Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs

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Most people treat health like a scoreboard: no pain, no problem. But what if that’s exactly why so many of us hit midlife feeling stuck, tired, and quietly unfulfilled even when nothing looks “wrong”? We sit down with Dr. Kyle Hulsebus, a third-generation chiropractor and health and human potential specialist, to make a bigger definition of wellness feel usable. His anchor idea is simple and challenging: health means wholeness, not just symptom control.

We talk about why the 40s and 50s can trigger a deep reassessment of purpose, relationships, work, and id...

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AI can sound certain while being dangerously incomplete, and we open with a perfect example: a confident answer about methionine that falls apart the moment you compare it to published research and real patient outcomes. From there, we get very specific about cancer metabolism, why many tumors show a strong dependence on the amino acid methionine, and how methionine restriction turns nutrition into a practical part of evidence-based cancer care. We also talk plainly about food myths, including why “healthy” options like salmon can be context-dependent when methionine load becomes the variable that matt...

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A cancer diagnosis has a way of stripping life down to one brutal question: who’s really driving your health decisions? Joe Grumbine sits down with returning guest Richard McCuen, a military veteran who’s been through grief, injury, and a pancreatic cancer scare that forced him to rebuild his life from the ground up. We talk about what changed after watching cancer up close, why “wait and see” can be dangerous, and how recovery often starts with the unglamorous basics you control every day.

We dig into nutrition and lifestyle shifts t...

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Trust isn’t a soft concept, it’s the invisible system running everything from your closest relationships to the way a factory floor performs. Joe Grumbine sits down with leadership coach and continuous improvement specialist Rob Carroll to unpack why so many teams feel stuck even when they have smart people, good tools, and clear goals. When trust breaks, execution drags, costs climb, and organizations build layers of workarounds just to function.

Rob shares the unusual path that shaped his approach, from decades in manufacturing and Lean Six Sigma problem solving to t...

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You can love your job, love your routine, and still be slowly drained by it. We talk about why taking a break is not a fancy indulgence but a real health strategy, especially when life feels like a constant grind of responsibilities, bills, and never-ending to-do lists. When we don’t step away, stress starts to chip at our peace, our mood, and even our ability to be present with the people we care about.

We walk through the most practical health benefits of vacation time and true rest: lower stress an...

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A voice in her head said, “You have to stay” and Shannon Presson did something wildly uncharacteristic: she canceled her flight, sat down to breakfast, and trusted the moment. That one choice led to a new home, a new life, and eventually a new way of helping people navigate change when the old map stops working.

We sit down with Shannon, author of The Unexpected Story, to explore the powerful idea that the stories we tell become the maps we navigate by. Shannon breaks her work into four inner narratives we all...

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Cancer news can feel like a nonstop parade of miracle cures, but the lived reality is messier, harder, and far more human. We sit down with Dr. Robert Hoffman to talk about what it means to find an oncologist who won’t emotionally check out, won’t rush you onto a conveyor belt of protocols, and will fight to keep you from relapsing. That leads us straight to Dr. Tom Song’s unusual mix of intensity, independence, and patient level care, including how he navigates insurance so treatments like Keytruda can continue when other...

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A mom with Alzheimer’s looks at her daughter and asks a question that’s tender, impossible, and weirdly practical: “How will you name them all?” That one line becomes the heart of our conversation with psychologist and author Sarah Vosburgh, whose memoir *Who Will Name the Bees?* traces the months from moving her mother into memory care to the day she died, while also reaching back into childhood and earlier adulthood to show what their relationship was before dementia rewrote it. 

We talk about what Alzheimer’s disease can look like in rea...

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Cancer gets framed as a mystery, but a lot of the confusion is self-inflicted. We sit down with Dr. Robert Hoffman, a lifelong cancer researcher who helped shape my own treatment path, and we push on a simple question that too many papers dodge: where are the controls with normal cells? When researchers skip that step, they can mistake general cell stress for a cancer-specific weakness and then build an entire story around it. That’s part of why ideas like the Warburg effect can spread as “truth” even when the underlying experiments do not...

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A mental health “diagnosis” can be subjective, but the consequences are real and sometimes irreversible. We talk with Miriam Putnam, a holistic mental health advocate, board-certified wellness coach, and freedom from stress counselor, about what she saw firsthand inside a system that often defaults to labels and pharmaceuticals even when people are begging for deeper answers. If you’ve ever wondered why the standard path can feel like trial-and-error, you’ll relate to this conversation.

We get specific about what holistic mental health can mean in practice: looking at the body before a...

