Something You Should Know - How GPS Quietly Runs the World & When Illness Has No Obvious Cause

Episode Date: June 29, 2026

Ever notice when you hear someone talking on the phone nearby it’s hard not to listen? You are only hearing one-side of the conversation and that can drive your brain crazy. It’s not just annoying and distracting it can actually be dangerous. https://now.uiowa.edu/news/2017/06/ui-study-explores-why-cell-phone-use-leads-distracted-driving It’s hard to imagine life without GPS. But now it has become so woven into daily life that most of us never think about it. We use it to navigate, order food, track packages, find rides, locate our phones and even synchronize financial transactions. Yet GPS wasn't created for that. It began as a military technology and evolved into one of the most important—and expensive—infrastructure systems ever built. How does GPS actually know where you are? Why is it free to use? Who pays for it? Is it spying on you? Here to explain is Katherine Dunn, business reporter, editor and author of the book Little Blue Dot: How GPS Shaped the Modern World (https://amzn.to/4uvtk2M). Why is it that millions of people experience chronic pain, fatigue, digestive problems and other ailments that doctors and medical tests often fail to explain? Too often they're told "it's all in your head." But according to psychiatrist Susan Trachman, that phrase badly misunderstands what's happening. The connection between the brain and body is far more powerful than most people realize. Thoughts, emotions and stress can trigger genuine physical symptoms—and understanding how can be the key to finding relief. Susan has spent more than 30 years treating medically unexplained illnesses. She is author of the popular Psychology Today blog and the book It's Not Just in Your Head. (https://amzn.to/4oqvjDP) Listen to a tennis match or walk through a gym and you'll hear it everywhere: grunting. Sometimes really loud grunting. It seems odd. Maybe even unnecessary. So why do athletes do it? Is it habit? Showmanship? Or is there something else going on? https://www.womenshealthmag.com/fitness/a64691561/grunting-power-output-study/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS AIR DOCTOR: Head to ⁠⁠https://AirDoctorPro.com⁠⁠ and use promo code SYSK to get $250 off select AirDoctor air purifiers, including the 3500, 4000, and 5500 models. Plus, you’ll receive a free 3year warranty!  RULA: Thousands of people are already using Rula to get affordable, high-quality therapy that’s actually covered by insurance. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Rula.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to get started. QUINCE: Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! SHOPIFY: It's time to turn those "what ifs" into CHA CHING with Shopify Today! Sign up for your $1 per month trail and start selling today at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Shopify.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on something you should know, why listening to a person talk on their phone to someone else can be dangerous for you. Then the fascinating story of GPS, and things about it you may not know. Our day-to-day experience with GPS is Google Maps, navigating around, but what the satellites also provide is they have atomic clocks. So they're providing extremely accurate time to clocks that are not very good, like the one of my iPhone. Also, why do tennis players and weightlifters grunt so loudly? And when you know you're sick, but the doctor can't find anything wrong, it can be really discouraging, and it happens to a lot of people. Who go from doctor to doctor, and when the physician cannot come up with the diagnosis,

they might say to the patient, we really can't find anything wrong with you. It's all in your head. Go see a psychiatrist, which is how they end up in my office. All this today on Something You Should Know. Something You Should Know. Fascinating Intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. You know what can be really annoying and distracting? Is listening to someone else talk on their phone to someone else? And it can have some important consequences you should probably be aware of, which is why we're starting with that today on this episode. of something you should know. Hi, I'm Mike Herr Rothers. Thanks for joining me today.

So you ever notice how hard it is to ignore someone else's cell phone conversation? You might be reading or working or driving along just fine until the person next to you starts talking on the phone to someone else. And then suddenly, you can't concentrate. Psychologists have a name for it. It's called half a log, hearing only one side of a conversation. Research shows that hafologs are more distracting than listening to two people talk face to face. And the reason is your brain is naturally wired to predict what comes next in a conversation.

