thing that you get from these people that are outliers, but they’re not naive. They know their bodies and the doctors may know more physiology, but you know, more of your phenomenology than any doctor or any other person. So coauthor with them, but you don’t let them dictate your reality. Uh, because everyone is different.

Dr. Cates: Well, and I think it’s, you know, I’ve got some people that are practitioners that, that watch and listen to the podcast too. And I think it’s, it’s great for our practitioners, for doctors to have this mindfulness when they’re talking to their patients or clients. So just want to slide that in hopes that that will help, and I really want to emphasize what you talked about, about affirmations because I think it’s easy for people to put words down. I’m, you know, I’m, I’m beautiful, I’m whatever, you know, like my skin is great, but if you don’t really like what you’re saying about if it about embodying, you’ve got to really believe it and bringing in, because there’s this disconnect. If you just see the words and you still think in your mind, that’s great. I know I’m supposed to do this, but I don’t really believe it, then it’s not going to work. Right.

Dr. Martinez: Exactly. And I’ll just mention it, just a really brief neuro psychology behind her or neuroscience behind it. Uh, so, so that your audience can see that it’s not something that just made up in a dream or some kind of hallucination. If you have an affirmation and it’s just words, it’s going to be on the left side of the hemisphere. It’s going to be on the language side of the Broca and the in area of the brain that’s going to be there. All right, so you have a neuro map of the language, fine. But the way that behavior, is created and brought into an existence, is by movement. So for example, with cats, if they don’t allow them to move them, they can see the world. Once you let them move and they have not had the movement, they walk around as if they were blind for six weeks. So movement brings the closure to the behavior. So let’s say you have the affirmation and then you embody it and you say, this is what I feel now and I’m going to live as if the affirmation, what happens, you create neural maps of movement. You’re maps of affect, the psychoimmunology that’s going on with neuro maps. After a while, the affirmation becomes a part of you rather than just a, a wishful thought that doesn’t go anywhere other than the left hemisphere of language.

Dr. Cates: Yeah. Do you have some, just so people can really understand this fully, do you have some examples that you can share? It doesn’t have to be skin issues. I know we’ve been talking about psoriasis, but certainly as far as skin issues go really is that there are a number of skin issues, Eczema, acne, Rosacea, all a lot of different, especially chronic skin issues, even skin recovering from uh, you know, traumas and things I think. But do you have specific examples that you could share with us? It doesn’t have to be a skin issue. Anything health related that could show an example of this?
Dr. Martinez: Oh yeah. I’ll use skin in a particular psoriasis, in the left arm. One of the things that I try to use this, a lot of the researchers already been done and put it into biocognitive theory. A lot of research has been done in psychology, what’s called the semantic differentials. And what he said is that we can only look at the world with three main variables. You could either, it has power, strong, weak, it has speed, it fast, slow, it has, the valuation which is good, bad, pretty and so forth. So what I’ve done with, uh, let’s say psoriasis less side, you go into that contemplative state and the reason for that is to turn that, uh, the prefrontal lobe that’s constantly judging and Beta waves and all that. It doesn’t let you really go in. So once you don’t, you go in and you go into a more subdued, accepting way of looking at the world. Then you go to that left side. Let’s say it’s the left elbow and you give it a semantic space. The semantic space would be it’s red. It’s hot, it’s ugly, it’s fast or slow. Whenever you give it a semantic space and you give it a form, it’s round or it’s amorphis or whatever, then there’s always a part of the body that doesn’t have the problem. You go to the part of the body that doesn’t have the psoriasis. So you go to your right elbow, that’s fine. Then you give us a semantic differential to that. All right. This part is beautiful. It’s blue, green, it’s slow. It’s strong where it’s weak, whatever you want to give it. That is the opposite of that. Then you imagine one and the other one and the other go back and forth, back and forth, and you allow the one that’s working to overwhelm the other one, I’ve done this with chronic, a pain neurosurgeons that have sent me, patients who tell me I can’t give him any more narcotics. They’ll die. We had to do this and some of them have been taken off, had their implants removed and things because what happens is that in the health side we have a lot of the old emotions and a lot of good psychoneuroimmunology and the other side we have a lot of fear based emotions and a lot of primitive under immunity kinds of things over immunity. So one side goes to the other and not only are you taking the imagery, but you’re taking the whole physiology to that side. And it begins to overwhelm. It’s slowly overwhelming slowly, but you have to ask always. All right, so what is this doing for you? The, the, the secondary gains you had, the psoriasis. What is it that you don’t have to do any more than that, that, that you don’t want to do? One more important. What is it that you can’t do? You couldn’t if you didn’t have a psoriasis but you don’t feel worthy of doing. And it has those two components that need to be looked at. And a lot of times, uh, it’s not so much a secondary gains, but well, if I didn’t have the psoriasis, I could, I could fall in love or somebody would like me, but then I have a fear of being mocked or being or, or being abandoned or whatever. Well, the psoriasis keeps you in a good place. So it’s Kinda like this physiology or no question, but the physiology can be modified where the psychoneurological cultural components,

