Untold Medicine Interview: Dr. Catherine Clinton
Dr. Catherine Clinton: Navigating Emotions, Immunity, and Quantum Biology for Holistic Health
Dr. Catherine Clinton is a Quantum Biology Health Educator, Licensed Naturopathic Physician, and Author. She has a focus on gut health, autoimmunity and psychoneuroimmunology. As a respected author, speaker, health advocate, Dr. Catherine practices in Eugene, Oregon.
When in medical school Dr. Catherine was diagnosed with and healed from an autoimmune disease that affects the gastrointestinal tract, leaving her with a passion to prevent autoimmunity in people everywhere. Dr. Catherine addresses the psychoneuroimmune system and gut health of children, adults and families through a deeper connection with the world around us. Dr. Catherine is passionate about the connections we have with the world around us and how these connections can regenerate our health and the health of the planet. She sees an urgent need for healing our internal terrain as well as healing the terrain of the world we live in..
In a recent episode of a thought-provoking podcast, Dr. Catherine Clinton, a seasoned quantum biology health educator and naturopathic physician, takes us on an insightful exploration of the intricate connection between our emotions, immunity, and the quantum biological processes that govern our health. Her discourse, rooted in personal experience and professional practice, unravels the profound influence of our emotional state on our physical wellbeing, offering a holistic approach to healthcare that marries scientific understanding with spiritual insight.
Dr. Clinton's journey, which traversed from debilitating illness to robust health, underscores the significance of addressing our emotional landscapes as part of the healing process. Her narrative highlights the potency of psychoneuroimmunology—a field that investigates the interplay between our psychological processes, nervous system, and immune functions. She posits that our emotions are not just fleeting experiences but powerful agents that shape our health at a cellular level.
The podcast episode also ventures into the realm of quantum biology, shedding light on the ways subatomic processes orchestrate life's symphony within us. Traditional biochemical models of health, Dr. Clinton argues, are limited in their scope. They fail to account for the dynamic role that 'junk' DNA and the energetic essence of our cells play in our health. Here, the pioneering work of researchers like Martin Picard on mitochondria and energy production is brought into focus, illuminating the intrinsic link between our mental states and cellular vitality.
As the conversation progresses, Dr. Clinton delves into the concept of liquid crystal technology within the human body. Our DNA, mitochondria, and fascia, she explains, function as liquid crystalline structures—acting as receivers for the myriad of electrical and frequency-based communications that occur within us. This insight suggests that our bodies are far more than biochemical machines; they are vibrant fields of energy and information, connected to the world in ways we are only beginning to comprehend.
One of the most compelling aspects of the podcast is the discussion on the alchemy of morning rituals and their impact on health. Dr. Clinton advocates for grounding practices that align us with the natural cycles of the sun and encourage a state of gratitude. Such rituals, she suggests, have the potential to rewire our hormonal systems, enhance immune function, and cultivate emotional resilience, demonstrating the simple yet profound ways we can attune our health to the cosmos.
Throughout the episode, the interdependence of emotional wellbeing, immune response, and quantum biological principles is woven into a tapestry of holistic health wisdom. Listeners are invited to embrace this knowledge, not merely as an academic pursuit but as a practical guide to nurturing wellness in their daily lives. This exploration of the nexus between science and spirituality is a clarion call to view health through a wider, more integrated lens—a perspective that honors the complexity and interconnectedness of our existence.
In closing, Dr. Catherine Clinton's message is clear: health is not just the absence of disease but a harmonious balance that resonates through every layer of our being. By tuning into the symphony of subatomic processes, acknowledging the power of our emotions, and engaging in life-affirming rituals, we open the door to a state of health that is vibrant, holistic, and deeply connected to the world around us.
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Dr. Michele Burklund
Host
00:05
Welcome to the podcast Medicine Untold and come with me on a journey to the unexplored side of medicine, where we speak with rebel doctors, radical herbalists, unorthodox healers and patients who have healed themselves. Explore the intersection between science and spirituality and discover the power within you. I'm host, Dr. Michele Burklund , licensed naturopathic doctor, botanical alchemist and practicing physician. Hello everyone, thank you for joining me today. Today, we have Dr Catherine Clinton with us. I'm super excited that you're here. So thank you so much, Catherine, and welcome.
