In this episode, Dr. Kevin Conners hosts an enlightening conversation with Dr. Beverly Yates, a naturopathic physician with a compelling backstory. Once an MIT-trained electrical engineer, Dr. Yates transitioned into natural medicine following personal health challenges exacerbated by environmental conditions in the Pacific Northwest. Throughout the episode, she shares her transformative journey from tech to medicine, emphasizing the profound impact that naturopathy had on her health and life. Dr. Yates also discusses her contributions to the field, including founding the first integrative and naturopathic medicine residency program in California, and her current focus on managing blood sugar and diabetes through simple, sustainable practices. This episode not only highlights the unique paths individuals can take to find their calling but also showcases the power of alternative medicine in treating chronic conditions.
Tune in to learn:
- Unconventional Career Paths: Discover how Dr. Beverly Yates transitioned from a successful career as an MIT-trained electrical engineer in Silicon Valley to a naturopathic physician due to her personal health struggles.
- Benefits of Naturopathic Medicine: Understand the principles and effectiveness of naturopathic medicine through Dr. Yates’ personal recovery from mold-induced health issues.
- Integrative Medicine Development: Learn about the challenges and triumphs of establishing the first fully accredited integrative and naturopathic medicine residency program in California.
- Virtual Healthcare Advantages: Explore the benefits and logistics of running a fully virtual clinic, and how this model can improve patient care and accessibility.
- Blood Sugar Management: Gain insights into Dr. Yates’ forthcoming book and her approach to managing blood sugar and diabetes, emphasizing natural, practical solutions tailored to individual needs.
- Practical Health Tips: Receive actionable advice on lifestyle changes that can significantly improve health, focusing on diet, exercise, and stress management without overwhelming changes.
- Personalized Medicine: Appreciate the importance of personalized medicine in naturopathy, which treats patients as unique individuals rather than textbook cases.
- Future of Naturopathy: Get a glimpse into the future directions of naturopathic medicine and how Dr. Yates plans to collaborate with other professionals to enhance diabetes care and blood sugar management globally.
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About Dr. Beverly Yates
Dr. Beverly Yates is a shining light in diabetes care, recognized for her dedicated advocacy and innovative contributions. As the creator of the Yates Protocol, she has played a crucial role in advancing the treatment of diabetes and heart disease, earning a reputation as a leading figure in these fields. Her expertise is showcased through frequent media appearances, insightful publications, and engaging speaking engagements.
Driven by both personal and professional motives, Dr. Yates aims to guide over 3 million individuals on their path to recovery from type 2 diabetes and prediabetes. She is committed to educating people on the Yates Protocol and the significance of a holistic approach to diabetes management, advocating for a life enriched with vitality and wellness.
Blending her expertise in Naturopathic Medicine with her background in Electrical Engineering from MIT, Dr. Yates developed the Yates Protocol, a straightforward strategy that distills diabetes management into practical and attainable lifestyle changes. With 30 years of experience, her approach goes beyond mere management; it empowers millions to achieve genuine liberation from the disease.
Dr. Yates’s connection to diabetes is profoundly personal; the condition has deeply affected her family, inspiring her to transform her personal mission into a broader healing movement that has already improved thousands of lives. Through the Yates Protocol and her clinical work, Dr. Yates consistently proves that reversing Type II Diabetes is not only possible but achievable. Her dedication to holistic care and lifestyle changes offers hope and real solutions for those battling diabetes.
Listen to or Watch the Full Podcast Episode
Transcript
Dr. Kevin Conners
Hello, everybody. This is Dr. Kevin Conners Welcome to another episode of Conners Clinic Live. Today, we have my new friend. We’ve talked to Dr. Beverly Yates several times now.
You do so much work in the natural realm and I got to learn more about you when we were speaking off the air, and I thought: I have got to have you on our podcast because our listeners need to get to know you and everything you do. We just seem to click because we think alike in so many ways. So, Dr. Yates, Dr. Beverly, tell us a little bit more about you, if you will.
