Food Sensitivities, Inflammation, and Autoimmune Disease: A Clinical Conversation with Tom O’Bryan, DC, CCN, DACBN, and Robert Rountree, MD

Abstract

Robert Rountree: I would like to start by hearing about how you got to where you are today. What was the trajectory of your educational and professional experience? You graduated from chiropractic school in 1981. That means it has been 38 years since you got that license. You have really come a long way since then! Tom O'Bryan: I went to the University of Michigan for undergrad. I think I was 19 at the time and I first read Prevention magazine, when it was a true health magazine, before it was sold to a pharmaceutical company and began advertising the benefits of drugs for different conditions. Jonathan Wright wrote case studies every month. I would read these case studies, and he had this very down-home, earthy kind of way of explaining medical conditions to patients in language they would understand and made sense to them. I did not realize until this interview that he was my first mentor on how to effectively communicate to patients. He would talk to this guy that had a condition, what were the symptoms and all that, and he recommended nutrition and diet and the guy would come back a few months later and he was much better. The references at the back of the article gave credibility to what he was talking about and it caught my interest. I said, "My gosh, there is really something to this holistic approach, that has science to validate it." I thought that was very interesting. The world that I was really in at the time, besides my studies, was the world of aikido. I had been lucky enough that the number-two guy in the world had come to Detroit to give a demonstration. He ultimately stayed and would have three to five classes per day, and a very special once a week by invitation only class called Kenshu, for a select group of the students. This man carried the direct unfiltered lineage of > 350 years of samurai in his family. These special weekly classes were on different concepts, one per week, of the samurai code of honor called Bushido. Dr. Rountree: So those were your formative yearsduring college, when you were studying aikido? Long before you went to chiropractic school? I would imagine that introduced you to a philosophy of how to approach health care. Dr. O'Bryan: That is exactly right. From there, I then went to Japan, and I lived in the world headquarters. I was a deshi. It was such an honor. On the surface it meant that I got to clean the toilets in the school, and whatever other menial tasks were assigned to me. I spent six months there and I was privileged to visit a number of the grand masters of different disciplines, jodo and kyodo and karate. I met some very famous grand masters. Dr. Rountree: Do you still do an aikido practice today? Dr. O'Bryan: Every day as a way of life. The whole premise of aikido is that you never fight force with force, it is that you deflect and allow the force to go in the direction it wants to go. That is what really attracted me. My girlfriend at the time, who became my wife later, was in a bad car accident when she was very young, and annually or so, she would have t...