Dr. Catherine Clinton
Guest
00:49
Oh, thank you so much for having me on. I'm so excited to talk with you today.
Dr. Michele Burklund
Host
00:54
Yeah, I think it's going to be a lot of great information. So I'm going to read a little bit about your bio so everyone can get to know you. Who might not know you on this podcast yet. So Dr Catherine Clinton is a quantum biology health educator, licensed naturopathic physician and author. She has a focus on gut health, autoimmunity and psychoneuroimmunology. As a respected author, speaker and health advocate, dr Catherine practices in Eugene, oregon. When, in medical school, dr Catherine was diagnosed with and healed from an autoimmune disease that affects the gastrointestinal tract, leaving her with a passion to prevent autoimmunity in people everywhere. Dr Catherine addresses the psychoneuroimmune system and gut health of children, adults and families through a deeper connection with the world around us. Dr Catherine is passionate about the connections we have with the world around us and how these connections can regenerate our health and the health of the planet. She sees an urgent need for healing our internal terrain as well as healing the terrain of the world we live in.
Dr. Catherine Clinton
Guest
02:09
So welcome.
Dr. Michele Burklund
Host
02:12
Yeah, and that is a powerful statement that I'm sure we're going to get into a little more, but first I want to kind of hear your story. So tell me a little bit more about you know how you found naturopathic medicine, what happened when you were in medical school, and what kind of led you on this path that you're on today? Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Catherine Clinton
Guest
02:35
So actually I assisted with a traditional midwife from Mexico for six or seven years and I knew pretty much like by the third birth I was like this is amazing. Natural medicine is amazing. I can't be a midwife. They are just cut from a different beautiful cloth. I just need that off sign. I need to be able to switch that off sign.
03:07
And midwives are incredible in their dedication to all those mamas and babies out there. But for me it was more of a paradigm shifting experience and from there that's when I decided, okay, I can do naturopathic medical school, I can help people this way and also close the office at night. And so I went on in my undergrad I was. I got my degree in philosophy and I avoided everything science like the plague. So I had to go back and start all my pre-med stuff math 95, do all my college level physiology, anatomy, organic chem, all that stuff. So that took me a couple of years and then I went to naturopathic medical school in Portland and it was my second year of medical school there and I got really sick.
04:08
It was that initiation year where you have to sign in at seven. If you don't sign in by seven, you don't pass that class and you can take it the next year. And so that was like the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back and it was just too much. I didn't have the foundation to handle that amount of stress and I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, which affects the GI tract, and autoimmune condition, another autoimmune condition, hashimoto thyroiditis, which affects the thyroid gland, and Lyme disease and GI parasite.
04:50
I mean, the list went on and on. It was sort of that domino effect when your health just kind of spirals out of control, and I was in a great place to put the physical pieces back together and go from that debilitated, really sick state where you can't participate in life, to being able to be a productive member and I was able to go back to school and see patients in the clinic. But there was a huge piece of vitality that was missing from my life and that's when I really started getting interested in researching and practicing quantum biology and quantum biological perspective to healing.
Dr. Michele Burklund
Host
05:47
Yeah, and I think that's that was definitely a missing component in naturopathic medicine school too is tying in the emotions to everything, and to me I mean I am a hundred percent in alignment with you and how important that is for healing in general too, and how all of that really needs to be together.
Dr. Catherine Clinton
Guest
06:04
Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Michele Burklund
Host
06:07
Can you tell us, um, like a little more about the field of psychoneuroimmunology and and really what that means, Cause I think some people might be a little confused, or maybe they've never even heard that word for the first time before?
Dr. Catherine Clinton
Guest
06:23
Yeah, absolutely. Psychoneuroimmunology what a mouthful right that's just. It's just a huge word to describe how our thoughts and emotions impact our biology and our immune system. And they have a huge impact. They are intimately tied with our hormonal state, our inflammatory state, our immune system balance or imbalance.
06:52
And so it was during that time when I was really sick that my physician and she was also the physician that I was doing rotations with at the clinic she kind of pushed me to look at psychoneuroimmunology and I was doing rotations with at the clinic. She kind of pushed me to look at psychoneuroimmunology and I was like, oh, I don't, we can talk about that patient or we could talk about that patient, but I don't want to talk about me, like don't you have another herb or a different intervention. But of course she was right and of course our thoughts have an enormous impact on our biological function and just across the board there is a predictable influence that certain emotions have on how inflamed we are and inflammation is kind of that backbone indicator of symptoms and disease state right. When we're really inflamed, those symptoms start to pop up, disease onset ensues. So we see that all the time in clinic and our thoughts have an immense impact on that and that's something that's really not being addressed in mainstream medicine.