Dr. Beverly Yates
Sure. I’m happy to do it. Thank you so much for this invitation. My path to the world of natural medicine is probably an unusual one, but in some ways it’s probably typical, too. It’s a hybrid. The number one question I get asked is: how did you go from being an MIT electrical engineer in Silicon Valley to becoming a naturopathic physician? I was like, okay, get ready.
Dr. Kevin Conners
I would say that there’s nothing similar there because I don’t know of any other MIT electrical engineer that became a naturopath. That’s why I was so intrigued about you, just your humility. You’ve got such unbelievable education and you’re so humble in everything that you do. Sorry, I interrupted. Go ahead.
Dr. Beverly Yates
Thank you for those kind words. I appreciate it. Life is just so interesting. You never know what’s going to be next. I feel like sometimes you get put in a place for a reason, maybe for a season, things change. Same way people come in and out of each other’s lives. In my case, it was through my own illness, unexpectedly in my early 20s, I moved from Silicon Valley to the Pacific Northwest with my then-fiance. What I didn’t understand about the Pacific Northwest is how rainy and moldy it is. That mold grows on concrete there. It’s that much rain. At least it used to be in the case of the 1990s. Now with climate change, I don’t know, it may not be quite so moist, but it was then. It turns out I’m quite sensitive to mold. It made me sick.
What got my health back, what impressed me being the results-oriented person I am, was naturopathic medicine. It completely put my health back together. My initial symptoms were I was sneezing, I had no energy, I had these deep belly sneezes. Honestly, Dr. Kevin, they were so deep, they would cause me to feel pain in my belly and in my diaphragm area. I was like, whoa, why? That’s a powerful sneeze.
My body was trying to throw it off. It was really reacting to this black mold. My fiancé and I, we discovered quite by accident that the house we were renting had mold because we were trying to fix something in a closet. We pulled back a little bit of the carpet, looked behind a baseboard, again, trying to repair something, and quite by accident, discovered that there was black mold. I was like, I wonder if that’s why I was sneezing. I didn’t know much about it. I was not in the world of medicine at all then. Long story short, I went to see an allergist, conventional medical doctor, for about a year. We did the skin scratch test. They came up with a number of things that I was sensitive to. I remember at the time thinking: well, if you scratch your skin, it’s going to heal. So how is this scientific? Because then you have to subjectively look at the amount of irritation when you put the substances from the allergy skin scratch test on, to decide how sensitive someone is. I was like, is that scientific? I don’t know.
We went through this for about a year, got the shots that were supposedly customized to the things that I was showing to be positive, to have sensitivity to that were environmental, whether it was dog danders or cat danders, things of that nature, mold. But I wasn’t any better. I was like, my God, where’d my energy go? I am all of 22, 23, 24 years old. This is the time of life to feel like carpe diem, seize the day. If you don’t have energy in your early 20s, when are you going to have energy? I wasn’t impressed with the lack of results. My husband worked with a guy who had seen a naturopathic physician there in Oregon and had gotten wonderful results. He had very similar symptoms to mine. I went to see this same person, and I have to say, after about three visits, I was so much better. There were a few things that he did that were really striking at the time. One was the man actually listened to me. Our initial visit was for about an hour. He looked me in the eye. He was present. I had never been to a doctor of any kind who actually paid attention like that.
Then we did some homeopathy, we did some biofeedback, we made some really simple nutritional shifts, and it was profound, the turnaround. At the time, I’d never heard of homeopathy. I wasn’t aware of biofeedback. I had no prior knowledge or existing beliefs about these things. The more I learned about them, I was like, okay, this is really different than “pop a pill”, like “a pill for every ill”. It’s a very different approach. For me, it was the right thing at the right time, and I’m forever grateful.
Dr. Kevin Conners
You were so impressed, you said, I want to do this, or what was it? What made you shift to change professions?