So when you hear only one side, your mind keeps trying to fill in the blanks, which quietly steals your attention away from whatever you're doing. This can become problematic if you're driving your car and your passenger starts a phone call with someone else. That can be very distracting for you while you're trying to pay attention and drive the car. And that is something you should know. When was the last time you were trying to figure out how to get somewhere and actually pulled out a paper map? For most of us, it's been years. Today we simply pull out our phone, tap in an address, and a calm voice tells us exactly where to go.

It is truly amazing. and yet GPS wasn't created to help people find coffee shops and avoid traffic. It was built for the military. It is operated by the U.S. government. It costs billions of dollars to maintain, and yet anyone on Earth can use it for free. GPS doesn't just help you get from point A to point B. It quietly runs much of the modern world,

everything from banking and shipping to farming, emergency services, power grids, and the Internet itself depends on its timing signals. So how does it all work? Where did it come from? Who runs it? And why is it free? Here to explain is Catherine Dunn. She's a business reporter and editor who works at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. And she's author of the book Little Blue Dot, how GPS shaped the modern world. Hey, Catherine, welcome to something you should know. Hi, thanks for having me. So before we get into the history of GPS, which I think is a rather fascinating history,

explain to me in basic language. How does it work? The globe is basically encircled by a series of satellites. We're talking about the U.S. global positioning system here, but now there's a bunch of these systems run by different governments, and they all operate on more or less the same idea. So the globe is encircled by these satellites, it's in your sort of in sight of minimum four of them at any time.

And people often think it's, oh, it's about triangulation, but actually your location is being found on Earth through time. So the satellites are sending out a signal from space, and say you have your phone, I have my iPhone next to me. It's actually calculating the length of time it takes for a radio signal to reach you on Earth. And it does that three times, longitude, latitude, latitude and elevation.

So it calculates your position in three dimensions. And then the fourth one actually calculates time, which is arguably the most important and sort of the trickiest to explain. But yeah, you're looking at four sort of dimensions here, longitude, latitude, elevation, and time. And that situates where you are on Earth. But it's really about making that calculation.

And we can do that because electromagnetic waves move, you know, in a vacuum, they move at a steady known speed, and that's from Einstein. So this is really putting a lot of Einstein's theories into practice and helping us understand where and when we are on Earth. So those four satellites that find my phone and communicate with my phone, is my phone communicating back with it or not? So one thing you have to know about GPS is it's actually a one-way system. So, So the satellites collectively don't know where you are. It's all one way.

So you can think of it. It's like being underneath a shower head. It's just raining down on you, basically. And what turns it into a two-way system is the way that your phone is stitched into all of these other things, you know, telecommunications systems and wireless networks and that sort of thing. So yeah, the satellites don't individually know where you are. None of the system knows where you are.

And the reason it's like that is because it was built for a conflict, right? So the whole idea was that you could use it wherever you were on Earth, but it wouldn't simultaneously give you a way if somebody was looking for you. So that's one way to think about it. We do think of it as a two-way trackable system, but the trackable element comes from all the other aspects of technology that interact with GPS in the way that we use it. And so the signals are coming in,

and it's the phone or the thing in my car or whatever that is making sense of those signals and turning it into a dot on the map. Yeah, exactly. The math on one level is pretty simple. You've got four equations, but actually this is like a computer in space, talking to a computer in your phone, talking to other computers at base station, you know, as part of the U.S. government, This whole system is a U.S. government system.

So actually what's going on here is incredibly complicated. It's a lot of different computers talking to each other. That's kind of the core of it. Something I've always wondered about GPS when I'm using it, for example, if the satellites are finding my phone and sending signals to it, how does it know where I am? How does it do that when I'm, say, at the bottom of a parking structure or in a tunnel? where theoretically radio signals can't get to it, how does it know where I am?