08:12
I remember when my dad had a heart attack, trying to get the cardiologist to say like doesn't mental, emotional stress impact heart, and he was like no, no, no. And it was like oh my gosh, please, how can we be saying this? I mean, you know, just from common sense, when we get stressed, our blood pressure goes up. So the idea that the energetic imprint of a thought or an emotion can impact our biology is paradigm shifting in a medical system that looks at only this chemical, mechanical model. And, of course, psychoimmunology doesn't negate the chemical model. It just says there's something else at play. There's something else we should be looking at too, something else in our toolkit, and I think as doctors we can both agree that once we widen that toolkit, the better health that we can help our patients with, that our immunities can have, that our world can have overall.
Dr. Michele Burklund
Host
09:24
Right, and I mean and your proof of that too with the autoimmune issues that you were diagnosed with, which were pretty serious, and being able to overcome them and having this component and working through it, I think that's super powerful and that says a lot, too, just in your own work.
Dr. Catherine Clinton
Guest
09:45
Yeah, yeah, I think that you know the work of psychoneuroimmunology. When we and the idea of heart coherence and emotional regulation, it can be really daunting for someone who's sick to hear that. For me it was. It was like, oh my goodness, you mean, my thoughts are impacting my health state and I'm having a hard time regulating them, and they're not always that positive. So this isn't looking good, right, it was just this spiral, and I think for us to remember that, as humans, we're meant to feel fear, frustration, grief, anger. We're meant to feel all those things.
10:30
It's when we get stuck in those patterns that this chronic inflammation, these disease states, can become associated with those emotional states. So it's not that one thought or that continuation of the thought. We have to remember that we can forge a new path. I mean neuroplasticity. The ability for our brains to create new pathways is always there, and so anyone listening out there who might be feeling like, oh, this is a lot, that's exactly how I felt. I did not want to look at it, and once I did, I started to realize that there's space for all these emotions and they're healthy, they're guiding us as well, as long as we don't stay there, as long as we don't judge them right, as long as we just recognize that's an emotion and I'm having it and I'm making space for it, and then it can go on its merry way, right. It's the friction of judgment and blame or shame or guilt, of having that emotion that really interferes with us getting back to that state of gratitude and sense of awe or joy or love from our place in the world around us.
Dr. Michele Burklund
Host
11:53
Definitely yeah. I think. I think some people could misinterpret yeah that as saying like oh no, I caused this, you know, and then having guilt and shame versus saying I take responsibility, you know, and then having guilt and shame versus saying I take responsibility which is more empowering, and then going to that effort to change the thoughts, rather than holding that and and blaming yourself and in that cycle for sure.
Dr. Catherine Clinton
Guest
12:18
Yeah, absolutely. And oftentimes, when we look at those emotions, we realize those patterns have been there since we were very young and instilled by other authority figures right, and so that blame really doesn't rest on our shoulders. We can even sometimes look back generationally and see, like that cortisol response, that response to stress, is handed down generationally. So, you know, some of us come into this life with a blueprint to be more vulnerable to those kind of emotional reactions and patterns and just recognizing that holds such power, that hold such power that, oh wow, this is something that isn't necessarily a product of my everyday life. It was handed down or something that I picked up early on and I can. I can till the garden and grow something new, right.
Dr. Michele Burklund
Host
13:23
Definitely, and I think I think kind of the hardest part for that is finding the best ways to do that, to remove those limiting beliefs and take that route. But just acknowledging them or being able to see them, I think is a huge stride to yeah, yeah, so tell me a little bit more about quantum biology, how you kind of blended all these different things together and kind of what that means too.
