ICP 90: Dr. Bonnie Coyle, MD- High Blood Pressure, Rural and Urban considerations and Universal Healthcare

Hello, I am Ian Cramer and welcome to my podcast where I speak to doctors and scholars of lifestyle medicine. Lifestyle medicine is a branch of medicine where your chronic disease or ailment is treated and often times reversed with diet and lifestyle. If diet and lifestyle causes the chronic disease, it can likely be reversed with diet and lifestyle change, rather than prescriptions that mask symptoms or procedures that don’t address the root cause. In episode 90, I am speaking with Dr. Bonnie Coyle. She is the Chairman of Community Health and Preventive Medicine at St. Luke’s University Health Network. I met her at the Lehigh Valley Vegfest in Tatamy, Pennsylvania. I reached out to Bonnie through previous podcast guest and organizer of the Lehigh Valley VegFest Meghan Grega. This is one of the rare instances these days where I got to use my portable equipment and we had an in-person discussion, which listening to it in post-production had a different, more intimate feel. Given the choice, I would make all of my conversations in person because of better sound quality, more personal, more emotions, more social ques. They’re just better. Someday. In our discussion, we speak about: What got her into Lifestyle Medicine- I’m sure her story is very relatable with many listeners out there. We address lifestyle and Preventative medicine juxtaposed to the modern medical paradigm and the work arounds for physicians and medical professionals out there who want to implement more of these preventative tactics and who still want to make a career out of it. Because Bonnie’s territory spans both rural and urban in the Lehigh Valley, we speak about what differences she sees in those patient populations both from a perspective of specific diseases and their etiology and interventions to those problems. One of the only chronic ailments we speak about is High Blood Pressure, Standards and how it’s a symptom that often flies under the radar. Bonnie’s take on the Ketogenic diet- Devil’s Advocate. The role epidemiology plays in Bonnie’s decisions and a common devil’s advocate question about Nutritional Epi. Shift gears into speaking about Opioids and their prevalence in her area. Universal Healthcare or Medicare for All. Bonnie as the next Surgeon General- End with something Bonnie has changed her mind on recently. Thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoy my conversation, on Episode #90, with Physician Dr. Bonnie Coyle.