But basically, the U.S. government puts together sort of a predictive list of where all the satellites are going to be in the next however many hours. So if you've ever wondered sometimes, if you get off a plane, for example, and you don't have data reception yet or you don't have other things, and your phone can kind of give you an indication of where you are, right? If you just open Google Maps, for example. Part of this is there is a predictive element built into it. And your phone and the chip inside your phone is interacting also with a database. So it can make a guess of where you are, even when it doesn't actively sort of have all of those satellites within sight.

And this is one of the things that allows your phone, if you open Google Maps or something to connect so, so, so, so quickly to your location is the fact that it has some indication of where the satellites are and therefore where you are. And so it kind of makes a jump. It makes a prediction. And from that prediction, it can adjust. So, yeah, so it's kind of making assumptions about where it's likely that you are when it can't see you and then it'll it'll recorrect itself when it does see you. Yeah, exactly. It's this constant process. process of test and refine, test and refine and test and refine. And the reason all of this testing and refining can happen is because, of course, we're dealing with chips and we're dealing with computers. You know, it's, it was when this whole system was created, it was something pretty

incredible, the level of computing that needed to go into a system like this. And the fact that we're still using it today, basically, more or less, as it was designed. Is it possible to know how many people or businesses or how many, how many, you know, how many users there are of GPS at any one time? Or, you know, you gave the analogy that the information is one way like a shower, where it's just coming out of the shower, that you wouldn't really know how many people are getting wet. So we have no idea how many people are using GPS at any one time, or the other systems that are similar to GPS run by other governments. We have no idea, you know, how many people are collectively using these systems. It's not even how many people.

It's how many chips and electricity grids or cars or all of these different pieces of technology, right? Because it's just sort of raining down on you. It's passive. From the beginning, when they were looking at how popular GPS was becoming with civilians, one of the things the U.S. government didn't know is how many people are actually using this thing? How popular is it for civilians outside of military uses? And they could only guess, really, based on how. many sort of receivers were maybe being sold or who was making chips. But it was, it was just that. It was a guess. We don't know how many people are using it at any one time. Well, it's kind of like, like if you were operating a radio station and sending out a signal,

you don't know who's listening. Exactly. It's exactly like that. It's, it's radio waves and you don't know who's on the other side, which is interesting when the U.S. government has developed a tool that's, you know, it's a military tool, but they realized fairly early. early on, uh-oh, whoever they were up against could use it as well. I know the history of GPS is, I find this story pretty interesting, and I'd like to get you to tell it. I mean, you could probably go for hours on this topic, but just in a nutshell, what is the story, the history of GPS? The GPS system, as we know it now, is from the early 1970s, And it essentially emerged out of the end of the Vietnam War as a tool to bomb more precisely.

This had been a real issue in the Vietnam War, this lack of ability to really precision bomb. And there were a lot of different competing systems within the U.S. military, you know, systems that could do one thing better or another thing better. there had been a predating system that came out of the late 50s. And so this was sort of a refinement of a lot of ideas that have been building and building and building. But yeah, it was essentially a tool to make bombing more precise. And it needed to work in three dimensions because you were really thinking at that time about, you know, fighter jets or missiles or things where you were working in three dimensions. So you have the system. It's sort of in the bowels of the Pentagon.

It's designed. They're testing it. They're trying trialing it. If you think about it, it's, you know, it's incredibly, incredibly, incredibly expensive program because you're launching satellites, right? And one of the really surprising things about it that I was very surprised by it was it wasn't popular in the Pentagon.

