Stay Off My Operating Table

Episódios

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  An Endocrinologist Got Sick and Her Own Specialty Couldn't Fix Her - Dr. Cassie Smith 18.08.2026 57min

  Dr. Cassie Smith spent a decade being failed by her own specialty. As a board-certified endocrinologist, she developed Graves' disease, then Hashimoto's, then infertility, and no colleague could give her an answer. The answer she eventually found wasn't in a prescription pad. It was in her gut. In this conversation with Dr. Philip Ovadia, Smith explains why millions of people on thyroid medication still feel exhausted, and why the problem often isn't the hormone itself but whether the body ca...
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  The Conference Founder Who Thinks Data Isn't the Answer to Wellness - Robin Switzer 11.08.2026 43min

  Robin Switzer has spent nearly a decade building one of the largest gatherings in metabolic health, watching thousands of people arrive chasing the same thing: a way to feel better. But somewhere between the Oura Rings, the continuous glucose monitors, and the endless lists of things to optimize, something shifted. Dr. Philip Ovadia and Jack Heald sit down with Switzer to talk about that shift, and why the community she built around the ketogenic diet has quietly become something much bigger....
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  Beyond Blood Sugar: Why Insulin Matters More Than We've Been Told - Dr. Ian Lake 04.08.2026 52min

  Most conversations about diabetes focus on controlling blood sugar. Dr. Ian Lake spent 20 years following this playbook—counting carbohydrates, injecting insulin, managing his type 1 diagnosis according to conventional medical guidance. Then a serious hypoglycemic episode and early signs of retinopathy forced him to reconsider everything. What he discovered became the foundation of his practice and his new book Shifting Gears: insulin itself may be more important than the glucose it controls....
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  How One Young Man Beat a Connective Tissue Disorder Everyone Said Was Permanent - Edward Goeke 28.07.2026 59min

  A genetic connective tissue disorder deemed incurable by medicine improved dramatically through carnivore nutrition and structural medicine that conventional practice overlooks. DESCRIPTION At 16, Edward Goeke developed debilitating symptoms that left him bedridden: crippling pain whenever he felt emotion, constant tachycardia, and progressive deterioration. For two years, doctors dismissed him. Medications failed. Plant-based eating worsened his condition. By 18, he was losing vision and pr...
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  The Gratitude Cure: Why Your Body Can't Heal Under Stress - Ben Azadi 21.07.2026 53min

  Your body cannot release stored fat or heal itself when it perceives threat; gratitude is the measurable physiological switch that lowers cortisol, raises oxytocin, and allows metabolic transformation. DESCRIPTION Ben Azadi lost 80 pounds and reversed suicidal depression through metabolic healing. His father wasn't as fortunate—a preventable decline into type 2 diabetes, neuropathy, and stroke in 2014. That loss forged his purpose: reach one billion people and reverse type 2 diabetes in a mi...
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  The Eating Disorder Doctors Couldn't Fix, Cured With Eggs and Butter - Kelsey Buchalter 14.07.2026 49min

  For twenty years, Kelsey Buchalter cycled through hospitals, medications, and every conventional treatment psychiatry could offer for anorexia, bulimia, and anxiety. None of it touched the underlying problem. What finally did was a single instruction from a nutritionist: eat only red meat and eggs for ten days. Now a health coach at Ovadia Heart Health, Kelsey sits down with Dr. Philip Ovadia and Jack Heald to trace the biological mechanism behind that shift, and to challenge a premise most m...
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  The Heart Scan That Could Save Your Life (And Why You Can't Get One) - Kim Mischo 07.07.2026 55min

  Cardiac imaging expert Kim Mischo spent 20 years inside the cardiology machine — running nuclear stress tests that told patients they were fine, then watching some of those patients have heart attacks the following week. She knew the system was broken long before she could prove it. Now she can prove it. A non-invasive scan exists that can detect coronary artery disease at 5% blockage — before symptoms, before a stress test would ever flag anything. It's been guideline-recommended since 2021....
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  The Accountant Who Cracked the Parkinson's Code Using Gut Bacteria - Martha Carlin 30.06.2026 1h 1min

  Martha Carlin wasn't a scientist when her husband was diagnosed with Parkinson's at 44. She was an auditor — trained to follow the evidence wherever it leads, and to never take anything at face value. That discipline took her somewhere medicine hadn't yet looked: the gut. What she found over the next two decades reframes how we understand not just Parkinson's, but chronic constipation, cancer, metabolic disease, sleep, cravings, and the quiet collapse of human health since World War II. The m...
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  Why You're Sabotaging Your Health (And Don't Know It) - Martin Silva 23.06.2026 48min

  Most people trying to get healthier are losing a battle they don't know they're fighting. It's not a lack of information. It's not even a lack of effort. It's something quieter — the stories running beneath the surface, the environments they've stopped noticing, the split-second decisions that feel small until they're not. Martin Silva has spent 20 years coaching people out of the patterns that keep them stuck. A former competitive natural bodybuilder who hit the aesthetic ceiling and found i...
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  254: When Food Isn't Enough: The Missing Half of Metabolic Health - Craig Emmerich 16.06.2026 53min

  Craig Emmerich spent a decade eating low-carb and feeling great — until he wasn't. What followed was a quarter-million dollars, a chronic Lyme diagnosis, and a hard-won education in what diet alone simply cannot do. In this conversation, Craig and Dr. Ovadia pull apart one of the most seductive myths in the metabolic health space: that the right food is always the right answer. They talk protein thresholds, personal fat limits, the case for bio-identical hormones, and the nuanced reality of G...
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  253: The Scientist Who Helped Rewrite America's Dietary Guidelines Tells All - Ty Beal 09.06.2026 54min

