Living A Full Life

From Pills To Prevention: A Doctor’s New Playbook

• Full Life Chiropractic • Season 4 • Episode 11

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Sick of white-knuckle health fixes that fizzle out? We sat down with Dr. Ann Hester—board-certified in internal medicine and lifestyle medicine—to map out a smarter, kinder way to better health. Instead of waiting for problems to erupt, she shows how small, strategic habits can prevent disease, treat root causes, and sometimes reverse conditions like type 2 diabetes and high LDL cholesterol.

We unpack the six pillars that drive real results: a whole-food, plant-predominant diet, meaningful movement, restorative sleep, stress management, strong social ties, and avoiding harmful substances. Dr. Hester explains how food pairing turns everyday meals into therapeutic tools—think broccoli with mustard to supercharge sulforaphane, or turmeric with black pepper to boost curcumin absorption. She shares practical wins, including a case where LDL dropped from the high 180s to 129 without pharmaceuticals by combining targeted nutrition, fiber, movement, and natural compounds like berberine and red yeast rice. Along the way, we talk gut health, the microbiome’s role in mood and immunity, and why “eat the rainbow” is more than a catchy phrase.

You’ll also get a tour of the PTR Reset—Prevent, Treat, Reverse—a stepwise method with quick starts, deeper dives, and a 30-day breakthrough program that builds coaching into your routine. We break down SMART goals so you can turn “be healthier” into clear actions you can track, adjust, and actually enjoy. If you’ve felt stuck between rigid protocols and vague advice, this conversation offers a practical middle path grounded in evidence and designed for real life.

Ready to try choices over chances? Subscribe, share this episode with someone you want to be healthy with, and leave a review to tell us which pillar you’ll start with this week.

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SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to another episode of Living a Full Life Podcast. I'm Dr. Enrico Dolchkori. We have a great guest with us today talking about lifestyle medicine, Dr. and Coach Dr. Ann Hester. Thanks for joining us this week. Thank you for having me. It is so exciting to know that medicine, because you're a medical board certified medical doctor, that medicine is getting into the lifestyle portion of health and wellness, which is fantastic. I've always joked through my entire career that uh you come to us well, you go to your doctor when aren't well, you go to your medical doctor when things aren't well. They are the pathology specialists in the world. And now you've told me that this whole new frontier for medicine is here, and I'm excited to talk about it. So uh I always like to ask our doctors, especially is what got you into this? How did your whole career start, and what's brought you here now?

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, great. So, first of all, I became a board certified internal medicine physician. Excuse me. So, for those of you who aren't familiar with internal medicine, basically we're adult doctors. A pediatrician is who you see when your kid gets sick. If you get sick, you go see likely an internal medicine doctor, an internist, maybe a family practitioner. And so I did everything from in medical school delivering kids, um, in residency and beyond, putting people on a ventilator, and everything in between. Most of my life I spent as a hospitalist. That's a hospital-based physician. And I saw so much unnecessary pain and suffering. But I also spent a lot of time in the office. And I noticed this huge void between how doctors think and how patients think. And I decided I wanted to create a platform where patients can go and sign up for on-demand courses, take them whenever they want to, and learn like bite-sized chunks of important information from experts. So I created a platform called patientworld.net. And I started hiring, I would get different specialists to come in, and I hired one physician to do lifestyle medicine, not really understanding what it really was, but it sounded really interesting. So I hired her, and as I was recording her, I just sat there aghast like, how is it that I practiced medicine for decades and I didn't know this information? We weren't trained that way in medical school. In medical school, we were trained anatomy, physiology, disease, pill, surgery, maybe decreased life expectancy. We were trained to catch the train after it left the tracks. Lifestyle medicine is the opposite. It is an emerging field that actually is growing like a wildfire, and it's in like 50 countries, at least 50 countries now. And the American Medical Association put out a resolution in 2017 saying you doctors need to learn and apply lifestyle medicine because the data is that strong.

SPEAKER_00:

Great. Well, I'm excited about that. I don't know how I missed that. Uh, but that is exciting from our from our MDs. I know you guys are full practice, doing tons of work, always helping patients and putting out fires. You're always dealing with fires. So it's really nice to see this side of it. Welcome to this side of healthcare. It is, it is um, I think just as exciting as a doctor to be on this side, helping people fulfill the health and wellness journey that they're on and staying well and uh preserving what you know God gave us our health, which is fantastic. So, what did you see? I mean, you've been practicing, I know you're only 42, but you've been practicing for a little bit. You've been practicing decades ago.

