Podcast 521: Community Is the Cure: The Health Revolution

MARTIN: Hi everyone, this is Martin Pytela for Life Enthusiast podcast where you will learn very interesting things about the field of health, especially alternative health, and today with me is Dr. Athena Hall. Welcome.

ATHENA: Thank you, Martin. It's great to be here with you.

MARTIN: Indeed. I think you have a very interesting angle to bring to this whole situation because the world as we know it, and especially the healing profession as the mainstream knows it, has been fully captured by a specific mindset, a mind virus introduced to us back in the 1910-1920 by Rockefeller and Carnegie, and here we are.

ATHENA: Absolutely. Yeah. Our health care system has a lot to offer in terms of emergency services and surgeries and technology and has come a long way in some of those advancements. But we are really lacking in chronic disease management as well as prevention, and we have closed ourselves off to other modalities of health.

MARTIN: Right. indeed. They're exceedingly good for saving us from emergencies. They're exceedingly useless at preventing them.

ATHENA: Right. Yeah.

MARTIN: Yeah. And you say it well, the chronic disease that's usually caused by lifestyle rather than a blunt force impact, or sharp force, or a bullet, or a sword in the chest. All right. So, there you are. So, tell a bit of history. I think it would be relevant for all of us to hear just how you got to saying, "I don't like the way I'm becoming".

ATHENA: I felt really drawn to global health work, and it's actually why I went into medicine, and I did a fellowship right after residency. I spent a year in Rwanda and a year on a Navajo reservation, and during that time I saw so many of the health disparities and the hierarchical nature of our health care system and how we weren't really giving patients tools to understand their health and to be able to advocate for themselves. And I saw how we were not including our community in the design of their own health care system, and how we weren't asking them what services they wanted, and instead pushing a one-size-fits-all health care model on these communities. 

And in Rwanda especially, I saw the impact of that with the expense, the wastefulness, and the alienation of the community. How they didn't feel like they were really part of the health care system. And so there was a lack of trust there. And I also saw how a lot of people wanted to see their traditional healers in their communities, but we taught the providers in Rwanda to shame them for seeing these traditional healers. And we didn't talk with the healers. And so that created a huge gap where there was a lack of collaboration that we could have had with the healers, and the patients felt like they couldn't speak about it.

MARTIN: Yeah, we've done an exceedingly good job of that here. We used to have homeopaths or homeopathy and herbology and chiropractic and osteopathy and all these, and traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic medicine, and we have managed to shame them out of the mainstream just fine around here too, didn't we?

ATHENA: Yeah. And it's really hurting everyone, including people within the healthcare industry. Perhaps not the people at the top, who have a stake in keeping things as they are, but a lot of people feel like they want to help others and want to be able to have that collaboration and network and see patients and our communities healthy. But instead we're really pressured to push this one-size model.

MARTIN: Well, that's the basic premise of the medicine as you are taught it in the medical school of today which is treatment not healing, treatment not cure.

ATHENA: Right. Yes.

MARTIN: By the way, I'm curious who gets better health outcomes now—Navajos or Rwandans? Just curious if you have an impression that you would say, well, you know..

ATHENA: Oh, that's a tricky question. Yeah, I would say the Navajo people have more access to emergency equipment and services, but there is so little invested in prevention. And some of the Native healthcare models are really incredible, and they have built in a lot of community health workers and people that serve as bridges from the health care institutions and the community so that they can better understand the culture and help people navigate the systems. But where I was there, that was pretty lacking.

MARTIN: I keep thinking about the separation of us from our original food resources. You know I come to it from the metabolic typing perspective where I see that genetics are tied directly to health outcomes through the prism of food. Meaning this: as long as you eat the diet that your ancestors were selected for, you're going to have much better outcomes than if you switch to some other diet. And Weston A. Price proved it beautifully when in the 1930s he went around the world and at the end wrote: As long as you eat your Aboriginal diet you'll be fine, as soon as you switch to the industrial diet you will start seeing genetic deformities. He was looking at it from a dentist's perspective, so more cavities, collapsing arches, and all other problems.

