Dr. Frank Lipman: Questioning the Norms in Medicine and Life
Good Life Project
Jonathan Fields / Acast
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 20 February 2017
⏱️ 65 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A pioneer in functional and integrative medicine, Dr. Frank Lipman is the founder and director of the Eleven Eleven Wellness Center in New York City and the author of many New York Times-bestselling books, including 10 Reasons You Feel Old and Get Fat, The New Health Rules. and Revive: Stop Feeling Spent and Start Living Again.
Born into an activist family in then apartheid South Africa, he was taught to always question norms and authority. This ethos followed him into his initial training as a doctor in South Africa. In his early work in a Soweto hospital, he was exposed to non-traditional healers who were able to accomplish what a more traditional approach to medicine struggled with.
He then emigrated to the United States in 1984, where he worked in the South Bronx, becoming Chief Medical Resident at Lincoln Hospital at the height of the crack epidemic. There, again, Lipman, began to see the limitations of traditional medicine in treating addiction, and embraced complimentary modalities. He deepened his study of nutrition, acupuncture, Chinese medicine, herbal medicine, functional medicine, biofeedback, meditation, and yoga and began to form a more integrated approach to the practice of medicine and wellbeing.
Frank eventually founded the Eleven Eleven Wellness Center in 1992, combining cutting-edge nutritional science with age-old healing techniques from the East. In a quest to bring this unique approach to the masses, he then founded BE WELL, based on the belief that everyone should have a fundamental right to be healthy.
Frank lives according to the philosophy of Ubuntu, a Xhosa word that serves as the spiritual foundation of African societies and articulates a basic understanding, caring, respect, and compassion for others. In his words, “what makes us human is the humanity we show each other.”
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I was always taught to question authority and that's really helped me in my medical training |
| 0:11.1 | too. |
| 0:12.1 | So I think part of why I went to where I went to in medicine had to do with the way I |
| 0:18.4 | grew up in South Africa because you sort of knew that the system was right. |
| 0:29.1 | Today's guest Dr. Frank Lippman grew up in apartheid South Africa. |
| 0:33.5 | His family though never accepted any of the things that they were told to do. |
| 0:37.5 | In fact, his parents were very strong activists against that system. |
| 0:42.0 | He ended up finding his way into the world of medicine and when it came time for him to |
| 0:46.3 | start practicing actually served in a hospital in Suedo just outside of South Africa's |
| 0:53.2 | Johannesburg. |
| 0:54.2 | Eventually, he really started questioning a lot of what medicine was teaching because he'd |
| 0:57.9 | been taught to question the system. |
| 1:00.2 | He'd taught to question authority by his parents. |
| 1:03.0 | That led him along journey that brought him to the United States doing stints in the |
| 1:06.7 | South Bronx in the 80s in the Lower Side in New York City. |
| 1:10.6 | All the way really questioning what is it we're doing as doctors and are there better ways |
| 1:16.0 | should we be looking at other traditions to bring into the way that we practice medicine? |
| 1:21.4 | And that led him along on a long journey which started having him integrate all sorts |
| 1:26.1 | of things that he had seen along the way and to create really his own approach to the |
| 1:31.8 | practice of medicine and eventually launching a super successful wellness center in New |
| 1:37.2 | York City. |
| 1:38.2 | He's become a multi-time author and kind of a revolutionary and an activist now in the |
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