Dr. Cates: Right? So there are some components of this that would help set someone up for success on this because it would be hard, I think are harder. It’s not impossible to do this alone, but it would be easier to do it with some support. So what kind of support do you think people need to really be able to go through this kind of process?

Dr. Martinez: Well, they need a professional to guide them and then look the coauthors, because there’s another, the coauthors of the people that, that, that author your reality, whether you, let’s say you have the coauthor who says, this is family. This is just say, damn, this is, this is the Ryan family. And anytime you talk about it as an answer, look though, that’s just not, they know what they’re talking about. You can’t coauthor with people like that because you won’t get better. You have to coauthor number one with people that have done well. That gives me hope because hope is a immunological, very powerful. It’s one of the crosses of health. Yeah. And then you have to look at the people that are encouraging you, not in a naive way, not Pollyanna. Everything’s wonderful if you have a good father, people are saying, you know, this a lot to this, a lot of science to this. Let’s work this out and to see what well we can do. I have this problem with this. You have this problem with that. Let’s, let’s work the techniques together and see how they help each other. That kind of social support is really, really powerful in creating a new reality of hope, uh, when, when hope has gone, it’s been measured when people give up and k cells and also they’re very responsible for fighting precancer cells. Not only do they become less efficient, but the population drops. So you have an immunological response in consequences for the way that you see things with hope or no hope or, or this is a genetic sentence or it’s not. So what I’m saying is that this a lot that we can do if we get our agency and then work with professionals who are willing to support what you’re trying to do based on good science.

Dr. Cates: I know family is not always easy. We don’t always get to choose. So what do you, what do you do about family? I mean I think you can choose your friends and you can, you can pick them and you can surround yourself with the practitioners with doctors. But, yeah. Any, any tips on what to do with family?

Dr. Martinez: Well, yeah, not to try to not have tried to change the people who are into their fear. Because if you do, they’re better at fear than you are. So what’d you do is you don’t, you don’t discuss, you try to get away from, cause I’m sure you’ve seen it with your patients. How are you doing today? Don’t ask that. When I was working in a psychiatric hospital, we would never ask the chronic pain patients, how are you doing? We would ask him, what have you done today? If you ask them what you’re doing, well, how are you feeling at this? First I’d heard on up, what have you done? Nothing. What would you like to do? My pain is really bad. What would you like to do? Always action oriented as the first thing. So when people, we’ll talk to you at, let’s say a mother says, well, darling how’s your psoriasis. Oh mmm mmm. Right now what I’m doing is I’m going out to the movies … but how is your psoriasis? I haven’t thought about it, so I don’t know. See that you have to neutralize, because if you get into the dialogue, they have a lot of power where you, people that change your diapers have a lot of power over you. So you have to be aware of who they are and not pay because they’re going to do an ocebo on you no matter what other people tell you. Gradually what will happen as you begin to shape them into thinking of Trevor rather than what Trevor is identifying herself with in a particular illness, graduate. And then you don’t talk about your illness to anybody. And that might seem counterintuitive, but if somebody says, do you want to go to the movies? Oh No, my psoriasis acting up. No. Uh, I don’t want to go to the movies because I’m going to stay at home and relax or whatever. And what cultures do is they force you to over inform, oh, come on, you could relax another time. But if you say the psoriasis, they will leave you alone.