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Hair loss rarely happens all at once and that’s exactly why it catches so many people off guard. I sit down with Dr. Alan J. Baumann, MD, a board-certified hair restoration physician and founder of Bauman Medical, to get past the hype and talk about what actually drives thinning, shedding, and baldness, and what you can do before it becomes a “heroic” problem.

We dig into the idea that hair restoration starts with a precision diagnosis, not a sales pitch. Genetics, chemotherapy hair loss, scalp inflammation, autoimmune issues, traction alopecia, and sc...

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Grit gets praised like it’s the whole answer, but what happens when grit runs out and life keeps coming? Joe Grumbine sits down with Scott Lackey, a military veteran, inventor, Ironman athlete, and author, to talk about the moments that shake you down to your DNA and the surprising way those moments can become your greatest leverage for healthy living.

Scott shares the inner wake-up call that hit during COVID: “You’re not where you’re supposed to be,” followed by two words that changed everything, “broken promises.” That led him back to th...

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Cancer doesn’t just grow, it learns. Joe Grumbine and Dr. Robert Hoffman dig into a hard truth that too many patients discover late: tumors can change their behavior, their markers, and their vulnerabilities, even when a treatment plan looks “stable” on paper. We start with what sparked the conversation, a metastatic breast cancer case where old numbers look fine and a new number shifts, then use that as a launch point for how cancer adapts over time.

We unpack why drug resistance can emerge after long stretches on the same therap...

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If you’ve ever felt like healthcare is all process and no humanity, this conversation snaps that illusion in half. We’re joined by Winston Meikle, a lifelong nurse who started as a home health aide at 16, spent decades in critical care and the ER, and now leads hospital teams while teaching the next generation of clinicians. Along the way, he built a bold framework he calls The Power of Love, a nursing theory rooted in one core claim: true healing accelerates when care is infused with empathy, connection, and clear intention.

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A terminal diagnosis doesn’t have to be the loudest voice in the room. We sit down with Nicholas Kelly, a Cleveland-born registered dietitian, author, dancer, and longtime cystic fibrosis advocate, to hear how he’s built a life driven by compassion, creativity, and grit while living with CF.

Nicholas breaks down cystic fibrosis in plain language: the thick mucus, the lung damage over time, the GI and pancreas complications, and how cystic fibrosis-related diabetes can change everything. He shares the story of how his mother essentially diagnosed him decades ago, push...

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“Unexplained infertility” can sound like a verdict. Gabriella Rosa joins me to argue it’s often a sign we haven’t looked closely enough, or we’re asking the wrong questions. Gabriela is a Harvard-trained fertility specialist and founder of the Rosa Institute, and she brings a grounded, evidence-based approach to integrative fertility care that still respects the power of IVF when it’s truly needed.

We dig into why fertility rates in the news don’t always mean what people think, then get honest about the real-world incentives inside reproductive healthcare. Ga...

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A lot of people can teach mindset. Far fewer can tell you what it costs to rebuild a nervous system that learned fear before it learned safety. We sit down with Thayne Martin, creator of the “equation of life and abundant happiness,” for a conversation that moves from childhood sexual abuse and decades of depression, PTSD, dissociation, addiction, and shame to the moment everything cracked open and healing finally started. 

Thane shares the suicide attempt that exposed how much he’d been hiding, the friend who stepped in at the last moment...

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A lot of recovery stories skip the messy parts, but Jonathan Crawford doesn’t. He takes us back to being told he was “the man of the house” at 10, growing up in South Central LA, and carrying pressure that quietly shaped his identity, emotions, and choices for years. When his sister dies by suicide, grief hits with nowhere to go and it becomes the spark for crack cocaine, denial, and a fast spiral into addiction and homelessness.

We get honest about what relapse really feels like, including the guilt that can push y...

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“Complete remission” is the phrase everyone hopes to hear, and I just did. But once the celebration settles, the real question shows up fast: how do you keep cancer away when you know recurrence can happen years later and come back tougher than before? Dr. Robert Hoffman joins me to talk through the moment a clean Met-PET scan and a liquid biopsy finally bring real relief, and why that relief has to turn into a long-term plan.

We dig into the language medicine uses to measure success, including overall survival (OS) and...

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Your life can change in one play, one decision, or one diagnosis. When it does, the real question is whether you cling to the old story or build a better one with what’s left.

We sit down with Don Kurz, a former Johns Hopkins lacrosse champion turned Studio 54 hustle regular turned entrepreneur and creative agency leader, to unpack how reinvention actually works. Don shares what it feels like to lose an athletic future to a brutal knee injury, why the disco era became more than a party, and how dance he...