It wasn't like people automatically saw, oh, this is something transformative that we really, really want. Let's shell out loads of money for it. Let's keep it going. It was constantly at risk of getting its budget cut, even canceled. So over time, you're looking at decades to get the system up to the way we see it today. And the way we see it today is only essentially from 2000 that it became as accessible to civilians, that it became as fast and as super, super accurate as we understand it now.

and it started being put in, you know, cars and cell phones kind of in a mass scale. Yeah, I want to find out more about that, about how it moved from being a military thing to becoming basically a consumer product, and we'll do that in just a moment. We're talking about GPS, and my guest is Catherine Dunn, author of the book, Little Blue Dot, how GPS shaped the modern world. And Catherine, I'm really curious how GPS is how GPS, got in cars because as you said, it was a military thing. And somebody must have been sitting around going, hey, I have an idea. Why don't we put it in cars? And then people can like know where they are

and know where they're going. How did that all start? The people who had the idea to put it in cars were first and foremost the Japanese. So as it starts leaking out of the U.S. military, as they get enough satellites up that you can get, they call it a fix, you can get a location and a time to some extent. It's some time, nothing like what we have now, but still really, really amazing. It started kind of leaking out of the military. And quite quickly what you saw happening is people realizing the potential. So in Japan, they realized really early on that this was going to be useful for managing earthquakes. You know, they were going to put it on buildings and see how they were shifting and using it to track things.

They started using it on boats really early. They started using it on fishing fleets really early. And then, yeah, it was really the Japanese who thought, okay, we can put this in a car. But when they started putting it in cars, it was these really elite futuristic cars. They were sort of in this battle with the U.S. at the time in the late 80s to produce these incredible. credible futuristic cars with computer consoles and things that have now become really standard. So it started showing up in these sort of show cars. The same year that GPS appeared in a car at the Tokyo Motor Show was the same year that they had a car that was modeled after like the Batmobile.

And what year was that? That was 1989. It was right, right before the Berlin Wall fell. It was also right before Japan's economy crashed. And so it started to appear in cars regularly. regularly when? Around 2000? Yeah, around the 2000s. So through the 90s, it was sort of this real high-tech novelty thing in Japan. It didn't work that well. But what happened in 2000, GPS got a lot more accurate for the average person. And this coincided with sort of the digital revolution where you started getting these really, really small chips, right? You started getting mobile phones. By 2007, you have.

you have the iPhone. And in the meantime, if you remember TomTom and you remember these navigation devices you could put in your car, that was really like the boom, I would say, you know, sort of 2000 to 2007, 2008. That was really when average people got this in their car and they realized how useful it was. And so does anybody make money on this? Well, who operates those satellites? Is it still the military? Yeah, it's the U.S. military. I mean, who pays for it is the U.S. taxpayer. But at the same time when you think what comes back in the form of who makes money off of it would be all sorts, every business with logistics, the tech companies. It's just, it's so unimaginable almost at this point for these businesses to run without GPS.

If you think about Uber, you think about these dating apps. You know, they maybe work with Wi-Fi. they work with all these other things, but all of this location-based services and never mind global trade. And one of the points that I think is really easy to miss is actually that just as important, sometimes more important, is time. Is the fact that GPS provides extraordinarily cheap and accurate time. And of course, our day-to-day experience with GPS is, you know, is Google Maps, is your car, is navigating around. but what the satellites also provide is they have atomic clocks. So they're providing extremely, extremely accurate time to clocks that are not very good, like the one in my iPhone.

And it creates this sort of stitch and this synchronization that we really need for digital life. We need it for electricity grids. We need it for all kinds of digital systems. We need to know that, you know, the email will leave at X time and it arrives at X time. minute arrives at X time, it's like this heartbeat, right, where everything's sort of synced up. One of the things now, though, with GPS, the way people use it, which is, I think, primarily, you know, with maps and things like that, you get all this other information. That's not GPS, right? That's not calculating your trip time. That's not telling you how bad the traffic is.

GPS is really just telling you where you are. Is that a fair statement? Yeah, but where you are, but then also that's everybody else's location is also based on GPS. It's sort of like a skeleton underneath a lot of things, sort of stitching everything together. And then things get layered on top, obviously. But the basic location and the basic time is really GPS. So if I'm understanding all of this correctly, GPS is essentially and only a system that attracts your location, and time. Everything else that you see on, say, Google Maps or Ways or whatever, all that other information, that's not GPS, that's Google Maps or Ways, layering on top of the GPS location,

traffic conditions, where the restaurants are, that's not GPS. So GPS is basically location and time. It is what it is. I think GPS is what it is. You have to remember, this is still a system from the 70s. It still follows those core principles. What people have often said to me is that the Chinese equivalent of GPS, Bado, it is a lot more complex. It's more satellites. Some people say there is a two-way element there.