ATHENA: I think most humans don't benefit from industrialized food. When I was living in Rwanda, just, and in other parts of Africa, seeing how much pressure they had to westernize and have all these fast food restaurants and things and shift away from their traditional ways of eating and the effect that it had on the population and rising cancer rates and obesity and chronic diseases that we see here which weren't so prevalent in those areas.

MARTIN: Yeah, and of course we come with our money. Our capital allows us to go build the grocery stores and import the foods and the fast food restaurants and so on. And so we're actually draining money from their economy towards us through these mediators, right?

ATHENA: Yes. Taking from the local economies. It's pretty hard to watch and to see that happening in those communities.

MARTIN: So, right there, I guess that was the main motivation in your change of heart about medicine, right?

ATHENA: Yeah. I really am, ultimately what I want to do in my career is help communities to develop their own health care systems. So, have adaptable health care models, and they may want to have their traditional healers incorporated into the hospital as well as more of them in the community, and they may want to have emergency services. They may want to have more home births, but have access to blood banks that can easily help women when they're hemorrhaging and different things like that. So I think we can be so much more creative.

MARTIN: So when you say community, what size are you thinking? 

ATHENA: In terms of the community being served?

MARTIN: Like you say, I want to see the community, right? What scale are you thinking?

ATHENA: Yeah. So, I think looking at communities, it's definitely a kind of nebulous term and hard to define, and sometimes they're overlapping communities. But there are really great models out there that we can learn from on how to understand what communities need and how to include them in the design of their health care system. I think it really is looking at, within a village, and sometimes it overlaps with an area nearby. But I think we can be a lot more adaptive and flexible in how we design health care systems.

MARTIN: Oh definitely. I mean, when I think of community, I could see it as a physical locality like a reservation, or it could be all the Hasidic Jews in New York City because they will group together and they will have their preferences compared to, I don't know, all the Nicaraguans living in New York City, right?

ATHENA: Yeah. There's some communities, I'm thinking with developing these services would be more in terms of location where they're living; but then there would also be some services that are provided to groups that are across the US and living in different areas because they share a commonality.

MARTIN: Yeah. Well, in today's economy as I know it, centralization is the drive, right? Smaller companies get bought up by bigger companies. A local insurance scheme gets integrated and gobbled up until there are only three very large fish left in the pond, and that's the end of that. We arrive at a cartel, like the way we have arrived at a cartel of gas companies; there are only four or five gasoline providers? And the choice is none; the price is pretty much all the same at all the pumps, and you can't tell one from the other, or we have that happening at the internet level.

ATHENA: Yeah. I really feel like it needs to be people from the inside, and it needs to be a bottom-up solution for change to happen because everyone at the top is really concerned with money and power, and there's nothing that we can do or say or protest that's really going to shift the needle that much in the services and how things are provided. So we really have to band together and network.

MARTIN: Right. That reminds me of the most evil words: standard of care. That's from top down, from the insurance company telling the doctor what they should or shouldn't do based on what the insurance company has decided was acceptable.

ATHENA: Yeah. That's a really awful thing that has come out of insurance companies dictating what services patients can receive and how much reimbursement they get from the services. It really loses your agency as both a provider and a patient.

MARTIN: Exactly. I mean, I remember my own story. Stuff didn't get done because it was needed. It got done because it was insured, and I couldn't care less if it cost money because as a client, I had no motivation in reducing the costs. It was just built in, baked in.

ATHENA: Right. Yeah. 

MARTIN: And that enough for me actually, was plenty enough of a reason to not do it. Except I didn't know it then.

ATHENA: I think it's so important that we educate everyone within our communities so that they understand how to advocate for what they need and what they need to ask for. Because our health care system doesn't give us the tools of the time. So, you don't really know what to say no to and what to ask for. It can be very confusing, especially if you have a family member who you're having to care take for, and your plate's already full.

MARTIN: Or if you have a bunch of relatives who are somehow bought into the system telling you you have to be crazy to try something other than that. So, let's try and have you describe what you would like to see in the world. What are you trying to birth?