SPEAKER_01:

I like that.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, where where are we going? Where are we going as not society, but where are we going from a healthcare perspective on taking care of ourselves? What is the demand from the patient right now that you're seeing? It's huge.

SPEAKER_01:

I mean, people are realizing that they don't want to go down this path to disease. There's a better way. And literally around the world, this is catching steam. Because, you know, I mentioned I was a hospital-based doctor for most of my life. I can't tell you how many people I admitted to the hospital with drug toxicity. They were taking the right dose, but they had life-threatening side effects. Everything from bleeding internally, some of them unfortunately didn't make it, to all sorts of side effects. You'd have this disease, you take this drug, it caused these side effects, so you would take this drug. The medicine cabinet was so full, sometimes you doubled up and you took one that had the generic name and one that had the brand name. He ended up back in the hospital because of the side effects. So it just goes on and on. And people are tired. They spend all this money on health care, and they don't get better. So traditional health care tries to control the disease once it occurs. Lifestyle medicine focuses on ways to prevent the disease, treat it naturally, and sometimes even reverse it. When I was coming through training, the thought of reversing type 2 diabetes was like the Jetsons. It's like this just not going to happen. But now it's very common. There are specific things that we can do to reverse type 2 diabetes in a lot of people, not everybody. And I also actually got a certification, a certificate from lifestyle medicine to reverse diabetes, but there's so much out there for men. You take two groups of men with prostate cancer, one group does life as normal, the other group adopts the pillars of lifestyle medicine. That group is going to live longer. Same for women with breast cancer. I'm not talking any change, any difference in the chemotherapy or anything else. I'm talking your lifestyle after the diagnosis. And if you follow these pillars before the diagnosis, you decrease your risk of ever getting the disease in the first place.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes. Yes, yes. Love it. Um, so the yes, the demand is there. We've I've noticed it. People want it. Um, now as a provider, as a doctor, what's the toughest part about helping helping your patients? Where is it where you just end the day and you're like, I wish they would just listen to me. But uh, what's the toughest part for you as a provider doing this type of uh medical care? Because traditional medicine is here's your prescription, take it twice a day, and we'll see you in 60 days and redo your blood work. What is it with lifestyle medicine that frustrates you the most?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I left clinical medicine a few years ago. I do administrative medicine and my lifestyle medicine, the coaching and the creating courses and so forth is something that I do in addition to that. And what I've seen is people really want to know what they need to do better. They want to do better, but they need the appropriate steps. And I don't get a lot of pushback from people because when they respond to something I've done, it's positive. Like I did, I recently did a LinkedIn article. I have a LinkedIn newsletter, the PTR reset. And I talked about pairing foods. And so if you pair your broccoli with mustard, one of the important nutrients in broccoli multiplies 20-fold just by food pairing. You pair turmeric with pepper, and you increase the power of turmeric many times. And so my responses were like, I asked people which one of these things do you prefer? And so they would choose what they like, but I don't get a lot of people responding, you know, in disbelief because I mean, we're talking about decades of medical research. With the AMA to promote lifestyle medicine, I mean, that says a great deal. And people are hungry, they don't want high medical bills, they'd rather spend their money putting it in their retirement account than in their copay for a long hospital stay.

SPEAKER_00:

Amen. Uh, you're absolutely right. And the thing, I think you answered my question in there by saying the patient chooses. Very rarely in medicine does the patient get any choice in anything. It is definitive. It's here's a prescription, here's your prognosis. And you're giving them choices to be interactive with their health, which was you know, my experience, which is my experience as well, is the accountability and choice that they get to they they can say, well, I'm not gonna do that. I probably won't be able to do that, but I can do this. And then as a doctor, you're like, Great, let's go down this path and how and that's lifestyle. That's the whole definition of what lifestyle is. Everyone's lifestyle is a little different. So accommodating to that, what a what a great paradigm shift for medicine to be able to bend and twist around the patient. Absolutely. That's how you help them. It's like giving them one big hug, and it's it's great. I love it, I really do. So I think choice was the answer there. Great answer on that one. What has been some uh rewarding, um not cases specifically, but rewarding uh times in your career during this whole journey in lifestyle medicine? What has been the most rewarding parts that you've seen from either results or just helping patients?