There is a transmission element. So you do have these newer systems. This is a much, much, much newer system. Like from the early 2000s, kind of we're talking about it, you know, coming up to speed. Even Galileo is sort of late 90s, 2000s, you're moving into the launching of satellites. So they're newer systems. And then they are more complex. But yeah, the fundamental idea of GPS, the way we've been using it, I can't imagine it really changing.

but people are still finding new and interesting ways to use it. And so when it gets into my phone and it gets into my car and it's raining down all these things and then Apple, for example, will take that information and build on top of it and give you the estimated time of your trip and everything. Is Apple, is anybody paying the government to use GPS? Or it's just the taxpayer dollars? Yeah, it's taxpayer dollars. Wow. That's nice of us.

It's really nice if you think about how many industries are built on the back of this. Yeah. And how many industries have been destroyed by it? I mean, the map business is pretty much dead. And that whole part of your brain where you used to have this sense of direction and kind of have to know where you're going, you don't have to know that anymore. Yeah. And if you think about a lot of jobs have really been transformed.

by this as well. If you think about surveyors, that's a job that has changed unimaginably since the invention of GPS. And in fact, surveyors were very, very early adopters of GPS because it immediately cut down their work time. So that was sort of fundamental to changing the way that job was done. But yeah, it's interesting, too, because the U.S. government also realized in the late 90s, that whole industries were being refined or built on top of this product. And at that point, actually, they went and they spent several years going around the world promoting GPS and getting other countries to adopt it. So, you know, it was a, it was a tool of power as well for whole country's civil infrastructure, their airports, their energy grids, all these

things to become actually very dependent on this system. Yeah, I suspect maybe because it's free and it's always been free that GPS kind of slid under the radar and kind of crept into our lives. We didn't make a big thing out of it because we didn't have to pay for it. And yet look at how dependent we are on it now. It's quite a story. I've been talking to Catherine Dunn. She is author of the book Little Blue Dot, how GPS shaped the modern world.

and there's a link to her book in the show notes. Great to have you. Thanks, Catherine. Oh, thanks so much, Mike. I appreciate it. Thanks for interviewing me. Have you ever gone to the doctor with a physical symptom and the doctor couldn't explain it? Maybe chronic pain or fatigue, stomach problems, or something else that was clearly real to you,

yet every test came back normal. It's a frustrating experience that leaves many people wondering if they're just imagining it. And yet, medically unexplained symptoms account for a surprisingly large percentage of primary care visits. And when no clear cause can be found, patients often hear some version of,

well, maybe it's just stress or maybe it's all in your head. But what if that conclusion is wrong? According to my guest, Dr. Susan Trackman, many mysterious symptoms are very real physical experiences created through a powerful connection between the brain and the body that science is only beginning to fully understand.

Understanding that connection can be the key to finally making sense of symptoms that seem to make no sense. Dr. Trackman is a specialist in psychosomatic medicine and author of the popular psychology today blog, It's Not Just in Your Head. And she's author of the book, It's Not Just in Your Head. Hi, Susan, welcome. Thank you, Mike. I really appreciate the invitation.

You know, I guess it just doesn't seem intuitive that when you have a physical problem to think that it has something to do with what's going on in your brain, because a physical problem is a physical problem and therefore should have a physical solution, which is why I imagine people have trouble buying this idea of a brain-body connection sometimes. What we do know, and I could say to my patients, if I cut off your head, could you function? And of course they look at me like cross-side. Of course not. So I think rather than looking at the brain and the body as two separate entities, it makes sense to look at them as being connected because, in fact, they are.