Dr. Catherine Clinton
Guest
13:53
Yeah, absolutely A lot of us have heard of quantum physics, a lot of us have heard of biology, but not many of us have heard of quantum biology. And really what it is is the study of quantum phenomenon in a living system, in a body, in a human body, and basically, simply put, what that means is looking at the subatomic action in the body and how that sometimes gives rise to what we see on our lab work or our symptoms or disease states. Like I've mentioned before, dominant paradigm is so chemically driven, so mechanically driven. We have trillions and trillions of cells in the body and each one of these cells is completing hundreds of thousands of tasks each second and mathematically that is impossible with this idea of random collision or the allosteric model, where you have these biological keys bumping around in a cell trying to find their receptor until they randomly find it. Hundreds and thousands of tasks each second is just mathematically impossible with this random collision model. And you know, we see that all the time right? Oh, that's junk dna or you know something we don't understand. We just say, oh that, oh, that's random, that's junk, that's not a big deal. And later we find out oh no, there's this beautiful subatomic quantum action guiding what we see on a chemical level, right, what we see on a mechanical level. And it's just such a beautiful step for science to take to sort of embrace this invisible blueprint of the flow of electrons in the body, or protons or photons of light or phonons from sound, or how the frequency of an emotion can impact cellular life. And that's what quantum biology is. It's looking at the impact of all those really small pieces in the body and how they give rise to biological function. And it was in that state of me trying to get better when I came across an article, a research article by a researcher named Martin Picard and he is still doing incredible research to this day on mitochondria. And mitochondria are those little jelly bean shaped organelles in a cell that create energy. They create ATP and that's the energy currency of our body. They create ATP and that's the energy currency of our body. And so when we have a dip in ATP, there's symptoms, disease state. We really, really want to maintain that ATP production, that energy production in the body was talking about in this research articles. He was showing that our mental state impacts the energy production in a mitochondria. And at the same time there was other quantum biological research happening at UC Berkeley showing how quantum phenomenon are leading to photosynthesis, and all of it At the same time I was like, oh my goodness, there is this unseen force happening, just like we always kind of thought, right, like ancient indigenous cultures always talked about.
17:37
It was always part of our medicine until the scientific revolution. And everything has to be proven under a microscope and validated, which is important. We need that. We need some level of scrutiny and consensus in science. But the beautiful thing about quantum biology is it's starting to pull back in and validate some of those things that were cast away in the scientific revolution. This idea of energy, electricity, sound, light having such an impact on our biology is now being validated and it's such a fascinating subject and emerging field. I just can't get enough of it.
Dr. Michele Burklund
Host
18:25
Yeah, I know it's such an exciting time and it's so awesome that there's so many different studies happening right now finally associating that, and it is it's like common sense in so many ways. But yeah, our medical model has gone so far to separate the body into pieces that it kind of removed that completely for so long that we have to come back and and then see how powerful the data is too. I mean, I know that, um, stress is literally associated with pretty much every chronic disease in America, but we still have to prove that emotions affect the body in these different ways. But yeah, I think I think that's the perfect field and that's exactly kind of where we need to be right now too.
Dr. Catherine Clinton
Guest
19:16
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I'm loving the research out about coherence and quantum coherence and the idea, you know, coherence is just two or more things working at the same vibration, like you walk into a piano shop and strike the C chord and all the other C keys in the piano shop start to ring that same tune and that idea that we can have coherence in our body but we can have coherence if we are coherent. We can have coherence in groups and communities. I mean, it's just such a a beautiful and really timely science. Right, we need that right now, in this global society that we have, where we are inundated with all this information around the globe and all these things happening that can sow real division, to really focus on this idea that we can create this coherence and this ability to work through these things is really, really incredible, and I think it's the perfect time for this science to be emerging.
Dr. Michele Burklund
Host
20:34
Yeah, 100% on that, especially everything that's going on in our lives to really bring us back. And I have another question for you, kind of on that, where you've mentioned a little bit about liquid crystal technology. I heard that in one of your lectures or something I was listening to, and when you were speaking about how DNA is a liquid crystalline structure, as well as our mitochondria and our fascia, and so can you describe this in further detail and how this can affect our health, cause we're kind of on the same subject here with everything?