SPEAKER_01:

One of the most rewarding things I've seen is one individual had a cholesterol that put her at risk of heart attacks and strokes. She does not like to take pills. So you may be familiar with the LDL cholesterol, that's the cholesterol that blocked the arteries. It was like 188 or 189, did not want drugs, and got into lifestyle medicine and dropped it to 129. So the risk of having a fatal heart attack in the next few years, it plummeted. No drugs. And so lifestyle medicine, it's about lifestyle, but it also considers natural things like, for instance, berberine, that is something that's natural, that can lower your LDL cholesterol, improve your blood sugar, red yeast rice has the same chemical that one of the first generation statins had, MerCor, the same chemical. And based on this individual whose LDL dropped by like 60 points, using berberine, red yeast rice, um, exercise, flaxseed, um, psyllium, green tea, there are multiple things that we can do to lower the cholesterol naturally. And so to me, that is huge. And there are a lot of people who either they don't want to take pharmaceuticals, they may not be able to afford them, they don't like the side effects, they've heard horror stories. Whatever the case may be, now we have alternatives for people to do things so they can actually live longer and do the things the way they want to do them. Everybody does not want a medicine cabinet full of drugs. Some people feel, well, I do what the doctor tells me, I forget the medicine, don't pick it up, you know, I do it when I want to. But now that people have a choice to say, and first of all, let me say, I'm not giving medical advice, always talk to your doctor, different people are different. But now people have a choice. So if the doctor says, okay, your LDL, cholesterol, your cholesterol is high, I want to start you on a statin. The first line is typically lifestyle anyway. And when people learn all the different things they can do with lifestyle, I mean, even green tea can lower your LDL. When you learn the many things you can do, you go back to your doctor a few months later, your cholesterol is normal, and you haven't taken a single pharmaceutical, that says a lot because you have made the choice to do these things. And for instance, I talked about, you know, green tea and oat brand and so forth. Not only do those things improve your cholesterol, but they do a lot of other healthy things to your body. So you may be doing it for this reason, and your body gets this benefit, this benefit, and this benefit. And so all of these things are interwoven and the potential is phenomenal.

SPEAKER_00:

It really, it really is. And I see the paradigm shift too in in in medicine, because you know, collaborative medicine across all fields uh is patients now go back to their primary, and the primary is like, keep doing what you're doing. I find that even 10 years ago that wasn't the thing. There was a little bit of uh resistance from the medical field about being, hey, what do you mean you're not doing the prescription drugs we prescribed you uh a year ago? Why are you not doing it? There was a little bit of pushback on it because the protocol was the protocol. That's medical. Yes, we did it too, but we have our protocols as well. And we're kind of pushing against that now. And patients are coming back and saying, Hey, I've been doing the I changed my diet, I've been following Dr. Ann's uh recipes, and I've been doing some red light therapy in my chiropractor's office. My cholesterol's gone down, and they're like, keep doing what you're doing. And I'm like, that's that's some great feedback. So I so maybe that's because I've been out of the loop. Maybe there is lifestyle medicine um and the doctors are hearing this. And I and I knew research and implementing new things across an entire industry can take up to 10 years. Something has to cross each provider's desk statistically, and by the time they read this and implement it into their own practices, that gap can be 10 years from the time we said increase your vitamin D to 10 years later in 2011 doctors saying, hey, you have low vitamin D. That can take time. And maybe that's where we're at with lifestyle medicine. Maybe we're in the middle of this, where the old school providers that have been doing this two, three, four decades are starting to see this crossing their desks and in the journals and being like, oh, okay, maybe I need to be a little bit more open, which uh I hope that's the case. That's great.

SPEAKER_01:

I think it is. Uh, I think I saw recently that even Harvard gave like maybe a three-day um webinar for doctors who want to learn lifestyle medicine. I mean, this is becoming really mainstream. And I do want to say, I am board certified by the American Board of Lifestyle Medicine. But the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, you can still get certification if you're a chiropractor, if you're multiple other things. And so you don't have to be a physician, it's just physicians are board certified by the American Board of Lifestyle Medicine, like the American Board of Pediatrics, American Board of Internal Medicine, and so forth.

SPEAKER_00:

The board, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

So um, a lot of different healthcare providers, once they have that degree that they have, they can still go on and get certification in lifestyle medicine. So that opens a lot of doors for many different people.

SPEAKER_00:

Great, great to great to know about that too. So we can all be on the same page. That's that's fantastic as well. Um I had a question and I forgot it, so I'll come up with a different question. Uh, so with patients, uh how do patients find you or how do they know to look for this? Where is how do they find lifestyle? So they're gonna hear this podcast and you're gonna be on other podcasts, and the word's gonna spread. How do people find lifestyle board-certified medical doctors?

SPEAKER_01:

They can go to Google and put in Lifestyle Medicine Doctor near me if they want to see somebody in person.

unknown:

Okay.

SPEAKER_01:

A lot of lifestyle medicine physicians they do coaching online like I do or courses or whatever else. So a lot of us are on the internet. Um, but certainly they can easily find if they want a lifestyle medicine physician that they sit down and talk to, Google it.