ATHENA: Yeah. So I created a network called Zena Health Network to bring communities and healthcare workers together so that we can learn about other ways of providing health care, models that are already working out there, like the Nuka system of care in Alaska where they're including the communities in their health care system decisions. So we can learn, and then we can also create new models or create models based off of those programs that are already working, and we can scale them out into our communities. 

And I think as a health care system we can open doors for people to explore what health means to them, what services they might want, which could include acupuncture, yoga, it might even be something like a swimming lesson or a dance lesson. And our job is to promote health for them and to open up opportunities so that they feel supported to take care of their health and to prevent disease in the first place.

MARTIN: Yeah. So I guess we have two choices or one choice between, insure everything or insure nothing, right? Because the only level field we will ever have that will give us a chance to break out of the chokehold that the current health coverage has is if we buy out of it or step out of it.

ATHENA: Yeah. Universal healthcare or just getting rid of it all together. I think yeah, it's a complicated problem that I don't think there's a,

MARTIN: Well, there is an option; it's called cooperative.

ATHENA: Yeah. I think if our communities were investing in their own health and their own health services, then they get more of a say in what they receive, and they're more invested in their own health.

MARTIN: Well, if we are covering each other and if we're in each other's face, we will be talking to each other saying, "Don't do that. That's going to cost all of us". And we're going to be saying that to our dangerous behavior that's going to break a leg, or we going to be saying that to our silly habits like consuming pizza every Friday night?

ATHENA: Yeah. More accountability and I think more support, too. You're looking at your community more and wanting to support their health. You're invested in their health. And I think that's really important as humans to be caring for each other and to feel that sense of community and support. Otherwise, our individualism is really killing us in this country.

MARTIN: Yeah. Your way of thinking is got sort of a liberal slant to it where we are considering each other as equal and we're also on the team, team community, like we all belong together, which kind of goes against the mindset of the more individualistic—I would call it the conservative mindset—where they would say, "No, no, no. Don't put your nose in my affairs. Stay out. It's up to me to decide what I want to do, and I want the consequences of my actions to be mine".

ATHENA: Yeah. And we've seen how that plays out, how destructive it can be when you're really only invested in your own interests. And we're not taking care of our planet; we're not taking care of other humans around us, and it's ultimately hurting us as well. So, I wouldn't say that these issues are black and white, conservative or liberal. I'm not super invested in politics, I’m more invested in humans. 

MARTIN: I’m not wanting to use the political labels, although it is somewhat overlapped. Like, the libertarian folk will say: “Everybody is responsible for their outcomes. Everybody is free to choose what they want to do.” And it has consequences, a lot of these types will come begging for help after they’d proudly said: “I don’t need help.” And then, sometime later, in trouble, they will be saying: “Oh, please help me.”

ATHENA: I don't think, I think there's some value to the individualist mindset and understanding it, and it's important to have your agency and to be able to feel like you have choices. But we also have to recognize that we are not an island by ourselves. We are all connected. Anything that we do will impact the people and plants and animals around us, and so we need to start thinking about that more so that we don't destroy everything around us.

MARTIN: Indeed. So what have you managed to build so far?

ATHENA: Yeah, so we just launched in January 2025. We have a small network right now that's growing, and we are going to start a pilot project that's geared towards educating our communities and our healthcare workers so that our communities feel like they can advocate for what they need, and our healthcare workers have more tools and skills to be able to relate to their patients and build those relationships and also with their communities.

MARTIN: So, are you building it as little islands, little colonies that grow?

ATHENA: Not really. Right now, it's going to be actually a global community, but concentrated in the US and the projects will definitely start out within the US in the beginning. But it's really a space to learn from each other and to work together because if we're working on a project and we say, "Hey, we actually realize we need a lawyer to help us navigate this portion of the project," and maybe we need someone who understands project management or grant writing, and we have a physician and a social worker all working together on this one project. I think it's so important to work across sectors and not just be stuck in our bubble.

MARTIN: Right. Okay. So I guess we should try and define who are the people that should connect with you and how should they do that?

ATHENA: Yeah. So people who see the problems in our health care system.

MARTIN: That's everyone.

ATHENA: Yeah. Well, not everyone. Some people are still pretty attached to the way things have been and they think that we can just make tweaks to our current system.