Dr. Catherine Clinton
Guest
21:13
Yeah, absolutely, it's fascinating. You know, when I say liquid crystal, people are like, oh, there, she goes off to like the new age gem store or something right. But we're really familiar actually with liquid crystal technology. Like, the reason I can see your beautiful face right now and we can have this conversation is because our screens computer TV, smartphone screens have liquid crystal technology and that just means that the screen is a mesophase between a liquid and a crystal. It can act as both, and all the molecules are aligned in a certain fashion. They're organized as a collective, and when I send an electrical impulse into that liquid crystal, I send an electrical impulse into that liquid crystal. Those molecules shift, and right behind that liquid crystal screen is a bunch of light, and so when those molecules shift direction, they let in a different amount of light and that's how we get these beautiful pictures right.
22:21
Well, the same kind of thing is happening in our body. We have liquid crystal structures in our body, our fascia, our cell membranes, our DNA. These things are acting as receivers for electrical impulses, for electrical impulses. And again, this brings us back to a level that goes beyond that chemical model. It doesn't negate it right, it doesn't say it doesn't exist. It says there's something else out there, that we are communicating with frequency information, with electrical information, and we know this to be true. We know that electromagnetic frequencies help guide cell behavior. They help guide cell migration and movement throughout the body. They help guide differentiation of like. How does a cell become an ear right?
23:20
We're starting to understand that it isn't all seen underneath the microscope, that some of these electrical magnetic impulses are guiding life. And how is that possible? Because some things in our body can receive those messages right. They can receive that like a antenna, like a radio antenna would, and if that's not mind blowing, I don't know what is. It's just astonishing to me that our body is acting on that way, because I've been trained in school and in medical school that it's a chemical. It's a chemical or it's a random event of a key finding a receptor lock that allows for this beautiful miracle of life. And now we're finding that that does happen. But there's also this sea of quantum action guiding life as well, and that to me is very exciting and that to me is very exciting, yeah, and it seems very similar.
Dr. Michele Burklund
Host
24:36
We had Dr Pollack talk about easy water and everything and how the cell would align differently, if you know, regular water versus easy water, and it sounds, yeah, very similar in the same realm. Um to that that you know it's not random and it's not by mistake, but everything has a deeper intelligence to it, for sure oh, absolutely, and all those things I mentioned.
Dr. Catherine Clinton
Guest
24:56
um, I try to keep it really simple and not go crazy on people, but I all those things I mentioned fascia, cell membranes, dna, all those things, mitochondria they are covered by that structured water that Pollock discovered, right, the professor Pollock, gerald Pollock discovered, and so you've got this structured water that's also acting as a liquid crystal. Right, we could call it crystalline water as well. It's organized, it responds to this energy information and realigns. It's absolutely incredible to start looking at the body at that way, acknowledging that and tending to it.
Dr. Michele Burklund
Host
25:45
Right, and yeah, I guess it's just. It's understanding how much intelligence we have and how much we don't understand and can't be explained. But we're learning like the like, the beauty and how amazing it really is in the body and that innate intelligence Absolutely. Can you tell us a little bit about quantum entanglement and how we have this interaction in our bodies on easy to understand scales?
Dr. Catherine Clinton
Guest
26:19
Yeah, absolutely so. Quantum entanglement is just the idea that two particles that were created together, spent time together, have an inseparable bond, even if they're far away from each other, and one state of a molecule will inform the state of the other molecule, right? So if I know what's happening in this molecule over here, even if the entangled molecule is far away, I know what's happening in it instantaneously, just because of what's happening here, because they're entangled, because they are still connected, and we see this happening in our mitochondria, we see this happening in research with protons in the neurons of our brain. So we're starting to understand. And why do we care about that? Isn't it just this random thing that doesn't matter? No, it seems to be a way to communicate information in the body and from the world around us, right? So this idea of entanglement, right?
27:50
So this idea of entanglement, um, is what quantum biologists think allows birds to migrate over long distances. Right, these birds don't have a roadmap, they don't have gps, some of them have never done it before, and the reason they're able to do this without a physical guide is because researchers postulate it's because there is a quantum entanglement happening in their eyes from the magnetic field of the earth. And so there is this communication happening that's instantly relayed between the magnetic field of the earth and the brains of these birds. And it's just absolutely phenomenal to think that these processes we've always kind of said, well, yes, they're almost 100% efficient. Yes, we have no machines that can do this that efficiently. But it's just kind of random, it just sort of just happens right. It's like, well, that's a strange explanation, but we'll just go with it. And that's what we've been doing. We've just been going with it.