SPEAKER_00:

There are a lot of us. I didn't know if that was a key word that's there yet, but I guess it is, it is. Okay, perfect.

SPEAKER_01:

About the last time I checked, about 0.4% of US physicians, 0.1%, less than 0.4%, and less than 0.1% of physicians worldwide have a board certification in lifestyle medicine. So it's a tiny fraction, but it's not insignificant. Thousands of us do have that certification. Uh, and so you know, you can choose somebody online, or you can, you know, some some practicing physicians also went back and got that certification. So there's a small percentage of doctors who have brick and mortar offices will also have that certification, but a lot of us are online as well.

SPEAKER_00:

So virtual. So I mean there's no real borders here. I mean, people can call you from a distance away and still you could help them. Yes. Can you do out of state? You can do across the United States.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, what I do, I don't do telemedicine. Okay. Health coaching, you can do any place. And so it's very clear I am a physician, but I'm not acting against your physician. I'm giving you information and helping you chart our out your path and helping you stay accountable. So that's different from telemedicine. You have bronchitis, let me call in a prescription.

SPEAKER_00:

Makes sense. Uh that's that is cool. I met, you know, calling someone up as a coach, being able to get assistance, and then at the end of the conversation, learning that uh Dr. Ann is a board certified medical doctor, and you're like, oh, I'm gonna trust this information. That I love that. That is fantastic that you guys can do that. So I see what you're doing. The coach thing opens your umbrella to anyone, and the telemedicine restricts it to your wherever um your guests are contracted to work. Where, yeah, that makes more sense. Okay, perfect. So this is great. So now how do they find you specifically? Let's talk about the PTR reset. What did you build? What does this look like? What can people expect when they go to search this?

SPEAKER_01:

The PTR reset is a way, it's a method to help you get from A to Z. And so P is prevent, T is treat, R is reverse. So this is built on the six pillars of lifestyle medicine, which include a whole food plant predominant, a plant-based diet, meaningful movement, stress management, and then you have social connections, um, adequate sleep, and avoidance of toxins. So the PTR reset goes through each of those six pillars with videos, and I have smart goes. One one course, actually, there's one course, the PTR reset uh sneak peek, and that's free. And that is a brief video on all the six pillars of lifestyle medicine. But then there are different levels. The the quick start just takes you to a deeper dive, and then I have a 30-day breakthrough program that goes through everything in the quick start, and it adds multiple videos, and it actually adds some pre-recorded coaching. So I would coach you through, for instance, your dietary habits, whole food plant-based diets. And there is a downloadable form that you fill out, and you can actually fill it out on the computer. So, a question such as how do you feel when you eat these foods? What is the trigger for you to do these things? And then you pause the video and you think about it. So, coaching is actually built into the 30 day reset. And then I have downloadable SMART goals that you fill out, you download them, you create your SMART goal for people. Aren't familiar with that? S is specific. M marriageable. A achievable. R relevant T time bound. So let's say that you want to increase your green vegetables. Let's say S specific. I want to eat more broccoli. M marageable. I want to eat three more servings of broccoli a week. A achievable. Yes, go to the store and get it. R relevant. Absolutely. It can decrease your cancer risk and it's very germane to your desire to be healthier. T, time bound. I want to do this for two weeks and reassess. So I have downloadable SMART goals. You determine your which SMART goals you want to create for yourself. You keep downloading, creating more SMART goals. And so as opposed to the New Year's resolution, I want to do A, B, C, D, and E, and by week one, I'm not going to be able to do this. You go at the pace that you set and you document what your goals are. And then you save these or you print these. And so over time, you can see all the goals you've made for yourself. You can look back and say, on February 1st, this is my lifestyle. On June the 1st, look how far I've come. There is information from a lot of people don't want whole food, plant-based, purely. So I call the Mediterranean diet the Plan B. So it deals with a lot of similar things, but it does allow you to eat some meat. And then I have a gut expert who deals with the microbiome of what you can do differently to have a healthy gut. So your gut is like the second brain. Everything from dealing with serotonin that impacts how depressed or anxious you are, to, you know, I mean, so many things. The gut is your key to health. The immune system strongly linked to your gut. And so there are just different steps based on I want to learn about it, you know, just an overview, your sneak peek to your quick start, I'm going to get deeper in to revving up to a 30-day program. And you just basically learn how to transform your life. And one thing I like to tell people to do, once you learn these things, share them with somebody. Because if we're going to turn the tide in healthcare, there aren't enough doctors and nurses. And actually, we're not trained well enough to do all of this. I was an internist for decades. I didn't know about lifestyle medicine until a few years ago. So I was trained anatomy, physiology, disease, pill surgery. And that's how most of us are trained, to be quite honest. But you can be part of this revolution to transform the health for yourself, for your loved ones, for your kids, be around long enough to see your kids have kids, maybe their kids have kids. I'm a great-grandmother, so I'm a little bit over 42. So there is so much potential. And I even have a couple of teenagers, and they know when they go to the grocery store, they pick it up, oh mommy, this has chemicals, and they put it back down. So start getting them to think in those along those lines at a young age. And so as they grow older, they're more likely not to choose the ultra-processed foods, or at least choose them less often and choose the things that actually nourish their bodies and can help them live longer.