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He didn’t break in Vietnam. He broke years later in a quiet office, with stress piled so high that one more “push through it” simply wasn’t possible. We talk with Keith Cole, a Marine Corps Vietnam veteran who carried combat wounds, the trauma of notifying next of kin, and the weight of becoming a guardian for his younger siblings, then spent decades building a high-pressure career as a CPA. The result was a familiar modern story with uncommon honesty: burnout, sleepless nights, and a moment where alcohol looked like the only escape.<...

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The scariest part of cancer isn’t always the diagnosis, it’s the not knowing if it’s truly gone. After aggressive head and neck squamous cell carcinoma and months of brutal chemotherapy, my U.S. PET CT and MRI looked “good,” but nobody could tell me with confidence whether I was in complete remission. So I flew to Japan for a carbon-11 methionine PET scan, a rare imaging tool that demands an onsite cyclotron and a near-immediate scan because the tracer’s half-life is only about 11 to 12 minutes. What I heard next changed ever...

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A scan that can’t wait sounds like science fiction until you hear the numbers: carbon-11 has a 12-minute half-life, which means a carbon-11 methionine PET scan has to be made onsite, injected fast, and run immediately or the signal can vanish. That time pressure is exactly why we traveled to Japan to talk with Dr. Toshihiko Sato at the Utsunomiya Clinic, where they produce specialized PET radiotracers and perform total-body methionine PET imaging that many hospitals simply can’t offer. 

We get into what methionine PET shows that a standard FDG P...

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Heat can feel like comfort, but I see it as something more useful than that: a hands-on tool for pain relief, mobility, recovery, and nervous system support. I walk through thermotherapy in plain language, starting with the basics of why warmth helps tight muscles relax, why stiff joints often move better once you warm up, and how improved circulation can deliver oxygen and nutrients while clearing metabolic waste that adds to soreness. If you deal with arthritis, back pain, fibromyalgia, or that brutal “I can’t move yet” morning stiffness, you’ll recognize a lot of...

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The condolences pour in, the flowers fill the room, and then the funeral ends. What happens when the hardest part of grief shows up weeks later, when everyone else has gone back to normal?

We sit down with Kelly Edmondson, a trauma ICU and ER nurse turned grief counselor, whose life changed when her 28-year-old son Darius died suddenly from an epilepsy-related seizure. Kelly shares the moment that cracked something open for her: Mother’s Day. She expected darkness, but her family created space to speak his name, laugh, remember, and br...

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You can feel it when someone stops telling their story to get sympathy and starts telling it to get free. That’s where Juan is right now, and our conversation goes straight into the real mechanics of healing from childhood trauma.

We talk about Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE), what it means to carry a high ACE score, and why silence doesn’t erase pain it just hands it the steering wheel. Juan shares a vivid metaphor for trauma recovery: holding it in is like refusing to throw up after alcohol poisoning. It’s...

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Trauma doesn’t just live in the past. It can live in your nervous system, showing up as anxiety, addiction patterns, sleeplessness, shutdown, or that moment when you feel your brain go offline and you don’t know why. We sit down with Steve Sapourn, founder of Neuros Journey, to unpack trauma-informed neuroscience in a way that’s practical, human, and surprisingly hopeful: what if the “settings” you’ve been fighting are adaptations your brain made to survive?

Steve walks us through how neurofeedback works, why seeing your brainwave patterns can dissolve sha...

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A lot of people look “fine” on the outside while they are quietly falling apart on the inside. We talk with Jeremy Stalneker, a Marine Corps infantry veteran and the leader of the Mighty Oaks Foundation, about what happens after combat stress, career transition, and life trauma collide with identity loss. When someone starts thinking, “If I’m not in the military anymore, who am I?” the slide into isolation, bad decisions, and hopelessness can feel fast and final. Jeremy’s message cuts through the fog: there is always hope, and forward movement is still pos...

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When you’re sick and every appointment creates a new theory, hope can feel like a luxury. I sit down with Allie Chandler, founder of Upsell Health, to trace the long road from a life-changing Lyme disease crash to a near-full recovery, and what that journey taught her about modern healthcare, functional medicine, and real patient advocacy.

We get into why Lyme is often called the great mimicker, how symptoms can ricochet across the heart, nervous system, digestion, and immune function, and why strict diagnostic boxes can leave people stranded. From th...

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Something is off in modern health: more specialists, more tests, more “answers” and yet so many people still feel stuck, inflamed, anxious, and exhausted. We sit down with Brandon Yager to explore a different map of healing, one that treats the nervous system, beliefs, and unresolved emotional shock as central factors in physical symptoms.

Brandon shares how early personal development shaped his life, then takes us into the Yager Method Framework, where NLP, subconscious reprogramming, emotional safety, and habit change help people create rapid lasting shifts. We talk about trauma without glam...