29:00
And now we start to understand oh there's an information encoding happening at a very small, small level of the subatomic level of an electron, a photon, a proton, that allows for this information transfer and allows for it to happen almost instantaneously.
29:20
And it is really small and it is really fast, but it's enough. It's enough to guide this information. And to me that's really exciting because it leads us to an era of medicine that isn't just chemical, that we have other options because we know the chemical model only gets us so far and for some people just plainly doesn't work. And it also speaks to this interconnection that we have with the world around us, where I don't end at the barriers of my skin. I'm connected with the dirt beneath my feet, with the rising and setting of the sun, with the seasonal patterns, with all of those things. And for me personally that brings a great depth of safety, a feeling of belonging, like, oh okay, that's what I'm doing here. So for me it also brings just a beautiful sense of where I'm supposed to be and what I'm supposed to be doing in this world.
Dr. Michele Burklund
Host
30:33
Right, and I think even something as simple as going barefoot on the earth or something and grounding yourself, you can be in that field and fill it even in that sense Absolutely. And can you tell us more about how light and sound and water, how they all kind of interplay to affect us and to affect our bodies too?
Dr. Catherine Clinton
Guest
31:08
Sure, absolutely. I mean, we could do like a week series about this, right? I know, I know about this, right, I know, I know. But everybody should definitely go back and listen to your episode with Professor Gerald Pollack, right, so that they understand that these hydrophilic surfaces in us that means water loving create this different. It allows water to come up to the surface of a cell, that cell membrane or the surface of fascia, fascial tube, or the mitochondria or DNA. It allows, as that water comes up to the surface, it reorganizes in structure. It becomes structurally different than the regular bulk water in our body and, like we said, it becomes liquid crystal in nature.
31:58
It's able to capture light in the infrared spectrum, especially in the sun is our biggest source of infrared energy in our solar system. It is able to capture light in that spectrum. It's able to capture sound. So the field of cymatics is how different frequencies of sound each have their own, create their own cymatic pattern in water and these are beautiful patterns. They look like mandalas, right, and Hans Jennings was sort of the pioneer of cymatics.
32:39
John Stewart Reed has continued and expanded that research tremendously, showing that water structures oh, excuse me, sound structures, water, light structures, water.
32:52
So it is acting as a receiver of this information that's happening in light. And when I say light, we think of light, as we should, right. But we often don't think that that light is also an electromagnetic field and has that information encoded in it, right. And same thing with sound we think of sound as pressure waves. We often don't think of sound as light, which it is right. So we're coming back down to this idea of information being encoded in frequency and our body being able to pick that up because of the way it's made in those liquid crystal structures, like we mentioned, cell, brain and fashion, DNA and mitochondria, as well as the water that is forming on the surface of those structures. So it starts to really open up a whole new window on how the body works, how we can affect health. Right, Because we know that certain frequencies of light, certain frequencies of sound are so impactful on our health and so beneficial and in most cases, free right.
34:15
So it really puts the power back into our hands to really facilitate health in a free, accessible way.
Dr. Michele Burklund
Host
34:27
Right, and I mean there's so much studies going on with the different frequencies, you know whether it's in all different areas for data or for technology but we haven't really taken the effort to study how much we can do with our health through all of these things. So, yeah, I feel like it's it's just the beginning of an amazing field, but we really need to embrace it and really go down that path.
Dr. Catherine Clinton
Guest
34:55
Absolutely, absolutely. I think that what people don't understand when we're talking about quantum computing and neurogenic technology and all this stuff it's based it's trying to mimic what's happening in our body. So when we think like, oh my gosh, that's too wild, it has nothing to do with the body, it's like no, actually that research is trying to recreate what happens in a neuron. It's using life as the instruction manual to come up with this. So for us to kind of wrap our heads around the technology that naturally exists in us and to tend to that just opens up an incredible new avenue for accessing health.
35:50
And the thing that's really exciting for me when I speak to people about it is so much of it's free and accessible. You know it's not the latest, greatest, most fancy, most expensive thing. It's going outside in the morning, it's putting our feet in the ground, it's making sure your body knows what season it's in. It's it's working on coherence and coherent relationships with ourselves and the people in our lives and the world we live in and nature. So that's a really exciting thing for me, because so much of medicine is inaccessible and when we do access it, it's so expensive. A lot of us have gone into debt for medical procedures and medical help, and this is free and we have evolved over millennia with it. So when we're talking about side effects of putting our feet in the ground or seeing the sunrise, I mean we have ample evidence on that side as well. It's just a beautiful, beautiful practice to return to.