Dr. Martinez: So the cultures are set up to maintain illnesses rather than get you out of illnesses. In fact, they become very compassionate with you when you tell them you have a problem. But if you say you want, I want to take care of me, no, you go to a restaurant by yourself and they’ll say, only one? And you look around and say, well, how many do you need? So it was set up that way to the take the self out of the equation. And it only has value when other people’s collective needs are met at your expense. So all of that is culture. This is why culture is so important. In looking at illness.

Dr. Cates: Yeah, I really do think it’s important to take identifying with an illness that to separate that I it, I don’t know how many times I’ve heard patients say my, my Eczema, my acne, my, you know, and they like, they’re identifying that like that’s theirs and they’re owning it. Yeah. Yeah. So you can we just talk about the acne or the acne used to have or something along those lines?

Dr. Martinez: Very interesting. I’m working on it, but it’s, the skin reaction is very interesting. I’m working on it and I’m becoming a really good detective to see what’s going on. The patient with the patient or the person with the, the glucose issues, he finds a context extremely important in that in the Lanward Harvard has done a lot of work with everything from cancer to diabetes. The context is, it’s not an illness, not just the aesthetic process, but the context has variability. So then what, what you do is you find under what conditions is this exacerbated under what conditions does it seem to be regressing. But the other problem is that I talk about in that article I sent you when I called the change allowance change allowance says this should take this long and not just an illness, falling in love, intimacy, wellness aging. They’ll have a change allowance. And if it goes too fast, you tend to not believe, then you tend to sabotage it. Then what happens then when you have a spontaneous remissions? Biology cannot explain that immediately gone. And, and the in some doctors will, is either misdiagnosed or, you’re just having a hysterical reaction that will bring the illness back. They can’t by that. There’s some, there’s a, uh, and it’s cultural too. There’s this change allowance. It’s cultural to a certain degree. So for example, well, people will say, well, look, if you have an infection, it’s an infection. You’re going to have an antibiotic. And that’s it. No, it’s not it. You have an infection in the United States and you know that they’re, uh, pathogens and you find the right antibiotic and you take it and it gets better. You go to the Amazon and you have an infection and a Shaman happens to tells you, you see that wound, an evil spirit has gotten into that wound. Unless he does some kind of exorcism, a tremendous amount of antibiotics going to do almost nothing. It’s an immunological bio symbol. Now if the Shaman comes with a doctor, says, look, the doctor and I are going to work with this, I’m going to exercise the a demon or whatever. And then the doctor’s going to give you the, this kind of medication. And both of them are powerful medication, be fine. And I’ve seen it, I’ve seen it in Bolivia and other places.

Dr. Cates: Yeah. And so with this kind of experience, how, how much time does this take? Is this, I mean, I think sometimes people and today’s society expect really quick fixes. So I want timelines and expectations.

Dr. Martinez: Well, the, the, uh, the importance of that is it, when you’re doing, let’s say you’re doing this method, you want to, at the beginning, you want to prolong that, that, that change alone. Because if you’re looking for a quick fix, it doesn’t work. It’s an organic, gradual process. So you want to prolong the process. And then rather than looking at the outcome, I want this to be this way. Let me look at the things I’m learning about myself and the process in what can I change that not only expresses a psoriasis but expresses in an over reaction with my partner or an over reaction when something happens. And I have taught my system, do overreact and join the expression of genes that has to do with psoriasis or or whatever illness. So, so when you’re curious, you take away the fear, fear and curiosity are incompatible. So you, you go into curiosity mode rather than fear mode. And then you allow yourself to have hope and the hope has to do with having unconditional caring for yourself even times where you don’t think you can care automatically. I’m going to, I’m going to, I’m going to believe I’m worthy, even though I may not believe it. Now I’m going to allow myself to believe why. Because if you’re not worthy, you’re not going to work on anything to do something good for yourself.