SPEAKER_00:

Love it. Yes. A lot of chiropractors, if they're listening, they're like smiling right now. They're like, yes, we have the full team, they're back. Because this is how it all started 150 years ago. The chiropractors were studying alongside when we first started with medicine in anatomy and physiology, and uh the DOs and DCs went out the other way, and the medical doctors went their way, and then the DOs came back, and now they're in medicine again, and the doctor of chiropractic scope was limited. And we're like, I guess we'll just stay out here and adjust spines. So it's cool to see us all work together again. And the demand is high. You're gonna do wonderful with this. Good job. Go to PTRreset.com to get that free quiz you can do to download or to ask.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, it's a free course, the PTR Reset Sneak Peek. So just sign up for it and then you can take the course immediately.

SPEAKER_00:

Then if you want to talk to Dr. Anne even more, you go in there and you send her a message and she'll show you how to work with her or help you out in any way she can. I'm excited about this. Good work, first of all. I know what it takes to build something like this and to implement it. And uh now it's the groundwork and get on the podcast, get your SEO going, and get people to find you and share it. Uh, and I'll help you in any way I can moving forward. But this is exciting. It's nice to have that. You guys still have the authority as medical doctors in the knowledge base of health and wellness, and you've built that over 200 years, and people do trust, so they've been disappointed, disappointed in the healthcare system the last probably two, three decades because they feel like the medicine has failed. And it's not this was the answer, and you guys are on it. I'm excited. This is this is fantastic. Good job on that. Did I miss anything that you want the listeners to hear?

SPEAKER_01:

What I would say is I like to think of healthcare like as um Navy. So you can have an admiral, you can have you know the commanders, the doctors, nurses, and so forth, but unless you have the individual seamen, the general public, you're not gonna win. So there are not enough healthcare professionals to turn it around. But if you learn the benefits of lifestyle medicine and you teach your kids, you teach your cowork, you teach your spouse, over time, as this builds exponentially, 10 years from now, we'll all be in a healthier space.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, we love it. Like flipping the food pyramid, that's a start, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, that's a horse of a different color. So um, you know, I I when you I'm a vegetarian, um, everybody doesn't have to be. I mean, I think salmon, there's certain meats that are good, but we do know that red meat is classified as the carcinogen. We know that it's linked to colon cancer and it's linked, you know, red meat and all that fat is linked to inflammation in the body and early death. Um, and so if you look at the blue zones around the world and you look at some of these natural cancer centers, they're talking about whole foods.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes.

SPEAKER_01:

And so you have to pick what's the best for you. There's no point in saying everybody needs to do what I do because I'm different than the next person. My body makeup is different. I may not need what you might need, but what I would say is make most of your plate fruits, vegetables, grains when you can make them organic. Go to EWG, learn about the clean 15 and the dirty dozens, and you can see which foods it's okay to buy without the organic part and which foods you really do need to strongly consider it because you don't want all those chemicals in your body. So most of your plate, make it fruits, vegetables, grains, herbs, seeds, nuts, and so forth. And then certainly, if you want the piece of salmon or chicken breasts or something, it would not be the overwhelming majority of the meal, but there's room for that. But make it more like the garnish or the dessert than the main plate. And that way you'll get, you heard of eat the rainbow. That's because different nutrients are found in different colored foods. The red um cherries are not gonna have all the same nutrients as the green kale or the yellow squash. I mean, in order for your body to get everything it needs, you need to pull from all of these different corners. And so if you're focused on just one thing, even one color fruit or vegetable, you're still gonna be missing the boat.

SPEAKER_00:

Love it. Great thing to close out on. That's fantastic. And I have episodes on all that the the dirty dozen, the blue zones. I have we've done it all. That's your time. Yeah, thank you for your time. Appreciate it. Good luck with everything. Thank you, sir. Thanks for having me on the show. Of course.

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Dr. Enrico Dolcecore

Host
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Dr. Christine Hafer

Co-host