Dr. Michele Burklund
Host
37:01
Yeah, and I'm. I was reading some of the statistics on your website too and I think it said 3%. Yeah, the average person spends 3% of their time outdoors, which is I mean, it's so crazy how far we've gone, you know, over the last probably hundred years, of how much our lifestyle has changed to 97% of the time we are in indoor spaces, and so, um, yeah, it's powerful when you really look at it that way, and and your whole approach to rewilding and and and getting out there, it's, it's shocking when you, when you look at it and you hear those statistics.
Dr. Catherine Clinton
Guest
37:43
It is so shocking, and I, you know that's pre COVID I wonder what the statistics would be now after the pandemic. Because we've become even more reliant on technology, right, we've become even more tied to our screens. So, and I have two kids, right, I have a teenager, and so I understand that we live in a world. But there's ways to to affect change, right, if they want to do screen time, I am often saying, well, you have to do it outside. You know, like, at least you're inundated with that screen technology and that relationship, but you still will be exposed to the natural world.
38:28
You know, like um and and, and we're not talking about a big time, we're not saying you have to spend 97 of your time to be outside to get this benefit, right, we're talking about 10, 15 minutes in the morning. You know 10, 20 minutes throughout the day, lowering those lights at night. So your body knows that it's now evening and darkness and they need to do all the things that happen in that circadian rhythm. Lots of time outside is great, right, but this medicine, this relationship, doesn't need a reversal and you have to spend 90% of your time outside or 80% or something it's, it's still just, these small little bits can have enormous impacts on our health and wellbeing.
Dr. Michele Burklund
Host
39:24
Right, and, and I, I, so I have. I have one more question for you, kind of on this and and if you could find one recommendation for our audience, like the single most important thing they could do for their health, like a take-home message what would you tell them today? Jeez, you're going to move it from the one.
Dr. Catherine Clinton
Guest
39:50
Okay, that's a tough one. It's so tough I'm totally going to cheat on this one.
39:59
So I'm totally going to cheat on this one.
40:00
I'm going to combine a couple into one instance.
40:01
So if I had to choose one practice that combines a couple of things, I would say that going outside in the morning is an enormous regulator of our body, right, almost every cell in the body has a circadian gene or circadian clock that's governed by the light in our environment.
40:23
So if we can go outside in those morning hours, like before 10 AM, our hormonal cascade is set, our immune system, our digestion, our immune system, our digestion cardiovascular, neurological, mental, emotional all of these things are initiated by this spectrum of light that happens in the morning hours. So if we can do that and combine it with a practice of gratitude, we're setting ourselves up to be coherent in the body, in that heart, brain connection and coherence that can happen there and how that ripples throughout our body. And we also can become coherent with the rhythm, the main rhythm of the solar system, that circadian rhythm, the rising and setting of the sun. And so that would be my answer, and I totally cheated, but I couldn't pick between which coherence is more important, because they're so foundational both of them, that idea that gratitude can really shift our internal biology and our internal state of inflammation and immune system and hormones and all of those things. And so can the sun, right, so can that relationship with the sun. So I cheated, but that's my answer.
Dr. Michele Burklund
Host
41:57
I love that and it's like creating a ritual, like a morning ritual, to get out there and to be in tune with your body and your mind. And that's the core anyway to combine everything and to be in tune, because we're not just physical beings and we're not just emotional beings. So I think that's a powerful take home message for for everyone listening to just a simple thing they can do each day.
Dr. Catherine Clinton
Guest
42:25
Yeah, yeah, and it is simple and it's free, and yet it's so very powerful. I've seen people really shift their entire disease state with something as simple as that practice we just mentioned. So while it's simple, it doesn't mean that it's not very powerful.
Dr. Michele Burklund
Host
42:47
Exactly Well. Thank you so much for coming on today and telling us a little bit about your story and quantum biology and and hopefully a lot of people will start thinking a little differently and and being aware of the world around us in a different way.
Dr. Catherine Clinton
Guest
43:03
So thank you so much yeah, thank you so much for having me on today. It was an absolute pleasure, thank you.