So if you think about the brain as a big computer, computer has all these USB ports, and they're connected to various organs in the body. And so communication flows in both directions from the computer, the brain, out to the organs, and back in turn to send information back to the brain. So that whatever is going on in your brain is going to affect various organ systems and vice versa. A classic example is the brain gut connection, which we hear a lot about now, because the brain and the gut are actually derived from the same embryonic material. And they communicate constantly. there's a big nerve that runs between the brain and the gut called the vagus nerve.

And so whatever's going on in the brain is going to affect the gut. And they're almost like besties who are texting all the time. So if the brain's like, ooh, we're anxious, the gut's going to be like, yeah, we really are. I think we need to do something about that. And so then people develop symptoms like diarrhea or cramps. So we know that. And in fact, whatever is going on in the brain will affect other organ systems. For example, if your brain is stressed, it's going to impact your cardiovascular.

vascular system and you may develop hypertension. The American Heart Association has identified stress as an independent risk factor for heart disease. And that is the case for many other organ systems, including other categories of illness, for example, autoimmune disorders. So what I'm curious about, though, is you just gave two good examples of how stress in your mind can cause problems with your cardiovascular system or other things in your mind can and set off your stomach and you get symptoms there.

But not everything going on in my brain is causing symptoms. So why is that? Well, something's happening, but you're not developing symptoms, so you're lucky. It's the folks who do develop symptoms, and unfortunately are categorized in a group called, we call it M-U-S medically unexplained symptoms, who go from doctor to doctor trying to arrive at a diagnosis. And when the physician cannot come up with the diagnosis using usual physical exam, laboratory studies, and for example, even kind of radiographs, they might say to the patient, we really can't find anything wrong with you.

It's all in your head. Go see a psychiatrist, which is how they end up in my office. And oftentimes I can listen to what's going on and arrive at a different diagnosis because I do consider not just the target organ, but what else. might be going on, for example, their psychological state at the time, and also their environment. I mean, your environment very much impacts your physical health. So then it is in those cases, it is in your head because that's where the problem is starting. You're absolutely right. And when patients will come to my office and say, you know, my doctor X told me it's all in my head, well, what I'll say is, well, it is because your brain's in your head.

and your brain is your master computer, and your brain is sending signals to your other target organs, which may be causing your symptoms, but may not be picked up by a very well-meaning physician who's not considering the other possibilities. My sense is that when people say it's all in your head, what they're really saying is it's nothing. Correct.

And you can imagine how that would be very dismissive or demeaning to an individual who's trying to arrive at a diagnosis for their symptoms that are causing them real distress. But how often does this happen? How often do people present with real symptoms? And it turns out it is in their head. Is it one out of a hundred, one out of a million? I mean, give me a sense. Sure, that's a great question. Forty percent of visits to a primary care doctor are for general symptoms, such as, headache, fatigue, difficulty sleeping, shortness of breath would be another one. And in only 25% of those cases can a, quote, biological diagnosis be found based upon

the usual physical exam, laboratory studies, radiographs. But there's lots of diagnoses that take a bit more investigation. And so I like to think of myself as a medical detective. Because I think about other factors that may be influencing the individual at the time. And those factors might be things like what? Workplace stress, stress at home, a toxic environment, an environment in which they're exposed to secondhand smoke. And they suddenly develop difficulty breathing. And they go to a pulmonologist, and the pulmonologist will do a chest xerone,

and do lab studies and listen to their lungs and they're like, hmm, and we don't see anything. And yet the fact that they're being constantly exposed to toxins from their workplace can be actually causing some of the difficulty with their breathing. You know, some of the other factors that fall into the category of toxic environment would be, you know, chemical exposures, mold, undetected mold. And these things can cause all kinds of physical. symptoms that may not be readily apparent to even a specialist. For example, toxic mold

exposure can cause things like skin disorders, which a well-meaning dermatologists may not pick up even though they're looking for things that they can treat. And I think part of the reason is that in medicine we have become so specialized and so siloed that if you go see someone who specializes in cardiology, they're going to well-meaning try to find something wrong with your heart. And if they can't, they're going to be like, we don't really see anything wrong and wrong. Maybe you should go see Dr. X and they'll be referred to a different specialist. And that's specialist again. They're going to try to find something they can find.