MARTIN: Oh yeah. Let's put a pin in this for a moment. I want to just throw in this thought which is, I think it was Buckminster Fuller, but I'm not sure, but the point is you cannot reform a sick system. The only hope you have is that you start something new and allow it to grow, and enough people will see that the new thing is a better choice and join it. That's how we stand a chance of fixing it. There's zero chance of fixing the power structure as it stands.

ATHENA: Yeah. I mean, I think you can fix a sick system that has a strong foundation and strong core values that align with the people that are working within that system. But our system has a foundation that is really faulty. That so many people struggled with burnout and apathy because it's so misaligned.

MARTIN: Yeah. I think it starts from the top. When you have money in politics controlling the legislators who then will write legislation that is tilted towards the people who paid for it, it just stands no chance. It's irreparable in the sense that you can be fiddling with it, but it's a lot like rearranging furniture on the Titanic.

ATHENA: Exactly. Yeah. And that's what the problem with our system and education and a lot of our other symptoms, is the foundation of it, what it was is geared towards profits, to benefiting the industry instead of benefiting the actual humans that we're caring for. And so I think there's no fixing that. It is like rearranging the furniture, like you said. Any tweaks we make to the system it’s just going to go back to what it was created for in the first place. We need to create something entirely new alongside it and have bridges over so people can shift over to a new system.

MARTIN: All right. So the obvious choices are people working in the health industry—health providers, anything from nurses to doctors, and every other profession. And you're mentioning legal and social work and everything else. Okay. So that's essentially, you're trying to re-knit a different sweater of the society. Right?

ATHENA: Right. Yeah, it is like re-knitting. We really need that network and we need that working together. 

MARTIN: How do we, they, interact with you and your work?

ATHENA: Yeah, so, you were asking earlier who should come in to the network and who should reach out? And that would be people who see those health problems in the health care system and people who want to invest time and energy into creating something new. And so, you can find my website at www.znahealthnetwork.com. You can find me on LinkedIn at Athena Lorin Hall, L-o-r-i-n. So if you want to reach out, send me a message, find out more about the network. There's also a free community space so you can hop into the network, learn about what we're doing, and get involved in the discussions that we’re having, and go from there.

MARTIN: Yeah. So how do you see the world some years out—five, ten, fifteen—describe to me what that might look like? Let's just do some visioning. What keeps you going?

ATHENA: Yes. Well, I'm so inspired by the Alaskan Native health care system. That's, I think a direction that I see we could be going in. 25 years ago. They were stuck in the Indian Health Services IHS health care system, that was really government-owned. It was very slow. Really didn't invest at all in prevention. And so there were so many chronic diseases, a lot of ER visits because nobody could get primary care, and a lot of people with mental illness and substance abuse. And so they were given the chance to take over their own health care system and rebuild it. So they created a health care system where the patients are called customer owners. So, they're part owners of their own health care system, and they get to design what services are provided, what their hospitals and clinics look like. And then the cost structure of it. They get to say, "We want this bar to be removed from this neighborhood and to make it a coffee shop." And so, the actual health care system is putting money and investing into a coffee shop. So, it's pretty amazing what they're doing. And they've shifted the health of their communities drastically with a significant drop in ER visits and chronic disease. And so, I think that's something that I could see in our future is where we have people in our communities actually really involved in the health care system, and they get to advocate what they need and design their own their own system.

MARTIN: Yeah. So that's a fairly rural setting, right?

ATHENA: There's Anchorage, which is a bigger city, but the rest of Alaska is yeah, very rural. So.

MARTIN: Yeah, I'm just trying to think how it might play in say, Washington where we have, I could see that in the small town rural settings. I could see that the hunting communities or the farming communities might work that way. The big city might just well I don't know.

ATHENA: Yeah. And there's other programs too to learn from. They involve their communities. There's some in Chicago like City Block Health. And so there's a lot that already is working and that we can learn from that is significantly impacting the health of their communities.

MARTIN: Yeah. I guess as long as people buy in, as long as they want to know one another as opposed to treat each others as objects, treat one another as neighbors, right?

ATHENA: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think things are shifting these days. Even though, that's not really reflected in our politics. I think a lot of people are really ready for change. They want to feel more of a sense of community and less isolation. 