Dr. Cates: Yeah, absolutely. And then lastly, I know I wanted to, you mentioned this thing about what is normal and kind of mediocrity and how a lot of people, we, a lot of people settle for that, but there’s another way, right?

Dr. Martinez: Yes. Normal to me is very troublesome. I don’t want to be normal because normal is, is it puts you in some kind of mediocrity of what is acceptable. So for example, some doctors will say, look, I got to tell this person that they have six months to live so big because it’s my ethical responsibility and I could be sued. Why don’t you do it this way? Uh, you tell this person, you have this illness that on the average, on the, on the normal curve, people live,, six months. You go to the other side of the curve and they live five weeks. Then you go to the outlier in the right side of the curve and they’d been around for 10 years. So why don’t we explore what these people are doing so we don’t fulfill the prophecy of the normal or the norm. If you have any illnesses within the norm, you’re in good shape because you’ll get medication. Yeah. If you’re on the other side, I don’t know. There’s nothing I can do for you. It’s, it’s gone. So I think the, the normal thing has become a bit of a, of a restraining process for people because sometimes outliers by definition are not normal so they don’t fit and they think there’s something wrong with it. Every outlier that I’ve talked to when they were kids, they thought they were weird. I had these ideas as this one told me the other day that when I was nine years old, I was wondering about my existence. I was wondering how do I do with the universe and the infinite? And another kid is saying, what toy am I going to play with? There’s a depth and curiosity and that’s what makes a modifier because they see beyond what everybody’s saying. And centenarians are that way sent there and stuff. High level of curiosity. They’ll, if I’m centenary and I’m talking to you and I say, hey Trevor, what’s that book behind there? And they have immediately they go into curiosity rather than speaking to you as if that’s it. And there’s no novelty at all. Novelty is another cost of health, novelty is a cost of health. You want to get better, you need to find novelty in your world and within you. Yeah.

Dr. Cates: Okay. I love all that. All right, well Mario has been great having you back on Friday where they can find you.

Dr. Martinez: It’s just a Google biocognitive science. And then, or my Facebook page, Dr Mario Martinez biocognitive.com anything that has to do with that, I’m just saying my name would come up. And then we can go from there. I have a private group that I’ve set up in Facebook to create this subculture of wellness that people can join. And there that what they do is they, they, they reinforce their excellence. And it’s really a powerful, powerful way to look at it. And, and all that information is up on the website and everything. But thank you for all the work you do cause you do outstanding work. And I’m really glad that we had a chance to talk again.

Dr. Cates: Yeah. Thank you Mario. And I’ll get those links from you. I’ll put them up below the show notes.

Dr. Martinez: Yes. We’ll put it up and get all that out to to people that are going to understand it and benefit from it.

Dr. Cates: All right. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Dr Mario Martinez and found out some ways, some tools to help you reprogram the way that you talk to yourself, to look at the environment, to look at the culture that you’re in and set that up in a healthier way to help your skin and your health. To learn more about Dr Mario, you can go to TheSpaDr.com, go to the podcast page with his interview and you’ll find all the information and links there. And while you’re there, I invite you to join the spa doctor community so you don’t miss any of our upcoming shows. And if you haven’t already taken the skin quiz, you can go there at theskinquiz.com get your own customized skin report to find out what messages your skin is trying to tell you about your health and what you could do about it. Just go to theskinquiz.com also, I invite you to join me on social media. The spot Dr is everywhere on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube. So join us there. Join the conversation and I’ll see you next time on The Spa Dr podcast.