Dr. Beverly Yates
The shift came out because in part, I was really dissatisfied with my experience at that time in Silicon Valley, originally in engineering. While I love math and science, I think I will always love math and science, I’m just that person, my social experience of it was really negative. I found that in the workplace that my point of view, my information, my contributions were absolutely not welcome. As both a woman at that time and as a black person at that time, it was tough. I thought to myself, do I really need to work in an environment that doesn’t want me here? Does that make sense after all that work? It is a tremendous amount of work. It’s a lot of work. To walk away from that, that gives you a sense of the dissatisfaction I felt.
At the time, I had started after this introduction to naturopathic medicine, I was still an engineer, and I got involved with some of the local herbalists in that community in the, I would say, Northwestern part, Central part of Oregon, and did some wildcrafting, things like that. Got to go into an actual watershed, and I’d never been in any place where literally the water was shedding from the land. Once I understood what that meant and saw it, I realized how precious it is in nature and in the environment we have to protect it. I got to a very different, more spiritual relationship with that. I realized now we have to protect our own environment within ourselves, too, whether it’s our bodies, our spirits, et cetera. What a shift, right?
Dr. Kevin Conners
Yeah, that’s a big shift. Then it took a couple of years. When did you end up going to naturopathic school then?
Dr. Beverly Yates
I went to the one right there in Portland. Lucky me, it was right there. At that time, it was called the National College of Naturopathic Medicine. Now, it’s National University of Natural Medicine. They’ve expanded the number and kinds of degrees that they offer. I feel like the education I got there and the information and the access to the other schools of the healing arts and medical sciences that are in the Portland area, it was just really fabulous. We had traditional Chinese medicine and doctors of Oriental medicine as part of our curriculum and program. The Western States Chiropractic College is there, Oregon Health Sciences University for Medical Doctors and all are there. There’s just a lot of amazing health synergy. It was a great place for me to be exposed to all these different ideas and to have a way really to collaborate and come together.
One of the things I became later on, an offshoot of that, was I was honored with being able to be the first hosted residency program. I was the founder and medical director for the first ever fully accredited, in the State of California, Integrative and Naturopathic Medicine Residency program. With that residency program, I was able to help some residents out in the community and build bridges to other of the conventional medical world as well as with the integrative and alternative medical world, and people in functional medicine. All of these things were coming up in the 2000s, so it was a great time.
Dr. Kevin Conners
That is fantastic. Then did you start practice? When did practice start for you?
Dr. Beverly Yates
Yeah, I started practice, was licensed, board certified, all that good stuff in 1994. Before then, I had been licensed as a massage therapist to just earn some money for school, and working as an herbalist. I just really enjoyed the practicality of the naturopath world because we know how to meet people where they’re at. Rather than come up with some treatment plan that’s impossible for people to do or something that’s optimized, but it’s optimized for someone who has a tremendous number of resources and staff. Instead, we could strip it down, keep it simple, and go for the essentials.
Right before coming on here, I went for a walk. It’s a beautiful day out here. It’s windy, and I’m just like, I’m going to go get some sunshine. That’s one of nature’s healers. I think we have these missed opportunities sometimes to really help people feel better and live a healthier, more energetic life by just living more in tune, more in rhythm with how we’re actually designed.
Dr. Kevin Conners
Yes, I like that. You and I talked about that at one point in time. I can’t remember if it was last time we discussed it or not, about how many naturopathic – or you see, maybe it’s not in real life, but in YouTube’s and Instagram videos and TikTok videos and stuff, you see these people that are into natural medicine. I don’t know if they have degrees or not, but sometimes they are making very unrealistic propositions to people. That’s the problem with social media, right? Because young people look at this as: oh my gosh, that person looks like that when they wake up? I look horrible. Well, it’s the same. It’s not really any different when you talk about trying to do natural things. People claiming to live this lifestyle that isn’t really attainable for the average person. In truth, the person making that claim probably isn’t living that lifestyle either, right?
Dr. Beverly Yates
Right.