What's your sense about how big a problem is this? That's what I really want to try to understand. Is this 50% of doctor visits? Is this one-tenth of one-percent of doctor visits? Like, how often does this happen? There's about 80 million people in this country who are diagnosed with what are called medically unexplained symptoms. That's a lot of people.

Many of them do not come to the attention of someone who can take a look at that. As I said, 25% of those who go see primary care doctors are, they're not going to come up with a diagnosis. And even among specialists, it's not a whole lot better. So it's a cost in terms of one's self-doubt, meaning if doctors are telling you there's nothing wrong with you, but you know you have physical symptoms, it's self-doubt. So it can impact you psychologically. It has a tremendous impact on work performance because there's a great amount of time spent away from work to try to diagnose these issues and try to find a provider who can

come up with them. And in terms of the cost to the health. health care system, if you get referred to doctor, doctor, and sometimes procedures that are not necessary, it's a tremendous cost for the medical care. When it is a psychological problem or a social problem, does often fixing the social problem or the psychological problem fix the physical problem and how would you even know or tell? Yeah. Again, these are really great questions. So I'll give you an example, I see a lot of folks who were referred from gastroenterologists who come to my office with a diagnosis called Irritable bowel syndrome. And it's kind of a non-specific term of people who are

having, you know, alternating difficulties with diarrhea and constipation. But oftentimes, the underlying issue with IBS is an anxiety disorder. And if you treat the anxiety disorder, their gastrointestinal symptoms improved dramatically. So how do I know? I know because I take a complete history. I find out what's happening in their life. I find out what's happened in their past life. There's a significant percentage of individuals

who present with GI symptoms who have a past history of trauma or neglect. And so, you know, looking at these things and arriving at a more broad-based approach to coming up with a diagnosis, yes, I actually can improve their underlying physical symptoms. Same thing, for example, with someone who comes in with an autoimmune disorder. Folks with autoimmune disorders have real physical symptoms. Their symptoms are based on the fact that their immune system, which is supposed to protect us from invaders, so to speak,

overreact and instead of just addressing an invader or an injury, it begins to attack one's own healthy tissues. We know from all the data that's out there that stress is a major factor in worsening symptoms of autoimmune disorders because stress causes inflammation and inflammation is linked to many disorders, including autoimmune disorders. And if you can find ways of reducing the stress in their life, either through medication or psychotherapy, their autoimmune symptoms improve. It's not going to cure the underlying cause, but it can dramatically decrease their symptoms so that they become more functional and can actually use less medication that's prescribed by their rheumatologist, for example. So I want to understand

something about pain. Can your brain create pain? Or it just makes pain feel worse if you have real physical pain? Generally, people don't imagine that they have pain. Generally, there is some type of real reason. I stub my toe. I have a bad tooth. You know, my head hurts. Usually they are real.

But the way one interprets the physical sensation can impact the course of, how this may progress or be treated. Here's an example of how people may perceive pain in a different way. I stub my toe, ow, you silly, whatever I want to call yourself. You really shouldn't have done that. That's dumb and you get angry at yourself. Versus someone has a history of breast cancer.