MARTIN: Yeah you mentioned the customer-owner. It's essentially is neighbor, citizen community member, and I have to look you in the eye, and I have to be accountable for what I'll do to you and you to me, right?

ATHENA: Yeah, and a lot it is very humbling which I think is what our health care system really needs to shift into, humility, knowing that we don't have all the answers, and we can't dictate what what everybody gets, they need to have a say in it as well. It needs to be a partnership.

MARTIN: Alright. Okay. And so, how long do you think this might take you to have these, I think I see it sort of like a a bacterial colony. Where we drop some into the fertile ground and it's going to start growing somewhere along some around something. I keep thinking that this really does require a personal contact and trust and connection.

ATHENA: Absolutely. And that's a big core principle of ZNA is relationships, building these relationships. So I think it could take, it could take about, I think about in five years, we're going to be  having projects across the US, but it might take around 10 years for those to really start scaling out.

MARTIN: Do you know anything, or do you operate within the sphere of astrology? 

ATHENA: Somewhat. Yeah.

MARTIN: Okay. You may know this, but we are in Aquarian, Pluto is in Aquarius, which is bound to highlight community, these next 24 years will have that influence is bound to strengthen community is bound to force it into our consciousness that community is important that relationships are more important than some transactions.

ATHENA: Right. Yeah, we've been through a dark period of really feeling alone and feeling like we have to do it all on our own and work really hard, and now we're realizing, and it's going to take some time for that shift to happen to feel like we are supported.

MARTIN: Well, you have the wind, if the wind would be astrology. You have the wind in your back, so to speak. So, you do stand a chance of building what you're after, which I think is marvelous

ATHENA: That’s pretty cool.

MARTIN: And I really love the word agency. As in personal accountability, responsibility, and having the power to make decisions for oneself, as opposed to being a victim of circumstance.

ATHENA: Yes. Yeah. Having that sense of agency is so important. What I saw in a lot of places in Africa was feeling like they are dependent on aid and victims to their circumstance and it's a codependence that was created.

MARTIN: Similar to the native communities. The reservation itself was created to essentially turn them into children dependent on daddy. And daddy is a jackass. 

ATHENA: Exactly. Very stingy jackass. Yeah.

MARTIN: Yeah. 

ATHENA: Yeah. So I think people are realizing that it doesn't have to be that way and sometimes they need somebody to stand up and say, we have other options. And yeah, there's other ways of doing this. 

MARTIN: Yeah, I see that in my daily work when I encounter people. I can very quickly tell whether somebody has had it happen to them or not. Doesn't matter at this point. I would say it this way, I'm not blaming you for the situation you're in, but I'm telling you that it's your responsibility to get yourself out of it. And that's the agency part. And that’s when these natives that you're describing took over, took over and took it in their own hands. And that's what has to happen. One block at a time, one neighborhood at a time, one town at a time, you're on to it.

ATHENA: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And when they're creating it themselves, they have so much more invested in it and it's it's more aligned with who they are, and it's more likely to be sustainable and supportive. 

MARTIN: Back when a long long, long ago in China, there were doctors who were collecting monthly payments from patients only when the patient was healthy. The moment the patient got sick, the payments stopped. Guess what that led to, right? The doctor was highly motivated to keep the patients healthy. Complete reversal of how this is set up right now. If you could think that the, I don't know, the big governments right at the top, the Obamacare as we've called it, if it were actually interested in the health of the nation, what would they do? Would they still promote soft drinks and HFCs or whatever it's called, high fructose corn syrup? Would they still promote subsidies for corn and wheat? Would they still, should I go on, right?

ATHENA: Yeah. I mean, they're following the profits. And so, if they have that incentive to actually keep everyone healthy, that's what they're going to do.

MARTIN: And that's how we need to flip it, right? In this new system that you're building, I think it needs to be that health is the measure, not the cost, right? Because what gets measured is what gets done. So, if we're measuring by cost, we're trying to lower the cost. But if we're measuring by the wealth of our health, we'll be treating the whole thing very differently.