Dr. Kevin Conners
We discussed about when we have patients come in, to be realistic about lifestyle changes that they can maintain and still have enjoyment in life. Many times it’s just those simple little baby steps, like go take a walk and enjoy the weather. Don’t think you have to go to some club and work out for four hours a day. That’s not health. Go out and live. We were discussing this before. I thought that was essential – part of not putting too many burdens on someone.
Dr. Beverly Yates
Yeah, I think there’s a way in which sometimes we present health and wellness and medical care in a way that, you’re absolutely right, it is burdensome. It just adds to the stress and the difficulty. People sometimes wind up being sorry they ever asked for help. We give them these impossible number of hoops to jump through.
Another aspect of it can be stigma. Sometimes people make assumptions about what someone’s journey is without ever doing them the courtesy and really being respectful and asking them, what is their journey? People might be surprised who are in the world of medicine and health if they just, again, sat still and listened, and find out what got this person to this situation today. Sometimes that back story is amazing. It’s not obvious. It’s not linear. Life isn’t always “this cause, that cause, the other”, and now we’re here. It’s rarely that neat.
Dr. Kevin Conners
Right. Well, what’s your focus now in the last year? What has your focus been on?
Dr. Beverly Yates
Well, my focus was preparing a book proposal, and then I now have a book deal getting ready for doing more work around the topic of blood sugar and diabetes. The topic will be of blood sugar, which encompasses, of course, diabetes, along with other blood sugar sensitive related kinds of conditions. The idea is to really help people reclaim their health and their energy through the lens of blood sugar so they can better understand it, understand the natural dance that blood sugar does throughout the day and the night, that the night time is a beautiful opportunity to hit the reset button for your blood sugar. But if you’ve got blood sugar problems and your blood sugar doesn’t appropriately reset overnight or between your meals, you’ve got a problem. Then how do we correct it? Just keeping it simple.
One of the things I’ve noticed about some of the approaches people have to diabetes support, diabetes reversal, diabetes remission, to blood sugar help, is that it’s complicated. You’re absolutely right. You were talking about people going to a gym or a club for four hours and working themselves into the dirt. I’m like, yeah, that kind of workout is so intensive. All you’ve done is raised your cortisol. Now you’re raising your blood sugar because when cortisol goes up, there goes your blood sugar. You’ve defeated your purpose. It’s too much.
Dr. Kevin Conners
Right. Overdoing something, thinking that you have to make these giant leaps and bounds changes.
Now, you did the diabetes summit. That was very successful for you, getting that out. I was interviewed on that. Sugar, handling diabetes, glucose issues, that’s been a major focus. Where do you see yourself in a couple of years?
Dr. Beverly Yates
That’s a great question. Thanks for asking that. I think from there, I will start to work more with colleagues of all stripes who really want to do a better job of helping people who are struggling with their blood sugar.
We all know that before the pandemic that many parts of the world, including the US, were struggling with metabolic problems. The rise of type 2 diabetes and pre-diabetes has been pretty stunning in these last 20, 25 years. Since the pandemic, these last four years, it’s really bad. I’m hopeful now, as I finish the book that’s public-facing for the regular folks who’ve got these problems and want to do something about it in a way that’s sustainable, that’s enjoyable. They can still eat the food they love. They will learn how to cook it and prepare it so that it is helpful. Often, that is where things fall apart rather than eat stuff that you hate and can’t do for more than a week or two. Then from there, expanded to invite our colleagues to come and learn how to help the people that they work with, their patients and clients, have healthier levels of blood sugar.
Because that’s one of the things I’ve observed over these last three to four years is I’ve met with more colleagues, both in-person at conferences, at summits, and online, that they don’t really know how to lead people that way, and they’re looking for help as well. So the general public and then other health and medical colleagues.
Dr. Kevin Conners
That’s fantastic. Are you still seeing patients?