  The science of what to eat has never been clearer. The problem was never the biology — it was everything else. Dr. Ty Beal, a global nutrition scientist who helped author the new U.S. Dietary Guidelines, has spent his career mapping where modern diets fail and why they keep failing. His Nutritional Value Score ranked foods with a rigor that finally puts organ meats in their proper place, calls out the grain mythology for what it is, and confirms what many already suspect: ultra-processed ...
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  252: The Hidden Illness Hiding in Your Walls: Mold, Misdiagnosis & the Path Back - Ally D'Amico NP 02.06.2026 46min

  You've done the work. You cleaned up your diet, fixed your sleep, addressed your metabolic health — and something is still wrong. Brain fog you can't explain. Fatigue that won't move. Weight creeping up for no apparent reason. Personality changes your family notices before you do. Nurse practitioner Ally D'Amico spent 14 years watching patients spiral through specialists, collect diagnoses like fibromyalgia and chronic depression, and never actually get better — until she stumbled onto the th...
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  251: Stem Cells, Peptides, and the Real Reason You're Getting Old - Dr. Adeel Khan 26.05.2026 51min

  Your body already knows how to heal itself. The question is whether anyone is giving it the right signals. Dr. Adeel Khan trained as a conventional physician before following a thread most doctors ignore: what if we could restore the system, not just manage the symptoms? That thread led him through sports medicine, global laboratories, stem cell research, and a fundamental rethinking of what aging actually is at the cellular level. In this conversation, Dr. Khan explains why most clinics call...
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  250: Seven Years, 700 Cholesterol, Zero Plaque: What Dr. Nick Norwitz's Case Report Changes 19.05.2026 57min

  Nick Norwitz has an MD, a PhD, and a cholesterol level that should have killed him — at least according to the standard model of cardiovascular disease. For seven years, his total cholesterol held above 700. His LDL sat in the high 500s. Every clinical algorithm flagged him as a cardiac emergency. He took none of the prescribed medications. His just-published case report shows zero coronary plaque. Not reduced. Not minimal. Zero. This episode isn't a victory lap. It's a serious conversation a...
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  249: You've Seen 10 Doctors and Still Aren't Better. Here's Why - Reed Davis 12.05.2026 55min

  You got the tests. You got the diagnosis — maybe more than one. You took the medication. And you still don't feel like yourself. Reed Davis has spent 30 years working with exactly those people. As the founder of Functional Diagnostic Nutrition, he's trained over 5,000 practitioners in a methodology built on one counterintuitive premise: chasing a diagnosis may be the wrong move entirely. Instead of narrowing in on a label, Reed looks for what he calls metabolic chaos — a constellation of inte...
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  248: The Patient Is the Point: How AI Is Forcing Medicine to Finally Listen - Dr. Ami Bhatt 05.05.2026 57min

  Medicine has always positioned itself as the authority — the place you go when something is wrong, on its terms, in its building, by its schedule. But the infrastructure built to support that model may now be its biggest liability. Dr. Ami Bhatt, Chief Innovation Officer of the American College of Cardiology, has a front-row seat to what's breaking down and what's quietly beginning to work. What she sees isn't a technology problem. It's a relationship problem — between patients and the system...
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  247: Darius Sharpe, The ER Nurse Who Ran His Own Blood Sugar Experiments (And Found Heart Disease) 28.04.2026 1h 18min

  Darius Sharpe has spent over two decades watching the same patients cycle through emergency rooms with the same conditions, the same medications, and the same unaddressed root cause. As a paramedic-turned-ER nurse, he started asking a question nobody around him wanted to answer: why are we treating the result instead of the cause? What followed was years of self-experimentation — continuous glucose monitors, serial lab draws, coronary imaging — on a man who, by every outward measure, looked l...
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  246: The Missing Link Between Menopause, Marriage & Your Microbiome - Cynthia Thurlow 21.04.2026 1h

  Every woman will go through menopause. Every partner, spouse, child, and close friend will feel it too. And almost none of them will understand what is actually happening — or why the standard medical response of "just add hormones" so often falls short. Cynthia Thurlow joins Stay Off My Operating Table to explain why so many women hit midlife feeling like their bodies suddenly stopped cooperating, despite doing “all the right things.” This conversation connects gut health to hormones, ...
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  245: Your Doctor Can't Save You: Dylan Gemelli on Accountability, Arterial Plaque, & the Health System's Blind Spots 14.04.2026 1h 1min

  Dylan Gemelli went from prison to Milan runways to millions of YouTube subscribers — and then a calcium score of 120 and an LP(a) of 330 stopped him cold at 40 years old. In this conversation with Dr. Philip Ovadia, he breaks down what both the biohacking and conventional medical worlds are getting wrong, why confusion is the real enemy of public health, and how he dropped his LP(a) from 330 to 94 without following his doctor's orders. This episode is equal parts cardiovascular science and ha...
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  244: The Metabolic Root of Depression, Anxiety, & Mental Illness - Dr. Lori Calabrese 07.04.2026 51min

  Dr. Lori Calabrese is a psychiatrist whose trajectory changed when a patient with 15 years of treatment-resistant anorexia went into full remission after a ketogenic diet. What followed was a research journey — pilot studies, peer-reviewed case series, and a now-funded randomized controlled trial — consistently showing that depression, anxiety, OCD, bipolar disorder, and other conditions could achieve complete remission, not just symptom reduction, through metabolic intervention. The key mech...