ATHENA: Exactly. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And I think too, not just looking at health in terms of less ER visits and hospitalizations, but looking at measures and not just at longevity, what about quality of life? How many quality years does someone have? They may be spending the last 15 years of their life on oxygen, bedridden, but is that really a healthy life? So, having different health measures, I think, is important as well.

MARTIN: Yeah, maybe we should be really hard. If you can't do 25 push-ups and 25 squats, we're going to take away your pension. You're no longer worthy.

ATHENA: Yeah, I don't know about that, but.

MARTIN: Well, you know, I'm looking for a stick that would be strong enough to motivate a person towards doing the right thing.

ATHENA: I think that's something that we're still figuring out, but there are people that have come up with some measures for health. I don't have them on the top of my head right now, but yeah.

MARTIN: Well, you know the score, right? The smoking and the street drugs and the alcohol and whether it's legal or not legal doesn't matter as long as it leads to abuse. And then you have to start asking the question, well, why are people wanting to not feel, right? Why are they so emotionally distraught that they want to block out of their consciousness the pain?

ATHENA: And I think that's a huge part of our prevention needs to be in mental health. 

MARTIN: Exactly. 

ATHENA: It really drives the rest of our behaviors and our choices. And yeah. So, if we're investing in people's mental well-being, which doesn't have to be, of course, medications or even traditional counseling. It may be other ways that people feel like they are supported to be mentally well. Might be community groups where they can talk openly. It may be those dance classes or something like that.

MARTIN: Even that, yes. Emotional wellness, mental wellness.

ATHENA: And that's where I think the root of a lot of our health problems are, is our inner mental well-being. 

MARTIN: Yeah, I expect that you're aware of the blue zones of longevity. An example being Sardinia where people live a long time and the steeper the hill they live on, the longer they live because they have to exercise to go from home to church to the store up and down the hill. And the other thing is that they hang out at the village square or city square and they have a community, right?

ATHENA: Right. Yeah.

MARTIN: And there's no such thing as old folks homes. There are old folks living at home usually with their offspring. 

ATHENA: Yeah. Yeah. I think it's something we've lost touch with is the value in having multiple generations around you where you have children and elderly. You can learn from them and benefit so much from being around people of all ages. So yeah, not just isolating them in a home like that.

MARTIN: Yeah. Which happens when you introduce the industrial scope and scale. Super efficient when you build an old folks home because you can just garage them and house them in a large quantity like you would house chickens to make egg egg-laying factory.

ATHENA: Yeah. And it also shows you that we don't value our elderly population. We just want to um put them away because they aren't valuable in a society that wants money from people working and people contributing to the economy. But they are valuable of course they're  human beings with decades of knowledge and experience that we can learn from, and yeah just like in those blue zones.

MARTIN: Well, we need to feed our elders a diet that allows to still be able to recall things, which isn't the institutional food that they're being fed here or in the current model. 

ATHENA: Mhm.

MARTIN: I could go on to about 27 different tangents, but.

ATHENA: Yeah.

MARTIN: All right. So, there we have it. So, ZNAhealthnetwork.com. We have a chance of building a better world. If not you, then who, right? 

ATHENA: Yeah. And I think it'll be me with a lot of other people. And you know, I'm somebody who has had experience and been able to see a lot of new ways of doing things. And it's just going to take us networking together and working. It'll take a lot of passionate people working together, but it doesn't have to be everyone in the US. It's really just enough people that have that passion. So.

MARTIN: Yeah. Well, I certainly wish you all the success that you could possibly carry. Yeah, you're doing such a valuable thing because I promise you, if we don't make the change, it's going to collapse all around us. This thing is doomed. It's already like a dead tree just waiting for the windstorm to knock it over.

ATHENA: Thank you so much, Martin. I appreciate that. Yeah, it already has a lot of cracks in it and is crumbling. It will fall. No doubt in my mind. Right.

MARTIN: All right, Athena Hall, you're a bright light in this world. Thank you.

ATHENA: Thank you, Martin. This has been great. Yeah.

MARTIN: All right. You can find me at life-enthusiast.com. And one more time, ZNAhealthnetwork.com. Thank you, Athena.

ATHENA: Thank you, Martin.