They've had surgery for the breast cancer. And hopefully they're in remission. Six months later, they end up. up doing some exercise and they pull a muscle and they have pain in the area of their scar. The question, it may be, it won't be something like, oh, you silly, you did exercise and you exacerbated the pain in that muscle. It's, oh my God, I hope the cancer hasn't come back. So it's the interpretation of the pain that may be very different. And the way of people who now specialize in that area look at pain and management of pain very much.

encompasses one psychological state. If you're depressed, your pain's going to feel worse. And if you're not depressed, you're still going to have pain, but it may not be as bad. What do you recommend, though, to people who don't know who you are until now, if I've got a doctor telling me, we can't find anything, this really hurts, who do I call? What do I do? Again, that's a very good question. I'm glad you us that I think that people in general know themselves and their bodies better than any doctor. Yeah, we go to school for a long time and we specialize and we think we're really smart and, you know, hopefully we are. But I think that in general, patients know their bodies better than anybody.

And if you're being told by a physician or a provider, there's nothing wrong with you. You know, stop worrying about it. I had one patient whose doctor said, you know, go read a book, which was absurd, right? I mean, it's good to read a book, but it had nothing to do with why her blood pressure was elevated. You have to look at reviews. In other words, if one doctor's telling you this and you don't appreciate what they're telling you because you know there's something wrong with you, you don't have to go back to that doctor. You know, patients are paying our salaries, and we deserve to do the best we can.

And if you as a patient are not getting the answer that you want, you are not, you don't necessarily have to go back to that provider. So what I like to say to patients is, you know, you wouldn't hire a plumber without looking at their reviews, right? there are plenty of sites now available where you can review patients' reviews of physicians and their qualifications. And we have lots of resources now that we didn't use to have. Make sure that when you do go to a physician, because time is limited, write down your questions, write down your concerns. If a doctor or a provider says we can't find anything, it is reasonable to ask.

ask, are there other procedures or tests that we might do that would help us if the answer to that is no? Again, very reasonable to ask the question. Is there a specialist that you might consider referring me to who you think might look in a different direction? Are there things people can do themselves? Must they always seek out a doctor? Or are there things they can do at home? There are lots of things that you can do. So without getting to a whole lot of biology, there is a part of your sympathetic nervous system called your parasympathetic nervous system. And that's the part of our nervous system that helps us calm down and regulate. And there are things we can do to stimulate that part of our nervous system, such as exercise, one of the best things you can do to reduce stress.

There's a quote from a Cleveland Clinic specialist in gastroenterology that says the best thing you can do for gastrointestinal symptoms is exercise. Adequate. I think people really underrate the importance of a good night's sleep. If you don't sleep well, it causes all kinds of problems, including increased inflammation. Eat a healthy diet. And when I say diet, I don't mean you should go on a diet to lose weight. I mean, there are foods that you can eat that can improve your mental health and physical health and actually decrease inflammation in your body.

And finally, social outlets, if you have healthy social relationships, that has also been shown to help us live longer, decrease chronic illness and decrease stress. Well, this is very enlightening for people who have had problems and been told, you know, we can't find anything or, you know, it may be it's stress. and it's all very vague. And there's really something to this that I think is important for people to understand. My guest has been Dr. Susan Trackman.

She is a specialist in psychosomatic medicine and author of the book, It's not just in your head. And there's a link to her book at Amazon in the show notes. Great, Susan. Thank you for being here. I very much appreciate you having me. You ever notice when you watch

professional tennis or you go to a gym and watch somebody lift weights, you often hear a lot of grunting. It sounds a little weird, and if you're standing nearby, it's hard not to roll your eyes, but the fact is grunting may actually help. Research has found that making a forceful sound while exerting yourself can increase strength and power. In one study, people generated significantly more grip strength when they grunted than when they stayed silent. The secret isn't the noise itself, it's what the noise does. Grunting usually comes with a forceful exhale that helps tighten your core, stabilize your body, and recruit more muscle power.

In other words, that strange sound may be your body's built-in performance enhancer. So the next time you hear somebody grunting at a gym, remember, it may sound weird, but there's a good chance those people are actually getting stronger because of it. and that is something you should know. Hey, I would really appreciate it if you would tell somebody about this podcast since you've just listened to a whole episode,

you have a pretty good sense of what it's about. You could tell somebody and get them to listen and then we get another listener. And in this business, every listener counts. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know.