Dr. Beverly Yates
I am in my virtual clinic. I’ve gone 100% online. It’s certainly more convenient for all concerned and allows me to help people in a different way and in a deeper way than in-person could. One of the nice things is that because people don’t have the stresses and aggravations of trying to drive in traffic, finding parking, all the other things that go with an in-person clinic, I think is a mixed bag. Of course, we screen for people who definitely need to have hands-on. If there’s a need for urgent care or emergency care, et cetera, send people appropriately because sometimes you really do need to actually touch something, image it, et cetera. But a lot of this is very consultative. It lends itself to online because what people need is clear information that’s actionable, helping them to figure out what’s going on. If they’re using a drop of blood and a glucometer with test strips, or if they’re using a CGM or whatever they’re doing to figure out their blood sugar, give them those actionable insights so they take the mystery out of it and help them learn how to look for trends so they can find out if what they’re doing is healthy for them.
Because one of the biggest things I’ve discovered this last, I’d say seven to eight years, is that people have these bio-individual responses to what they do for blood sugar. The generic lists of, say, low glycemic foods, for some people, they still have a high blood sugar reaction to something that otherwise would be healthy. It could be quinoa, it could be cauliflower, it could be Brussels sprouts, it could be things that you think: How in the world is that driving a big blood sugar response? But for some people, I would think through their gut’s microbiome… they eat the food, body rings it in, and then there goes their blood sugar. They need to note that because sometimes they’re doing an otherwise healthy plan, but they’re not having a healthy response.
Dr. Kevin Conners
Yeah, everybody is so unique. Years ago, I had a patient who would just have literally a sip of carrot juice, and her blood sugar would just bounce way up into the high hundreds. It’s so unique. I’m trying to figure out if it was some autoimmune response. Everybody’s just different. We don’t all fit into these molds set out by the Merck manual. That’s the uniqueness of a natural approach. You’re trying to look at each person as a unique individual, not as a textbook example.
Well, any closing remarks that you’d want to give somebody whose focus is blood sugar, that is dealing with blood sugar issues? Anything that you could give? A pearl of advice?
Dr. Beverly Yates
Yeah, I think my tip to share with everyone is keep at it, stay with it. Persevere, hang in there. You will figure out how to get that secret decoder ring, if you will, to figure out what’s going on with your blood sugar. It might not be obvious. If you’ve done the reasonable things and you still haven’t found the answers, keep looking. Test, don’t get guess, and insist that the team around you is cooperative. If you want access to things like a CGM, a continuous glucose monitor, make sure you’re working with people who can make that happen, who won’t be obstacles to you finding out what that data is. I think we should never hold people hostage. They absolutely deserve to know what’s going on in their own bodies.
Know whether or not your sleep is a factor. Is that what’s causing the blood sugar issue? Maybe you have sleep apnea. That can make a huge difference in blood sugar regulation. What if you’re really stressed? Maybe your meal timing is not quite right. Nutrition is an obvious one to look at, and there’s a lot of detail there.
Then exercise. Are you exercising at a pace that makes sense for you, along with strength training? People lose that opportunity – if they aren’t building their muscles… because active working muscles are blood sugar sponges. They’re a huge help when it comes to better blood sugar regulation.
Dr. Kevin Conners
Well, I hear you, just keep digging until you find the answer that’s yours.
We will have all your information and contact information on this video so people can find you. I just thank you again. Maybe we’ll meet up again in a few months and you could do a deep dive in diabetes and how you would analyze somebody.
Dr. Beverly Yates, thank you. You’ve just been a blessing. You are a bright shining star out there, helping people.
Dr. Beverly Yates
Thanks so much for your work, Dr. Conners. I really appreciate connecting with you. Take care.
Dr. Kevin Conners
Bye-bye.
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Dustin has been passionate about holistic health since he met his wife, Dr Mallory Ranem (Conners) 20 years ago. As the Digital Media Manager, he coordinates content across Conners Clinic’s large online presence, including written, video, and audio.
In this Brand New 3rd Edition Dr. Kevin Conners adds almost DOUBLE the content with all new insights and practical tips on how to understand your body’s ability to heal and get back to a state of health.