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One moment can split your life into “before” and “after” and you still have to wake up the next day and decide who you’re going to be. Earl Thompson joins me to share the deeply personal story of losing his wife to acute myeloid leukemia, the years of remission and relapse, and what it really takes to grieve without getting trapped in an identity built around tragedy.

From there, we dig into Earl’s work as a rehabilitation counselor and vocational rehabilitation expert witness. We talk about how disability and injury chang...

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“Trust the science” is easy to say until you are staring at a scan that can’t truly rule cancer out. We sit down again with Dr. Robert Hoffman to talk about what medical evidence can prove, what it can only suggest, and why patients get trapped between uncertainty and aggressive standard-of-care treatment. Along the way, we share real stakes: recurrence fear, metastasis language that lands like a hammer, and the hard truth that you have to want to live enough to do the work that survival demands.

We walk through the pr...

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Walking into a prison for the first time changes your body before it changes your mind. Gates, rules, metal detectors, and then something you don’t expect: a room full of people trying to practice honesty, calm, and respect. I’m joined by Megan McDrew, founder of Empathy in Action at the Transformative Justice Center, to explain how her volunteer-based prison program brings civilians together with incarcerated men and women to build the one tool trauma most desperately needs: a meaningful relationship.

We talk about trauma-informed rehabilitation through the lens of ACE...

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A secret can feel like armor, especially when you learned early that telling the truth might cost you love, respect, or safety. We get honest about how childhood trauma turns into a vow of silence, how that vow shapes identity and “manhood,” and why the toughest thing many of us will ever do is let ourselves be seen.

We walk through Juan’s “Letters To The Young Me,” a raw set of lyrics aimed at interrupting the school-to-prison pipeline and the cycle of acting out. We unpack the psychology behind it: trauma tha...

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A hard truth sits at the center of cancer care: remission isn’t the finish line. We open up about the maintenance mindset—how to manage cancer for the long haul—through a rare blend of lab insight, clinical pragmatism, and real-world patient experience. With Dr. Robert Hoffman, we unpack the “Hoffman effect,” the addiction of many tumors to methionine, and why that metabolic weakness changes how we scan, treat, and monitor disease.

We compare methionine PET with standard glucose PET and MRI, explaining when each tool shines and where they fall short...

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What does it take to stand up for your family when the system feels stacked against you? We sit down with Paula Yost—both a seasoned attorney and a licensed mental health clinician—to unpack the real skills of advocacy through stories that move from foster care to the NICU and back to the courtroom. Paula’s journey, from first‑generation college grad to mother of four, grounds a conversation that stays clear-eyed about harm while refusing to give up on change.

We start with foster care myths and realities. Paula explains...

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What if we measured justice by how well it heals? We sit down with Juan to unpack a rare, unfiltered look at growth behind the wall—how being seen and heard can jumpstart dignity, how trauma-informed practices rewire the brain, and why labels fail to capture a living, changing human. Juan describes the painful split between the authentic self and the survival self, the years spent pushing down feelings to fit expectations, and the moment a safe room—and a simple handshake—made humanity feel possible again.

We trace the arc from r...

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What if feeling truly safe was the first step to feeling truly better? We sit down with licensed psychotherapist Scott Stolarick to explore how trauma ripples through the body, why listening can be more powerful than lecturing, and how the right pace turns resistance into real change. From mapping family systems with genograms to giving adolescents the mic, Scott shows how a nonthreatening, collaborative approach builds trust—and why trust is the doorway to any lasting result.

We take a clear, practical tour of EMDR therapy—what it is, why bilateral stim...

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What if reversing type 2 diabetes could start with your next meal and a five-minute walk? We welcome Dr. Jonar, a dual board certified physician in internal and lifestyle medicine, who left hospital medicine after seeing the cycle of late-stage complications—heart attacks, amputations, kidney failure—and chose to go upstream. His message is both practical and hopeful: target insulin resistance at its roots with food, movement, stress relief, and real sleep, and watch markers move fast.

We unpack how a plant-forward, whole food approach stabilizes blood sugar without demanding perfection or labe...

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One diagnosis can shape a decade—and the wrong one can steal it. We sit down with author Benton Savage to unpack how a bipolar label masked what was really driving his life: severe OCD and schizophrenia. His account is unsparing and deeply human, from an impulsive proposal and a terrifying break‑in to a dehydrated trek after deciding to “run home” across the country. Benton’s story doesn’t ask for pity; it argues for precision. When the diagnosis finally fit, the treatment did too.

Benton walks us through the medications...